Small business leaders have a vital role to play in improving the UK economy. Our digital partnership supported SMEs from launch through post-Covid recovery and continued digital and productivity transformation.
Be the Business puts that opportunity into perspective: if every employing small business leader achieved and maintained an annual 1% productivity improvement over five years, it could add £94 billion to the UK economy.
The challenge is helping individual businesses understand where to start.
Making a national ambition practical
Be the Business launched in 2017 following the work of the Productivity Leadership Group, led by Sir Charlie Mayfield and Sir Richard Lambert. Its purpose was to help businesses improve their performance and strengthen productivity across the UK. Read Be the Business’s history.
Our role was to bring that purpose to life online.
For a business owner balancing customers, people and day-to-day operations, productivity can feel abstract. A useful digital service needs to connect that broad ambition with questions about their own organisation: how are we doing, where could we improve, and what should we prioritise?
From benchmarking to personalised recommendations
Alongside the website, we built a series of online benchmarking tools that allowed businesses to register, provide information about their organisation and compare their performance against relevant datasets.
The tools helped leaders see where their business stood and provided personalised recommendations based on their results.
This journey—from information to comparison to recommended action—was central to the work. The comparison gave business leaders context. The recommendations helped them identify practical next steps.
It made the experience relevant to each participating business, giving owners a clearer starting point for improving productivity and developing their digital capabilities.
Working together to support SMEs
Working alongside KPMG and Cisco, we contributed digital design and delivery expertise to a wider collaboration focused on business improvement.
The website created an accessible route into Be the Business. The benchmarking tools deepened that experience, helping businesses explore their own circumstances and find more relevant guidance.
For us, the design challenge was to make the data useful to the person making decisions. A business leader needs to understand what a result means and how it might influence where they invest their time, attention and resources.
Supporting recovery and continued transformation
Our partnership extended beyond the initial launch.
As the pandemic changed the circumstances facing SMEs, our work supported post-Covid recovery alongside the continuing focus on digital transformation and productivity. Be the Business launched its Rebuild initiative in 2020 to help small businesses recover from the crisis. Read about the Rebuild initiative.
The context had changed, but the need for clear direction remained. Business leaders were reassessing their operations, exploring digital opportunities and deciding which improvements mattered most.
The website and tools formed part of the support available as businesses navigated those decisions.
Part of a wider impact
Be the Business reports supporting more than 16,000 business leaders since 2017. Its published impact figures include over £915 million in GVA uplift for businesses participating in its interventions from inception to March 2024, alongside 15,000 additional jobs and £2.1 billion in additional turnover.
These figures reflect the organisation’s wider work and the contribution of its programmes, partners and participating businesses. Our contribution was the digital presence and benchmarking tools that helped make its support accessible and relevant to SMEs.
The experience reinforced a principle that continues to guide our work: data is most valuable when it helps someone make a better decision. By connecting business benchmarking with personalised recommendations, we helped turn a national productivity ambition into a practical starting point for individual businesses.
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