When you run a small business, there’s never enough time in the day to service your customers and handle the day-to-day operations, let alone take a step back to develop any of your ideas to grow or innovate.

Tarnia Elsworth felt that time-poverty acutely.

Three years ago, she and her wife Annabel Lumsden, left behind their successful careers in financial services to launch their own venture, TP Financial Solutions, based in Heysham, Lancashire.

They were motivated by the desire to make retirement, investment and protection planning more accessible to more people, while achieving a better work-life balance to raise their two children.

Tarnia explained: “Financial services has a reputation for being just for the wealthy and very complicated. But that is simply not true. Everybody needs financial advice, especially during the economic upheaval we are experiencing, and it isn’t that complicated if you explain it in a more simplified way. Building that trust is vital.

“After 15 years working in the sector, we wanted to share the benefit of our knowledge and experience with the wider community, so took a leap of faith and set up on our own. It was the best decision we ever made.”

To be able to devote as much of their time to responding to customer enquiries, the business outsources most of its backroom operations. But that still doesn’t leave a lot of time for strategy and business planning.

Tarnia heard about ‘Ideas into Action’, a Business Excellence programme delivered by Lancaster University Management School (LUMS), and signed up.

“We are always coming up with what we consider to be great ideas,” Tarnia said. “But we used to end up going off on tangents and losing confidence in the original idea, so it felt you had wasted time, and that’s frustrating.

“When I came across the ‘Ideas into Action’ programme it seemed a perfect fit, although I was sceptical about the value of something that was completely free of charge. But when I weighed up the potential benefit of learning new strategies and tools from other organisations we went for it.”

The two-day programme is led by innovation expert Dr Jo North, Managing Director of The Big Bang Partnership Ltd, a commercial consultancy that works with businesses to help them to innovate and grow.

Over three modules she teaches delegates: how to explore and prioritise a range of ideas to take your business to the next level of sustainable, profitable growth; how to apply assumption-testing and decision-making techniques to identify potential routes to commercialise your ideas using input from your peer-learning group; and how to start to shape the core of the business plan and roadmap to get your idea off the ground.

“It was incredible,” Tarnia enthused. “Jo was a fantastic facilitator and helped me understand what an idea is, how to capture it, how to analyse, test and action it. Those tools are now in my arsenal, and I have been able to share that process with Annabel. We can now quickly identify a good idea and implement it.

“It was also fantastic to be able to connect with a new network of like-minded people who face similar challenges.”

Through the programme Tarnia developed an idea for a ‘financial passport’, an editable PDF where customers could store all their important details such as policy numbers.

“Most clients had the same issue struggling to keep track of paperwork with vital information about their finances,” she said. “This slows down our progress, eating into their time and ours.

“Our financial passport means the information is stored in one place, securely, and saves everyone a lot of time. This means Annabel and I can be more productive, support more customers, and enjoy more family time.”

Ideas into Action is delivered in-person via two full-day workshops (November 8 and 22) and is designed to be short, practical, and impactful.

If you are a director or the owner-manager of a Lancashire SME, the Business Excellence programmes could help you move your business forward and weather the ever-growing costs across wages, materials and transport.

The Lancashire Forum is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and available to Lancashire businesses that employ from two to 250 full-time employees and have a turnover of less than €50m (or equivalent in GBP).

This is a historic programme that was funded by ERDF between 2014 and 2020. For further information about other business development opportunities please get in touch with us.



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