Well over 180 businesses across Cumbria have taken advantage of the offer of practical support and advice from Digital Tech Cumbria’s team of associate advisers. And more than half of those have completed the practical support package with an expert to tackle their specific priorities and challenges. 

Feedback from those who have completed the support has been enthusiastic and encouraging:

• “(The adviser) helped us run through everything that we were doing, so we were actually able to sit down and think on our strategies. Normally, you don’t have a chance to do this.”
• “I felt like the coach was very knowledgeable and took a lot of time to understand the business needs.”
• “One of the best things was the quality of the advice.”
• “(The adviser) geared everything towards my level of understanding … she never went all over my head with things.”

If you are one of the businesses still to complete your support, please contact your associate. We’d like to convince you to make the most of the 1-2-1 offer. There could be all sorts of reasons for not completing and we’d like to tackle just a few here:

Reason 1: “I’m short of time and this isn’t a priority at present.”

“We’ve been surprised how many really stretched businesses have realised the benefits, have used their adviser as an extra resource and have managed to make useful changes even in tough or busy (or both) times.

 If this is you, please get in touch with your adviser – they’ll understand your time constraints and can work with you to adapt any plan of action into something more manageable.

Reason 2: “My digital tech is all OK at present – if it’s not broken, I don’t want to waste time fixing it.”

It’s brilliant that everything’s OK for now but we don’t need to tell you how quickly things change – new social media channels develop for your target audience; a competitor invests in digital manufacture and beats you on price or lead times; or you’re short of admin staff and a process that could have been automated is taking up a disproportionate amount of time.

Using our advisers to anticipate some of these threats to your business could be the difference between getting ahead or missing the boat. Ask the questions of your adviser and make use of their time and knowledge to plan while you can.

Reason 3: “I did a first session and it was useful but there’s not much else that adviser can do for my business.”

That’s been the case with other businesses too and Digital Tech Cumbria can be flexible. If you’ve another digital priority, the first adviser can easily hand over to someone who is in a better position to help where you need it.

Just ask.

Reason 4: “Things have changed. I completed the initial assessment process but other priorities have taken over now.”

We understand and we can still help. If you let us know where you’re up to and what you’re facing, we can assign a different adviser to help you tackle the digital challenges that are facing your business now.

We might even be able to help you find new opportunities.

All we ask is that you please get in touch as soon as possible while we’ve funding and resources to help.

As some of our completers have commented:

• “Quality of the expertise is really high.”
• “DTC allowed me to have a bit of thinking space.”
• “The experts went one step further and actually helped implement the changes.”
• “(We) have already recommended DTC’s support to other businesses.”

If you need any more persuasion or encouragement, you can find out more on our website where we’ve a selection of case study videos – we call them our Digital Heroes – where you can hear first-hand how DTC has helped other Cumbrian businesses.