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KENT NEWS: Eager after peeling away some of the understandable hype, Kent 2020 Vision yesterday inspired a positive outlook for the county’s business sector.
Even the once-maligned ‘green shoots of recovery’ phrase was uttered many times without too much adverse comment on Thursday at Detling showground near Maidstone, during what was billed as the largest business to business conference and exhibition in the South East.
And serial entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den star James Caan gave meaning to his billing as keynote speaker by urging the audience to invest in their businesses now after retrenchment during the recession.
Having lived and traded through two recessions, he told them: “I realised that those are periods when I learned the most.”
And even this paragon of entrepreneurship admitted his business came close to collapse in the early 1990s, through other people failing to pay their bills – see more on that topic in our new Business Week supplement.
His top tip for investment was: people.
Companies may have had to shed staff during the downturn, he said, but the smart ones will have kept their best people and are already in the market for good recruits, getting ready for the upturn and before staffing competition gets tougher.
He also urged them to look at exports, a more attractive position now that the pound had fallen in value.
And his most radical tip was to get fresh thoughts and minds into your company by offering internships to hungry young graduates keen to get some kind of work experience in a crowded market.
It was an invitation that budding young entrepreneur Victoria Hart from Larkfield could not resist.
In her final year as a business studies student at Canterbury Christchurch University she asked Caan how she might get one of his internships and he invited her to leave word with him at his website.
The show programme started bright and early with a breakfast meeting staged by Visit Kent, with guest speaker Nick Hewer – Lord Alan Sugar’s famously dry and witty right-hand man on The Apprentice.
He could not resist a quip or two about the PR disaster for Margate when The Apprentice staged an episode there, but he held the audience spellbound with a behind-the-scenes account of the hit business show.
The serious message of this session though was Visit Kent’s launch of its eye-catching new Kent Contemporary tourism campaign, backed initially by a £400,000 KCC grant and easily justifiable against tourism’s ranking as the UK’s most valuable industry and one worth a cool £2.5 bn to Kent alone and set to grow with a favourable exchange rate.
But while the overall mood was relentlessly upbeat with rare mentions of the recession, KCC Leader Paul Carter hammered home the point that the county’s business needs to be freed to put the ‘R’ word behind it.
Bureaucracy was killing the efforts of business to move on, he said, and he had gathered evidence that in his own business sector, construction, paperwork and restrictions was adding 20-25 per cent to UK construction costs in the UK compared with Europe.
For more on Kent 2020 Vision, check out next week’s Business Week, our new e-Bulletin and www.businessforkent.co.uk.
POSTED: 23/04/2010 09:15:00