Small businesses set to benefit from Olympics

by Yixiang Zeng

Small busi­nesses across the UK are expec­ted to have an estim­ated 3,400 con­tracts to deliver 2012 Olympic game related ser­vices and goods, says chief exec­ut­ive Mike Mul­vey from Lon­don Busi­ness Network.

The event, organ­ised on Tues­day in Strat­ford, is one of the hun­dreds of events held by the organ­isa­tion across Lon­don to intro­duce small enter­prises to upcom­ing oppor­tun­it­ies such as cater­ing, foot­ball goal post man­u­fac­tur­ing and bro­chure and web­site design.

Mike said: “6,600 con­tracts have already been placed to small busi­nesses around the coun­try and 35 per cent of these com­pan­ies are based in London.”

Accord­ing to him, the value of these new sub-contracts avail­able now forms part of over £1.7billion, which includes big­ger sup­pli­ers dir­ectly work­ing with the Olympic Deliv­ery Author­ity (ODA) and Lon­don Organ­ising Com­mit­tee of the Olympic and Para­lympic Games (LOCOG).

Catering2Order, a firm with 20 employ­ees based in South­wark, won their cater­ing con­tract on the Olympic con­struc­tion site two years ago.

John Charles, man­aging dir­ector of the com­pany, said: “We are expect­ing one mil­lion turnover for this fin­an­cial year. Win­ning the con­tract in such a dif­fi­cult fin­an­cial period is fantastic.”

“As a small com­pany we work with big­ger sup­plier, and we are also con­stantly get­ting more con­tracts because of our qual­ity and ser­vice deliv­ery and our track record.”

When asked how hard it is to get the con­tract, John said: “We got the con­tract through CompeteFor.

“The whole pro­cess is extremely com­pet­it­ive, I know lots of com­pan­ies achieved 100% score on the ques­tion­naire [designed by the buy­ing com­pan­ies], but they still can’t get the contract.

“You have got to offer your unique­ness and some­thing bey­ond what they require.”

Com­pete­For portal is a plat­form that links buy­ers and suppliers.

Com­pan­ies who wish to become part of the Olympic sup­ply chain need to register through the web­site and bid for the con­tract with other competitors.

Another pre­vi­ous con­tract win­ner is trans­late plus, a 35-staff firm that provides Welsh trans­la­tion ser­vice to Lon­don 2012’s edu­ca­tion web­site Get Set.

Dir­ector Per Sever­insen said: “The con­tract is very prof­it­able. And obvi­ously, it is a very good ref­er­ence for the poten­tial cli­ents to use our services.

“When they know that we are work­ing with the biggest sport­ing organ­isa­tion in the UK, they just think it is quite impressive.”

When asked whether London-based com­pan­ies have any pri­or­ity com­pared with the ones from other regions, Nick Winch, Olympic co-ordinator from the Fed­er­a­tion of Small Busi­nesses, said: “Lon­don com­pan­ies will get the con­tract if they are the best to deliver the contract.

“They won the con­tract not because they are local or small. What we do is to make sure Lon­don com­pan­ies are aware about the oppor­tun­it­ies and best pre­pared to bid for the opportunities.”

The chal­lenges small busi­nesses are facing, accord­ing to Nick, is some of the con­tracts might be too big for them to put things together.

“We and other organ­isa­tions right from the begin­ning have spoken to the ODA and LOCOG that we wanted the chances to be as small-business friendly as possible.”