How Basildon Council Uses BeauhurstImpact to Identify High-Growth Companies, Secure Funding, and Build Relationships
Beauhurst is the go-to tool if you want to understand your local economy and its path trajectory, to understand who your key strategic firms are, and to develop relationships with them.
Basildon Borough Council serves the residents and businesses of Basildon, Billericay, and Wickford in Essex County. They work to support the entire local ecosystem, from housing and recycling, to supporting businesses and growth.
- Industry
Local Government
- Location
- Employees
The Challenge
Before using BeauhurstImpact, Basildon Council struggled to find the data it needed to compile compelling data-driven evidence of its funding need in the local area.
âI was looking for a comprehensive database of companies in Basildon that would give me the ability to map the larger firms and help me identify the âvital 6â (a phrase coined by Nesta to describe the small number of fast-growing firms that were likely to add the greatest value to our economy going forward).
“I also wanted a system that would allow me to track changes happening in each companyâand that would alert us when changes occurred, so we could use the data to drive relationship strategies. I had used FAME before, and a few other platforms, but felt that they either werenât intuitive enough or were built for people who wanted to undertake financial analysis, rather than use it for our broader requirements.â
âIn my opinion, Beauhurst was really the only tool we could have used to evidence the high incidence of creative businesses in the region, but the weak investment markets.â
Basildon Council also struggled with tools that lacked the sophistication to separate Essex County from the wider London region, which created a misleading picture of the state of funding in the area.
âAll too often, the region we were analysing is lumped in with London as being part of the Greater South East, but Beauhurst enabled us to prove that the historical lack of Regional Investment Funds and Creative Business Support programmes had really served to suppress the CI sector.â
The Solution
With BeauhurstImpact, Basildon Council can access the data they need to get an accurate picture of the local business ecosystem, develop key relationships, and support due diligence.
âThe Beauhurst platform supports us across the whole cycle of project development, design and delivery. We use it as a management, analysis, planning, implementation and control tool. It also helps us across the business engagement cycleâfrom reporting, segmentation, targeting, and initial engagement, to deepening conversations and evaluation.â
âWe use Beauhurst to understand our business base and the relative strengths of our area. This data informs our strategic direction, our policy development and our bids for funding. Some of the Beauhurst reports are also really useful in helping shape policy. I have used Beauhurst to present members with data on the local economy.
“The platform helps us to account manage our key strategic firms, enabling us to identify the key firms we want a relationship with, providing us with alerts about significant changes that occur in these firms and helping us to sound qualified when we try and open up a dialogue with them.
“We also use Beauhurst as a Risk Management tool, checking out the stability and robustness of companies that we work with. That can range from simple credit searches, and financial analysis, to exploring ownership arrangements and the strength of group companies. We find that it allows us to de-risk investment decisions.â
Want to learn more about how councils can use BeauhurstImpact? Read our explainer blog on the topic.
The Results
BeauhurstImpact enables Basildon Council to secure funding and actively track local firms to identify opportunities.
âBeauhurst was instrumental in helping us secure the ÂŁ1.27m South East Create Growth Programme from the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS).â
âWe use Beauhurst for a range of different processes, such as securing funding. For example, Beauhurst was instrumental in helping us secure the ÂŁ1.27m South East Create Growth Programme from the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). In that project, we used Beauhurst to analyse the structure of the Creative Industries (CI) across the Greater Essex, Kent, Medway, West and East Sussex, and map accelerator attendance and investment flows in the region.
“Our use of Beauhurst doesnât stop at analysis. We also use it to track company activity in Basildon, enabling us to identify opportunities to have conversations with senior leaders. The Advanced Search function is extensive and we can use it to identify firms that have recently started, those that might have recently taken on a new mortgage, those that appear to be struggling financially, those that are flyingâthe list is endless.â
Discover BeauhurstImpact
- Identify, track, and support companies in the area
- Understand the economic ecosystem
- Easily measure impact (no spreadsheets in sight)
- Find potential partners, companies, people, or grant recipients
