How CPCA better supports local businesses with a subscription to Beauhurst

Main uses of Beauhurst

- Identify and approach scaling businesses
- Find appropriate funding options for clients
- Better understand the local high-growth ecosystem

If your organisation is serious about understanding businesses, trends and investment in the area then look no further than Beauhurst.

Joe Watson, Growth Hub Advisor

About the organisation

Cambridge and Peterborough Combined Authority is a local government body that works to improve the housing, infrastructure, skills and economic development in the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough areas. The organisation has a budget of £600m to spend over the next 30 years to support and nurture business in the area, and a target to increase Gross Value Added (GVA) from £22b to £40b in 25 years. CPCA has supported 600 local SMEs to date.

Joe is a Growth Hub Advisor at CPCA. His job is to understand the 160+ local and national schemes that are available to local businesses. He reaches out to scaleups in the area, listens to their needs and signposts them to the most appropriate support. He and his team use Beauhurst to identify scaling businesses, match them with appropriate funders and be more proactive with offering grants and loans.

We sat down with Joe to learn more about how he uses Beauhurst to get a comprehensive understanding of the local high-growth ecosystem and better support his clients.

How Beauhurst helps CPCA identify scaling companies

If we know a company is scaling quickly, the likelihood of that company requiring additional funding or needing general business support is quite high.

We use Beauhurst’s Advanced Search tool to identify businesses that are showing signs that they’re scaling quickly, whether that’s a recent funding round or opening a new office location. The criteria I most often use in these searches include the location of the company, the amount of funding they’ve received so far and the sectors that they’re operating in. We have a specific focus on helping agritech businesses, so we use sectors and buzzwords to narrow in on companies in this space. Once we’ve identified businesses that might need our help, I’ll check our CRM to see if we’ve had any previous contact with them.

If we’ve never interacted with a company before, then we’ll use key contact details from Beauhurst to reach out and offer our support. Businesses typically have a great response when we reach out, but some can be a little skeptical because we’re offering them free services, so we usually try and organise a meeting and reassure them that we really are just trying to help! Beauhurst data can be really useful for this – it allows us to demonstrate our knowledge of the area and different industries, showing that we know what we’re talking about.

How Beauhurst helps with finding funding for local businesses

The My Clients tool has been really useful in helping us match our clients to appropriate funding options. We’ve set up profiles for each of the companies we’re working with and can see all the investors and grant funding that’s relevant to them. I also receive alerts whenever a new fund is set up that they could approach, and will reach out to them off the back of this. This means we’re always up to date with what funding is out there, so we can be of real assistance to businesses at a critical time in their growth.

The results of using Beauhurst

We’re now able to easily identify scaleup businesses, sectoral trends and explore investments that are happening locally – all in a really intuitive platform.

This has been reflected in the feedback received from other business support programmes we’ve referred people to, who have seen what we’re doing and are really impressed.