How Dorset LEP Uses Beauhurst
to Find Key Businesses
You probably don't realise how little you know about businesses until you have Beauhurst. It enables you to see the bigger picture, a company’s origins, its people and their networks. Having access to Beauhurst is like having a colleague, not just a data platform.
- Industry
Local Enterprise Partnerships
- Location
6th Floor, Poole House, Bournemouth University, BH12 5HH
- Employees
Dorset Local Enterprise Partnership is a business-led private and public sector partnership, promoting local economic growth and prosperity. Dorset LEP delivers projects that support and develop infrastructure, housing, skills, enterprise and business growth to achieve long-term economic benefit for all in Dorset.
We sat down with Finn Morgan, Business Engagement and Dorset Gateway Manager at Dorset LEP, to hear how they’re using Beauhurst to find, understand and reach out to key businesses in Dorset.
What first led you to Beauhurst?
We first subscribed to Beauhurst in February 2019, off the back of The Scaleup Index. Someone from Beauhurst showed us the platform and we were super impressed—we love it. Since then, we’ve been using the platform to track scaleup companies and other high-growth businesses in the local area, in order to create weekly reports for BEIS and perform outreach campaigns.
How does Beauhurst fit into your reporting process?
We report to the Government on a weekly basis. I construct these reports using Beauhurst’s Collections feature—I have weekly alerts set up for local businesses, which notify me of any updates, such as a change in headcount or registered address, or a new foreign investment. I’ll then cross reference this information with our CRM, to check what support companies have drawn on before, and build a detailed narrative so that the Government can understand the context of their growth.
We can also track different data points on the platform and then export them into spreadsheets or download graphs directly into presentations. This means we can show the broader picture of the local business landscape really easily.
How is Beauhurst supporting your local outreach efforts?
We use the Beauhurst platform to help us make contact with local businesses. We’ve written to each of the high-growth companies in the LEP, individually inviting them to find out more about scaleup support in Dorset and signposting them to different peer networks and relevant programmes. We didn’t tend to do this before, but now we have data on each of the high-growth businesses in our area and all their key people, which is super helpful.
When we’re doing cold outreach to businesses, we can learn a lot about them just from looking at their profile on Beauhurst. So now, we can say something like “I see you’ve got a new CFO” or “congratulations on securing that Innovate UK grant”, and this really opens up the conversation for us—it shows that we’ve done our due diligence and know what we’re talking about.
We’ve seen a very successful conversion rate with this kind of outreach. For instance, we recently carried out a campaign around the Department for International Trade’s Internationalisation Fund. We identified eligible SMEs using the “Direct exports from country of incorporation” filter on Beauhurst. Of the 168 businesses we contacted, 29 subsequently went on to apply for and secure funding from the programme—a conversion rate of more than 17% from a 30-minute exercise.
How does Beauhurst save you and your team time?
Without Beauhurst, understanding our local economy would be a very manual process, trawling data, and having to knock on doors or rely on introductions from people we know—the whole process would be a lot harder and more time-consuming.
Another big benefit of Beauhurst is being able to group relevant companies into Collections. Now, when I’m asked by directors things like “how many female-led enterprises are in a particular postcode”, I can find that data super quickly and even pull out some key names to invite to roundtables or ministerial visits. It’s a real gamechanger.
Plus, some of our corporate partners also use the Beauhurst platform, which really speeds up the due diligence process for our scaleup programmes.
How has your experience been with our team so far?
How would you describe Beauhurst to another LEP?