Skillslocal
12 December 2024
Sector: Consultancy
Location: High Peak
Skillslocal, located in Furness Vale in the High Peak, will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2025. It helps ambitious leaders and organisations thrive through various frameworks, coaching, mentoring, and training.
Its signature framework, flourish, supports organisations, leaders, and teams in growing and leading with compassion and purpose. Currently, Skillslocal employs three people and is looking to expand next year.
Challenges faced
For small businesses a big difficulty is keeping up with technology and finding staff with the right skills to support the future of the business. One of the key challenges as a small business owner is that there are only so many hours in the day, explained founder and owner, Tracy Duggan. And while it’s easy to find people with basic admin skills, it's harder to find someone with good digital marketing skills. It’s also expensive to outsource this.
Solution and Impact
Tracy has taken advantage of a diagnostic meeting with a business adviser and several training events from the Accelerator Project. This includes Forecasts: Cashflow and Sales, A Start-ups Guide to Paid Digital Advertising and How to Safely Update your WordPress Website.
The Accelerator project is funded by High Peak Borough Council’s share of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) and delivered by East Midlands Chamber.
Tracy also benefitted from a Growth Grant from the Council. This £6,500 grant allowed her to introduce a new CRM, Learner Management System and marketing database which were essential in launching her new flourish framework for forward-thinking, people and purpose-led organisations, and the step up and standout leadership programme for individuals and teams. This funding has been transformative for the business enabling them to build the tools and infrastructure necessary to scale and innovate.
Tracy explained:
“With this support, we’ve introduced a CRM and marketing database revolutionising how we engage with clients and manage our programmes. This transformation means we can now deliver a more streamlined, personalised experience to our clients while ensuring our operations run more efficiently. The funding has also created one new role and safeguarded two roles.
We’re excited to launch our new leadership programme Step Up and Standout, in the new year. This cohort is targeted to empower purpose-led female leaders with the skills, confidence and tools to drive meaningful change in their organisations. The UKSPF funding has been instrumental in bringing this vision to life, allowing us to not only develop the programme but also build the infrastructure to market and manage it effectively and efficiently.
Additionally, the investment has enabled us to expand our offering of short courses. These are compliance-led, allowing us to support even more businesses by providing short bite-sized accredited and accessible, focused training on key topics like leadership skills, health and safety, and health and wellbeing. This means we can reach a wider audience, delivering value to organisations of all sizes, supporting growth and development at every level."
“The support from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund has been truly transformative for our business. It’s enabled us to take bold steps forward, invest in the tools we need, and bring our vision to life.
I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity, as it’s not only helped us prepare for the launch of our new leadership programme but also expand our reach to support even more businesses through our short courses.
This funding has been a game-changer, and I’m excited to see the impact it will have on the businesses and leaders we support."
- Tracy Duggan, Owner and Founder
This initiative is funded by the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) and delivered by East Midlands Chamber on behalf of High Peak Borough Council.
