One pair of young men came in with the idea of setting up their own video production company, the butcher told them to go to college, the builder told them to get a job and learn first.
I took them to one side and showed them how to apply for a Regional Development Grant of £6000 and an Enterprise Initiative Scheme grant of £3000 and off they went into business.
...By 1986 I actually had served a 4 1/2 year apprenticeship as an ENG/EFP Cameraman, plus the extra 18 months to gain 'Journeyman' status, and another year on top of that. I was told much of the wondrous grants that were supposedly available to me, especially since I hailed originally from a 'deprived area (Glasgow's infamous Red Road) - to which I'd returned 'after London' - to set up my own business...
And I was under 25.
With that experience and a not inconsiderable savings, it was my plan to set up on my own as a corporate video producer.
In the waiting room at the interview (in the middle of a freezing March) for the Prince's Trust there was this wee Windsoresque blonde with her skirt half way up her @*** and her not inconsiderable 'Erthas' out on display; the daughter of one of the cleaners at the University I'd started out at. She wanted £2500 for a car so she could set up as a 'mobile hairdressing' business. - This despite the fact she had absolutely no professional background or training and her experience of hairdressing was 'cutting her pals' hair' (this I know from her mother). She got the money! - And spent (what would then be about half-a-year's wages for a clerk) on a fortnight in Spain and an old banger. The hairdressing business never happened! It was never going to!
I was looking for £1500 to fund a vision mixer for the edit suite... I got hee-haw! - Despite having a carefully developed business plan, work lined up, being fully trained and qualified, experienced, and having £19K to invest. Apparently my plans were 'too vague'!
Another plot that was run by the then Scottish Development Agency was called the 'Better Business Scheme' - The SDA would put up a Grand to fund the planning phase of any project with a registered provider. And many a printer would print you up screeds of stuff for 99p! - Provided you 'paid' £1000 to have the layout designed and the plates made...
The trouble was becoming a 'registered provider'. I'd been going for about eighteen months then - and this 'scheme' was killing my business because the 'registered providers' were making people videos for £1001 and folk were effectively getting their programmes made for nothing. - When I phoned the SDA up and pointed this out to them, the woman on the other end laughed down the phone at me!
More recently my local council (West Lothian Council) used to run a 'business advice centre' - One late November I visited to ask whether they'd put some of my leaflets and cards in their racks. About 1000 of each were taken. As I walked out to my car a chap who had came out behind me tapped me on the shoulder - apparently, the moment my back was turned - the woman to whom I had given the material walked to a large bin at the back of their work area and simply dumped the whole lot!
...I've been in business 31 years now. And never had so much as a blind penny's worth of help or support from any of these so-called 'support agencies'. Quite the opposite; the little incidents I outline above are just minor examples of how obstructive they can be. It strikes me that they exist purely to keep certain well-connected 'types' "oot the way o' the buses" as we say in these parts.
Go and talk to them by all means... And if you can get something out of them all well and good. But take a good supply of salt with you! At the end of the day, in my experience, you're out there on your own and it's a case of sink or swim!
