Evaluating the Impact of Business Service Expertise and Business Links on the Performance of SMEs in England

The last decade has seen a growing body of research on information-intensive business service firms. These are companies that supply expertise and knowledge which are considered to add value to the output of their clients. This paper explores the impact of business service expertise provided via business link on the performance, profitability and competitiveness of client companies. The authors use a unique survey of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in England as well as case studies of individual firms. It is possible to identify a positive impact of business service expertise on client performance, but difficult and perhaps impossible to isolate such impacts from other variables. Employment as an impact measure is problematic as redundancy rather than recruitment may result from a consultancy project. The best measure is improvements in profitability, but not all consultancy projects will impact on this variable. The department of trade and industry needs to be extremely careful that a concern for evaluation of business link companies does not inadvertently produce a situation in which the evaluation process determines the way in which a business link company identifies and deals with its clients.