PRIME business club

PRIME’s nationwide offer for anyone over 50 in the UK is described further down this this page. This is the basic offer made to anyone over 50 contacting PRIME for help with self-employment, from anywhere in the UK.

But thanks to the generosity of funders sometimes we can offer more. We can pass people on to the more comprehensive PRIME projects if the person contacting us meets the agreed criteria. These are usually geographical - the place of residence or the location of the intended business.

PRIME currently has the following major project partnerships:

• Black Country
• Doncaster
• England’s North West
• HMRC advice days
• Pension education
• PRIME Northern Ireland
• Scotland
• Sheffield
• Wales
• North East Derbyshire

Across the UK - PRIME’s nationwide offer

Here’s PRIME’s service promise which we make to all the over- 50s who contact us for help. Because the numbers involved can be large, our initial response has to be “low-touch” - but for some individuals this may be all they need. It consists of information in one form or another - things that scale up well. In practice this means a printed start-up pack, the information provided from PRIME’s client support web site www.primebusinessclub.com and some phone support.

This is supplemented by referral (signposting) to other organisations we are confident can still offer free or low-cost advice. In some cases these organisations are formal “PRIME partners”, though this is becoming less common.

Partnerships

PRIME currently has around 150 delivery associates - vetted organisations with properly accredited advisors to whom we are happy to refer people. All associates are listed on the “Find your nearest business support” button on the web site, and people enquiring by phone or letter (now the minority) are sent a printed list of their local support options.

On the inbound side, Jobcentre Plus is the largest single source of people referred to PRIME. But to place that in context, many more people find PRIME for themselves, or are referred in smaller numbers by a very wide variety of other organisations from around the UK.

Funders

The European Social Fund’s Equal Diversity in Practice project part-funded the construction of a dedicated client-support web site for the start of 2008 and fresh booklets for the start-up pack. The development of PRIME’s catalogue of specially-written literature has mostly been funded by Regional Development Agencies. Money then just has to be found to reprint stuff from time to time. As for PRIME’s associates, most are public or voluntary sector organisations, or if they are private sector ones they have government contracts to provide free or low-cost business support.