Around three decades ago, a wannabe journalist from Durham found himself helping young people to find work. Since then, he's offered business support to firms and communities from Sunderland to South Africa. John Hill meets Entrust CEO Dan Brophy.
FOR a country that’s meant to be in this together, we sure are doing a lot of finger pointing.
Maybe there’s something lodged deep in our brains that tells us we can’t endure sacrifices without a scapegoat, but the process of recovering from the downturn seems to involve firing blame around like a sniper taking potshots from a spinning children’s roundabout.
Sunderland City Council received a dig from the Prime Minister himself last week for spending money on US trade missions he quickly dismissed as “parties”. In fact, so many arrows have been fired at the public sector itself recently that – in the words of the 2006 action movie 300 – they’re in danger of blotting out the sun.
Business support expert and original Business Link Tyne and Wear CEO Dan Brophy winces at the thought as he paces his office in Ouseburn in Newcastle.
“This ideological thing going around that everyone in the public sector is bad and everyone in the private sector is good is not just wrong, but entirely unhelpful”, he says. “The customer service I’ve had from Newcastle’s bin men is just as good as the service I’ve had from BT.
“We haven’t seen the full extent of the public sector cuts yet. There are many businesses directly dependent on its spend and activity. It provides a lot of graduate first jobs, so our graduate retention strategy will also be threatened. There will be talented people who love Newcastle and want to stay, but can’t.”
He stops at a shelf in the corner and pulls out a bright red management manual, palming it open on the table. The chosen paragraph is a summary of the classical African philosophy of ubuntu, which stresses the interconnectedness of humanity. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described it as a knowledge that everyone “belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished”.
Brophy says: “There are many entrepreneurial people in the public sector as well as the private sector.
“I would never patronise anybody by saying you should have to teach a certain group of people to be entrepreneurs. It’s about helping individuals to discover their entrepreneurial driver within.”
Back when he was a philosophy and politics student at Durham University, Brophy wanted to be a journalist. However, his first job finding careers for young people inspired him to help businesses expand and thus improve the economy as a whole.
He says: “It was the late 70s and early 80s – the first wave of graduate unemployment. Up until then, you were virtually guaranteed a job. However, the first stage of Thatcher’s economic restructuring came and there just weren’t jobs.
“Maybe I was naive in that way that recent graduates can be, but I had one of those ‘road to Damascus’ moments when I asked myself ‘Who actually makes jobs?’. I then decided to focus on helping people set up businesses and create jobs and wealth.”
Brophy’s career since has seen him work on business development for Project North East, run his own consultancy firm, and expand the region’s Business Link organisation into the largest body of its kind outside London at the time.
For the last four years, he has been CEO of Entrust, which has offered support and advice to start-ups and existing businesses for three decades. Entrust is now the manager of the Finance for Business North East Micro Loan Fund, which is designed to offer businesses sums ranging from £1,000 to £25,000.
Brophy’s philosophy for achieving growth involves challenging businesses to be ambitious, and encouraging individuals to realise the full potential of what they know.
He says: “People talk a lot about buildings and physical regeneration, but you’ve also got to regenerate how people feel about earning a living.
“You probably don’t have a job for life in any sector any more, so you have to manage your own way. That might involve a period of employment in the public sector, a short-term contract, starting a new business or turning a hobby into an supplementary income stream.
“It’s a black art, not a science. There may be more opportunities in the South, but you don’t lose the entrepreneurial gene at Scotch Corner.
“We’ve seen a slow shift in the culture of entrepreneurism in the North East. In the 70s and 80s there was a culture in which you followed your father to the shipyard, and then the coalmines and shipyards disappeared and weren’t replaced.
“Now we’ve got some cracking start-ups in the digital and software industry, growth in the service economy and we’re retaining traditional manufacturing in some form. Adaptation and innovation is more prevalent in the North East, and the region is in a much better position now to weather a recession than it was during the late 70s.”