In January this year, we marked our first full year of operation with a board meeting. (At the time, Omicron was in full effect, so the cake/ pub/ dancing on tables options were broadly unavailable). Part of that meeting was about setting our goals for the future year. And it’s important to us that our members and the wider community know what we’re aiming to achieve.

Of course, what will underpin everything is our continuing intention to provide as much as we can for free, and where we have to charge for a service, to do it for as little as possible. This is the crucial point of difference for SWCRC. We’re lucky enough to have funding from policing and Home Office, so we don’t need to make a profit. And this is what enables us to provide a uniquely accessible and affordable service to small businesses and charities in the South West region.

Firstly, we want to grow. We want to more than double our membership over the next year, because we need more businesses to be safer. To achieve this, we’re focusing on the supply chain: we’re asking larger companies to consider referring their suppliers and partners to us. Because if their network is safer, they’re safer too. So, if you’re a bigger company, with neither the time or the resource to manage your supply chain risk as effectively as you’d like, we’ll be happy to talk to you about how we could support.

Secondly, we want to know that we’re making an impact. We’re gearing up a webinar programme for our members, to generate more discussion. We want to be referring more of them across to the free police training offers that they might not know about, and we want to provide more of our own student services, so that they can access affordable checks of their systems, and know how safe they are from hackers. We also want to maintain the strong engagement with our monthly newsletters, which warn all of our members about the latest threats that they should look out for. Because we know that if they continue to read them, they’re safer.

Thirdly, we want to generate some income to support our operating expenses, and ensure that we can continue to provide a great service to a growing membership. We’re looking for the right collaborators in the region, who have valuable services to offer and are interested in supporting SME’s. This might be through our affordable collaborator memberships, where we work with you to make your offer more widely known, or it might be through the board partnerships where you help fund us and refine our strategy. We’re immensely proud to have Leonardo and Bamboo already at our board table, joining the head of regional cyber policing and the lead police and crime commissioner for cyber nationally. If you think that either opportunity might be of interest, please get in touch.

So that’s us until April 2023. There are a host of developments we also want to bring online before then: we’re busy now refining our website, our welcome pack, our customer journey, and our membership offerings. And if you think there are other things we should be working on, let us know. Because we’re here to support the SW business community, and it’s only if you tell us what you need that we can get that right.