Mind Matters is a relatively new company, a small business based in South Yorkshire, with some big reasons for the doing the work that we do. We are a small team that work very hard to make a positive difference to people and businesses through our Mental Health Training courses. Like many small businesses, we face small business challenges such as capacity, cash flow, marketing on a budget, and various other considerations.
This means we can often relate to our small business customers, because we too are faced with similar challenges that they face. As a small mental health training company, we started out by offering just our open courses in mental health. We worked (and still do) very hard to generate interest in these courses. We have since reached a stage in our business growth where we often deliver several in-house courses per week and have a small team of Associates who help us to do this. And whilst one of our most labour intensive areas is delivering our open courses, the courses we started out with, we’ve never removed them from our range of services and offerings. One of the reasons for this is that without our open courses, our small business customers wouldn’t necessarily have chance to access an open mental health course locally. The reasons for this may be that they don’t employ sufficient staff numbers to validate an in-house course, and even if they did, this may been a 100% of their workforce being on a training course at any one time – effectively shutting down their business for a day or two. As small business owners will know, this could have a significant impact on their business, catastrophic even for some. So continuing to offer open courses helps us to know our courses are still accessible for small businesses, as well as the large business customers that we support.
The Federation of Small Business have also given consideration to the needs of small businesses in developing a new wellbeing guide: Wellbeing in Small Businesses – How you can help. The guide includes how small businesses can introduce discussion about mental health, job design, support for your staff when it’s needed, and various signposting and support helplines. It’s a short user-friendly guide for small businesses out there, just like us.