£4850 free Cash for my Decorating Business
That caught your attention,
I know it caught mine when we first heard that we could potentially access £5000 free funding towards training, there had to be a catch, read on and you will see it’s just too good to miss out on
Why did we decide to focus on training
As a small decorating company Painttech Decorators find it hard to find the additional cash to invest in training for ourselves and staff. cash flow is hard at times as you all probably know and in the same boat.
we always want to be ahead of our competitors plus entice new contractors so having those qualifications and courses in our company will help us stay one step ahead
We’ve been building our business for over 25yrs
we’ve always specialised in decorating and focused our early career on Decorative Arts, we won a massive contract at the Royal Albert Hall many years ago for our Graining, Marbling and Gilding.
we had to invest a lot of money into to private training to obtain the skills needed, we trained with some true legends including the Marble master Bill Holgate who was a true gent and a true artist. so training is nothing new to me but gaining funding for our future training is something new
Who are the CITB
CITB is the industry training board for the construction sector in England, Scotland and Wales.
It’s their job to help the construction industry attract talent and to support skills development, to build a better Britain.
We are an executive non-departmental public body in charge of our budget and activities. Sponsored by the Department for Education, we are also accountable to government ministers, and ultimately Parliament.
What do they aim to do.
- To support British construction:
- We target our knowledge and resources to develop a world-class workforce for the challenges of today and tomorrow.
- We look to get the best new talent by promoting construction for its exciting and rewarding career opportunities.
- We work with industry to ensure training standards and qualifications are right for its needs.
- We strive to provide employers with the training they want for their people when they want it.
- We look to make it easy for levy-paying firms to get funding for innovation and skills development.
- And we will continue to talk and listen to industry, to research and survey, to question and analyse so that we can stay ahead of change and respond to the sector’s evolving needs.
if only we had been told about the Skills & training fund earlier we truly feel that our business would be on another level, we could have taken advantage of the funding for so many years but hey let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.
It seemed too good to be true
as a small decorating company we thought that any help or support from the CITB would have a major catch and we would end up getting hit hard for using the funding so we did a load of research and spoke to countless CITB representatives to make sure that we didn’t get taken for a ride. It just seemed to good to be true.
How easy was it to access funding?
I must admit that the process was Scary due to the website being quite intimidating and very confusing but we decided to persevere and although we got some things wrong we got Tracey in the office to work through the whole process with us until we got the funding accepted.
Do I have to pay it all back?
“NO” as long as you use all the money for the training you applied for then you don’t have to pay a penny back so make sure you complete all the training you applied for
Is this a one off grant?
CITB is focused on helping my business grow and they will support me every year with more funding for further training for me and my team.
the majority of Decorators will never exceed the 80K limit unless that have a blinding year as we have.
£7500 is my next goal.
this what my funding allowance will go up to if
as a business owner, I might have to pay a small Levy return this year but that’s only because I’ve had a very busy successful year so I might have exceeded the 80K on the Subbie bills so I’ve yet to calculate how much I will have to pay.
but I will always win more than I lose as the limit increases nicely.
So what does the future hold
we have completed so much training this year and this alone has helped me be well ahead of my competitors and attract new clients that clearly want to work with a business that is focused on growing and training so the future is already bright and only going to get better with more training options
Time to get busy.
Seriously you would need to be mental to not take advantage of this funding, not only have we grown because of the training we now know loads of great companies following our example
plus when you think about it those guys are your direct competition so you really need to get Busy guys.
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