Thursday, February 13th, 2020

ESBA: New Brand. New Direction

On Wednesday, 22 January, at the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels,  the culmination of six month’s hard work by the ESBA Secretariat came to fruition, when the  ESBA Board launched ‘ESBA: a new brand, a new direction’, our new strategy for a new decade.

So why change?

Put simply, because the world has changed.

The technological explosion started in the mid-nineties has revolutionised business, big and small.

Of all these wide-reaching changes, the most important, to my mind, is a change of attitude from owners and managers of small businesses.

These owners and managers of what economists call SMEs have become, indeed have had to become, entrepreneurs in the truest sense of the word. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are straight out of business school determined to be the next unicorn, or the children of an old family run business who have just taken over from the older generation, they all believe, and truly are, entrepreneurs, not SMEs or small business managers, or any of the other labels bestowed on them by the older generation, they bring new vision to the business world.

These modern entrepreneurs want an organisation to represent them in a twenty-first century way, using twenty-first century techniques. They want to see a diverse membership, full of the young (and, not forgetting the young at heart, like me), women entrepreneurs, those from minority ethnic cultures, the immigrant searching for a better life, the socially responsible environmentally conscious entrepreneur, the disabled, those who pursue modern lifestyles, and those who thirst to learn new ways to grow their business.

In other words, they want an organisation that looks like them, that thinks like them, talks like them, and that really understands them.

One of the most important changes we  proposed at the reception was ‘The ESBA Manifesto for Change’.

The idea is simple. The ESBA membership will tell us in a yearly poll what changes they would like to see the EU institutions make in the upcoming year that will really help them grow their business.

And then we will campaign hard to convince both the Commission and the Parliament of the benefits of making those changes.

Entrepreneurs need a voice in Brussels. An independent voice for change.

And that’s exactly what ESBA intends to be over the next decade.

Photos of the ESBA: a new brand, a new direction event.