Creating, Financing and Marketing a business

Creating, Financing and Marketing a business

Pros and Cons of Partnership

The benefits of partnership working are premised on the understanding that crime has multiple causes and effects. Young people who offend are likely to experience a range of problems connected to, for example, their family and social, economic, health or education needs. It is therefore not possible for any sole agency to address all aspects of offending behavior. Instead, an effective approach requires the input of a variety of agencies. In this context, partnership working has three key advantages (Souhami, 2007).

First, because they can pool information and expertise, multi-agency teams can identify the range of service user needs and provide a 'holistic' service to address them. This allows partnerships to identify children and young people thought to be at most 'risk' of offending and to intervene to attempt to prevent them from doing so.

Second, by consolidating the diverse expertise and resources of staff from different agencies into a single structure, partnerships allow for a more coordinated and more efficient use of resources, whether funding, expertise, effort or information.

Third, partnership work can encourage creativity and innovation. It enables staff to work outside their traditional structures and practices and allows for the development of new ways of working. Further, partnership structures can raise the status of the services delivered. The multi-agency governance structure of YOTs, for example, was explicitly intended to encourage the local authority and all statutory partners to participate in their operation and to see youth offending as their corporate responsibility.

However, the blurring of boundaries between agencies that partnership work represents can also be problematic in at least two ways (Souhami, 2007). First, it can lead to unaccountable working practices, in particular in relation to information sharing. While the ability to bypass the formal and often bureaucratic systems of communication between agencies is considered a central strength of partnership work, the ease and informality with which information can be exchanged within partnerships can lead to unacceptable practices, including breaches of confidentiality.

Second, partnership working raises some important challenges for practitioners. The relationships between participating agencies are a particular source of difficulty. Power differentials between agencies make conflict a central feature of multi-agency work.

Funding Options for Small Businesses

While large companies can take the financial markets in order to to raise capital, small businesses have only limited sources of funding.

Bank Loans

Before banks grant loans, they assess the relative risks of the company and make forecasts on growth and their ability to repay the loans. They refuse loans if the risk of potentially high and the profit is low, which is often characteristic for smaller loans.

A third party may make it easier for a bank to grant a loan by in the form of guarantee takes the risk of default of the bank (Bloomfield, 2008).

Equity

Small businesses, which are too risky for banks and can not get loans, raise capital by selling shares in their company. Investors provide small innovative companies whose growth potential is high, with risk capital when their ...