Mr. Joe Lowe:

To reiterate what my colleagues said in terms of hitting the nail on the head, I will point to a PowerPoint slide I prepared on some work we are doing with our client base. The question I asked them was, "Why are you so hard to convince?". This is the challenge faced daily at the coalface. There are issues and concerns around the real and perceived costs of getting involved in this space. There is the short-term focus versus the lack of urgency to an extent, in some microenterprises in particular. We have to understand the businesses we are dealing with in the LEO client base, which are typically small enterprises with fewer than ten employees. There is a perceived complexity to this. There is a degree of whataboutery, sometimes, as in "What about the guy across the road?" and "Why should I adopt this?" We focus on two things, namely, awareness of the importance and, second, the benefits in the context of evolving costumer demands. Where the customer is at right now is a very powerful influencing factor in the kinds of conversations we are having with microenterprises. Right now, the key challenge our clients face is around bandwidth and the capacity they have right now. We are probably beyond full employment. Many of our small businesses are struggling with being a little short-staffed and a lot of them are very busy. They are doing well right now. In that context, they say they know this is important but just not yet. That bandwidth piece is massively important. The reason our green for business programme and energy efficiency grants are so important is that we are helping businesses right now to think about how we can save time, energy and money. These are the things small businesses understand. This is the language we are engaging with them on and in that context we find that pointing out the benefits and showing them how they can save money and time is starting to work in terms of getting the traction we need with the businesses we work with.