Transitions is co-founder of a new joint venture company, TriStart, a web-based tool for the assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of new start-up ventures and existing enterprises.

TriStart enables enterprise support agencies, banks and professionals to meet their performance targets in a more realistic and cost effective manner and signposts them to the support required to address their specific training and development needs - thus ensuring they have the greatest chance of becoming a successful and sustainable business.

National governments fund apex organisations such as Regional Development Agencies (RDA) to deliver support and advice to entrepreneurs and start up companies. Determining the most effective support is very time consuming and largely dependent on the skill of the advisor. A similar situation exists in the major lending banks who advise start-ups and SMEs where they need to determine the level of risk before providing a loan, or and how much time to spend on an account.

TriStart,as a web based statistical tool, can dramatically cut the time and cost of determining the appropriate advice. The entrepreneur is asked to spend 15 minutes filling in an online dialogue which is subjected to deep statistical analysis to determine which skills need to be developed. This tool has been developed from research with over 600 companies on the skills and qualities needed to establish a successful business.

In England and Wales there are approximately 400,000 start-ups each year, of which half seek advice. The public sector support agencies sees 35,000, or 17.5% of these, while the banks advise another 100,000; the rest go to professionals, consultants etc.

For the public sector, the cost of deriving this advice is approximately £100 per client or 3 hours of time. TriStart can achieve the same result for £50 per client in 15 minutes. The banks will see a greater saving as TriStart can help them to determine the probability of a business defaulting on a loan as well as reducing the time spent in working this out. The banks currently use a proprietary tool based on financial instruments. TriStart reinforces and add considerable value to this system by analysing original input data.

TriStartdetermines the training requirements for people who are thinking of starting a business, a third of whom go onto start a company. There are 600,000 potential users for TriStart every year in England and Wales. Developing relationships with the banks will enable TriStart to capture a sizeable share of this market.

In addition the data collected by TriStart can be analysed to provide longitudinal studies to determine the effectiveness of government policy and support. The global market for the TriStart package is estimated to be over £ 0.9 billion over what period?.

TriStartwas founded by a team that provides advice and consultancy to enterprise support agencies across the world. TriStart is marketing the assessment tool directly to RDAs in the UK, and establishing a global network of agents

Currently the competition is highly fragmented and there is no single product that can deliver all of the benefits of the TriStart system.

As a result of market research and discussions with new and potential clients we have identified that Tristart has an equally powerful application for the evaluation of existing businesses. For example we know that the UK RDAs are under great pressure to increase the focus and applicability of business support services to maximise cost effectiveness. Furthermore there is a similar opportunity with the Banks where their SME customers are under pressure and would benefit from specific support in their areas of weakness. 

In both these instances Tristart will add considerable value for clients in the level of service and benefit they provide to their customers.  The primary benefit is achieved first through the saving of time spent with those customers in assessing their strengths and weaknesses; and second, the ability to direct them to the sources of advice and support that will be matched to their specific needs as identified through the Tristart assessment system.

For further information on Tristart click here www.tristart.co.uk