Carlos Portela explains what Santander Breakthrough is offering ambitious SMEs across the UK

We’re passionate about helping ambitious businesses to succeed. Building long lasting relationships with businesses runs deep in our heritage, which has helped us to appreciate the challenges they face and the support they need to overcome them.

 

Here to fuel your entrepreneurial aspirations, Breakthrough is built around the needs of ambitious businesses and gives you access to the support and expertise your business needs to accelerate its growth plans and to reach its full potential.

 

You could meet inspirational business leaders and learn how they overcame the challenges to achieve success. We could also help you access growth finance and new talent, or help you build your business networks and make new connections. And if you want to explore international opportunities that could take your business into new markets, we can help.

 

Underpinning all of this is our local network of dedicated Relationship Directors, who will be there to provide information, support, and offer solutions to help accelerate your growth. 

The fast-growth businesses we’ve been working with were seeing great results: they were growing their workforce, launching new products and entering new markets. But we understand that not all ambitious businesses are necessarily fast-growth. Business ambition comes in many guises and we realised that the tools, resources and support that had been developed through the Breakthrough programme could help businesses achieve a variety of goals – whether it’s finding the right talent, expanding networks or going international.

We’ve added new elements, including regional business festivals across the UK, each delivering a week-long series of workshops and roundtables that bring more business owners face-to-face with each other and with experts in their field. We’re also bringing entrepreneurs together online via a LinkedIn community that’s already encouraging some great debates and knowledge sharing. We’re increasing the number of subsidised graduate interns we can provide access to, recognising that finding and retaining high quality people is a key hurdle for many firms. And as more businesses look abroad to new markets, we’re doing more to help them find the right one, by adding more countries and contacts to Trade Portal, for example. We’re developing the programme all the time, listening to our customers to ensure it remains relevant and effective in helping them develop their businesses.

The five pillars of Breakthrough – knowledge, talent, international, connections and finance – have been developed to address the different ambitions we hear business owners talking about most often. In fact, we believe there isn’t much a business can’t achieve by keeping one step ahead; being connected to talented and experienced people; understanding how best to take your business abroad; having the right financial support in place – and that, in a nutshell, is what Breakthrough delivers.