Half a billion pound marketplace prepares to open its doors

We flagged this in 2024, asking: ‘Want your business to benefit from half a billion pounds?'. That project, to help Gloucestershire’s biggest firms spend an extra £550m with its SMEs, is almost here.

Dear reader,

Welcome to Thursday’s edition of The Raikes Journal, the thrice-weekly (or more) series of digital newsletters we send out to our growing list of subscribers.

Today we follow up on a story we first touched on this time last year - about an incredibly exciting project that, if successful, could create an extra £550 million spend in Gloucestershire by its very biggest firms.

It might sound too good to be true, but that total is only a tiny percentage of what the county’s biggest 100 firms already spend by way of procurement annually.

The idea is that if those busy buying teams can easily access a list of potential suppliers from Gloucestershire that meet their many needs - ones that tick all their CSR, ethical and environmetal targets too - the benefits would be huge.

As fanciful and ambitious as that might sound, Raikes has been told the digital model that will help make this possible is already onboarding firms - big and small - in readiness for testing. And a launch is being planned.

The article also explains how you can register your interest too.

Credit goes to Adam Vines, of Lounge Design Limited and Cirencester Chamber of Commerce, and his fellow team members from the public and private sectors for staying the course to make possible what many thought was impossible.

Saying that, a minor thread that emerged, and one we loved, is that while credit for bringing this to life lies with a team of volunteers from the private and public sector, from some of our biggest firms and very smallest, the inspiration can be traced back to one of the Founding Partners of Raikes.

QuoLux, the leadership development specialists and passionate proponents of business as a force for good, has been given credit for planting the seed in the mind of one Adam Vines, of Lounge Designs, who has been one of the team working tirelessly on the project for the last three years plus!

• Just to finish… I am looking for commercial partners who would like to work with Raikes in 2025, support what we do and and feature in our stories as well! We don’t do advertorials, but we can deliver content for your business you can’t get anywhere else; credible, independent, third-party content business leaders and significant others want to read and take seriously. If you want to know more, please email me: andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.

• And… if you refer a friend to Raikes you’ll not only help us grow our audience, you’ll gain points towards a free full subscription too! Click the link below for more details.

Andrew Merrell (editor).

If you have a story, an issue, a news item, a charity or an interview you want us to write about or investigate, challenge the powers that be on, then please email me: andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.

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* The Raikes Journal is a community interest company. Everything you read by us is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne, our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.

If you subscribe and invite friends to The Raike Journal you will earn rewards towards complimentary membership (three referrals will get you one month, 10 will get you three months and 25 will win you six months).

If you upgrade to paid you’ll be part of this CIC too. We are dedicated to delivering quality journalism for Gloucestershire, to championing the county, in particular its businesses, charities, education and training providers, and to helping create an even stronger community. If you upgrade to paid you will be able to see past the paywalls often put on our second and third email editions of the week, that lock all our archive after two weeks and lock our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire series. You will be able to comment on our stories too. You’ll be helping make this CIC sustainable to deliver more original articles on our county.

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Half a billion pound marketplace prepares to open its doors

We flagged this in 2024, asking: ‘Want your business to benefit from half a billion pounds?'. That project, to help Gloucestershire’s biggest firms spend an extra £550m with its SMEs is almost here.

By Andrew Merrell.

A new marketplace that could be worth as much as an extra half a billion pounds to Gloucestershire’s economy through the creation of new trading agreements between the county’s biggest and smallest firms, is readying itself to launch.

It’s been three years plus in the making, for even longer been considered a Holy Grail for local economies everywhere - and certainly in Gloucestershire it is a dream many thought was just too difficult to ever come to pass.

But a team of volunteers is about to start testing a digital portal that will provide a shop window in which the county’s small and medium-sized businesses can parade their wares before many of its very biggest firms.

So powerful is the procurement might of the latter group that even an extra five per cent spend in the county would deliver a boost to the county’s economy of more than half a billion pounds.

Adam Vines, founder and director of Cirencester-headquartered creative marketing agency Lounge Design, has been leading the Together Gloucestershire project since its inception.

“We’ve had a working group of large organisations - public and private - and smaller SMEs for some time. All of them are still on board,” said Vines, encouraged that everyone remains so invested.

“The next stage will be to give companies access to try out the website, help us test the system, and help us learn how they might use it, what we can do to improve it, in order to create as good a tool as we can.”