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I've just read with amazement an article in today's Crains about a Liverpool search firm CL5 that has been awarded a grant by North West Vision and Media to set up an office in Manchester.
To be quite frank I can't believe it - search is one of the few parts of the market that are really buoyant at the moment with most firms of any merit recording quite rapid growth and acceptable profits.
Why does a government institution want to pour money into a firm that if it was any good would be able to finance its expansion itself?
The remit of NWVM, part of the North West Development Agency, is to help businesses in the digital and creative sector grow - but surely there are other businesses out there more in need of help than search firms. I'm thinking of all the traditional and pure creative agencies that are having a hard time as clients' budgets are cut.
The other thing that upsets me is that for a long time Liverpool agencies have benefited from an unfair playing field in Merseyside. It's been very difficult for Manchester agencies to compete with the 20% discounts offered by Liverpool competitors because they had access to Objective One funding again administered by the NWDA.
One has to wonder if the NWDA has a Mersey bias or whether it's just that Liverpool firms are better at working the system.
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