The work which Dundalk company Optimum Results & Customer Perceptions has been doing with the local SME retail and service sector was praised by Minister of State for Business, Employment and Retail, Damien English last week when he visited their offices in the Blackthorn Business Park, Coe’s Road.

 “I am very keen that we support small retail businesses and I’ve got terrific feedback from Optimum Results’ work in this field,” said Minister English.

CEO Emma Harte led a presentation for the Minister explaining how they had worked with some 30,000 clients across twenty-one countries over the past 27 years and how this SME Management Skills Development programme received the much-coveted “International Best Practice” award from the European Training Foundation (ETF).

Founder Director, Aidan Harte outlined the many challenges for small business managers, one being that they are often too busy with everyday work to avail of critically important training and strategic planning.

In this light, he said, training has to be hugely relevant, interesting, enjoyable and bring very real, tangible benefits if participants are to stay with what is quite a substantial programme.

Minister English sought further details about how this programme had now evolved into blended learning’ post-Covid. He was interested in hearing about how the elements of self-assessment exercises, mystery shopping, training workshops, mentoring, networking and complimentary services of the LEOs came together over four months to contribute to the SME owner-managers formulating detailed, strategic growth and development plans for their businesses to help optimise performance over the next two or three years.

Optimum Results and Customer Perceptions employ twenty-two full-time staff supported by eighteen expert trainers and consultants and over 8,500 field researchers and mystery shoppers.