With a little help. Running a business isn’t easy.

There are a number of skills entrepreneurs need to excel at and few have time, energy or expertise to master every single one. That’s why roping in external help to deal with some of these skills is part and parcel of heading up a successful firm.

To better understand on which fronts British business owners need help, we asked about their relationship with external professionals on a variety of issues – namely raising finance, ensuring effective corporate governance, managing data privacy risks, reviewing contracts, protecting intellectual property, and handling disputes. Our survey clearly revealed that on all the aforementioned issues, entrepreneurs are more likely to bring in external help than not. Unsurprisingly, larger firms are generally more likely to use external support for all the mentioned objectives.

The issue businesses - large and small - most commonly require external professional support with is managing data privacy risks and ensuring regulatory compliance.¹⁵ Seventy-one percent of larger business owners reported 'always' or 'often' calling upon external professionals to help them do so, while only 6% reported 'rarely' or 'never'. Among smaller businesses, 49% reported either always or often requiring this helping hand, with just 14% saying that they rarely or never get external professionals involved.

The next most commonly selected issue in our survey which entrepreneurs need external help with is protecting intellectual property. Here, 76% of larger business owners say that they always or often seek external help, with just 4% saying they rarely or never require external help. For smaller businesses, 48% always or often seek external help with protecting intellectual property, while 22% say that they never or rarely do.

On the other hand, 67% of owners of larger businesses said that they rely on external support for raising finance - split 30% for 'always' and 37% for 'often'. Meanwhile, for smaller businesses, the ratio stands at 41%, with 13% of owners saying that they 'always' get help when raising finance and 28% claiming that they 'often' do. Only 4% of owners of larger firms say that they 'never' or 'rarely' call on external help to raise funds. For smaller businesses, this stands at 19%. Overall, this reveals that the risk of not getting help is sometimes taken by smaller businesses, but it's a rarity among bigger ones.

According to owners of larger businesses, relying on external help for effective corporate governance is also common, with 68% of them reporting getting help for it 'always' or 'often', compared to just 39% of entrepreneurs running smaller businesses. However, this doesn't mean that the smaller businesses don't look for help on this issue - as 43% say that they 'sometimes' bring in external support to ensure corporate governance.

For owners of smaller businesses, handling disputes or conflicts is typically something that they deal with on their own, with 31% of them saying that they either 'never' or only 'rarely' rely on external help. Only 6% of entrepreneurs running larger businesses, meanwhile, say the same.