Adrian Gillespie, chief executive of Scottish Enterprise, has spoken about the importance of Scotland’s economic development agency being more closely connected to the companies it supports.

Speaking on the Go Radio Business Show, he said: “What I would say to listeners is, if they have an opportunity, if they want to grow, please do get in touch with us. One of the things we’ve done over the past few months is put more of a regional structure into what we do. We now have a regional lead within my leadership team for each of the regions across the country. We have a regional business support lead and a regional trade lead.

“This means there will be a face in the business community locally that everybody can get to know and can approach. Alongside all of the various other ways, such as through our website, that you can get in touch, this really helps to develop relationships and make sure there is easy access to what we do.”

Asked by Sir Tom Hunter what key changes he had made since coming into the role six months ago, he replied: “I’ve reinforced the need for us to have strategic relationships with companies and to structure ourselves that way. There had been a move towards issuing calls for funding. There might be an area of the economy we wanted to stimulate and we would go out to the community and say: ‘Who’s interested?’. In fact, you need to have relationships with companies to understand and support them to access funding. So we’ve changed some of our roles internally.

“We have restated the importance of our account managers, the colleagues in the organisation who have close working relationships with companies.”