Local Enterprise Office Mentoring and Training Supports

Every Local Enterprise Office runs subsidised mentoring and training: one-to-one mentor sessions with an experienced business person, Start Your Own Business courses, and short skills programmes covering finance, digital marketing, e-commerce and management. Most carry a nominal fee or none, and no sector restrictions apply to training. Any small business, including retail and local services that cannot access LEO capital grants.

What this scheme funds

Free or low-cost mentoring and skills training, open to sectors that grant aid excludes.

  • One-to-one mentoring hours with an assigned mentor
  • Start Your Own Business programmes
  • Short courses in digital marketing, e-commerce, finance and management
  • Management development programmes in many counties

What it does not fund

These costs are routinely ruled ineligible under this scheme.

  • Equipment
  • Supplier fees
  • Salaries

Who is eligible

Eligibility is decided by Local Enterprise Office, not by Digital Bridge.

  • Small businesses and prospective founders in the county
  • Sector restrictions that apply to grant aid generally do not apply to training and mentoring

How to apply

Typical end-to-end timeline: Immediate to a few weeks, depending on the course calendar.

  • Browse your Local Enterprise Office's training calendar
  • Book a place or request a mentor
  • Complete the sessions and agree an action plan

Evidence you will need

Applications are usually delayed by missing paperwork rather than by weak projects.

  • Basic business details

Why applications get rejected

The recurring reasons assessors give under this scheme.

  • Course fully booked
  • Business located outside the county

What Digital Bridge delivers under this scheme

Illustrative net cost applies the published rate (Heavily subsidised; many programmes are free) to our published engagement bands. It is arithmetic, not an offer of funding.

  • Team training and workshops on AI and digital tools — list from €1,200, illustrative net cost Commercial training is separate from LEO programmes and is not grant funded by this support

Who decides this grant, and what we are responsible for

Local Enterprise Office decides eligibility, approval and payment under this scheme. Digital Bridge supplies the work and the documentation an assessor asks for from the supplier side.

  • Digital Bridge does not administer, assess, approve, pay or appeal any grant. Every decision is made by the funding body named on the scheme, under its own published rules.
  • This section is general information, not financial, tax, legal or grant-writing advice. It is not an application, a pre-approval, or any form of assurance that you will be funded.
  • Scheme rates, ceilings and eligibility change without notice and several supports are administered locally, so your Local Enterprise Office or agency may apply different rules to the ones published here. Confirm everything with the funder in writing before you commit.
  • Our questionnaire is a deterministic guide based only on the answers you give. It cannot see your accounts, your sector classification, your state-aid position or your previous awards, so it can suggest a scheme you are ultimately found ineligible for.
  • If an application is refused, delayed, reduced or clawed back, our fees for work you have instructed remain payable. We recommend you do not instruct chargeable work until your funder confirms in writing what it will support.
  • Costs incurred before a funder receives your application are almost always ineligible. Timing is your responsibility, and we will always tell you when we think you should wait.

How the LEO Mentoring & Training works in practice

Local Enterprise Office mentoring and training is the most used and least discussed support in the system. Mentoring pairs a business owner with an experienced practitioner for a small number of structured sessions; training runs as short subsidised courses on finance, marketing, digital and management. Neither provides capital. The value depends heavily on the specificity of the question brought to the session — owners who arrive with a defined problem tend to leave with a decision, while those who arrive for a general chat get a general chat. Availability, panel composition and course calendars are local, so two neighbouring counties can offer noticeably different programmes in the same quarter.

What we do as the supplier on the quote

We regularly meet businesses whose digital plan came out of a mentoring session, and the plans are usually sound in direction and vague on cost. Our contribution is turning the direction into a scoped, priced sequence with the dependencies made explicit — you cannot report on orders you are not capturing, and you cannot automate a process nobody has written down. Where mentoring has recommended something we think is premature, we will say so and propose the cheaper prior step instead. Mentoring is advice, not instruction, and a supplier who implements it uncritically is not adding much.

How do you get value from LEO mentoring?

Mentoring is the cheapest support most Local Enterprise Offices offer and the one most often wasted, because owners arrive without a question. A mentor given "I want to grow" will spend the session establishing context. A mentor given "here are my last twelve months of enquiries by source, and I cannot tell which channel is worth more" starts working in the first ten minutes. Bring numbers, however rough. Bring the decision you are stuck on. Be prepared to hear that your assumption is wrong, since a mentor who agrees with everything has not earned the session. And book the follow-up: most of the value shows up in the second conversation, after you have tested the first one's advice.

Can retail businesses use this?

Yes. This is the main reason retail and local services should still register with their office even though they cannot usually access capital grants.

Can mentoring be used to review a supplier quote?

Business owners do use sessions to sanity-check proposed spend, and we have no objection to a mentor reviewing our scope. An independent read of a quote before signing is a reasonable use of the support and generally improves the eventual brief.

Source and last review

Scheme parameters checked against Local Enterprise Office — Training and Mentoring (https://www.localenterprise.ie/Discover-Business-Supports/Training-Programmes/) on 2026-08-21. Reviewed quarterly. Next scheduled review: November 2026. Digital Bridge is a supplier, not the awarding body. Eligibility, approval and payment are decided solely by the funding body named on each scheme. Figures below are the published scheme parameters as at the review date shown, and net costs are arithmetic illustrations of the published rate applied to our published prices. Always confirm current rules with the funder before you commit to any spend, because expenditure incurred before an application is received is almost always ineligible.

Is mentoring worth the time for an owner who already knows their trade?

The value is rarely technical. Owners who take up mentoring and get something out of it usually arrive with a decision they have been circling for months: whether to hire, whether to drop a service line, whether the pricing has drifted below cost. A mentor with sector experience is useful precisely because they have no stake in the outcome and no product to sell you, which is a position we are not in and will not pretend to be. Where it disappoints is when an owner turns up without a question, expecting a general review, and receives general advice. Come with something specific and awkward. On the digital side, the single most useful preparation is a plain list of what you currently pay for monthly — the domain, hosting, email, whatever tools accumulated over five years — because that list surprises most owners and gives the session something concrete to work on.

How do the training courses differ from what a supplier would teach you?

A Local Enterprise Office programme is written to be supplier-neutral: it covers how a thing works in general, across the market, without steering you to one product. Our workshops are not neutral and we say so plainly — they cover our builds, our tooling and how we approach a problem, which is genuinely useful once you are working with us and much less useful if you are still deciding. That distinction matters when a business is choosing where to spend limited hours. If you have not yet chosen a direction, take the neutral training first; you will negotiate better with every supplier afterwards, including us. Practical courses on digital marketing, bookkeeping and management fundamentals also tend to be the ones owners rate highest afterwards, ahead of the broader strategy sessions, largely because the material can be applied the same week rather than filed as intention.

How we decide what to quote for Leo Mentoring And Training

Digital Bridge delivers this work from Gorey Business Park in County Wexford on a fixed written scope — one price, one delivery date — and the client owns the finished work outright. Every Local Enterprise Office runs subsidised mentoring and training: one-to-one mentor sessions with an experienced business person, Start Your Own Business co Before a figure is given, four questions are answered in order, and a named person signs the scope off — it is never generated automatically.

  1. Is this the right job at all? We look at what you already have online, whether the domain and Google Business Profile are in your own name, and what Leo Mentoring And Training customers currently ask you for. If a repair or a single page would solve it, we quote that instead.
  2. What does the work have to achieve first? The scope is written around one outcome — enquiries, bookings, orders or credibility — and anything else is listed as optional so it can be dropped without renegotiating.
  3. What will it cost and when will it be live? Page count, content readiness, integrations and whether photography or copy still has to be produced set the price and the date, both fixed in writing before work starts.
  4. How will people in Leo Mentoring And Training find it afterwards? Local search setup is included in a build; ongoing SEO is a separate optional retainer you can start or stop with notice.

Checkable facts behind this Leo Mentoring And Training page

Author and reviewer: Joey Bray, founder of Digital Bridge, building and maintaining Irish business websites since 2016. Studio address: Gorey Business Park, Gorey, Co. Wexford. Phone: 085 224 1848. Every claim below can be checked before you speak to us.

  • Published starting prices, not estimates released after a sales call — see the pricing page for the full ladder.
  • Live client sites you can open and test yourself are listed in the work section.
  • One contact from first call to launch, rather than an account handler relaying messages.
  • A plain-text mirror of this page is published for AI assistants at the same path with a .md extension.