The problem is all inside your head, she said to me/The answer is easy if you take it logically/I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free/There must be 50 ways to love the levy.

The lyrics above aren’t exactly as Paul Simon penned them. But they are the ones that I sing these days in my excitement about the apprenticeship levy.

They also have some resonance with the questions many of us are asking ourselves at the moment about how we can best address the commercial opportunities ahead. I don’t have all the answers. I can, though, tell you how we’re approaching the issue at North Hertfordshire College.

Our starting point was a thorough assessment of the market. We wanted to make sure that our plans were rooted in a detailed understanding of our prospective customers, our competitors and the policy context. It would have been all too easy to focus our thinking more narrowly on the latter. Apprenticeships are the obsession; the government is changing the way in which they’re designed, delivered, assessed and funded. The levy more than doubles the size of the market.

Our assessment had to be broader and deeper, though. We wanted to make sure that our commercial plans reflected the needs of large and growing industry sectors, changes in the shape of the labour market, business attitudes to young people and some of the other pressures that our future clients might face in years to come.

Expanding revenue streams

Our commercial plan flowed directly from this assessment. Our first and biggest decision was that, as well as working with businesses of all sizes in our local area, we wanted to chase regional and national client work. We set ourselves the ambitious target of creating a £25 million business by 2020. For us, that would mean quadrupling the size of our commercial income streams in four years.

We wanted to make sure that our commercial plans reflected the needs of large and growing industry sectors

In truth, we didn’t talk about it for very long before deciding that we would need a discrete unit with its own executive leadership and operational delivery team to realise our commercial plans. We just couldn’t see how else to deliver the growth we wanted and the quality we wanted without distracting colleagues from our study programme and other community programmes in north Hertfordshire. So we appointed a managing director and operations director to lead the business, and called on a handful of relevant colleagues from North Hertfordshire College to get us started.

Brand building

Our next priority was creating a brand for our new business. We didn’t want our sales team to spend the first 15 minutes of every client conversation explaining how our ambitions extended beyond north Hertfordshire. We did want a brand that properly reflected the identity of our new venture.

This meant something that conveyed our interest in emerging talent, that showed our determination to keep it clean and simple for our clients because we’d make it our job to deal with the complexity and bureaucracy. Something that suggested we might be quite good fun to work with - and something that reflected our Hertfordshire provenance, too.

We eventually settled on Hart Learning and Development (the “hart” being borrowed from Hertfordshire’s county flag).

We use the bridge to help clients think in a joined-up and progressive way

Of equal importance to the name of the business was the client proposition. We wanted to find a way of summarising what we do, beyond just listing the programmes on offer. After weeks of scribbling on the back of train tickets, restaurant receipts and napkins, we settled on a simple picture of a bridge, depicting what we see as three distinct phases of business engagement with emerging talent - engaging, training and progressing.

“Engaging” is about how businesses work with young people in schools, colleges and the community to help them to form their views and aspirations about the world of work. “Training” represents how businesses recruit and train new employees using apprenticeships, traineeships and other programmes. “Progressing” focuses on how they enable people to realise their potential and rise as far as their talent will take them.

We use the bridge idea to guide conversations with prospective clients - to help them think in a joined-up and progressive way about what they’re doing and what they need to do to realise their own business plans.

We also recently created a comic strip to explain how we’re bringing talented young people from all parts of society together with talent-hungry businesses.

Just over a year in, we’re really pleased with the progress we’re making. In 2015-16, we increased like-for-like profitability by more than £1 million, grew direct-delivery apprenticeship and traineeship starts by more than 80 per cent, and increased direct-delivery apprenticeship success rates by 11 per cent year on year. We’re also now starting to close some of those bigger client contracts that we wanted to chase when we established the group. We’ve grown some of our local relationships into regional and national ones, and have now signed our first national deals.

Time will tell whether we’ll deliver our 2020 ambition - and whether some of the big decisions we’ve taken are the correct ones. And even if those decisions are right for us, it doesn’t mean they’ll be right for others, too. There must be at least 50 ways to get it right.

Matt Hamnett is principal of North Hertfordshire College and chief executive of the Hart Learning Group. He tweets as @matt_hamnett