Last week I looked at the preparation needed to write your business plan, now we are laying out the structure of the plan. Not all of the following will be needed for every plan and you must decide what to include based on the use that the business plan will be put to. For instance [...]

It’s a New Year and the entrepreneurial juices are flowing. It’s time to start the business that you’ve been talking about for years. What’s stopping you? Or maybe you’ve already got a business but it’s not growing as fast as you had thought, what has to happen to make this year the year it doubles [...]

Non Executive Directors (NEDs) are a valuable asset to any growing company, but although they may be very experienced in their market area, for some it’s the first time that they have acted as a Non Executive Director of a business. The business also may be new to taking on an NED, so between them [...]

Just back from giving a business plan workshop to a group of MBA students, many of whom were keen to start their own business. So naturally the subject of how to fund a business came up. One of the areas that regularly seems to cause confusion with the students is the difference between Private Equity, [...]

As promised the chancellor has confirmed in his March budget documents that there will be a Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) starting from 6th April 2012, although it didn’t get a mention in his actual speech. Just to clarify for anyone confused by the similarity of SEIS with an existing scheme, there is already an [...]

SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) is a new government incentive to help UK start-ups and young companies. It starts in just a few weeks on April 6th, so now is a good time to start building this into your funding plan for your start-up. Or if you are an Investor, have a look to see [...]

“How do I get an Investor?” is the question I most get asked by entrepreneurs. Finding an Investor is often a hard and very time-consuming part of growing a business, but thousands of companies manage to do it every year. Here are my top tips:   Make sure you really need an Investor. On the [...]

Every experienced Investor develops a sixth sense when looking at potential business opportunities, but even so it can sometimes be difficult to put your finger on what is the key ingredient in making a new venture successful. Over the years of working with start-ups I’ve seen companies grow rapidly and then fall away, great businesses [...]

I went along to The London Funding Conference at the British Library last night and was again impressed by the Library’s ability to host these events. In football terms the conference had scored a couple own goals, with over-long sponsor’s talks during the first half, but came storming back to win with truly excellent insights [...]

There seems to be no end of potential experts telling entrepreneurs the best way of getting their business funded and I guess it’s difficult at times to judge just what the optimum route for investment may be. That’s why I was pleased to see a funding conference where there is a solid grouping of expert [...]