“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 plus side they [...]

Whenever I hear advice from successful entrepreneurs the most consistent mantra is “always hire the best people you can afford”.
But how good is “the best”, how do you measure that? Also, if you are in a young company, with very limited resources, how much can you really afford?
Let’s step back for a moment though and [...]

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 speakers [...]

The first question is should it cost anything? After all it is the Investors who have money, so why should they charge in order to pitch to them?
Well, actually almost all Investors don’t charge a penny for entrepreneurs to present an investment case to them.
Investors are not looking to make money from people presenting [...]

Last night I attended the keynote event of Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), yes it’s this week, how could you miss it? Sitting in a packed conference centre of the British Library, I looked around at the alert eager faces of budding Entrepreneurs and thought this has to be the future for Britain.
Tom Bewick, the CEO [...]

At one time business incubators seemed to be mentioned in the business section of every newspaper. Now they have a much lower profile and you might be forgiven for wondering what had became of them.
Since they tend to be focused on high growth, technology or knowledge-based industries, it’s not surprising that during the hay day [...]

 
As you can imagine, I see a lot of business plans and so does any Investor. While many are good, most are very poor indeed.
Here’s my top ten of most common mistakes:
 

Typos and spellings – it sounds small, but it is a killer. Now days there is just no excuse. My own spelling is atrocious, [...]

Business Angels are often thought to be tough and worldly-wise and it’s true that they are people who have made a success of their business life, but even a Business Angel needs to remember to use their head rather than just their heart when making investment choices.
There are a number of new business angel investors [...]

The EIS (Enterprise Investment Scheme) was set up to encourage Investors, by giving them various tax breaks if they help to fund growing businesses.
The business must be set up as a limited company and the shares not listed on the stock market, which means a lot of small companies could use this to attract Investors, [...]