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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]