“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 [...]

I spent an enjoyable couple of days doing one-to-ones on business planning at a conference last week and the area that was most misunderstood was the need to define and understand your market.
It sounds simple, everyone of course understands their market don’t they, it’s obvious. The market is whoever will buy from us. We don’t [...]

I was putting together a business plan workshop for some MBA students the other day and looked for a couple of quotes to illustrate points. There are, as you can imagine, quotes for everything, sometimes contradictory.
There is one area though that no one disagrees with and it happens to be a pet issue with me. [...]

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 [...]

Last week I talked about having a simple sales & marketing plan for your business. It doesn’t have to be particularly fancy, but you should have bounced ideas around with your team (find someone to do this with if a sole trader) and written it down. The act of documenting it is important, clears up [...]

Hands up those who have more sales than they can handle? It does happen, but for most small businesses it is a constant battle to get customers.
You’ve got a good product or service; in fact you are probably very proud of the quality and cost effectiveness of your offering. But sales don’t seem to be [...]

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, [...]