Latest Articles

Periodical

What can the Government Learn from the S/EIS Tax Legislation?

The majority of tax legislation in the UK is confusing, and support for SMEs is often ineffective, so why is S/EIS any different?

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Funding in 2023

Valuing an Early-stage Business

Valuing any business can be a complicated and often inexact procedure, but arriving at a valuation for an early-stage business is so much more difficult...

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Funding in 2023

Getting Investors - Venture Capital Firms

When considering raising equity finance, most early-stage businesses would often have to turn to angel investors or crowdfunding as was explained in last week’s article...

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Funding in 2023

Getting Investors - Angels & Crowdfunding

Having decided to scale your business and having concluded that the only way to make that happen in a meaningful way is to raise equity funding, there are then some very obvious...

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Funding in 2023

Pitch Decks & Business Plans

Pitch decks and business plans are a very common area for discussion amongst founders and early-stage business owners, especially if those businesses are seeking to raise...

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Funding in 2023

SEIS/EIS Tax Relief

Having made the decision to raise equity funding, and assuming that you know how much you are looking to raise, you must then decide the best place to raise that funding. This...

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Funding in 2023

Why Raise Equity Funding?

Funding for your business can, in theory, come from many different places. It can be self-funded from your own resources, otherwise known as bootstrapping, or you can ask...

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Funding in 2023

Funding: Where to Start

Many hundreds of thousands of new businesses are set up each year in the UK. Indeed, according to Companies House, just over 200,000 new businesses were established in the first...

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Funding in 2023

Getting Funding to Scale in 2023

Ask any early-stage business owner and they will tell you that getting funding to scale can be tough. Very tough. All will tell you that it takes much more time and effort and take

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Challenges & Top Tips

Top Tips to Scaling Your Business

When starting a new business, founders tend to fit into one of two categories. There are founders whose plan it is to scale their new business as aggressively as possible and to...

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Challenges & Top Tips

Top Tips to Getting Investment Ready

If you want to scale your early-stage business, and to grow it quickly, then it is quite possible that you will need to raise investment by selling part of your business to new...

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Challenges & Top Tips

Top Tips to Fund Raising

Most entrepreneurs, and indeed the early-stage businesses themselves, share many of the same challenges and experiences along their journey. This is basically true irrespective...

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Challenges & Top Tips

Top Tips to Cash Flow

These are tough times for many businesses. Rapid inflation and so rising input costs. Rising interest rates leading to increased financial costs. Squeezed consumers buying less...

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Back to Basics

Cash Flow is Everything

It has often been said that cash is king. This does not of course mean cash itself, but the phrase refers to a company’s cash flow and how it manages the flows of payments into...

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Back to Basics

Raising Finance

Of all the areas of starting and scaling a business that most founders are unsure of, it is raising finance. For some, the questions are more basic, whilst for others the...

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Back to Basics

Pitch Decks & Business Plans

Pitch decks and business plans. Every early-stage business with any thought of expansion, even if only modest expansion, should have them. And every founder of a start-up should...

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Start-up to Scale-up

Changes for Growth

It is true that many people do not like change and shy away from it. But it is equally true that periods of change bring much more opportunity for innovation and for businesses...

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Start-up to Scale-up

The Challenge of Scaling

Starting a business is not always easy. But scaling a business, any business, often brings many more challenges than actually starting one. A typical small business is quite...

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Start-up to Scale-up

How Many Angels Make a Crowd?

When it comes to considering how best to raise pre-seed or seed finance for your business, one of the most commonly asked questions is whether getting investment from business...

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Start-up to Scale-up

Getting the Right Investment

Having decided that you want to scale your business and that you need more money to do this properly, you will then need to carefully consider all the different options available..

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Start-up to Scale-up

Valuations and Fundraising

The majority of businesses that are looking to scale in any meaningful way will look to raise funding at some point. As well as the other steps already discussed in this series...

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Start-up to Scale-up

Not Just a Number

This article could have been entitled ‘data and financials’ but so many of you would not have got even this far. But the truth is that data and your financials are not just...

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The Next Steps

Do I Need an Advisory Board?

What exactly is an Advisory Board and why is it so important to growing your business? This is a question that I am often asked by founders of early stage businesses. Thankfully..

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The Next Steps

Recovery Loan Scheme

On April 6th 2021 a new Government loan scheme has come into force to help those businesses with the next steps after they have been affected by the economic difficulties and...

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Periodical

Different Ways to Fund Your Startup - Crowdfunding

The founders of almost every early stage business will ask themselves on at least one occasion, “Do I need to raise finance in order to grow my business?” For many, the answer...

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Periodical

London - Fintech Capital of Europe

It’s official – London is Europe’s global tech city, with London based technology firms having raised more than $10.5bn in new investment from venture capital firms in 2020...

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Lessons Learned

Kickstart Scheme

How much do you know about the Kickstart Scheme that was introduced by the Government in September 2020? If you are a startup or early stage business, my guess would probably be...

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Top Tips

Top Tips to Pitching

One thing that every early stage business should produce is a pitch deck, whether they are looking to raise external funding or not. A pith deck is typically a 15 to 20 page...

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Top Tips

Top Tips to Valuing your Business

Founders typically establish a business with one of two game plans in mind. They either want a lifestyle business and one that fits their work life balance, or they want to build..

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Top Tips

Top Tips to Managing Cash Flow

It is often said that turnover is vanity and profit is sanity. But, even more importantly, do not forget that cash is king. Put simply, businesses fail because they do not have...

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Periodical

Choose Your Investors Wisely

Taking the plunge and deciding to start your own business can be one of the biggest and most important decisions that many of us will make. Having set out on that course...

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Periodical

Why Many Founders are Fantasists

Founders and entrepreneurs need to be many things. They need to be enthusiastic and energetic, intelligent and inventive, resourceful and resilient, tenacious and talented. But...

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Overheard in a Startup...

Is My Business Eligible for the Bounce Back Loan Scheme?

As we are all starting to hope that the end, or at least a temporary reprieve, is in sight, thoughts are starting to turn to how we and our businesses can bounce back. In fact...

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Overheard in a Startup...

Can I Raise Finance During the Coronavirus Pandemic?

Money most certainly does not buy happiness, but it does make the world go round. And the lack of money can lead to hardship in many ways. A question that I keep overhearing...

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Overheard in a Startup...

Can My Business Survive Coronavirus?

Coronavirus is on everyone’s lips, not literally but figuratively. And for very good reason. It seems so long ago already that the only thing in the news was all things Brexit...

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Overheard in a Startup...

How Do I Best Preserve Cashflow?

In any business, at any time, cash is king and cashflow is much more important than turnover, and in the short term it can often even be more important than profit. If turnover...

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Overheard in a Startup...

Tell Me More About Funding Options?

Whatever any of us care to call it - funding, finance, getting investors, or any other variation on the theme – obtaining finance remains one of the biggest areas of both concern..

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Overheard in a Startup...

What Exactly is SEIS and EIS Tax Relief?

Some questions in life are more fundamental than others and some are more specific or technical, and so it is in the world of early stage businesses. But for the person asking...

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Overheard in a Startup...

Why Do Most Businesses Fail?

For anyone starting a business there is that delicious and intoxicating mixture of excitement tinged with fear. That is partly the fear of the unknown but it is also very much...

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Finance

Money Matters! #4 Lower Risk but Better Returns

In my previous article in this series I set out why I thought that having cash in an instant bank or building society savings account, and especially in a cash ISA, was not good..

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Finance

Money Matters! #3 Deposit Accounts

Having started to understand that we owe it to ourselves that we really do need to know a little more about our personal finances it is easy to go one of two ways...

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Mentor's Journal

Week 17 - Et Deinceps Sursum

Last week was of course the last real working week of the year, but whilst many will have found opportunities to celebrate most will still have been working hard...

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Periodical

Crowdfunding or Angel Network - How to find your way in the world of financing options

At some stage in the development of a business that wishes to really grow and prosper, the founders or senior management will decide that they need to raise funding...

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Finance

Money Matters! #2

In my opening article in this ‘Money Matters!’ series I asked a number of basic questions about personal finance that everyone should be able to answer at least in general terms...

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Finance

Money Matters!

I have been in and around the financial service sector the whole of my working life and indeed studied Commerce and Economics at school, so I guess that that shapes my view on...

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Periodical

The Art Of Fundraising

As a mentor I get involved in a huge cross section of businesses in different sectors and at different stages of their development. As a result I have been involved in many...

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Mentor's Perspective

Understanding R&D Tax Credits

In the last two articles in this series I have looked at various aspects of finance and this time I am going to stay with the financial theme but from a very different angle...

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Mentor's Perspective

Getting Finance – Part 2

In this, the second part of looking at the different forms of finance available to a startup, I look specifically at the different types of equity finance and try to summarise...

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Mentor's Perspective

Getting Finance – Part 1

So far in the series I have looked at some of the different types of assistance that is available to a startup and also about what benefits working with a Mentor can bring and...

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boom

in British English

VERB

to prosper or cause to prosper vigorously and rapidly