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Entrepreneur

Pitching for Management – Manchester – 12 October 2011

by Steve Livingston on October 4, 2011

Do you want to take your business onto its next stage of growth? Do you need to find some senior talent to help you do this?

We are partnering with AngelNews for its latest Pitching for Management event in Manchester on 12th October. This will be the perfect event for exciting businesses to find senior people to help them build their teams at no cash cost and for executives to identify interesting early stage businesses that would value their expertise.

Pitching for Management is a live event series which runs in 18 cities across the UK. It will be held at Brown Shipley’s offices in Spinningfields from 4.00pm to 7.30pm. As well as the pitches there are plenty of networking opportunities at the event and canapés and drinks will be served during the evening.

The Pitching for Management concept is simple. Make a short pitch to an audience of senior executives who have come to see if they can offer their services to help you.

These executives are willing to work for sweat equity, bonuses, commissions and/or share options. So pitching companies do not need to pay high salaries until they are delivering the results you require.

You can read all about Pitching for Management at www.pitching4management.com.

We are expecting between 30 – 50 relevant senior executives will attend the event. Past events in the series have shown that pitching companies have a good chance of finding someone that suits.

AngelNews is holding a competition for the best pitch of this series of Pitching for Management. The winning pitch at the Manchester event will go through to the final in Bristol on 13th December. The winner of the final will receive a £2,000 cheque.

To find out more about this opportunity, please call Caroline Sage at AngelNews on 01761 452 248 or email her on caroline[at]angelnews.co[dot]uk or contact me.

You can find booking details here.

Hopefully see you there!

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5 tips for securing funding – Bill Morrow: Angels Den

by Steve Livingston on March 29, 2011

Bill Morrow, founder of the Angel Network, outlines 5 top tips for entrepreneurs seeking funding from VCs:

  1. Make sure you can explain your business quickly and succinctly. If it takes you more than 5 minutes, then you’ve yet to get it nailed. Back to the drawing-board for you!
  2. Outline the pain that your product or service will solve.
  3. Explain how your business will solve this pain.
  4. Enthuse investors with the opportunity for growth and how you will achieve this – how will your business scale to achieve the 5x + return on investment for your investors?
  5. Set out clearly how you will spend the money that you are requesting.

Morrow also explains how it helps for entrepreneurs to “humanise” interactions with potential investors, where possible. If you can build rapport by indulging in a bit of chit-chat about the cricket or football etc then this helps build relationships beyond business.  After all, you may have to work with each other over a number of years, so its important that you can get on outside of business-talk.

Good advice. Listen to this podcast in full over at Smallbiz pod.

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Budget 2011 must support entrepreneurs

March 23, 2011

With a little less than 30 minutes to go until the Budget speech, I am looking forward to a pro-entrepreneur business set of proposals and actions to support growth for the future.
Looks like the Institute of Directors (IoD) are too with some of their proposals – here’s one in particular that I like:
Introducing an exemption [...]

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Finding your true North

February 9, 2011

Richard North, Managing Director of Wow! Stuff, provides some great advice for entrepreneurs:
“You are either an employee and you are prepared not to take risks and end up with a bonus or you become an employer, you take risks but you also end up with the rewards”
Despite selling his first business for a 7 figure [...]

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Preventing potentially expensive business balls-ups!

January 20, 2011

It’s been a busy start to the year so far. It’s nice to see businesses that I’ve been talking to and getting to know for a number of weeks, months (or in some cases years) reach critical points in their business lifecycle in either starting new ventures, seeking and raising funding [...]

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Why 2011 should be a great year for north west entrepreneurs

January 11, 2011

Despite talk of economic doom and gloom, here are just 3 reasons why I think 2011 will be a great year for entrepreneurs and fast growth businesses across the north west:

The North West Fund is here to provide £185m of equity and loan funding making investments of £50,000 to £2m into fast growth businesses across [...]

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Tomorrow’s Business – 37 Signals, Duct Tape Marketing plus more

November 19, 2010

The following are links worthy of your attention in running your small-medium sized business:
Interview with Jason Fried of 37 Signals (video) – fascinating insights into productive work, generating ideas and products, improving communication – overall, tips in relation to the effective modern workplace. Great quote about entrepreneurialism and the danger of getting VC funding too early:
“The [...]

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Tinkering with tax simplification

November 10, 2010

Over 1,000 tax incentives have been identified and collated as part of the first stage of the Office of Tax Simplification work – tax advisers across the UK nod wearily! The next step is to review which tax incentives can be eliminated to ‘simplify’ UK tax. Target date for the first review is the next Budget scheduled for 23 [...]

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Clarity is power

October 12, 2010

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Have you ever noticed how certain business owners or entrepreneurs always seem to be in the right place at the right time? Is this is a coincidence?
I don’t think so.
A vital few entrepreneurs have a defined plan or strategy – they see the end game (before the game’s even begun). Having such a plan [...]

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A new breed of successful business

October 3, 2010

It is time to change how we measure and interpret success for businesses today. To introduce a definition of business success that is more aligned with our changing business environment i.e. a drive for innovation mixed with a growing distrust of large corporations and lower cost of starting new businesses.
It used to be the case [...]

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