| Informed Funding |
Message from Chris Dines, CEO of Informed Funding
I’d like to highlight that our Autumn Funding Fair is being held in one week, giving businesses and their advisors a chance to learn more about the way in which finance for SMEs continues to develop. Innovation, Technology (and the availability of plenty of cash looking for a better return!) means that the range of funding options available, and the way in which they are delivered, is creating a revolution in business finance. Both online and offline, Informed Funding aims to be at the centre of this change, creating a market place where growing businesses can better understand what is available to them and how they can be better prepared when approaching the right source of finance for them.
At the Funding Fair we have organised a fantastic range of sessions and activities. You can hear from a wide range of different funders, but, more importantly we give everyone the chance to listen to and question businesses that have raised finance through those different channels; we love real life case studies! In addition we have a special focus on how to present and secure your IP when seeking finance, and are joined by the Intellectual Property Office for the day who will answer your questions.
One business that has really looked after their IP is Brompton Bikes – now the UK’s biggest bicycle manufacture, based in . We will be live interviewing their CFO, Lorne Vary, who has been in the news a great deal recently, as Brompton look to expand their business further. Lorne will be discussing how Brompton are financing this growth – and you can win a brand new Brompton Bike as well!
We will be finishing the day with an inspiring talk from one of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs – “Secret Millionaire” Kevin Green. Kevin, once homeless, has an amazing story and will also be sharing his guidance on how to raise capital.
Informed Funding only launched in February this year, but we already have over 500 sources of SME finance on . No other service for SMEs provides such a range of information – but we believe that the range of options will continue to grow, and that the key supporting SMEs when seeking finance is education, information and guidance. Out service is free to SMEs, and that includes the use of online diagnostic tools and support.
Our Partners, Workspace Group, GLE and Buzzacott, have been invaluable to the development of Informed Funding. My personal thanks to them, for their shared desire in wanting to create better access to finance for all the aspirational businesses they work with.
Regards,
Chris
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Event Summary:
Thursday, 24th Sep 2015 at 13:00 to Thursday, 24th Sep 2015 at 21:00
Metal Box, 30 Great Guildford Street, , SE1 0HS
Full afternoon and evening of informative sessions focused around "What works in new Finance for SMEs"
The aim of the fair is to provide you, business owners, PRACTICAL education and information on business finance. The sessions will be clearly focused on how SMEs can start to think differently about the way they might finance themselves.
Sessions will include:
- Is your business suitable for a Peer to Peer (P2P) loan?
- Crowd Equity – A realistic option for your business?
- Making the most of your Intellectual Property – recognising value and protecting it.
- The Financial Outlook session with Barry Naisbitt
Other features:
- Opportunity to speak directly to funders
- Attend FREE business advice clinics (Buzzacott, ABP, Business Growth Service)
- Guest speakers including:
- Kevin Green (Secret Millionaire)
- Lorne Vary (Brompton Bikes CFO)
- Networking over Drinks and Canapés
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Needless to say, we are also securing some high profile key note speakers.
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Kevin Green
We are delighted to say that will be joining us for the evening for drinks and canapés. Kevin is a self-made multi-millionaire through property. You may have also heard of Kevin as he was on the Secret Millionaire programme. He has very recently launched a book ‘Rich Rules’ which is his Top 10 to getting rich. His 7th rule is ‘Know how to raise capital’. Kevin is an engaging speaker and will be sharing his stories of success and challenges and will specifically talk about raising that much needed capital. He will also be bringing signed copies of his new book. Definitely not one to be missed!
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Meet the Management - Brompton Bikes
Brompton Bikes began life in its inventor’s flat in 1975, and is now the UK’s biggest bike manfacture with 45,000 of its beautiful folding bikes delivered in 2014. It’s a great success story, with a focus on design, manufacturing and product excellence. The business is soon to move to new 86,000sq ft premises in Greenford.
We will be interviewing Lorne Vary, Brompton’s Chief Financial Officer, a key member of the team looking to grow Brompton to a 100,000 strong output by 2021. We will talk to Lorne about what is underpinning the success of the business, how it’s financed, why is so important as a base, and what tips he can offer to entrepreneurs looking to fund the growth of their business. Lorne will also take questions from the audience and over drinks.
We will also be offering a brand new Brompton bike to the winner of our free to entre draw!
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Below is an overview of the Sessions that we will be hosting at the Funding Fair.
It’s remarkable to note that internet enabled P2P loans have only been a realistic option for businesses for 3 years. This is still an emerging market, but one that is growing at a remarkable rate. £780million of P2P loans have already been raised through Funding Circle alone.
The P2P market continues to adapt to the needs of business – the products on offer reflect that. This session provides an opportunity to interrogate three different P2P businesses about their offering, and how it might work for your business. Funding Knight, Proplend and Money & Co will be on the stage, joined by business owners who have completed P2P deals through their online platforms.
Come armed to ask questions – speakers will be available to meet you over coffee as well.
Loading an early stage business with loans that might never get repaid makes little sense, hence the need for equity finance that can cope with a higher risk for high return. There is a general consensus that there are no shortage of investors out there; the challenge is matching those investors to suitable business opportunities. This is where crowd funding through online platforms can play such a key role.
Similar to the P2P market, equity crowd funding has grown exponentially since making an appearance on the market less than 5 years ago, and the processes and products on offer have developed significantly. We are delighted to be joined by Seedrs and Syndicate Room during the session – two of the longest established equity crowd funding platforms, focused on the business market. They will be joined on stage by companies that have recently raised capital through this rate.
This is your chance to learn whether your business might be suitable for injection of crowd equity – whatever your stage of development.
Investors back products and processes that they think have a high chance of generating cash. To attract investment, it’s essential that you can demonstrate the value of the Intellectual Property (IP) involved and that you are capable of protecting from others copying what you have put together.
This session looks at whether your IP is investor ready, and is supported by the Intellectual Property Office, who will also have a stand at the Funding Fair – so come along with your questions.
The session itself will involve insight from an Investor perspective (with Peter Gray from Cavendish Corporate Finance), real company case studies and an overview of the IP issues that business owners should be considering when seeking investment for their business.
Specialist advisors from Buzzacott will be delivering four free, advice clinics focusing on R&D tax credits, valuations, pension scheme auto-enrolment and VAT:
R&D Tax Credits – Do you know how to utilise these as a form of funding for your business?
Thousands of creative businesses fail to claim back cash they are due on the expense they incur on developing new products. This free one-to-one clinic, with leading experts from Buzzacott, will provide you with guidance on whether it is worth pursuing a claim.
Do you know how investors will value your business?
This is the big question most business owners ask. Meet specialist advisors from Buzzacott who can give initial pointers on how to value and sell your business – and how you might need to raise finance to get there.
Having VAT nightmares?
Not sure whether you should register for VAT? Wondering whether you should pay VAT on your rent? Confused by the new VAT place of supply rules? If you’d like some advice, Buzzacott’s VAT experts will be on hand to provide private, one-to-one guidance on your VAT-related queries.
Auto-Enrolment – Not sure when and how to implement pension schemes?
Every employer now has a new legal responsibility to put those who meet certain criteria into a workplace pension scheme and to contribute towards it. This is called automatic enrolment. Our experts will guide you through when and how to successfully implement pension scheme auto-enrolment.
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How to grow your business and access government funded support
The Business Growth Service (BGS) and Advantage Business Partnerships (ABP) are delighted to offer CEO's and Directors of ambitious businesses the opportunity to book into 1-2-1 clinics to discuss their future plans for growth, and to assess how they could potentially access government-backed support to overcome their business' barriers to growth. To date, the Business Growth Service has supported over 23,000 businesses across England.
If selected, you will be asked to complete a pre-event questionnaire which will be used to discuss your business opportunities in greater detail during your 1-2-1 session.
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When a company is growing, one of the biggest challenges is converting what is delivered to customers into cash. The amount owed by business customers is typically GREATER than amounts owed to banks or other sources of finance. The most often quoted reason for business failure is that “my customers weren’t paying/couldn’t pay/paying too slowly!”
This seminar will help businesses improve their cash flow through:
- A workshop process that helps you identify where you can improve the way you and your team are managing trade cash flow. This starts with the sales process!
- Learning how to credit check your new customers, and ensure that you hear early of any cash problems they are having.
- Identifying specialist finance that might assist in converting invoiced sales to cash. We will be joined by experts in both traditional invoice finance and alternative finance.
All delegates will get free use of special diagnostic tool designed by Informed Funding – this will benchmark how your business performs, compared to others.
Cost: The event is free to Registered Business Members of Informed Funding. £75 (including VAT) to others. Tickets are limited.
Customers of the Workspace Group have free premium access to Informed Funding including free membership and preferential access to our seminars.
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Having officially launched in February, it has now been six months since Informed Funding was opened to businesses at our launch event. In that time, Informed Funding has become the largest platform of its type, connecting businesses to the greatest number of funding options online, while hosting double the number of funder microsites than any other platform, with 80 pages managed by funders themselves, as well as a further 500 info-sites.
The platform aims to be the largest free information resource about business finance in the UK while remaining completely impartial. Through our online tools, business owners can determine which business finance option is best suited to their needs out of the 16 different types of finance that we have access to through the funders we are connected with.
In our first six months, both the number of businesses that use our service, as well as the number of funders we can connect businesses to have grown each month as our service becomes more widely used...
Read more HERE...
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Introducing: Informed Funding’s New Website Homepage!
- We feel that easy access to information is vital for growing businesses that are deciding how best to proceed when it comes to financing their business. For this reason, we have re-designed our homepage to make it easier than ever to find finance using out platform.
Interview with Roger Fenwick, NatWest's Regional Director in
- When it comes to lending to small businesses, banks don’t have the greatest of reputations. Ahead of the InformedFunding seminar on getting a better deal from your bank, we talked to Roger Fenwick, NatWest's Regional Director in .
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Two data releases came out last week that deserve the attention of anyone interested in SME finance – and especially anyone who like me has been struck by the ongoing disappearance of the small business overdraft. The steady drop in the number of overdraft approvals is probably the clearest signal of the huge structural change now unfolding in the way smaller companies finance their working capital. And it is no coincidence that Adam Tyler, who heads the National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers, puts the fast-rising popularity of alternative finance among his members down to the gradual demise of the overdraft.
Both data releases the Q2 reports from the SME Finance Monitor and the British Bankers’ Association – shed interesting light on the question of what’s happening to SME overdraft borrowing.
Here’s my top-line take on what they reveal:
There is a vast array of different types of funding options for businesses. In this newsletter we provide an overview on a further three funding methods firstly, with a deeper look into Equity Crowd Funding.
Business Cash Advances
Cash Advances provide unsecured funding that is repaid by deducting a fixed percentage from the borrower’s income each day. They are often used by businesses that receive much of their revenue via card payments, the fixed daily percentage being deducted automatically by the merchant services provider and passed to the lender.
What is a Business Cash Advance?
A business cash advance is a source of unsecured funding for businesses that accept payments from their customers via cards. However unlike a conventional loan that has fixed repayments on specific dates, the repayments for a business cash advance are made by deducting a fixed percentage of your card sales each day. This means that the repayments are always linked to your revenues, increasing and decreasing in line with your daily income from card payments.
What are the advantages of this type of loan?
The three main attractions of business cash advances are that they are flexible, come at a fixed cost and do not require you to provide any security. First, because repayments are linked to your card revenues, you will repay more when your business’s income is high and less if it falls, which helps to minimise the pressure on your cash flow. This also means that there is no fixed date by which the advance must be cleared: the rate at which you pay it off will depend entirely on how your revenues perform. Second, the cost of the advance is a fixed at the start and this does not increase if you take longer than expected to repay. Third, business cash advances are unsecured so you are not required to put business or personal assets at risk. This type of lending may be attractive to businesses that can’t obtain loans because they have bad credit ratings or little collateral available. However this type of lending will typically be significantly more expensive than a loan due to its unsecured and flexible nature.
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Private Equity
Private Equity investors usually acquire established companies in order to help accelerate their growth, for example by expanding into international markets or by acquiring competitors in order to consolidate their position. Transactions can include management buy-outs, management buy-ins and refinancings that allow owner-managers to stay in place while realising a portion of their equity value. PE funds usually aim to hold their shares for anything between three years and seven years.
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Public Equity
Raising funds via the equity markets involves offering shares in a company to the public that will be tradable on a public market such as the Stock Exchange or any of the smaller markets such as ISDX. If companies are seeking more than the equivalent of € 5m they will be required to publish a prospectus, a legal document that complies with the EU Prospectus Directive.
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The homepage has been simplified so that users will follow five simple steps to find the finding options they need.
The first step is to register, which gives full access to the funder microsites featured on our website, as well as all the tools that help businesses determine their funding options.
Our useful tool titled ‘What’s your funding challenge?’ helps filter the types of relevant funding options based on a business’ circumstances. Every business is unique, but specific factors will establish that some funding options are more suited than others. Filling this in is the second step.
The third step is to browse the funder’s microsites, of which we have over 80, which is more than double than any other platform!
To determine whether you are ‘funding ready’, follow step 4, which is a self-diagnosis tool that greatly increases the readiness to apply for funding.
Finally, the fifth step is to contact the funders directly through these microsites to officially start your application process.
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