So you want to create a start-up? — Bridging To The Future

As of 10:48 on 26th October, according to the StartUp Britain Tracker, 704 new businesses were made…

…since 8am that morning.

So, in reference to the presupposed question, you are definitely not alone!

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (2014) reported that 31% of women believe that they have the skills, knowledge and experience to start a business. What is stopping them? We think there to be three main problems inhibiting this:

1) Funding
2) Mentoring
3) Economic Independence

Funding

Funding is one of the biggest issues for aspiring entrepreneurs. Banks have tightened up their lending to small businesses following the economic downturn, and even as this is changing somewhat, there are now a number of other funding routes available, from peer to peer lending, to crowdfunding, to microinvestors.

We would say that there is funding available, you just have to dig around for it. Here are some examples:

Government Funding
StartUp Britain works in conjunction with the StartUp Loans scheme, a £310m government-funded initiative that provides loans to new businesses. Business owners can borrow up to £25,000 over five years at an interest rate of around 6%. PM David Cameron recently said he planned to triple the number of people using the scheme to 75,000 over the next five years. This is an example of the government trying to microinvest and create jobs on the back of credit.

Crowdsourcing
Increasingly, people are taking to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Crowdcube to drum up appeal for their product, and trying to get a platform to show off their products. Knowledge Peers reported that the UK saw £850 million of investment in the crowdfunding sector, up 135% on 2013. In addition, the Crowdfunding Centre reported that globally, in Q1 of 2014, $57,365 had been raised through crowdfunding per hour. If you have a product that can capture the imagination of the public, a world more & more in tune with online opportunities means that this form of funding is no longer a remote possibility.

Mentoring

Motivation and mentoring come hand in hand. A good mentor will always motivate an aspiring entrepreneur while giving valuable, real-life anecdotes of business experience and expertise. Aside from online support in the form of forum posts on Quora, or a list detailing the ‘5 tips that a well-known self-starter has for entrepreneurs’, what other tangible forms of mentoring are there?

mentorsme.co.uk hopes help businesses find a mentoring organisation to suit their needs in a fast and easy way. The free site offers businesses access to a list of quality-assured business mentoring organisations across Britain. Sites like this can make it a quick task to find a suitable business mentor, no matter how old your business is. Alternatively, Virgin Start Up (a not-for-profit arm of the global conglomerate) hand-picks a Virgin Start Up Mentor for everyone that takes one of their Virgin Start Up Loans, and the government initiative Get Mentoring provides a wealth of online learning and mentoring resources.

Currently in its pilot phase, the Be Your Own Boss project utilises business savvy Coaches to lead an entrepreneur through the phases of starting a business, combining practical experience, working in groups, and one-to-one coaching sessions. To learn more about BYOB, click here.

Economic Independence

Bridging to the Future believes that individuals, communities and regions which are economically independent have the capacity to make life, society and business work better and to strengthen and sustain local, regional, and global well-being. Ok, but how does this link to start-ups?

A common problem for people with a unique idea is that they feel that they are not in a viable financial position to take time out to start a business. This restriction could be because of unsupportive employers, busy personal schedules, and so on, but more generally boils down to a lack in economic independence. More and more people rely on a regular income to pay their credit cards, mortgages etc., and they feel trapped in this cycle.

So, how can we create more economic independence? We need more education, more social businesses, and more support to those wanting to take a risk and do something radical.

DT