by admin | Nov 19, 2015 | Advisory, Amaranthine, Enterprise, Uncategorised
We recently attended a crowdfunding seminar hosted by Startup Direct and Paul Grant of the Funding Game. Simon, our Business Development Manager, was sent to make copious notes. So here’s his take on the Five Points of Calvinism. Err, sorry. Crowdfunding. Point 1: TALK Spend your time in this pre-prep phase generating contacts and talking to possible investors and buyers. This will serve two purposes: Your potential investors will feel more involved and in sync with your idea and vision. Then, when the time comes, they will be more likely to invest because this is their project, too. You’ll get a second opinion on your product or service. You may be working on false pre-suppositions about your target market and what they want. This will help you to find out more about the problem you are addressing. Point 2: UNITE This is where your real preparation takes place. You must drum up the promises you got from Point 1 and unite this into a sizeable committed line even before you launch your crowdfunding campaign. Your should have at least 40% of the funding for your round pledged before you begin your campaign. This will give your pitch more credibility when you launch because so many people have already chosen to invest in your idea. Point 3: LURE Reel ’em in! Use your campaign design to lure the remaining 60%, and never skimp on the work you put in before the campaign. A few things to keep in mind: Your message should be clear and simple, should have a summary of where you are, where you are going and what you need...
by admin | Nov 5, 2015 | Accounting, Advisory, Amaranthine, Enterprise, Finance
In a recent post (HERE) we looked at a Guardian Small Business article on choosing your accountant, and explained why Aiteo Consulting simply must have been in the author’s mind as she wrote. Now, if there is any truth to the chorus of complaint which often follows the words ‘I tried to speak to my accountant and…’, we might have to admit that in most minds, value and accounting services go together like blood and stones. So a recent article, published in the same august organ (HERE – if you must – but do wait until the end if you can), begins to grapple with the thorny question of getting value for money from your accounting services. Now, before launching into our analysis, we would like to say this. When a major accounting firm launches a new nationwide service targeted to small business, and the Head of the aforesaid service manages to write a clear problem statement for a national daily without it in any way coming across as an advertorial, we can only applaud. If you do look carefully, you’ll see that the author is indeed Head of Small Business Accounting for … well you can read the article to find out. After all they haven’t paid us to advertise on here! Credit where it’s due though, and we believe the article represents an excellent contribution to the debate about value. So let’s take a look at some of these themes. Entrepreneurs often pitch their businesses without knowing basic financial information. To be fair, an evening in watching Dragons’ Den wouldn’t be half as much fun without the...
by admin | Oct 21, 2015 | Accounting, Advisory, Amaranthine, Enterprise, Finance
There have been a couple of great articles published in the Guardian’s Small Business Pages. So let’s look at the first one, which gives a few pointers on choosing an accountant for your small business. “Where’s the link?”, we hear you say. Well HERE it is, if you really must click right now, but we know everyone in life is busy, especially you, so we’ve extracted all of the questions the Guardian thinks you need to ask and listed them below. And, just to make things really easy, we’ve given you our answers before you’ve even asked. And as you’ll see, we like this article a lot. You could be forgiven for imagining that only our professional ethical standards prevented us from slipping the author a fiver to write it. Why? Well let’s see. Q. Are they regulated by a professional body? YES – we are. Aiteo Consulting is an accredited Member in Practice of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), the world’s largest and leading professional body of management accountants. CIMA has more than 227,000 members and students in 179 countries, all of whom work at the heart of business. CIMA also has very strong relationships with employers and sponsors leading research. And through CIMA’s joint venture with the American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA), we also hold the globally recognised designation of Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA). By the way, CLICK HERE for the public record. Q. Do they have PI cover? YES – and we’d be surprised if an accountant was operating without it, to be honest. Q. Can they act as your business partner? YES – and this is exactly...
by admin | Oct 8, 2015 | Advisory, Enterprise
IBM are offering up to $120k in #Cloud credit for your start-up if you build, launch and scale your business on IBM Cloud. Lots of information available if you...
by admin | Aug 27, 2015 | Advisory
The ICAEW and British Business Bank have published a great free guide to business finance, covering debt finance, equity finance and ways to find support and advice. Here is the link while it’s still up: FREE guide to business finance It can be downloaded as a PDF from the site. Of course, don’t forget to ask Aiteo Consulting for...
by admin | Jul 24, 2015 | Advisory, Enterprise
It’s a natural response. Your business runs on accounting data: profits; turnover; payroll; etc. Someone getting access to that data, whether they’re a competitor hoping to discover your pricing strategy and undercut you, or a disgruntled customer planning to dump your data online and discredit your business, is your worst nightmare. It’d be lunacy to put all that data into the cloud, which everyone knows is insecure. Except that’s wrong. Counter-intuitively, storing your data in the cloud – especially accounting data – is much more secure than storing it locally on your own computers. Why? Because, as David Linthicum helpfully describes, there’s a difference between control and security. When your accounting data lives on your hardware, you have full control of it. But it’s not very secure. To see what this means, imagine someone wants to gain access to your accounts. Imagine you own and run a fleet of ice cream vans, which drive every day to the best rural paradises Britain has to offer, refreshing those who wish to relax in nature with refreshing, organic gelato. One day, a family drives to a cool and shady glen, and amuse themselves by dropping litter, destroying flora, and terrifying fauna. They then, upon wishing to avail themselves of an ice cream, discover you’re no longer stocking chocolate in solidarity with the cocoa bean pickers of Ghana. Furious, they leave, vowing revenge. They have a cunning plan – they’ll hack into your accounts and publish them online, so that your competitors realise the size of the market you’ve tapped into. Rival ice cream vans will descend, and the unspoilt idylls will...
