Doug Richard's School for Startups

What business really hopes George Osborne will announce today

Vanessa Knight — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:05:13 +0000

Doug Richard, School for Startups founder, former Dragons’ Den investor

“It won’t be in there but what I would have hoped for was a specific tax relief targeted at increasing the amount of capital that flows into newly started or young businesses. It’s been shown that almost all new jobs and productivity growth come from young, entrepreneurial businesses and one of the biggest obstacles these businesses have is the absence of available seed stage capital. What needs to be done is something very radical – an opening for a direct tax credit on an annual basis for money invested into a new private retail business. This would be much better for the business because the money wouldn’t have to go into the Government and out again and it puts the money in the exact place where economic growth happens. I have a good deal of time for what the Government is trying to do but they are beset by conflicting tensions. This is something that actually moves economies but it doesn’t make headlines.”

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Make It Cheaper Delivers Instant Online Energy Quote

Nancy Fulton Mazur — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:35:13 +0000

Make It Cheaper helps businesses to compare business electricity prices in one quick online search. This means that you can find out, right now, just how much you can save off your current energy costs immediately. It’s often hundreds or thousands of pounds per year.

Govt to help small firms expand

fiona — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:54:45 +0000

Small businesses around the UK are to be given a boost by the government in order to stimulate growth and job creation.

Speaking at the recent Exporting for Growth and Fitness Finance conference, prime minister David Cameron announced new measures aimed at helping small firms export to new markets, secure finance and cut red tape.

Small business e-commerce scheme launched

fiona — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:43:59 +0000

Free one day seminars about e-commerce are part of the Government’s attempts to ‘nudge’ more business to export.

The behavioural insight team at Downing Street has analysed what prevents small businesses from exporting more and its findings have led to the launch of a free e-commerce scheme for more than 3,500 firms.

Officials believe small businesses are discouraged from exporting because of “soft” barriers to trade such as a lack of confidence and social links. But firms that enhance their online presence can significantly boost overseas sales and officials believe more firms could be encouraged to follow suit.

Doug Richard on disruptive technologies and London’s entrepreneurial opportunities

fiona — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:42:12 +0000

For Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’re catching up with business’ brightest brains to find out their thoughts on the future for London start-ups

Doug Richard is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, ex Dragons’ Den star and founder of School for Startups, which teaches people how to start up and run better businesses.

Where are the biggest opportunities for London’s start-up scene?

London represents probably the most important concentration of creative industries in the world. Yet all the focus seems to be on Silicon Roundabout – which is kind of ironic given that we’re a distant second place in that regard [internationally], but a clear first place in almost all of the creative industries.

Sell Your Products & Services with Advantages Not Features

Nancy Fulton Mazur — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 03:39:42 +0000

To be successful selling products and services to customers, you need to understand the difference between a feature and an advantage.

A feature is a property of a property of service. A product may come in red, green, blue or orange. The service may be delivered morning, noon or night. Those characteristics are features of the product.

As a product or service developer, you may be competing with a dozen products and they may have hundreds of features. Adding any or all of those features to your offering may deliver no value at all to your customers. So you need to figure out which features do matter to your target market and what advantages those customers see in those features.

You can then modify your product to deliver those advantages using the minimum number of features required, and sell your product not on a feature by feature comparison but on the basis of the advantages you actually deliver.

Some of the most elegant and widely used products and services have very few features and all kinds of advantages.

Google, for example, just lets you search a database of websites with a keyword. It’s listings are fairly simple and its algorithms aren’t overly complex. But people go to that site billions of times a day and Google Inc has grown from a dorm room startup into one of the largest companies on earth in under two decades because that simple product was so very advantagous to its customers.

The iPod doesn’t have a CD changer, a transistor radio or a cassette tape player built in, but it does hold more than a thousand songs and you can get access to millions songs via the internet.

Customers buy products and services based on the advantages they offer, so focus on delivering advantages to your customers and market your products based on those advantages.

Call for targeted SME lending

fiona — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 23:28:05 +0000

Without clear lending processes and more sensible decision-making at a local level, government targets for business loans will not be met, according to the head of one of the UK’s largest business groups.

John Longworth, the director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, issued the warning after the government announced the release of an additional £95m from the Regional Growth Fund to support lending to small businesses for new plant and equipment.

“The new SME Regional Growth Fund scheme will help some companies obtain the finance they need to grow at home,” Longworth said. “But it is not a panacea, and will not cure the wider problems companies still face in accessing finance.”

The extra government funding was among a package of small business support measures announced this week, including 3,500 workshops organised by former Dragons’ Den panellist Doug Richard and Yell to help companies better exploit internet opportunities, and free finance advice from Barclays and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.

Small businesses to benefit from Government web support

fiona — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:39:57 +0000

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) is teaming up with School for Startups founder and founding Dragons’ Den panellist Doug Richard to teach web exploitation skills to 3,500 small to medium sized businesses (SMEs) across England.

The Web Fuelled Business initiative will help small businesses in the UK to exploit and leverage the internet for their business.

The initiative is not just about selling online. It includes aspects such as driving marketing through social media, increasing website exposure through search engine optimisation and procuring and enhancing supply chains through business-to-business websites. More effective web use can help boost productivity and growth potential and assist in creating and safeguarding jobs.

Every business is a web business

fiona — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:03:00 +0000

We were telling you in an earlier post about the School for Startups program, one of the most important startups support programs in Europe, also present in Romania. We had the pleasure of having a little chat with Doug Richard, founder of School for Startups, one of the mentors of School for Startups Romania and one of the keynote speakers of this year’s How to Web conference.

How to Set the Price of a Product or Service

Nancy Fulton Mazur — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:29:19 +0000

To set a price for a new product or service, start by creating a list of competing solutions from other providers. Record the price and then, next to each product, record the advantages each offers to the customer.

Note that your competition is not limited to products that are similar to what you sell. For example, a cheap car competes with motorcycles and the bus as much as it does with other cars.

Add your product to the list and, based on it’s advantages, determine the range within which your price must to fall.

Your product may offer quite concrete advantages like fastest, strongest, most powerful, easier to find, lower calorie, gluten free, a money back guarantee and a lifetime warranty,

Some advantages are more ephemeral like quality of design, status conferred on the purchaser, and notoriety. These are properties a customer can see in one product and not in another even when they are similarly formulated.

Tip: One reason it is so important to present new products to customers is that you can ask them which brands your product reminds them of and what intangible values it might deliver.

By comparing your product’s advantages against those of its competitors, you begin to see how customers will measure your value.

Once you come up with a range of possible prices for your product or service based on the advantage you offer over your competition, start presenting the product and the price to individuals and small groups representing your target market at a variety of prices. You’ll be able to determine which advantages seem to matter to most people and what price point seems to spur people to place orders.

You can use this methodology to price products which haven’t even been created yet. Simply define the product, compare its anticipated advantages to what is currently on the market, and then begin presenting that solution to customers at prices that are inline with the value you provide. Adjust your pricing as you begin pitching your product to see at what point people start wanting to place orders.