Time, energy, contacts and some decent coal face experience. A marketing and incubation firm with a sales and revenue focus. We love vision but we’re not into the Field of Dreams style build it and hope they will come model; we want to build scaleable cash generative businesses and we want everyone involved to benefit from them.

We’ve jumped through a lot of the hoops involved with a start-up company and we’ve got a tonne of contacts to help us do it again… lots of bright entrepreneurs, certain industry experts, accountants, lawyers, angel backers, media companies, IT expertise, certain niche specialist (for example if anyone wants to get into the BWCA - yes, the British Water Cooler Association - just let us know, or at least ask us over a drink and we’ll tell you the story).

These are some of the areas we can help you look at:

• Sense check – be it fag packet / back of the envelope maths or an independent and experienced viability assessment. Turning pub banter into a week long action plan and a bunch of phone calls / favours
• Market analysis and specific sector research, qualitative and quantitative research, discrete investigation to build an intelligent revenue model
• Customer insight – interviews, questionnaires, workshops, round table discussions
• Branding – Creating and maintaining a brand (brand management), brand DNA – the attributes, purpose and profile. Brand awareness and trademark.
• Design – More specifically communication design and how this affects logos, colours and text. Continuity of design.
• Web development – Requirements gathering, site architecture, development, quality assurance and monitoring
• Outsourcing non-core – there are some corners which can be cut to lower costs, then there are some that can’t, if the communication is strong enough outsourcing can be an effective cost reduction from early stages.
• Contact management and networking - Keeping on top of your network and leveraging it to your advantage
• Marketing and media – From TV, press and industry journals to gorilla, digital and new media. Accountability. Advertising (should this be a separate bubble and how rename and split out?) Our media partners. Mobiles.
• Sales – direct customer contact, cold calling and follow-up, account management and goodwill
• PR – industry press, awards, general public awareness
• Recruitment and employment – P45s, P06s, P11D – seriously? It’s just jargon – learn it. It’s as easy as pie of you’ve got the right guy. Gen Y employees and infinite information.
• Sponsorship – supporting events or activities, tie-ups, grants, JVs, non-monetary support
• Incubation – Business plans, more dedicated time and energy and administrative services amongst others.
• Finance and Fundraising – Friends, Family, Founders and Fools, debt, angels and VCs.
• Corporate Finance – M&A opportunities, AIM and PLUS listings
• Other – all the fun little admin tasks, the bonus stuff, the reactionary extras etc.

Some of this takes time and money, some can be shortcut. Then there’s the myriad of fun little admin tasks that creep into all this work.