NEWS
PM Helps Launch ‘StartUp Britain’ Scheme For Entrepreneurs
The StartUp Britain initiative offers discounts on products and services for new UK businesses
Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday pledged government support for a new scheme designed to support entrepreneurs.
The initiative, StartUp Britain, was organised by entrepreneurs and is backed by 60 major companies, who are offering discounts on products and services intended to help new businesses get off the ground.
Discounts
This support is worth more than £1,500 for every British start-up business, according to the organisers’ estimates.
The scheme is a private-sector response to the government’s call for an economic recovery led by enterprises.
“If you’re working for a big firm but know you could do a better job on your own, now is the time to make the leap,” the Prime Minister (pictured) said in a statement. “There are thousands of people out there who are entrepreneurs but they just don’t know it yet.”
Google is pitching in with free advertising for start-ups, while Regus is offering free membership to Businessworld and O2 is offering a month’s free line rental.
Fujitsu is offering a 30-day free trial and 10 percent off the first year’s costs of its cloud-based infrastructure, such as processing power, IT network, servers, storage and back-up, for those who sign up by 15 July. The company estimates those discounts are worth £5,500 to the average start-up.
Good advice?
The initiative offers deals from other backers including Barclays, RIM, HP and Experian.
Not all industry observers were wholeheartedly in support of the scheme. IT industry analyst James Governor said in a Twitter post that the initiative’s advice amounted to: “Step one, ‘find idea’. Step two, ‘write business plan.”
“Trying to imagine a world in which Step 2 for [Google founders] Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] was ‘Write a business plan’,” he wrote.
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3 replies to PM Helps Launch ‘StartUp Britain’ Scheme For Entrepreneurs
There are exceptions to every rule, re: ‘Write a business plan’ this is essential for 99% of businesses. I’m sure the Google founders had targets and goals in their head at the very least!
step1 Find an idea.
step 2 Write a business plan.
step 3 Register a Ltd co
step 4 Fail to get a bank loan.
step5 Pay lots of IR35 tax as you a one man band.
step 6 never get that far as your legistated and taxed out of employing anyone else except for a business manager to handle the paperwork while you get on with earning the companies income.
step 7 Try and empoly someone.
step 8 Go bust cos you just priced your sevices out of the market.
step 9 Signon for Jobseekers – oh no they’ve scraped that.
sept 10 goto step1
If this is what helping businesses is, I’m upset. Gone are the days when a person could phone up Business Link speak to a real person and get REAL advice, what a shame. I found this article quite interesting: http://postdesk.com/debates/entrepreneur-featured-on-front-page-of-startupbritain-speaks-out/. At least some people are doing proper reporting.