Investors are the lifeblood of many new businesses. They provide the capital and the financial impetus to get things started and hopefully provide the lynch pin for the creation of a successful company. There are plenty of places nowadays to find individuals and organisations who could be interested in your idea. It’s one of the reasons why so many startups are getting off the ground, perhaps more so than in the past.

But many modern investors are looking for something beyond the initial concept or a good business plan.

They want to invest in a business startup that believes in being green.

The rise of the socially responsible investor is a fairly new phenomenon and it is beginning to have a real impact. That doesn’t mean your business needs to have a climate changing product. It does mean, however, that your company intends to do all that it can to run in a green and sustainable way.

If you are planning a startup, marketing your carbon friendly attitude could mean more investors flocking to your digital door and willing to sign up.

The Impact on Startups

Not having a green agenda may harm the amount and quality of investors you can attract. While your idea could well be a good one, if your potential backers are looking for that little bit more than a great idea, there’s a possibility of losing out to a similar startup that does have those green credentials.

There’s plenty of competition for investors both online and in the real world, so ensuring that sustainability is a key issue actually works better – and it’s not going to harm your relationship with backers who don’t see it as a priority either.

How to Go Green and Attract Ethical Investors

More and more businesses are starting to see financial, social and environmental sustainability as the core features of their operation. According to Chris Hines at The Wave in Bristol:

“There is a real opportunity for commercial companies to adopt a new model of doing business that reduces environmental impacts and maximises social and environmental benefits, at the same time as helping them to be more successful financially and attract investors.”

Step 1: Do Your Research

What does it actually mean to be a green business nowadays? There is plenty of information out there about how to make your startup sustainable, from switching to LED bulbs in the office to creating eco-friendly spaces that show how you are willing to invest in the health and wellbeing of your staff and customers. If you’re new to green, doing your research is important. That means knowing how to run a low carbon office and reduce your impact on the environment. It also includes what kind of suppliers and manufacturers you want your product associated with.

Step 2: Build Green into Your Business Plan

It’s no use having this as an add-on or afterthought. If you want to attract the right investors and build your credibility, you need to create your business with the notion of environmental sustainability at the forefront. Yes, you need to put in place a good business plan and have costed everything, planned for growth and wowed your potential investor with your product or service. But the green stuff needs to run through all of this and it’s much easier to achieve if you build it into your business plan from the start.

Step 3: Build it into your Brand

The best place to market your green credentials is to make sure that your brand revolves around it. Many companies nowadays push their low carbon attitude as part of their marketing, often devoting a whole page on their website to how they deliver on their commitments. That might include having policies in place for how you run the office, the type of vehicles you opt for in your sales fleet, who you buy your electricity from and companies that you do business with.

Creating a Green Product

Of course, you might want to go the whole hog and create a green product that is going to benefit the world. All the above still applies but you have the added advantage that you can also get access to a fast-growing market of people who want to source green products and that makes you more viable to certain investors who want to see this kind of change.

Maintaining Your Green Credentials

Being sustainable and thinking about the planet is not something you can choose to do as and when you feel like it. You need to be enthusiastic about it and willing to make the changes that are beneficial to the environment and those around you. In other words, you have to set the example.

It’s easier to be green than many people think. If you are planning a startup and looking around for investors, it’s time to consider how green your attitude is and the discover the benefits of creating your business plan around the core premise of long term sustainability.

Perhaps the most contentious issue that surrounded the Brexit debate was the one of immigration. We depend on a significant number of skilled workers from the EU and curbing access for these could well have a significant impact on business in the UK.

Like most things in respect of Brexit, the road ahead isn’t particularly clear and we’re not entirely sure where the country is heading. How will this impact on our ability to trade with the EU? How will these changes affect UK businesses who want to hire from the EU and our own population who want to find employment across the Channel?

EU Workers and the Brexit Conundrum

There are some 400,000 EU workers employed in skilled jobs in the UK. Most of these come from the EU14 countries. The major portion of unskilled workers who are currently in the UK come from the EU10 countries such as Estonia and Hungary.

Skilled workers are found in all professions from the financial and services sector through to our health services and they contribute a great deal to our economy and are important to our potential success as a country. The uncertainty over Brexit has meant that many skilled EU employees in businesses and organisations across the UK are no longer sure they will have a job once negotiations are over in a couple of years’ time. This has been compounded since the vote by the inability of the Government to confirm that their status in this country is entirely safe.

The good news is that Chancellor Phillip Hammond broached the subject of skilled EU workers when he said in October:

“We understand their needs for market access. We also understand their needs to be able to engage the right skilled people. I have said on the record, and I’m happy to say again today, that I do not believe the concerns the British people have expressed about migration from the European Union relate to people with high skills and high pay.”

The situation hasn’t been helped by the delay in triggering Article 50 which has left businesses and employees in a state of limbo. A recent quote from an immigration minister that the Government were planning to introduce a £1,000 levy on all skilled EU workers caused unnecessary consternation in the media and politicians roundly criticised it as counterproductive and idiotic. But this does show the level of uncertainty that businesses and organisations face now and this sense of unease is not going to disappear anytime soon.

Retaining Top Talent During Brexit

Businesses face numerous challenges because of Brexit, particularly when employing skilled workers. Are EU employees likely to start looking around for jobs on home ground and leave the UK? Is it worthwhile employing skilled staff from countries such as France and Germany when we are not sure of their immigration future? Will top talent look elsewhere rather than applying to UK companies? And do UK businesses have the resources and the home grown skilled staff to fill vacant positions?

There have already been calls from the business sector for the Government to begin boosting schools and higher education to fulfil any potential skills shortfall that may come from stricter immigration policies. There’s no doubt that businesses will also need to work a lot harder to retain and attract top talent and workers with specialist skills that are vital to their operations. Not only that, there is going to be a significant amount of work that needs to be done in making sure current employees have the right documentation or visas to stay in the UK, if this is the route we are going to take.

The true impact is yet to be seen, of course. If we opt for a hard Brexit, there will need to be measures in place that protect the EU skilled workforce and enables business to source the best and the brightest from Europe. Failure to do this could cause a dearth of talent that will adversely affect the way UK businesses are able to thrive, compete and grow. Replacing EU skilled workers with home grown talent will take time and involve investing in our education system.

For most businesses, the ideal solution is simple and necessary. There needs to be a sensible immigration policy that not only makes the sourcing of a skilled workforce easy but also doesn’t put off top talent or encourage them to search elsewhere. The good news is that we are already doing this with other global partners. We have doctors and nurses, finance experts and engineers and digital experts from all over the world.

Finally, any negotiation also needs to take into account the 3.3 million UK nationals currently working and living in the EU. Creating a reciprocal arrangement that protects both sides is important and to the benefit of the UK and the EU. Whether that will come to pass, of course, remains to be seen. For the moment, businesses and organisations need to prepare as best they can.

Effective internal communication is not only necessary for a company but is also paramount to its success. There are numerous examples of companies that have failed due to poor communication, and meetings are one of the easiest ways of keeping company communication alive.

Why are meetings useful?

Meetings make for a quick and easy way of communicating information across to multiple people in one go. Sure, this can be done through e-mails or memos, but meetings allow for a pool of ideas, brainstorming sessions, and a more personal relaying of information that other methods of communicating simply don’t.

This can be done across all levels as well and doesn’t just need to be for some employees. Directors should be effectively communicating to each other, and the bits that are relevant to even the lowest levels of the organisation must be effectively communicated down.

Meetings shouldn’t be held just for the sake of it, but effectively using different types of meetings a company can work as one smooth machine rather than several different cogs.

Consider team meetings to ensure that your team is working on a project at the same pace, full-office meetings so that each of the different departments can work in unison, and board of director meetings so that they know exactly how the business is operating.

Are meetings always necessary?

In the same way that meetings shouldn’t just be held for the sake of it, also make sure that meetings aren’t just left as an afterthought. Meetings are regularly viewed as business-killers, what with the rise of tools like Skype and the way in which meetings are run.

Many meetings are organised simply because businesses feel that they should be hosting one, but they often lack structure, are poorly moderated, they often pull people away from important work when they didn’t need the meeting, and they appear to be growing stale.

A meeting should be something people look forward to, a chance to brainstorm, bounce around ideas, and genuinely push the business forward. If meetings are organised once a week simply for the sake of it, workers will begin to dread them, and the boredom will show throughout.

This in no way makes meetings a waste of time, but they need to be properly planned and thought out to ensure that they are useful and successful.

How to keep meetings useful on all levels

Structuring a successful meeting is done in a similar way across all levels. Although meetings are getting a somewhat bad reputation, the first thing to do is to meet regularly. Although it might seem like a better idea to meet less regularly, regular meetings will help bring employees closer together in an ever-increasing screen dominated environment and can help to de-stress employees through problem-solving.

When planning your meetings, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is this meeting truly necessary?
• What needs to be achieved from this meeting?
• Who is completely relevant to this meeting and needs to be there to help achieve this goal?
• Is the timing for this meeting right?

Ask yourself each of these questions before you call a meeting; if any of your answers don’t seem relevant or necessary for the meeting at hand, then it probably isn’t the right time to call it.

You always need to remember that any time that an employee or director spends in a meeting is time that they aren’t working, and therefore earning revenue for the company, so meetings need to be weighed up directly against this.

You can assess the cost of a meeting using meeting calculators, with roughly $37 billion being wasted every year due to unnecessary meetings.

Keeping meetings relevant for your business

Despite the figure listed above, your business doesn’t need to follow the same trend! No matter which level of your organisation you’re planning to conduct your meeting on, follow the steps above and ask yourself those key questions about your meeting. This way, no matter if it’s with company directors or lower level employees, you can achieve exactly the outcomes that you want when holding your meeting.

It may seem strange to be thinking about the end of your time at your startup before you’ve even set it up, but you need to have a timeline and plan in place early on. This will allow you to focus and work towards your ultimate goal from day one. Below we explore whether or not you should have an exit strategy in place when you startup.

What is an exit strategy?

There are several exit strategies that you can have in place with your start up, which we have explored briefly below:

• Initial public offer (IPO): selling part of your business to the public in the form of shares
• Mergers: a merger is still considered an exit strategy, and may be needed should your startup be low on cash-flow and needs to stay afloat
• Private offerings: Similar to an IPO, this involves the selling of your shares to a private group, such as investors
• Cash cow: Cash cows are organisations that have high market shares in industries that have low growth, and can help startups to stay sustainable in tough situations
• Regulation A+: This is also similar to an IPO, but offers benefits as you can raise money without having to publish your accounts publicly
• Venture capital: this involves receiving large amounts of investment from venture capitalists to help your startup stay afloat, and will make your business look attractive to investors

Why should you have an exit strategy when you startup?

No matter what exit strategy you choose to have in place for your business, they can be an effective solution for your business plan. The chances are that you don’t quite have enough cash yourself to keep your business alive and that you are looking for third party investment.

You may feel that your business is in its early years and you’re just focusing on the beginning, but investors will want to see robust and money-making plans in place for the years to come. Exit strategies will help to show this.

You’re looking for investment to get the business started, but they’ll be looking at your business plan to know how much of a return they will get when you/they exit. Some investors may like the idea of your startup so much that they are investing in the business and not the exit strategy, but generally, they will be thinking about their return.

Exit strategies are also effective ways of bolstering your startup’s cash flow and preparing for means of expanding your business or keeping your company alive further down the line.

Why shouldn’t you have exit strategy when you startup?

However, having an exit strategy isn’t completely necessary when you startup. Highly successful businessman such as Mark Zuckerberg never had an exit strategy in place when he started. So what kind of reasons did people like Zuckerberg have for not thinking of exit early-on?

Your focus, and rightly so, in the early years should be on profitability and not of being a millionaire at a young age. While this is a nice idea, if you have a good idea with a large market potential, then it may be better to focus on where you can take this rather than exiting before you know what you might be able to achieve.

It is also much better to focus on the consumer and the market that will benefit your business and your target customer first, rather than focusing on the consumer and market that will enable you to sell your business successfully. Focusing on the former will help you to establish a successful business, at which point you may be in a better position to sell. For example, Zappos built themselves up and were acquired by Amazon by focusing on the consumer, rather than the exit strategy.

Some investors actually find an exit strategy a disappointing route to highlight in pitches as they may want to see your startup thrive in your hands.

Finally, focusing on the end-goal and that big pay date can be de-motivating for your employees. If you’re only concerned with a big pay check rather than actually trying to create and build something, your employees may not see the point in trying to be creative or innovative.

What is right for my business?

Every business is different, and each will have different aims. If you don’t believe this is right for your business then don’t waste time trying to craft an exit strategy. If you do take this route, just make sure that you clearly have your reasons why, as you’ll need to sell this to investors.

Success is something of a subjective word, and it can be measured in multiple ways depending on your business type or industry sector. It’s important to identify what will make your business a success, and focus on this to drive your business forward. Below we have listed out how to measure success.

The different ways of measuring success

Generally, the highest level of success is measured through profit, depending, of course, on the industry that you are in. But this is not the only way to measure success, and some businesses may find that brand awareness, or if you’re a charity, impact, is what has the biggest benefit to your organisation.

There will also be multiple ways that you can achieve the desired success rates of your company and this will, again, differ from industry to industry. For example, one business ranked profitability as a way that they could measure success. They believed that keeping employee turnover low would help them to increase customer satisfaction and therefore achieve their goal, but quickly realised that some stores with high employee turnover were among some of the most profitable.

It was the businesses that had the lowest manager turnover that had the highest levels of profitability, and so they shifted their focus towards retaining managers. It wasn’t manager retention or customer satisfaction that was their ultimate goals; it was profitability. But they could use manager retention and customer satisfaction as ways of measuring success, which ultimately allowed them to measure the profitability of their business.

It helps to break down the way in which you measure success rather than setting a general aim. “To be profitable” is not an easy goal to measure, and therefore it’s hard to say whether you are successful or not. “To have a 10% profit margin in this fiscal year” is a clearly defined measure of success which you will either achieve or not.

Again, it is important to think about what really matters most to your business, and narrow this down to a few measurements of success. Every business wants to be in profit, have great brand awareness, cause a big social impact, but in reality, it will be hard to achieve all of these aims.

Other ways that you might measure success are through the schedule of a project, the scope of the work at hand, a budget that you have set, team satisfaction or the quality of the work or product that you have produced.

Achieving your goals

To properly measure success, you need to set goals. It may be a small, week-long project, or it may be a five-year plan, but regardless of what it is you want to achieve, you need an effective way to measure success.

The most common way of measuring success is using SMART goals, which are goals that can be applied to however you want to measure success, be it through time, money, social impact, brand awareness, or something else entirely.

Specific – your goal needs to be clear and specific, such as “to have a 10% profit margin in this fiscal year”

Measurable – you should be able to easily measure your goal

Achievable – your goals need to be achievable and not wild

Relevant – make sure that your goals are relevant to your business aims. If you are a charity, then perhaps your success should be measured by social impact rather than profit

Time-bound – set time limits for your goals. This will help you to be more accountable when trying to achieve success

Lead and lag goals

Lead and lag goals, or indicators as they are also called, is another good way to measure success.

With lag indicators, you will be examining things that have already happened and are out of your control. For example, if you want to see how many accidents there have been in a factory, you will consult an accident log.

You can use this for ways to improve things moving forward, which will then impact on your success. Doing this would make it a lead goal. For example, you may increase staff training, and you can then measure the success of this by seeing if there is a decrease in the number of accidents.

Lead and lag goals are useful ways to see where things are lagging behind in your business, and how you can introduce other measures to lead onto greater success.

Measuring success for your business

Every business is different, and you shouldn’t measure success based on how other businesses around you are doing. Every industry has different lead times or profit margins, and it’s important that you clearly define what success means for your company.

Choosing the right supplier for your business is an important process, and involves much more than simply looking down a price list. There are many factors that you need to consider, and rushing into the process could hinder your business and, ultimately, your profits. Below we have laid out a guide on how to choose your suppliers.

Set the criteria that you would like your supplier to fulfil

The first step is to establish the rules that you would like your supplier to abide by in your business relationship. This will help you to narrow down the search early on and will help you to be more structured in your search rather than compiling a huge list of suppliers.

Your search criteria should include factors such as:

• The lead times that you can expect once you had ordered to delivery date
• If you have any minimum or maximum order quantities
• What your supplier’s storage and handling facilities are like
• How your supplier will deliver the goods
• What the supplier’s payment terms are
• What their quality assurance and returns policies are like
• How easily contactable they are

These are just some of the factors that are involved in helping you to choose your suppliers, and being clear on these from the beginning will help you to whittle down the thousands of suppliers available on the market.

How would you like to find your supplier?

Another part of the criteria selection process is deciding how you would like to go about finding your supplier. There are multiple ways of doing this, such as by publishing ads in trade magazines or researching and approaching suppliers directly yourself.

Remember that each different avenue will capture a different audience, so it may be worth having several different approaches to try and get as large a selection as possible. Have qualified members of your team review and narrow down the shortlist of suppliers to those that are best suited to your company.

What should you be looking for when choosing your suppliers?

There are several factors to consider when choosing your supplier, and much of it will depend on your business model and how it fits in with your company culture and ethos. However, there are some areas that businesses look for consistently among suppliers:

Price

Price is perhaps the biggest factor to consider when choosing your supplier. You need a supplier that is going to be able to offer real value for your business and offer you the most profitable margins possible. The price will obviously vary from business to business, but be sure that you find one that will still leave you making money while not sacrificing on quality.

Quality

This leads onto another extremely important factor; quality. Quality covers a large range of factors, with everything from materials used to packaging to labelling. You need a supplier that can deliver consistent quality across each and every product. Poor quality will lead to negative customer reviews, and it’ll only be your business that suffers.

Ensure that the quality assurance processes that your supplier has in place are sufficient enough to match the level of product that you want to put out to market.

Service

You need to look for a high level of service and reliability when you choose your suppliers. This includes things such as fulfilment rates, late orders, and how quickly a supplier resolves an issue. If a supplier falls down in these areas, then it will have an impact on customer satisfaction too.

Some businesses have noted that they can see a direct correlation between customer satisfaction scores and supplier scores.

Alignment

Finally, how well do your businesses align? This will come down to multiple factors, such as does your supplier speak the same language as you? Do they have the same ethos as you? Some suppliers will visit your business, get to know what you’re about, and be as passionate about making your customers happy as you are.

It’s much better if you can be partners with your suppliers, rather than just people who do business together.

Choosing the right supplier

Once you have considered all the above factors and whittled down your shortlist, you’ll need to get quotations from your potential suppliers and compare these against each other. Consider what is most important to you; is it price, quality, location, or another factor entirely?

Be sure that the supplier you choose is the one doing the work, as some will outsource the work to a third party. Once you’re happy with your selection, begin to negotiate terms and conditions with the supplier and then you can push ahead with your new profitable partnership!