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THE UK GOVERNMENT is to delay new controls on goods moving from the island of Ireland to Great Britain while negotiations with Brussels on the Northern Ireland Protocol continue.
The checks on incoming goods from the European Union – covering mainly food and agricultural products – are due to come into force on January 1, bringing post-Brexit customs arrangements with the bloc in line with those with the rest of world.
However, Brexit Minister Lord Frost said the existing arrangements would continue on a temporary basis for goods crossing the Irish Sea for as long as the discussions on the protocol are ongoing.
“The Government believes that this pragmatic act of good will can help to maintain space for continued negotiations on the protocol,” Lord Frost said in a written ministerial statement.
“It also ensures that traders in both Ireland and Northern Ireland are not faced with further uncertainty while the protocol arrangements themselves are still under discussion.”
The UK Government is seeking major changes to the protocol – which covers the movement of goods from Great Britain to North Ireland – arguing the checks required are damaging business and fuelling community tensions.
This must be some kind of joke, right?
Crowd funding by it’s very nature is usually consumer-centric. So I would imagine this is a bad suggestion for a B2B SME. And a lot of SME’s in Ireland are B2B.
Is there a crowd funding platform out there that isn’t consumer-centric and is based on getting shares for investment?
You’re looking more at angel investor route there. You could also look at a co-destiny arrangement with significant customers. That is where there is extremely close cooperation between a service provider and a customer such that they are almost one (e.g. A well functioning outsourcing arrangement). In such a scenario, your customer may work with you and help you grow your business as the rate of return for spare funds in a bank is so poor at the moment.
Contact me on twitter if you have any questions and I can talk you through a few things if you want.
NEWFLASH FROM ERSI….Banks are shite, banks are shite!! Just whats needed…the out of touch preaching to the untouchables!!
The very fact that Dr?? Martina Lawless would suggest Crowdfunding as a viable option for anything over 1-2% of SMEs in Ireland shows her and her organisation’s detachment from reality…The ERSI is the place that needs to ‘catch up’ and give some real alternatives to the banking sewer that is the unavoidable staple for so many self-employed and SMEs in Ireland.
The idea of borrowing from tax-funded bailed-out banks so you can make money to pay them interest and pay more taxes on any profit you make to pay ad finites for their bail-out is insane!
Really? You seem to have a loose grasp on business there.
The options are very straight forward:
Bank loan: will seek concomitant funding and/or security over loan against personal assets. Benefit is funding / risk is losing it all.
Equity swap: in return for a capital injection from a private investor or investors, a business gets access to funding but loses some of its independence. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it does mean you pay an awfully high price for what can be a modest level of start-up funding if you become successful. It just depends on how confident you are about your business and how much you’re willing to relinquish to have a shot at success.
Co-destiny funding: two businesses share business expansion plans and without formally joining help each other realise each other’s expansion plans. One may have spare cash that they are willing to advance because of the close relationship for a reasonable return like 5%. The other gets the funding and can expand operations such that it can take on new customers and build the size and scale to be able to support their co-destiny partner’s business.
Flotation: alternative investment markets for products and service but this tends to be down the line.
Crowd-funding: raise small amounts of modest funding levels in return for equity or some kind of benefit in kind.
There aren’t too many other ways to do this beside merging and then losing independence. Sin é, that’s it. So there aren’t alternatives. Besides it’s not ESRI’s job to innovate, it is a SMEs job to find a way.
@robespierre. Your post is informative and succinct but I fear from its tone that you may give your advice from behind a desk(no offence meant and apologies if I am wrong). The options you speak of all infer a loss of independence to some degree and if you have worked, planned, saved, discussed ad nauseam every detail of your start up/expansion/survival, I fear the way you have delivered the options to finance in your post would not be so ‘clinical’. I have listened to many advisors who never took the ownership/self-employed plunge, and they all had answers from a book but never from experience unfortunately. Re ERSI, you are right, they are not the innovators, however may I suggest that they should just give the facts then, not opinion, and allow us, the innovators, to decide for ourselves without the gratuitous dog-on-the-street ‘advice’.
Nope, I left a well paid position in a tier one consultancy to run my own business. I am building from a modest base of my own savings and am running one business (an advisory one) to build the business I quit to set-up primarily through equity sharing with individuals I convince to take the jump with me.
The options are simple and few and that may seem clinical. Simple and easy are two very different things however.
Absolutely correct but when 50% have now website and a large amount of the other simply have a magazine sites crowd funding is like going to mars.
Ultimately it’s adapt or die. Micro financing and crowd sourcing or angel investors are a great bet but so many small businesses offer generic services without significant differentiation that this kind investment is not really relevant. On the product side crowd sourcing is easier and more obvious but generational mind sets can affect this.
Finally, as a small business owner, we’re right to be wary of banks. The first thing they look for is a personal guarantee or a hold over your family home. We’ve seen how that has worked out over the past 7 years.
My top tip is I give a 10% discount for half the money up front. It means I am guaranteed a break even level of cash. While you need loans / capital to expand and build scale without cash you have no business. Bird in the hand is very much my perspective.
It is called invoice discounting and service providers don’t do it enough. It’s harder for products but you may be able to do it on high volume order to reduce non payment risk and maintain adequate working capital reserves.
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