A few days ago I received a glossy brochure through the post. I could, it trumpeted, buy stickers proclaiming that my company was ten years old this month.
Apart from the fact that I feel it would be less than gracious to emblazon this all across the envelopes I send out, it made me realise I was getting older... and we don't want to be reminded of that, thank you.
But it did serve to remind me of the last ten years and the attempts to keep my publishing business going. You quickly learn that, for some reason I've never been able to understand, you have to grow to survive (and I must quickly add that I do not want to receive e-mails telling me why this should be so. I prefer to remain ignorant, thanks).
And unless you publish a huge best seller (where is the next Harry Potter or, come to that, Eat, Shoots and Leaves?), you have to finance this yourself and this invariably means borrowing.
I financed my move from a very, very small publisher (one book a year while still working as a journalist) to very small publisher (three books a year) to small publisher (nine books next year) by a variety of methods.
The first was by selling a house in the South-East and moving to the nicer part of the Midlands and using some of the surplus cash plus an overdraft. I have no intention of moving again, although if I did, we'd probably have to move to North Wales or the Isle of Skye to release any worthwhile equity, and I don't think we'r ready for that just yet.
The second was increasing that overdraft, although this meant moving banks.
I'm not planning to re-finance in the near future – all next year's books are going to be best sellers, you see – but I wondered if I needed to, how I would go about it. Banks, as we all know, are notoriously conservative and I'd heard horror stories at the Sunday Times Business Week conference earlier this year when something called "the funding gap" was mentioned.
Apparently you want to borrow a couple of hundred thousand but they want to lend you a million. Frankly, confronted with that sort of dilemma, I don't know how I'd manage.
So it was interesting to read a column in Director magazine - the house journal of the Institute of Directors. That introduced me to something called The Entrepreneurs Club. Here, according to Lindsay Angus, of Spirit, the accountancy and business advisory company and the club's partner, the amounts offered start at a much more reasonable £50,000, the sort of cash needed by small companies, rather than the £1 million which venture capitalists force upon you.
What the club does is hold lunches where six companies give presentations to what is usually 80 to 100 people willing to lend money.
The lunches started in Leeds three years ago and are now also held in Nottinghamshire and Cheshire. The first central London lunch was held last month.
The website states that "companies will only be featured by the Entrepreneurs Club if they are at the point at which they are ready to enter negotiations with interested investors, and have business plans and accounts that will stand up to the necessary due diligence that an investor will insist on."
It adds that both start ups and established businesses (that's me) are welcome and that it "promotes the concept of 'Smart Money' – that is, funding from an investor who is seeking active participation within the business. So if you have a gap in your management team or if you simply need a business mentor, say so!"
I have no way of knowing if this is for you, but I do know that the article also mentions the National Business Angels Network and that if you look on their website you will see a banner ad for Times Online.
If you would like to contact Randall Northam about an issue that is affecting your business, e-mail him at randall@sportsbooks.ltd.uk
