Skip to main content

A Dragon as Your Mentor?


Hello again, welcome back to Write Away, the blog for small businesses, freelancers or anyone interested in working for themselves.

Mentoring has long being heralded as a great way for small businesses to tap into the vast knowledge and experience of successful business people or entrepreneurs, without having to pay for the privilege.
I’ve read many comments, from small business owners, on the value a mentor has added to their business, as well as the personal benefit they have drawn from the experience.

If mentoring is something you’ve considered for your business, fear not, here is your chance to have Deborah Meaden, star of the BBC show “Dragons Den”, as your business mentor for 12 months.

A competition, run by an initiative called Local Business Accelerators (LBA), is giving UK businesses who are between one and five years old, the chance to win this prize, plus £10,000 cash and an IPad.

The link to where you can enter is at the end of this post, and this gives eligible businesses the opportunity to explain where they are currently, and pitch their vision for growth and where they want to be in future.

Remember, someone has to win, and why shouldn’t it be your business – just think what benefits you would gain from having a Dragon as a mentor – without having to stand in front of them and pitch your idea!

Good luck!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Small Business Advice on a Beermat

Hello again. Today's post is about the co-author of a well known business start up guide called “The Beermat Entrepreneur”. Mike Southon is both an entrepreneur and business mentor and also writes regularly for the Mail on Sunday  and the Financial Times about small businesses and entrepreneurship. The Beermat Entrepreneur is a business self-help book aimed at people who have an idea for a business and need to know how to take it to the next stage and turn the idea into a viable business. Whilst the book is a recommended read for aspiring entrepreneurs, this post seeks to guide you to some useful resources on Mike Southon’s own website. If you so desire (and can afford to!) you can book Mike for a personal appearance from here, but there are a number of other free resources that may be of more interest. There are a number of free guides to download, some linked to the “Beermat” series but others, such as the useful “Sales pipeline simple spreadsheet”, that ...

Small Business Answers?

Hi there, and welcome back to Write Away, the blog for small businesses, the self employed and those thinking of working themselves. Our latest post concerns another online resource that could prove to be a valuable resource for any small business owner or budding entrepreneur. The website is called “My Business”, as usual, the link is included below this post. The website is divided into eight useful sections: Finance & Money, People, Technology, Sales & Marketing, Operations, Import & Export, Future and Cash flow, each one having a number of sub sections that contain valuable insights and advice on that aspect of running a business. The Finance & Money section has some great advice on late payments and how to try and avoid this and further advice on taking small claims through the courts if you need to. The latest Sales & Marketing article contains advice on pitching for new business and the “Top 10 Features” listing deals with questions surrounding IR35 and con...

An Online Freelance Community

Welcome back to Write Away. Our latest post is about a website that is aiming to create a massive online community for freelancers, writers and anyone running a home business. Ihubbub aims to replicate the “hubbub” heard when home workers get together and network. It wants users, who often work isolation, to feel part of a buzzing community of people who are in the same situation as them. It also wants to create a market place for businesses to use each other’s skills and grow together. First impressions are that it does this very well, the look and feel of the site are good, it is easy to navigate and there are a host of resources and information aimed at those working from home, whatever your business. There are three levels of membership, which allow you to pitch and interact with other users to different degrees, but the basic level is free enabling you to create a build a profile before starting to pitch for work or develop your online contacts and networks. You can register a...