Answers to 30 key business questions

If you have been incubated or accelerated, after your time with us you will have an answer to those 30 key business questions:

1. How much should I raise?
2. How to make a deck that tells people you know what you’re doing.
3. Funding structures – benefits and pitfalls.
4. How to pick an investor – is “more than money” real or fantasy? How to exploit them.
5. Strategic investors: benefit or burden? You got the money, do your new investors really matter anymore?
6. How to structure your cap table and option schemes so you don’t shoot yourself in the foot.
7. Shareholder agreements: how to avoid a horror-show in the future.
8. You’ve got a great invention, but is it a great product?
9. Product pricing schemes: what works and what doesn’t.
10. Negotiating B2B contracts: be humble but don’t give it all away.
11. How to measure your target market so investors believe you.
12. Customers and consumers: is there a real difference and does it matter?
13. Reaching customers in remoter markets: sales force or agents?
14. Do you have to move to the US to sell in the US, or do you need to be there to have a US exit?
15. You will need to grow your company – do you hire or outsource?
16. Cost control: is it important? It’s not as obvious as it seems.
17. Cash flow planning for dummies.
18. Marketing is an investment not a cost: be bold and invest, but also be smart.
19. Setting operational objectives and keeping to schedule – build a margin for delay.
20. Writing a business plan: always remember it’s going to be wrong.
21. Contingency planning: is it worth it?
22. If you find your idea isn’t going to fly, is it worth pivoting?
23. Things aren’t actually going well: did you notice, and if you did what to do about it?
24. You call yourself a CEO/CTO/CMO – this is what it really means to be one.
25. What happens when founders hire staff: avoiding a two-tier culture and build a real team.
26. Managing a disparate workforce – remote working is good and bad.
27. Hiring commercial staff – the most difficult and expensive hiring decisions and how to (try to) get it right.
28. Establishing your Board, and managing it so it’s supportive and not a pain in the backside.
29. What to do if someone is interested in your business? Can you trust a competitor?