Business Development Grant awarded!

Very good news Subject to contract, SEIF has agreed to award us a Business Development Grant! Apparently we are the first award of this year's round. One of the first steps is to establish the size and shape of the market for the Deep Green offer, and how much health and social care commissioners would be willing to pay.

The search for a friendly local authority will now be pursued in earnest. We have a real proposition, with likelihood of securing funding, which will create 100 jobs, plus the short-term jobs created in the construction - a sector which is crying out for work at the moment. This factor will make the costs of building cheaper now than they would have been 2 years ago. As we will be using environmentally conscious building methods, this will give the workforce experience which can only enhance their future employment prospects. "Green" building is increasinly making sense as the longer term energy costs continue to rise. So we make an attractive proposition for a local authority wanting to stimulate some business growth, and we "tick lots of boxes" - social enterprise, woman entrepreneur, person with disabilities, ethical, environmental, providing social benefit...how could they possibly say no?

Business Plan and Financial Forecasts complete-ish

Considering this time 2 years ago I hadn't realised that this was what I wanted to do - to now having written a Business Plan (with a little help from my friends) for a £6,000,000 development is amazing. Paul has written the two 3 year financial forecasts, using the huge, complex spreadsheets provided by SEIF (see previous) - one of those where changing a variable on one page, e.g. monthly utility bill, automatically updates the others, so you can play around with the figures to your heart's content. For instance, I hadn't factored in any extra payment for unsocial hours, so we were able to add on 5 day's pay per year (for staff who will work Bank Holidays - 10 days at time and a half). The forecasts take us up to 2015. We've projected the home opening for business in 2012, but I think that is extremely optimistic -there are so many factors around finding a site, getting it surveyed, getting Planning permisssion, who knows - being gazumped?
The next step is that our Investment Adviser will prepare a case for the development to a specially convened panel - by which I mean a panel which comes together when they have a couple of proposals to vet - rather than working to a pre-determined schedule. It will probably be September before we hear if we have been awarded a Business Development Grant to allow us to take the Business Plan and financial forecasts to a stage where we will be "investment ready". Then it will be a Dragon's Den scenario..... (yipes!)