Entrepreneurial Finance Directors

The Entrepreneur's Club is such a brilliant idea. I’d like to claim it was mine but it isn't. It came from our London FD Centre who started it in conjunction with Smith and Williamson. Then I got to hear about it and thought ‘yes this is something that I would like to do in the Thames Valley’.

I never attended any of their sessions but I liked the idea so much I copied it! I launched it a few years ago with a firm in Reading, Pitman’s solicitors. The idea behind it is an exclusive club for business owners and managers with a turnover of over one million pounds.

Like minds 

The USP of this club is that we don't allow anyone who’s going to try to sell into the club. Frequently, if you go to any business related event there's a very high percentage of people trying to sell you things. Bankers, lawyers or accountants. But our club is all about getting like minded people together, to share ideas. I made sure that we had some good interesting topics and most importantly, a lot of interaction - because entrepreneurs get bored very quickly and don't want lots of crushingly dull power point presentations! We’ve all sat through enough of those in our time haven’t we?

One of the best so far was based on Linked-In and Social Media about Eighteen months ago. There was quite a bit of confusion around social media at that stage, so we got three Gurus in to talk about Social Media and then we had some open questions. People were loving hearing that they were not in isolation in feeling that this was an unknown world.

Great entrepreneurs 

We’ve had sessions on how to sell your business, how to prepare your business for sale, how to raise Angel funds and all of them have had a huge amount of debate and interaction with the experts in the room. We make sure we have quality speakers and that they’re people that have done it themselves. Entrepreneurs like stories, so we have entrepreneurs that have sold their business's or raised funds an. We had such a great day with David Sanger from Rollover Hot Dogs who spoke about how he grew his business and then sold it. Fantastic story.

Next time we’re all set to get a room full of like minded people together and have an HSBC Economist lined up to talk about the economy. He’s brilliant economist and a really fascinating guy so I think it's going to be a bit of a crowd puller.

Ali

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