We’ve curated some of the sources of help available below. Please get in touch if you’d like to add a resource.
Digital businesses are been growing all over London, accounting for 42% of all property take up last year.
Rents have risen across London, and you can expect to pay £40 psf for grade A space in Tech City. But in other, close by parts of London, space can be accessed for £12 per foot, and there are still developers and landlords who are willing to offer short term, below market deals.
We recommend in all property transactions you have an agent act on your behalf, unless you are looking for co-working space. Get in touch with our property desk for help in finding an agent.
If you are looking for co-working space, Gocowo is one useful resource.
You can find listings for office space Spaciosapp and Tower10.
If you’re looking for retail space then We Are Pop Up, and Appear Here can help.
Please add a resource that you think might help others.
Technology has made it easier to source products, find distributors and develop relationships with customers across the globe. But it has made competition stiffer, ushering in competitors from all over the world. It is more important than ever for businesses to clearly research the market they plan to grow into, the potential for growth and how best to exploit these opportunities in the shortest possible time frame.
Tech City UK’s FolioShack gave us their thoughts on the importance of knowing your place in the market.
Founder and CEO of FolioShack
www.folioshack.com
on assessing routes to market.
“Ensuring your product or model satisfy a real business need is everything.
At FolioShack, we’ve built a platform that creates interactive and trackable documents that work on any device – a true end-to-end solution. Simply put, our product makes it much easier and quicker to generate documents, creating cost savings for the type of business that use our service.
Our clients are able to integrate these into their business in a very sticky way. Once you’ve identified this value and the place you occupy in your market, ensuring you focus on pursuing it is key. Do this well, and clients and customers will become your champions. Continuing to deliver great product and service will ensure they’ll help spread the word far and wide.”
For more information and links, visit www.example.com
Tech City UK offers links to a wide range of services to help you come to grips with tax and make the most of what’s on offer (like Gloople did below). Don’t forget, the UK offers one of the world’s most ambitious packages of policies and business incentives, including a large number of tax credits and tax rate reductions. So what’s stopping you?
Founder and CEO of Gloople
www.gloople.co.uk
on the tax break that can help securing early stage funding
“Funding the early stages of growth is a common challenge and like many, we hit a funding roadblock last year. We needed to continue to invest, to develop our brand into a SaaS online store builder, giving a cost-effective solution and delivering certainty to SMEs.
With their input we accessed funding available from the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), through which we’ve raised £150,000 in our latest funding round, with all but £30,000 of it coming from a London Business Angels syndicate.
This has provided us with the fuel our business needs to succeed by bringing in the right talent and developing our product. As a result our business has grown to more than £1 million in less than two years.
Charlie Munger calls accountancy “the language of practical business life” and he’s right – and if you’re not fluent we can help you find someone who speaks the lingo. It’s not just for legal and tax purposes that you need your books in order: proper accounting can show you how much your business is worth, demonstrate ways it can grow and highlight future pitfalls. We asked Geckoboard to tell you more.
Co-founder of Geckoboard
www.geckoboard.com
explains the importance of getting a handling on accounting processes
To run a successful start-up you need to have a great idea but you also need to be able to run a business
One of the main things our accountant does is to prepare monthly management accounts. They also run our payroll, ensure we pay our VAT, and meet our other compliance requirements.
However, what makes our accountant special is their understanding of the start-up world. We can call him directly whenever we want to ask him questions; he appreciates the need to be flexible as well as the need for the quick turn-around of information. A good accountant is invaluable – get one and free yourself to focus on the other stuff!
The Tech City UK team are committed to making hiring less tiring through links with agencies that understand the needs of small businesses (and the sometimes very specific skill-sets you’re seeking). One of our key contacts is Silicon Milkroundabout, the UK’s best ‘tech startup job fair’ (in our opinion) and a great way to find your next employee of the month.
Tim Davey of Onefinestay.com knows what we’re talking about – he found his current developers and product managers at the magic roundabout.
Head of Product and co-founder of Onefinestay
www.onefinestay.com
on recruiting the technical talent to grow a rapidly-expanding business
Fast-growing, early-stage companies face huge challenges in terms of expanding their teams to support the pace of growth. We’ve built an incredibly talented team of 150 in fewer than three years, but perhaps our toughest recruitment challenge has been growing our Engineering and Product team – the backbone of a technology-enabled business.
We have always been impressed by the crowd they attract – so much so that we’ve never come away without a new member of the team.
Meeting top technologists without hefty recruiter fees makes Silicon Milkroundabout one of the most effective channels for recruitment, and they’re also encouraging ‘working at a startup’ as a career path in London. This will be invaluable if Tech City UK is to continue to grow.
International staff can offer more than just filling a skills gap, they can bring a fresh perspective and global connections to a growing business. Tech City UK work with advisors, worldwide partners and local experts to make the process simpler and less expensive than you might think. The expertise you need might not be just around the corner, but we’ll help bring them closer.
CEO and Founder of Rentify
www.rentify.com
on how to hire from abroad.
We’ve faced a challenge around a real shortage of engineering talent in the UK. After hiring through domestic recruiters, we began placing adverts online, which provided global reach and attribute-matching to advertise roles to a broader audience. Bringing someone over from San Francisco is expensive but still cheaper than the fees to pay a recruiter for a C-level hire.
The interview is straightforward. All of the documentation is available on the UKBA website, with their chief concern being that the company has a history, a future, and some credibility, so provided companies can demonstrate this there should not be a problem.
We know the right space needs to reflect the culture and personality of your business and express your values. It needs to inspire your staff and send the right signal to partners and suppliers, or customers and clients. Location enables proximity to other, fast-growing, digital tech businesses, and of course allowing room for expansion and growth is also a key consideration.
We asked Tech City UK’s GoCardless for their tips on moving from a shared working space to their own pad.
Founder of GoCardless
gocardless.com
on finding the right place.
This makes it irrational to have a three-year lease. If you’re happy to potentially move around every 6-12 months, look for “fag-end” leases – the remainder of a 5- or 10-year lease taken by companies that have gone bankrupt or moved to a bigger space.
You can get significant discounts (up to 80% off) in return for accepting a short-term lease and a potentially slightly grubby office. We found brokers were expensive but quite unhelpful, and instead went straight to commercial estate agents for these leases.
If you’re lucky it will contain furniture from the previous company or you can keep an eye out for other companies upgrading their offices.
When everything from the length of the lease, the cost of maintenance and the rent itself being up for negotiation, you’ll need your own local expert beside you to even the playing field. With our own team providing advice, and links with the best local consultants and property advisors, we can help ease the burden small businesses face before they’ve even got their keys.
If You Can explains how Tech City UK helped smooth their move
Co-Founder at If You Can
ifyoucan.org
on negotiating leases.
The difficulty we have, is we’re just so busy getting the business going that we haven’t got a great deal of time to focus on finding space that is the right size and location.
Our experience has been that there is a lot of small spaces (approx. 600 sq. ft and below) and a lot of large space (5,000 sq. ft).
Through London and Partners we’ve been in contact with an independent commercial property adviser – and they’ve been very helpful, navigating us through the whole process of finding the right place and managing the negotiations with the landlord.
It’s definitely an area where we’ve benefited from expert advice and support.
So if you’re keen to open a new office, a headquarters or even relocate to London, Tech City UK are ready to help. Through key support agencies like London and Partners and UKTI, companies can seek advice and assistance with business registration, office location, market analysis, and even finding accommodation for your staff.
Yammer Inc. explains how we helped them cross the pond with ease.
Customer Success (EMEA) at Yammer Inc
www.yammer.com
on setting up in London
We were trying to service our European customers from the US – the wrong side of an eight-hour time difference. We needed a base in Tech City to get closer to our European clients and grow our customer base. The spread of sectors in London is also a real attraction, it’s an inspirational, up-and-coming and vibrant scene.
Both London & Partners and the team at Tech City know the city inside out, we really benefited from working with them. London & Partners and UKTI helped us with office location and introductions to fit-out companies and related service providers.
As a result, we opened our HQ in London with 15 staff in February 2011 and are on track to double over the next couple of years.
But having a virtual product or service doesn’t necessarily make start-up companies experts at creating brand awareness, finding new markets or developing a strategic vision.
Tech City UK and partners offer a range of support to help new companies thrive in a world of marketing and comms that continues to evolve, to keep your customers engaged, your products trending and your profits growing. We asked Tech City UK’s Nuji.com for their top tips for marketing and communications – and some of them may surprise you!
Co-Founder of Nuji
www.nuji.com
on marketing and communications
Don’t press the hype button until your product is ready – which is when your engagement numbers are through the roof (in the early stages the amount of users you have doesn’t matter). You’ll never grow if your user’s actions don’t touch people outside of your website’s immediate network – make sure this happens.
If you can, create a pull instead of a push strategy in regards to developing business networks. We don’t reach out to any of our clients – they come to us and they can sign up without having to contact us at all.
The other major lesson I learned is to call – you don’t need to have a physical meeting with a client to get their business.
In fact it’s part of our mission is to make it easier for investors to reach our community, with a series of schemes, incentives and programmes proudly detailed in our Investors section. This means that for our businesses we’re able to make the right introductions and also provide support for those preparing to pitch or building a business plan.
And we thought who better to share their tips than Taavet Hinrikus of Tech City UK’s TransferWise, who recently won £6m in early stage funding. Here’s how.
co-founder of TransferWise
transferwise.com/
gives his advice on fundraising
We’ve just announced $6 million early-stage funding led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures – his first in Europe. This is a fantastic match for Peter Thiel didn’t come to us – and we had to get a few things right before we approached him. Firstly, we had to show traction with our product.
Secondly, we had to explain the size of our vision and how we were solving a problem that many people have. It’s the first question every good investor asks!
Sell the skills and credentials of your early team – top class talent attracts top class funders. Never forget that finding investment is a two-way process. Do your due diligence on possible investors.
Do they have experience in your sector? Avoid the temptation to take money from just anyone.
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