FUNDED: Brilliant Entrepreneurs and Founders
At the heart of their towns and cities, wonderful local businesses and social enterprises are the vital spark in their communities. Our guests may all be brilliant but they're also real and relatable, with practical insights and tips to share.
All are united by one factor: they had a dream to grow, and used finance from the Business Enterprise Fund, a non-profit social enterprise, to make it happen. And our guests give us the inside story about their business journeys and all the lessons learned on the way in these fascinating and candid interviews with people facing the same business challenges you do.
FUNDED: Brilliant Entrepreneurs and Founders
Hyde Accessible Transport: from the pains of invoice finance to a lender that backed growth with Shaun Delaney
Shaun's business transports around 900 children each day and currently holds around 150 contracts with local authorities and NHS Trusts.
It provides vital transport to wheelchair users, disabled people and children, and vulnerable members of the public. It has grown from a first year turnover of £325,000 to reach a million pounds in its third year, then three million, with a projection for six million this year, and operates a growing fleet of vehicles – including EVs – all of which are fully accessible so the firm can satisfy a wide range of passenger and journey requirements.
While demand and growth have been dramatic, the business has multiple large expenses and its clients' payment terms or patterns can mean it is paid on 60 or even 90 days.
When it needed to borrow, banks could not help and it resorted to invoice finance, which provide expensive and inflexible. So when a broker put Shaun in touch with the Business Enterprise Fund (BEF) it proven an efficient and lower cost way to access the finance it needed. Hyde's first, £125,000 loan was followed by another and it has invested in additional vehicles and created jobs because of this finance. It now holds three times as many contracts as when it approached BEF. Shaun covers the business' history, and:
• meeting the Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds
• the importance of having the right equipment
• getting the right finance at the right time
• what to do if you want to secure contracts with local authorities and public sector authorities.
Also on this episode: BEF investment manager, Chris Conroy, on what a business can do to put itself into the best possible position to apply for finance.
What next?
• More about Hyde Accessible Transport: https://www.3939tameside.co.uk
• More about the Business Enterprise Fund (BEF): https://www.befund.org/about
FUNDED: Brilliant Entrepreneurs and Founders is a podcast by the Business Enterprise Fund a social enterprise dedicated to breaking the "finance shackles" faced by many small and medium-sized enterprises & social enterprises.
Find BEF online at https://www.befund.org and on LInkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/business-enterprise-fund/
• This podcast is produced and edited by Jamie Veitch https://www.jamieveitch.co.uk/
• The music is "Aerosol of my Love" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Artwork design by Research Retold https://www.researchretold.com
