With successful start-ups popping up every day, it鈥檚 easy to believe a good idea is all you need for success.
However a good idea without the right presentation is a major turn-off for potential investors, says expert Peter Leather.
Through his work as programme director for thehe has found that the majority of businesses get passed over because they don鈥檛 present their idea in the right way.
鈥淎 lot of them were good ideas which will have been missed just because they weren鈥檛 presented in a cohesive way,鈥� he told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淲orking with many businesses over many years and trying to help them raise investment, they would invariably get knocked back because the proposition wasn鈥檛 correct in the way they presented it.
鈥淒uring my time working with a seed fund we’d also get hundreds of applications across our desks and the vast majority would not be taken forward or read, just because we didn’t have the time or the resource to put them into a state that was ready to be viewed for investment.鈥�
This is often because the proposition is created by people who are technical experts but don鈥檛 have the business management team around them.
鈥淲ithout the business acumen the idea is just a piece of research that wants to spin out into a company and invariably fails,鈥� he said.
鈥淭here’s no shortage of money – it’s getting the right money on the right terms that benefits the company or the opportunity.鈥�
Leather was speaking to 老九品茶Cloud at an investment roundtable in聽London organised by the聽Lancashire Investment Readiness Programme.
Leather says there are plenty of tools available to develop online applications but where applications for investment fall down is if they don鈥檛 have an experienced management team in place.
鈥淧eople don鈥檛 buy tech, they buy solutions, so you need to build the team around the tech,鈥� he said.
鈥淵ou can have the best tech in the world but unless you’re addressing a problem and opportunity with a solution then the business is never going to reach its true potential.
鈥淔ounders get consumed by the tech role rather than the business opportunity.鈥�
The Investment Readiness Programme is attached to the University of Central Lancashire and is free to Lancashire-based SMEs as it is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
Other speakers at the funding roundtable veteran investor Jon Moulto, Norman Molyneux, chief Executive, Acceleris Capital; and Rohit Mateur, senior vice president venture capital, Barclays.