Centa is a long-standing social enterprise and a partner of the Business & IP Centre for over 12 years. Trading for over 36 years in central London, we support people wishing to start a business and offer existing small businesses advice and training on how to develop and grow their businesses. We are currently delivering the Get Started workshop for the Innovating for Growth: Start-ups programme, which is always well attended and well received by delegates from the feedback.

The workshop is delivered by Lucan Richards, who has 15 years’ experience as a business adviser. Since joining Centa initially as a business support officer, his business knowledge and expertise has grown tremendously whilst working on various government funded business support and mentoring programmes. Acting as the first point of call for all enquiries has enabled him to provide effective business solutions to budding entrepreneurs who required urgent help and support. This progressed to running his own business and the opportunity to better understand a client needs having gone through similar experiences. Besides delivering workshops for the last four years he still continues to provide direct business advice and business planning support, whilst to date has helped over 500 clients start in business and access over £750,000 of start-up finance. Delegates who attend the full day Get Started workshop will be able to:

• Identify effective market research techniques.
• Identify and quantify the market opportunity.
• Develop competitive service/product offers.
• Develop a successful marketing strategy.
• Generate sales, break-even and profit and loss forecasting techniques.
• Produce a clear business plan.
• Understand how to raise finance from banks, investors, or other sources of funding.
• Know where else to go to gain additional support and advice.

I attended your Get started workshop this week and just wanted to say one more time: great job! It was a really good day with a lot of valuable information. Thank you!

I have to say your session was one of the best and informative session I have attended so far.

Thank you for the time, energy and wealth of information and knowledge. We will have you to thank for a successful company launch.

Excellent presentation. Clear, concise, and informative. Very very useful for advice. Great tips to move forward.

From our experience there are many common pitfalls for start-ups that the workshop tries to raise awareness of:

• A reluctance to seek advice
• Poor or inadequate market research
• Lack of capital
• Weak financial planning/cashflow
• Over-optimistic forecasts
• Pricing mistakes

But also highlights characteristics of a good business with growth potential:

• Owners have previous success or experience and failure
• Risk takers/entrepreneurs
• Understanding the market – their customers
• Prepared for growth – staff, capital, physical space, scalable client base
• They keep evolving - moving forward.

We have a passionate determination for business and entrepreneurship and how it can be a means for economic improvement, wealth and job creation. And our partnership with the Business & IP Centre compliments this mission.