New grant scheme - Business Growth Programme

The new £20M Leeds City Region Business Growth Programme is “open for business” and inviting applicants.

This is an excellent opportunity for smaller SME’s to gain much-needed help with their growth plans. It is also worth noting that assistance with the finance-raising process might also be facilitated through Access 2 Finance/GrowthAccelerator.

RedSky Expansion!

We are delighted to announce that RedSky has recently recruited two senior bankers as additional dealmakers.

 

The funding market is presently at it’s most buoyant since the credit crunch and we see this as the ideal time to expand in Yorkshire and the North East.

Gareth Allenhas joined us from Barclays and will be mainly working in the West Yorkshire area.

Adrian Caisley, formerly of Yorkshire Bank, will primarily be covering Teeside and the North East.

We are delighted that Adrian and Gareth are joining the RedSky team!

Access to Finance – RedSky’s 3 Point Plan

RedSky have produced a 3 Point Plan to significantly improve the access to finance issue…

We deal with businesses every day requiring funding so we see first hand the issues they are facing with regard to accessing appropriate levels of funding.

 Whilst we appreciate this is a complicated matter, we believe there are three main aspects to the issue which, if implemented, would significantly improve access to funding for SME’s. In simple terms they are as follows:

1. Professional Help

Recent statistics show that only 20% of SME’s receive any professional assistance when approaching banks and other lenders. The success rate for those 20% is high – conversely, there is a very high rate of declines for those going it alone (of this category, many briefly approach their bank and are turned aside quickly, thereby missing the official statistics).

We believe there should be a simple, low-cost support mechanism introduced to assist SME’s, possibly via The Chamber, FSB etc. This would involve assessing the most appropriate funding solutions and producing a short (3 or 4 page) funding proposal together with submitting the appropriate supporting financial information.

2. Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme

The EFG scheme is, in principal, a good one, but it’s usage by banks is poor. We come across many instances daily where the scheme should have been used by banks but they have been reluctant to use it for a variety of reasons.

 The scheme should be reviewed and banks ‘encouraged’ to utilise the scheme to a larger extent.

3.Bank Declines

We would introduce a mechanism to review bank declines for appropriate funding solutions. We understand there is a proposed CDFI Referral Scheme being considered via the BBA for such declines but this, in our opinion, does not fully address the issue.

 Usually it is a complicated issue and, in our experience, the appropriate solution usually requires a combination of funding options rather than a simple loan.

 

  

RedSky Bank Video Released

We have produced a short film entitled: ‘How to get the bank onside’.

The film focuses on what the banks look for when lending money and what has recently changed since the credit crunch. Despite the adverse media reaction to the banks, we have had a good rate of success sourcing funding for our clients by putting ourselves in the shoes of the lender.

The video and a copy of the script  are available on this site.

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