A North East entrepreneur is hoping to raise £180,000 to finance a new and innovative way for small businesses to communicate with their customers.
A former young entrepreneur of the year who was responsible for last year's uStartup Business Awards, Richard Laverick will use crowd funding as an alternative way to raise the capital required to start up his new venture. In addition to generating seed money, Richard hopes to raise awareness of his company and give something back to the community by offering them the opportunity to buy shares to be a part of uBrands.
uBrands is the first business in the region to be given the green light to offer Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) approved shares to the general public via Crowdcube.com. In order to raise £180,000, Richard will be giving away 24% of his company through equity-based crowd funding website, Crowdcube, to armchair dragons looking to invest in uBrands. Investors will have until the 1st of April to pledge anything from as little as £10 in return for shares of the company.
Crowdcube is the world's first equity-based crowd funding community dedicated to business investment, and was recently nominated for the ‘Best Alternative Funding Provider' Award 2012. Their web platform takes care of the entire process from collecting the funds from investors to issuing the share certificates to the investors, allowing the entrepreneur to focus on creating awareness of their pitch, while allowing "the crowd" to validate the business
model.
Crowdcube has already helped UK entrepreneurs raise over £2.3-million and has 10,500 registered investors looking for the opportunity to back UK businesses.
There are many different ways to raise investment. With banks currently adopting a no-risk approach to lending and business angels or venture capitalists difficult to access, crowd funding is fast becoming an alternative way to raise investment capital to fund business ideas and entrepreneurial endeavours.
Crowd funding leverages the potential of the crowd to pool small amounts of investment by giving people who would not have thought of themselves as a traditional business investor the opportunity to take a risk in a potential high growth company at an early stage. With investment levels starting from as little as £10 for a share of the business, anyone has the potential to become a dragon and support small business growth in the UK.
Business Secretary, Vince Cable has announced the creation of a new task force to examine the future of business finance including a focus on crowd funding.
Founder and Chief Executive of uBrands, Richard Laverick, commented: "The uBrands' team have spent the past year preparing for this opportunity. I was determined to come up with a solution that would support small businesses to meet the unmet needs of their customers without having to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on traditional marketing communications. I believe uBrands is the answer.
A lot of time and money has been spent to ensure that we have a solid foundation to build a unique brand and a strong proposal to entice people to part with their pennies and help to give uBrands the funds it needs to make it happen."
Once uBrands has achieved its target it will become the first business to have generated venture capital using an equity-based crowd funding website in the region. The company aims to use the money to set up and showcase four of the 325 unique uBrand identities uMarry , uMove, uParty and uStartup that will support small businesses to meet their customers' unmet needs through identifying customer requirements before targeting them with a product or service on the uBrands marketplace platform via U.co.uk.