Tag Archives: The Pitch

AVG

Why I’m supporting AVG’s sponsorship of The Pitch

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My name is Lee Chappell and I am managing director of Total Computers, a business that I started up in 1995 when I left school aged just 16. In those days the IT services industry was still in its infancy so I guess you could say that by today’s standards I was something of an entrepreneur myself.

Not long after I started my IT services company there was a boom in PCs and we found ourselves providing support services to many smaller businesses where the PC was their first ever IT purchase.  Over the years our knowledge and expertise has tracked developments in the industry from resolving customers’ PC and server issues in the ‘90s and early 2000s to managing their Cloud-based software applications as we do today.

One of the reasons I decided to get involved with AVG in its support of The Pitch is that I remember how tough it is when starting out.  I’ve seen plenty of start-ups in my time some have succeeded but more often than not they fail.  I feel strongly about giving something back to the business community, to help someone else succeed in life.  I know I and many others would have loved the kind of support and mentoring opportunities – through government schemes and small business competitions like The Pitch – that are available to start-ups today. The more help you can get, the more you can focus your energies on something more productive.

As part of its commitment to support AVG’s lead sponsorship of The Pitch 2014, Total Computers has agreed to install and maintain AVG’s prize to the competition winner of a suite of AVG CloudCare Cloud security services including AVG CloudCare AntiVirus, Content Filtering, Email Security and Online Backup.  We have also agreed to be point of contact for any issues and provide 5 free remote fixes per month over a two year period.

When we begin working with a new start-up we understand that their IT needs to be running at all times. They simply don’t have the resources or finance of a large business so it just needs to work reliably at all times. Most of our customers are other local businesses. A lot of our new business comes from companies whose existing IT supplier is more than three hours away and has been unable to provide them with timely support.  We think the local touch is important and try to get out to the customer regularly. Not to fix their systems, but to review with them what we have been doing on their behalf.  This gives them confidence that we are looking after them and have everything covered.

Since working with AVG CloudCare we have found it has allowed us to take our support to a whole new level. Only last week, we had a customer whose PC got a virus. AVG CloudCare automatically sent us an email to inform us of the situation. We rang the customer and sorted the problem out. The customer loved the fact that we had contacted them before they even knew of the problem.

Finally, we obviously hope our relationship with the winner of The Pitch will be a long lasting one and they will want us to continue as their primary IT solution provider long after the initial two year period has ended.

 

 

AVG

Fever Pitch: Live Final is inspiration to us all

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By the time I arrived for The Pitch Live Final on 23rd October, 1,000 of the original competition entrants had been whittled down to just 30 of Britain’s brightest new entrepreneurial talents.  The event was held in Bristol, a city well-known for its strong start-up culture, its growing reputation as a technology hub and enlightened University initiatives. I took my place alongside my three fellow panellists: Karen Darby of CrowdMission; Lara Morgan of Company Shortcuts and Charles Carter of ICAEW.  Ours was the unenviable task of deciding which one of these great new business ideas should be the overall competition winner.  Judgement day was upon us.

The Contestants

We heard inspirational stories from guest speaker entrepreneurs who had successfully completed their journey interspersed with pitches from the finalists all of whom demonstrated no shortage of creative flare, energy and passion of their own.  Listening to them some common themes began to emerge including:

Judith and the winner of The Pitch

Certainly the business pitches made to the judges were of a very high calibre. I personally found it found it all very inspiring and a little bit of Christmas for the brain.  Deciding on a top five and eventual winner was no easy task.  Finally, after much deliberation, propertECO , the company that tests buildings for cancer-causing radon, was chosen as the competition winner.

It was particularly thrilling to see Rebecca Coates, co-founder of propertCEO, crowned the champion, as she became the first female winner of The Pitch since the competition’s inception in 2008!  In fact, women entrepreneurs were well represented in this year’s competition, earning 10 out of the 30 finalists.

Congratulations to Rebecca and all the finalists!  In fact everyone taking part deserved to be considered winners for creating a display of ingenuity and inventiveness that may one day benefit all our lives.  Photographs capturing the atmosphere of the event have been uploaded to the AVG Flickr account and may be viewed here.

I’ll close by saying; AVG’s active participation in the year-long competition was an extremely positive experience. Perhaps most important of all, it has provided AVG with an invaluable platform to engage directly with the small business community. And, hopefully we have started to make a lasting impression on their consciousness.

To sum up, the real winner is……all of us!

 

 

AVG

What does the future hold for women in Tech

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Enormous untapped investment opportunity exists for venture capitalists smart enough to look at the numbers and fund women entrepreneurs

Prof. Candida Brush

 

As you may have gleaned from my columns and history as a woman entrepreneur in tech, I’m a huge supporter of getting more women into the field.  Indeed, I feel that women bring a unique perspective to tech, business, investing and leadership.

For many of us in the tech field, it was disappointing to hear the comments of Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella’s when asked last week at pre-imminent women’s tech conference about his advice to women interested in advancing their careers – i.e. specifically on getting a pay raise. In an interview at “Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing” event, which you can read an account of here, he appears to suggest women should be quiet and wait until the system works… The comments, which produced immediate backlash, drew Nadella to respond on Twitter trying to clarify his position – that he had been inarticulate… And wrong.

Unfortunately, pay parity remains an enormous hurdle for women. As I addressed in my column on Labor Day, it’s the 77% rule (women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man in the U.S.).  And while Silicon Valley has been kinder in pay parity (when job parity exists), as other recent Silicon Valley research has pointed out, there also seems to be a 30% rule when it comes to women getting tech jobs.

Certainly, more work lies ahead to change these numbers and the mindset that encourages them.

But I also was struck recently by some encouraging findings in a comprehensive new survey on venture capital funding for women entrepreneurs by Babson College in the U.S. – which points to why there should be more women entrepreneurs.

The report found a narrowing but continuing significant gender gap in venture capital–funded businesses: Early-stage investment in companies with a woman on the executive team has tripled to 15% from 5% in the last 15 years. Despite this positive trend, 85 percent of all venture capital–funded businesses have no women on the executive team – and only 2.7% of VC-funded companies had a woman CEO.

But the report also contained this jewel: Companies with women on the executive team perform better! The study found that companies with a woman on the executive team are more likely to have higher valuations at both first and last funding (64 percent higher and 49 percent higher, respectively).

Called the Women Entrepreneurs 2014: Bridging the Gender Gap in Venture Capital, the study was conducted by Brush and fellow professors leading the Diana Project, a forward-thinking program founded in 1996 to research women-led businesses globally. The report provides the first comprehensive analysis of U.S. venture capital investments in women entrepreneurs in 15 years.

The study analyzed 6,793 unique companies in the United States that received venture capital funding between 2011 and 2013. You can read the executive summary here. The report findings and recommendations were shared on September 30 at an event presented by Babson’s Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership in partnership with the EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women Program.

Babson professor Brush noted in the report, “Only a small portion of early-stage investment is going to women entrepreneurs, yet our data suggest that venture capital–funded businesses with women on the executive team perform better on multiple dimensions. The venture capital community, therefore, may be missing good investment opportunities by not investing in women entrepreneurs.”

However, another key finding of the report, and one less encouraging, was that the number of women decision-makers in the VC community has dropped since 1999 – from 10% to 6%.

Among the Babson report’s recommendations to change the paradigm: Showcase the success of growth-oriented, venture-funded women entrepreneurs. I agree. There certainly have been a number of successful women VCs and angel investors in the past 15 years. Long-time angel investor Esther Dyson and VC partners Heidi Roizen of Draper Fisher, Jurvetson and Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad, and more recently Margit Wennemachers of Andreessen Horowitz, are a few that come to mind.

I think the opportunities are there for women, but that there can certainly be more, a fact borne out by this study. Perhaps the silver lining is that companies and VCs not motivated by a sense of equal play will be inclined to inclusion by a mercenary motive – from a closer scrutiny at the women leaders’ financial performance.

There is a huge opportunity here for people who can think outside the common dichotomy of man/CEO; man/VC; woman/somewhere else. I just look at this and think what we are missing by not navigating outside of an outdated business paradigm!

 

On another note: I’m extremely proud to be a judge for The Pitch 2014, the small business competition in the UK. AVG is a lead sponsor and mentor for the event that concludes next week in Bristol on Oct. 23.

AVG

Who Dares Wins in The Pitch, UK

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On Thursday 18th September more than 40 intrepid small business entrepreneurs  – including one  17 year-old – from around the UK assembled in Manchester for the Northern semi-final of The Pitch 2014, the small business competition that this year has AVG as its lead sponsor.   As with the first semi-final in London the event took the form of a Boot Camp during which the competition’s main sponsors provided a series of mentoring workshops designed to help the contestants hone their pitches as they bid to land a coveted place in the Live Final taking place in Bristol on 23rd October.

The AVG workshop – appropriately held in a room called ‘dare’ – centred on overcoming sales objections.  Adapted from the classic objection-rebuttal cycle training that AVG provides to IT partners our workshop was based on the premise that entrepreneurs are great at dreaming up ideas for new products and services but are less confident when it comes to dealing with negative responses to their sales proposition.

Led by Mike Byrne, the workshop taught one or two simple techniques for overcoming common sales objections. People were then split into pairs for a role-playing exercise where they had the chance to practice what they’d learnt.  This format seemed to work very well, never failing to break the ice and fully engage the participants.  This was reflected in the numerous pieces of positive feedback that we received – a good example being this tweet from RecruitPacks.

Then it was time for the main event.  Everyone was given just 90 seconds to step up in front of a room full of judges and rivals, pitch their business idea and make the case why they should be selected to go through to the live final. There was a hugely diverse range of start-ups to choose from.

As lead sponsor and one of the judges AVG has the very difficult task choosing between such a high calibre of entries. Of course, AVG is always interested in eye-catching new ideas – especially in tech -Very occasionally, we take more than a passing interest as the recent acquisition of mobile monetization start-up Location Labs demonstrates.  If you would like to read more on this why not check out Mike Foreman’s recent interview with BusinessZone, published this week, where he talks more about what companies like AVG look for when weighing up prospective acquisitions and what entrepreneurs can expect.

The Boot Camp had a whole spectrum of businesses: everything from e-book stores and games for teaching numeracy; radon detectives and crime scene cleaners ; Twitter-driven advertising concepts and nano technology; and many more besides.  However in one thing Manchester was united. They all shared the same courage and determination. A willingness to push themselves well beyond their personal comfort zones in pursuit of making their business dreams come true.

For some the experience was plainly quite traumatic.  But in conquering their nerves they won the sympathy and support of the whole room.  A place in the live final awaits 30 of the top semi-finalists and a chance to present their pitch to a live audience, a panel of judges that will include Judy Bitterli, as well as investors and supporters.

One final word on Manchester to end on.  There cannot be many other business contests where people who are technically in fierce competition do so much bonding with their peers and provide so much emotional support for each other.  As Dan Martin editor of BusinessZone put it, “There was a lot of love in the room!”

AVG

Entrepreneurs set high standard at The Pitch, UK

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Thursday September 4th , 50 budding small businesses and entrepreneurs from around the UK gathered in London to attend Southern leg of The Pitch boot-camp.

The UK’s largest small businesses competition has reached the midway stage and contestants gathered to receive further mentoring and training from industry experts, including AVG at the 15 Hatfields events venue in London.

Click here for our full gallery

The boot camp was broken down into four separate sessions:

Marketing:

This session was led by Jeffrey Ferrazzo from Constant Contact and focussed on some of the most effective strategies that emerging businesses can use to maximise their limited marketing budget. As you might expect, there was a heavy focus on winning social media strategies and how to define a brand and drive engagement in what is a very crowded environment.

Pitch (24)

 

Overcoming objections:

At some stage in its development, every business will encounter roadblocks and objections from potential clients. This lively workshop session, led by Mike Byrne from AVG, prepared each contestant with techniques for mitigating and overcoming common objections to their product or service during the sales process.

Pitch (36)

 

Financial Planning:

You can have the best product in the world but without the proper financial planning, your business may still struggle to turn a profit. A group of helpful tutors from the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW), also sponsors, were on hand in this session to help the contestants set up clear and sustainable financial numbers to back up their business plans.

Pitch (40)

 

Pitching and Presentation:

Pitching and being able to sell your business idea in as short a time as possible can often make the difference between getting investment or sales and falling short. Contestants at this year’s The Pitch were given mentoring and individual feedback from one of the leading pitch experts in the UK, Annette Kramer.

Pitch (47)

 

 

The Pitching:

After a busy day of thorough training and preparation, all 50 competitors had only 90 seconds to pitch their business, on camera, to the rest of the attendees. The business ideas were as varied as the competitors themselves and there were excellent pitches for everything from lifesaving medical equipment to artisan marshmallows to workplace pension brokers.

Click here for our full gallery

The next phase:

The next step of The Pitch will be the Northern leg of the boot-camp to be held in Manchester later in September. After both boot camps have taken place, the video pitches will be narrowed down from 100 to 30 applicants to proceed to the final where a winner will be chosen by a panel of judges including AVG’s own Judith Bitterli.

The overall winner of The Pitch will win a priceless prize package that includes expert mentoring from business leaders and free access to world leading products and services including free AVG CloudCare services for two years.