‘People powered investment’ provided the theme for the third Quarterly Investment Briefing which took place at TLT Solicitors office at 1 Redcliff Street yesterday afternoon, 27th September. At the event over 30 active or potentially active investors, managers of investors and enablers of investment activity gathered to hear from a couple of speakers and to share, learn and network.
As the host of the event, I opened with a quick explanation of what I was thinking when I came up with the theme – in essence, I was interested to hear how people have helped make or break investment in the experience of our speakers – as investors and as founders. There’s no question that there’s a lot more to successful investment than the transfer of some cash – the non exec directors who provide an independent, umbrella view of the strategy and direction, the investors who interrogate the proposition and impact its course, the senior management team who make the day-to-day decisions for example.
The data unfortunately isn’t very forthcoming on the topic – and so we took a quick tour of some insights from BDRC’s SME Finance Monitor to get us thinking. As the slides linked below indicate, there’s still much work to be done on the gender balance of founders, and the wider executive team, according to both BDRC and Beauhurst’s new ‘people’ function. I used a small sample set of the 25 companies who’ve raised equity investment in Q2 and found that 36% have a woman in their founding team or senior management. We talked briefly about the role of broader diversity in making investment successful but only really to say that more research is needed.
Read the full article on our scale up focused website, the scaleupgenerator here: https://scaleupgenerator.co.uk/articles/QIB–q3–people-powered-investment