The first payroll run is the moment a business stops being a founder with an idea and becomes an employer with obligations. Most founders arrive at it having thought hard about the hire and almost not at all about the …
Understanding Customer Needs: The Complete Guide to Identifying What Your Customers Actually Want
In 25 years of working with UK founders, and across the 2,000-plus businesses SGI has supported, I have watched capable entrepreneurs make the same expensive mistake again and again. They build what they assume customers want rather than what customers …
Competitive Analysis in a Business Plan: The Section That Wins or Loses Funding
“We have found a gap in the market with no direct competitors.” I hear that sentence almost every week, and it worries me more than any weakness a founder could confess to. Last quarter I sat with two founders building …
Bootstrapping Your Startup: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs
Most founders who come to me about bootstrapping their startup arrive carrying the same quiet assumption: that building without external funding is the path you take when you cannot get investment, rather than a deliberate strategy in its own right. …
How to Name Your Business: A Practical Guide
Every week, I speak to a founder who has spent three months agonising over their business name while everything else — their market research, their financial model, their first customer conversations — sits untouched. And every week I speak to …
SGI vs Techstars: Mentorship, Equity, and What UK Founders Are Really Choosing Between
A Leeds healthtech founder told me he was choosing between Techstars and us because, in his words, “both of you help with mentoring and getting funded.” He had read the Techstars pitch about a network of mentors and a path …
SGI vs Y Combinator: Which Is Right for a UK Founder Raising Their First Round?
A Manchester-based SaaS founder asked me last year whether she should apply to Y Combinator or work with us. She had a working product, a handful of paying customers, and interest from two UK angels. She assumed the two options …
SGI vs Seedcamp: Why This Is Not the Either-Or Decision Founders Think It Is
A founder building a fintech tool in London asked me whether she should “go with SGI or go with Seedcamp.” She had framed it as a fork in the road, two doors leading to the same place by different routes. …
Restaurant and Hospitality Business Plans: What Actually Wins Funding and Survives Year One
Most hospitality founders come to me with a plan that describes a lovely restaurant. The concept is clear, the menu reads well, the interior moodboard is beautiful, and the founder is genuinely excited. Then I ask two questions: what is …
Tech Startup Business Plans: Building the Evidence File Investors Actually Fund
Most tech founders who send me a business plan have written a pitch. It opens with a large market, a clever product, and a hockey-stick forecast, and it is built to excite. The problem is that excitement alone won’t get …