 webinar of our current series. My name is Cheryl Tipton and I'm here on behalf of Freedom Works who are just one of the partners that are running this series. I'll just pop some slides up if I may to share with you about where we are and what we're doing. Hopefully you can see these. Lovely. So here we are today on the last one as a say of series one Getting Online and we move over next month to series two which is all about customers and marketing. Creative Bloom and Shake It Up Creative are going to be taking you through marketing areas such as SEO, digital tools, Google Analytics, user experience and much more. So if you've enjoyed these sessions and interested in the next ones the booking is open at the moment through the link there WSCC Eventbrite and you can book for the next session so do have a look at those. In the meantime however today we're going to hear from three really great speakers. Lorraine Bell is joining us from Lowcase and Rise and she's going to talk about grants and funding. Gareth Sear is joining us from the business hot house and again he's going to talk about business funding and some money they've got to give away and then Karen Tyrrell is joining us from Coast to Capital and she's going to update us on the digital champions. So without further ado if I may, oh and I almost forget, we are going to have a networking session which is going to start in about 25 minutes and that's going to be organised by Bradley Hatcher of Network My Club so we're going to have an open networking session. We're not going to be taking questions and answers throughout the next three speakers but if you have got some questions please do stay for networking because all our speakers and all of our digital champions are going to be at the networking session so you'll get a chance to talk to everybody and I'll get all your questions answered. So without further ado let me invite Lorraine Bell up onto the screen from Lowcase and Rise who's going to talk to you about funding. Lorraine are you there? Hello. Hello, yes I am. Hello, brilliant. Let me turn my camera and mic off and over to you Lorraine. Good morning so hopefully this is the bit where the technology works so hopefully you'll hear me. So good morning, just good afternoon isn't it? We've just gone into the afternoon not the weather looks like it at the moment and thank you for coming along, letting me come along today and telling you about a couple of initiatives that run through the University of Brighton and University of Sussex. I'll whiz through them, I'm representing two projects here today and that are delivered by the University and hopefully they may be of interest to you. So the first program is a very new program to launch in West Sussex, it's called Rise. Anything with funding these days likes to have an acronym in the title but our acronym stands for Research and Innovation in Sussex Excellence and the purpose of this program is really to try and extend the big open door to businesses in the county to come and work with their universities on innovation. So we've been grateful to receive some last bits of the European Regional Development Funding and very generously sponsored as well by the West Sussex County Council and the boroughs and district councils too. So for that further ado I'll whistle through these and hope they all work. Okay so the purpose of Rise and why it came about was to really try and support innovation-led growth across the county. We've all been somewhat battered by the recent pandemics and Brexit's and all the other things that are thrown of us over the last two years and this project's really around supporting companies to look at innovation within their business and provide an intensive support program on that journey to only recovery but also hopefully future proof in case we have anything else come our way. So it's aimed at small and medium-sized businesses so whenever you see the term SME if you're not familiar with it that means small and medium-sized enterprise and we are working not only with University of Brighton but the University of Sussex as well and two very well regarded research institutions, research based institutions. The objectives of the program so what do we want to achieve and help businesses achieve through innovation is to really help improve revenues, reduce costs, try and help develop new products and processes and services. We're quite a service-based county but we've always got ideas for new productisation of services and new processes to improve that and more recently we've seen lots of examples of changing business models so maybe before you might have been working business to business and they'd be looking now at business to consumer and I know the Hot House program will be talking next but about the business support around that what we're looking for in terms of innovation is you know really helping to research and develop those opportunities with regards to maybe some of the research behind those business models or maybe the research into the market opportunities. The program covers four areas that covers four areas in short it's around exploring ideas for developing looking at a very quick and short innovation audit to identify what the challenges are around innovation development within your company and what the opportunities might be and then working with our experienced innovation advisers to support that idea through to commercialisation and we're looking at developing your knowledge to and embed that knowledge in your your company so using our experts not only for that innovation team with RISE but also across the two universities to look at providing that knowledge and embedding it as say into your company so you can grow through to the future and to help develop new products and services in the future too. We provide peer support through the network so we have an online portal where it's free to join companies can connect with each other they can share and connect through similar innovation challenges or through industry industry sector or location and they can build capability through accessing our workshops our webinars our master classes delivered by experts in industry but also across in experts from our academic community I've had the fortune of visiting lots of the new projects and innovation areas across both Brighton and Sussex University whether it's looking at future trends in sectors or future trends in technology which the the rapid speed that those those changes are coming about are something that businesses really need to look into and we'll be sharing the knowledge and expertise of those future trends and insights with the RISE businesses who join up. The say the whole purpose of RISE is to really try and unlock and make it easy to access expertise from a university so it's a free service we myself and the innovation advisors in the RISE team do the brokerage as it were we find the right academic expertise across the universities for you to work with we help scope projects we do all the paperwork and we make those projects easy to to facilitate and developed with the university so if you've got an innovation idea and you want to talk to us about that and say it's an open door come and talk to us no idea stupid idea it's it's an idea to be unpicked and explored and hopefully capitalised on with with this academic support so I should just say actually my previous site the the value of this support was up to seven and a half thousand pounds so whether that's made up of accessing the workshops and expertise or actually physically buy it we can physically buy out the time of academics to work on innovation projects so some examples of that would be it might be validating concepts it might be validating technology it might be trial and testing a new product idea it might be research in the market and doing some market analysis for for your potential innovation idea and we've helped companies look at process development we're looking at supply chain development we're looking at productivity and automation in businesses and this gives you a sort of flavour of some of the topics we're starting to talk to companies about and say that is a really great access of money and so financial support to your business we don't give us a grant it's not a grant that's going into your bank account however the the transaction of accessing expertise is is really easily made through this project and to get that value some of the areas that we've worked with West Sussex County Council on that we feel that are some of the key challenges in our West Sussex business community these are areas we're going to be specialising in some of them may fit with your business or I think some of these topics cover all sectors now but when you're thinking about digital technology and then the things you've been covering in the Recovery and Rise program so this isn't an exhaustive list but it gives you a flavour of some of the topics that we're going to be covering through through Rise. What we do in terms of developing projects with the university if you've got an innovation area that you feel you want some intensive academic expertise support to develop then we scope up the projects and say we take care of all the all the paperwork behind the scenes and you just get full access to having great conversations with say the academics on your ideas and and downloading their knowledge and expertise to really helpfully hopefully accelerate that innovation opportunity. So the invitation here is to come and join the Rise community is open to any businesses in the West Sussex Coastal Capital area and businesses from outside of that area can join Rise and become a friend and still access some of the events and news but say the program is pretty much focused at West Sussex businesses to really help stimulate innovation and develop that competitive advantage not only in your sector but in but in our geography in the UK. The second project I've got a contact detail there and hopefully you'll have access to these slides after today. The second project I'm just going to cover through today is another initiative led by the University of Brighton working with the University of Kent and I'm bigger part of the Kent County Council and Sussex County East Sussex County Council and Essex Council as well. So low case stands another acronym stands for low carbon across the southeast now the low carbon across the southeast program is delivered through the University of Brighton's green growth platform some of you may have come across this this is a large low carbon and environmental network running across Sussex and this network joined with other two another two low carbon networks a couple of years ago to form clean growth UK so if you are operating in the sort of clean and green space I encourage you to join this network but this network is leading on the low case project because of the nature of the low carbon and environmental expertise it has in the low case grant it's fantastic and I've used to previously work with this program is up to £10,000 towards innovation growth and energy projects for green sector businesses but also any sector business can apply for grants for energy efficiency projects. So there's two grants one is to say for growth and innovation and energy efficiency and then there's a wider grant for energy efficiency projects. It contributes a 40% cost towards the costs of any sort of projects that are going to help the acceleration of your business or the energy efficiency of your business so the SME has to put in 60% of the cost towards that it's non-repayable there's no catch to it it's quite an easy process to apply for and businesses within the southeast LEP which is sort of the location from East Sussex through to Kentway from sort of Lewis through to Kent the coastal capital area so mostly West Sussex Brighton and Hove and a fringe of East Sussex and then we have through to the Portsmouth and Solent region as well so I'd say spread the word because there's a lot of money up for grabs and this project funding will probably run out by March 2023 so I encourage you to apply but I'll give us a couple of examples of projects that are funded but we've funded website development we've funded exhibition materials and collateral we've funded IT and equipment for businesses to become more energy and resource efficient which was really popular during the recent pandemic when everyone all of a sudden to start working from home and online more energy efficiency projects they can be anything from solar panels through to secondhand electric vehicle cars through to air source heat pumps anything that's going to make your business more energy and resource efficient in the way it runs we through the lowcase program your hand held all the way through the process by the team they help write your application forms and generally you get an answer within a month for your grant and I say it's a very easy process to to go through if you're interested in the lowcase grant the contact details are here on this on the screen and so we'll hopefully we have to share these slides with you after today and if you've got any questions come and find me in the networking session brilliant thank you so much Lorraine and we will be sharing the slides afterwards so you'll have access to all those links but as Lorraine's just said she will be staying with us for the networking session thank you Lorraine all I need you to do now is pop off your camera and your mic thank you can I next please welcome Gareth up onto our stage from the business hot house and Gareth are you there I know you've had some problems with your camera today bear with us you can hear us we can hear you sorry just about sounds like you're coming through a tunnel yeah I am yeah Bradley can you help the tool here okay I'm gonna just try a couple of suggestions Gareth at the bottom of the screen next to your camera on is there a little arrow that points upwards can you click that maybe choose a different camera okay seem to all right there we go we can see you there's one I can't hear you now so can you unmute yourself does the mic say can you give me a thumbs up if the mic says mic on there at the bottom of the screen hey all right can hear you great oh now I'm probably shouting thank you for that over to you Gareth yeah try to do it earlier I've got no idea what what microphone I was on so I do apologize everyone um click the share button if you bear with me a second I bring my slide deck up it doesn't work okay I'm I'm not gonna try and share my slides it's uh I've got a dual screen set up and I can't get it to work but can everybody hear me just uh is that all right I'm gonna take that as a yes okay so uh thank you for inviting me along to speak to you um I hope you've all had a um a great series of workshops and looked at your uh you know how to uh increase your digitalization of your organizations so I'm Gareth Gareth here and I'm the program manager for a project called the business hot house we don't have an acronym but it's the business hot house it's all about creating growth uh within businesses so the business hot house uh hopefully a lot of you would have heard of it by now it's um six strands of support and both strands of support to cover things through from productivity and growth interventions within your business access to finance monetization of innovation so kind of like the other side of the stuff that um but Lorraine was talking about just now once you've gone through the innovation process we can help you to monetize that leadership and management development startup support one of the key things I'm going to be talking about now is the grant fund and being able to access um some of our funding to support the digitization uh within various different aspects of your business so the business hot house program is delivered by six different expert delivery partners University of Chichester who are the lead partner in this and they are myself as a program manager and we've got a team of other people that work within here the Sussex Innovation Center an organization called YTKO and WSX Enterprise they're all about helping you to access our grant fund Brighton hosts City Council who manage the grant fund on behalf of the business hot house and the Princess Trust who deliver business startup and growth support to to young people so the grant fund managed by Brighton Host City Council has 2.8 million pound of grants to distribute currently we've distributed around about 1.4 million pounds so halfway through it and we need to get that grant fund distributed we've got about a year left on it at the moment we're looking to try and extend that out to another 18 months so do get in quickly if you are looking for a grant fund for your business and I'll talk to you a little bit more about that grant fund and what it means so in a similar way to the ones again that Lorraine was talking about there's a 60 grant available towards the cost of your growth project so you as the SME business need to provide a 60 contribution so for example if you've got a 10,000 pound project to support the growth within your business we may be able to support you with a 4,000 pound grant and the business provides the other 6,000 pound that match funding can be from a whole range of different sources as long as it's not from the EU our program support funding comes from the EU the grants can be for anything from 2,000 pound up to 170,000 pound our average grants that we've been distributing at the moment coming at around about 14,000 pound they can be used for a whole range of different things I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment so capital or revenue costs within your business so could be used and we have funded things like new plant and machinery so for example we supported an engineering company a couple of months ago who had a 1950s lathe and were upgrading to a CNC machine so fairly substantial projects and they got a fairly substantial grant towards that so it would have helped them to become much more productive and create new jobs new skilled jobs to operate those CNC laves that they were putting in it can be used for growth consultancy in whatever aspect that might be so that growth might be through working with someone to develop a strategic growth plan for you it could be about working with your generic business planning it could be around marketing we've helped quite a number of businesses with marketing through websites marketing strategies branding logo design all these different aspects with regards to tangible marketing products what we can't help with marketing is just printing leaflets but websites we can help with leadership and management development so we've had a number of businesses who have received a grant through us who have been supported with developing their leaders and managers the UK lags behind pretty much every other EU country on investment and leadership and management and it's one of the key things that the government and research shows that is stopping the UK being much more competitive on a European and global basis so we can support leadership and management development of your teams and your businesses software development so perhaps a little bit key to this digitization program support that you guys are on at the moment so we've supported a number of businesses we've created bespoke CRM programs we've supported businesses with subscribing to other CRM systems we've supported inventory and stock control systems so there's a whole range of different different software development and digital platforms that could support the growth of your business and we've also done some elements of supporting businesses with specialist IT equipment so a whole range of different things that we can support your business with on that sort of digitization journey to create the growth within your organization some of the things we can't allow the money to be used for if you wanted to get a qualification can't use it for that can't use it for staff salaries can't use it for upgrading retail premises or stock normal day-to-day business costs so there's a whole sort of range of those sort of things basic things through there and a couple other things if you're thinking of decommissioning a nuclear power station our funding can't be used for that either so or nor can it be used for primary agriculture so just you know just be aware of that so the process I know Lorraine really stressed how much they support you through the process and we try to do the same with ours as well so there is quite a bit of paperwork to fill out but if you think you'll you will be accessing potentially accessing that grant fund to help invest in the future of your business it's worth the effort to go into it so our delivery partners on that access to finance strand will help and support you develop your knowledge and your abilities to fill out all the paperwork and get the paperwork into the grant fund so if you're looking for a large grant fund and we class that as over £5,000 we like to we needed to fill out an expression of interest expression of interest will just give us a good overview of your business and your project idea that gets reviewed by Brighton and Hove City Council and they'll just check that you as an organisation are eligible and what you're spending the money on is eligible as well if it's a small grant we just go straight to the full application form which is the next stage of the process we carry out due diligence on your organisation and on your project gain this starts at the expression of interest stage but just to make sure everything you're looking at spending the money on is is allowable under the scheme just to make sure that the business is a viable business going forward we appreciate the challenges of the last 18 months we do take that into account we make sure you've got all the paperwork in and we need to see cash flow forecasts business plans previous two years set of accounts current year set of accounts as well so all sort of things you should have as a business in place but we do understand not every business has those in place and that's why our access to finance support partners can help you make sure you've got it all together so if that goes through the due diligence process it goes to a grant panel where we discuss the application and make six within the project what we're trying to achieve and if you're successful with 90 of the last successful once they go to panel your grant contract is sent out to you you spend the money on your growth project and then you claim back 40 of your grant based on evidence that you've received the goods and services you said you're going to in your project application form we then make sure that you achieve all the outputs that you've said you achieve the growth new jobs those sort of things so what we look at on the application review we make sure you've got cash flow forecast for the next two years within that has it got the jobs created the project costs the grant income all those bits of detail but we need your last two years of accounts as I mentioned earlier we need to make sure that that is all part of your business plan that you've gone through the business planning process to show you've got the the growth plan within that and then we'll review all those different sections of it all and hopefully award you with your grant so I did have some slides here with some case studies but I'll just read them out to you so we supported a couple of airline pilots who set up a software platform in order to streamline the the recruitment of airline airline pilots and they've said that the grant that they are awarded by the Investor Panel has enabled us to invest in the technology that makes our website an applicant tracking system work more efficiently which in turn means that we offer a service it's far more robust than other recruitment companies so that was an organisation called Select My Tannons so we helped them with a software platform Roy Shin's Kefir Water so Roy Shin runs a Kefir Brewing business we supported her with sales and marketing so her comments were crucially they also helped me to successfully apply for a startup cash award from the Investor grant fund that meant I could afford to employ a sales and marketing consultant so consultancy to promote my product increase my customer base but consultant has helped me to develop my branding and messaging giving a professional touch to my product so I can compete with larger beverage manufacturers a couple more examples a business called My Room Outside there's a big growth in garden offices so this guy set his business up just before Covid so quite a good time obviously saw exponential growth in his business and he states that a grant funding application was approved and was awarded cash for his marketing expenses which meant she could afford to have a logo a website a sales brochure designed and produced the business is doing well I've moved into a light industrial unit and set up a workshop within it my website has launched which is attracting more customers who see what we produce for our social media campaigns then click through onto our websites to find out more from us and make our inquiries about our offices so another area of digitisation that you might be able to get support with and then just lastly a chat called John Ollar and Shaw who started a business called Juice Up Gain started just at the beginning of the lockdown period he was producing freshly squeezed juices from his home kitchen as everybody went for the home delivery options of getting their drinks of food during the Covid period his business really grew exponentially and he was able to invest in an industrial sized juicing machine so we supported him with that but the purchase of an industrial juicing machine so there's a range of some of the things that we support businesses with from laves to software to websites to marketing and to machinery to make their businesses more efficient and more effective so lots going on lots available to you it's not just about the grant funds it is about the skills development to enable you to have much more effective efficient productive businesses that support our regional economy and that full set of slides if I didn't show them to you I'll make sure they can be shared after the event. Thank you Gareth I'm so sorry you had so many issues but as Gareth just said we will share his slides we'll also share recording so you'll be you'll have two ways of picking up on what Gareth can talk about thank you so much and again are you happy to hang around for the network and Gareth yeah absolutely yeah thank you if you just turn oh brilliant he's done it um last but not least because I please invite Karen and you're a lot to the screen um Karen's from Coaster Capital and she's going to talk about how you can actually access some free business support with our digital champions um those people who you've been hearing from week on week on week um so Karen's going to talk us through that thanks so much Karen good afternoon everybody so um I stand corrected I do have a slide deck that I can share with the team after the event today but I'm unlikely to be going through the slide deck because I am well aware that my slot is keeping you between networking and lunch so um my name is Karen Tyrell I am one of the growth relationship associates with the Coaster Capital Growth Hub team I'm going to share my screen with you and just refer to our website as I talk through my presentation so the Coaster Capital Growth Hub team are part of a network of 38 growth hubs throughout the UK and we are government funded fully funded to work with SMEs to unlock potential growth within their business we do that by in a range of ways delivered through a team of growth relationship associates I cover the West Sussex area along with my colleague Nasa who you'll be able to meet in the networking after our presentations today and typically through a conversation with business owners we talk about the challenges that businesses face and we then create a tailored package of support for that business and that support can range from simple signposting to partners that we work with including Rise, Locase, Invest4, we also work with the DIT, Innovate, UK Edge and others but also the support might also include some of the programs that we run ourselves so we do run a peer networking program we have an online digital training coaching program and more importantly we have a panel of 35 growth champions all with a range of different range of expertise that can provide a days fully funded support with businesses and out of those that panel of 38 growth champions we have seven digital champions who are here on this program and available today in the networking session afterwards to talk to you about how they can support your business and how you can access the free eight hours of support attached to this program. You need to head over to our website to access the support where you will find our digital champions page there will be an overview of the program and the types of support that you can access and then scrolling down to the bottom of the screen is our lovely gallery of digital champions as I say they are available in the networking session this afternoon I am just going to give a brief overview of each of one of them and as you can see on the screen on our website you can find out much more about their areas of expertise so if you are looking for e-commerce support then a Malcolm Duffett is your man liais with Lisa if you're looking to leverage Digitech to improve productivity and processes within your business ask Andrew about authoring's website CRM and how to use tech to build stronger customer relationships reach out to Rachel an SEO expert for support with marketing planning and tactical activity advice say hello to Susan if you're seeking digitally focused product and or service related initiatives reach out to Roya if you want to utilize digital to accelerate growth by building your digital value and finally why not rendezvous with Rob for director level and first hand experience of digital transformation and how he can support your business through the whole process so as Cheryl has said I'll be available afterwards for questions and thus concludes my presentation brilliant thank you so much Karen I love your intro to each of our digital champions that was fantastic thank you and as Karen said our digital champions are all available now for a little while in a networking session for you to chat to as our speakers and all it remains for me to do is to say thank you so much to those of you who've attended all of our sessions or even to those of you who've attended just one of our sessions we really appreciate it and we will be sending slides out we will be sending recordings out please stay with us for networking I'm going to pass over to Bradley who's going to talk about how we're going to network on the remote platform thank you Bradley brilliant thanks Cheryl and this is really for those that haven't haven't used Remo before because it is a much more authentic platform that gives you the ability to move around the room so this is what you will go back into this is the the virtual lounge that we have today and just a couple of points really about what how you can best utilize it so the way that Remo works is everyone will appear on tables like this as small circular icons and you only see and speak to the people that are on your table but if you want to move to another table all you need to do is double click on another table and you will move there so when you go back into the room you'll just need to turn your camera microphone on at the bottom of your screen and then you will appear at the top like you can see me at the top of the screen and then you can start to move around the room one thing we're going to ask is the speakers from today if you can find a table so you're not on the same table together if you can find your own table there will be a couple of empty tables to utilize if you find your way there other people can then find your table and come and come and chat to you so this is really chance to move around the room freely simply by using the Remo platform for what it's great for and that is giving you that that freedom you'll also see the three boxes with the coaster capsule logo the business hot house logo and the freedom works logo you can actually click on those as well they are interactive boards and you can find links out to those websites as well but if you need any help or if you have any questions about how the platform works all you need to do is flag down myself or Nikita and Nikita will be over on a help desk on the left hand side or just pop a message in the chat box and we'll be happy to help so we'll go back into that room now and I don't think Cheryl has anything further to add so we'll come out of this presentation mode we'll go back into the room and as I say you'll just need to flick your camera and microphone on again and you can get networking thank you