1 in 5 businesses fail in less than 12 months. 

Over half go out of business within 3 years of starting – because it’s hard! It takes time, effort, energy, commitment, tenacity, planning, flexibility, and bloody hard work. If you are up for the challenge then we want to help you to plan your business, support you to do a bit of market research, and help you to make good decisions. 

Understanding why so many other businesses fail is a good place to start, so you can make sure you avoid the mistakes other people have made. 

Cash-flow is regularly mentioned as the number one reason… and there is absolutely no doubt that understanding what cash-flow is, and taking steps to help manage the flow of money in to, and out of your business it is really important, but there are some other things that I believe are more fundamental.   

If you would like to be part of this programme, please complete an expression of interest form here.

Participants in this programme will be invited to complete the following:

1. Behavioural Assessment. This is completed online. You should allow about 20 minutes to complete this assessment. No preparation is required, and you should not attempt to second-guess the outcomes that either we or you are seeking. The report that is generated after taking the assessment is entirely confidential and is only shared with you, the person completing the assessment. It is entirely for your benefit. For this reason we ask simply that you try to be honest, and try not to overthink the responses that you give. 

A video has been prepared with the designer of the assessment, Phil Hagan. Phil provide some guidance in the video of how you might understand the report that is generated. It’s very important to recognise that the behavioural assessment is not making a judgement on your suitability to run a business, it is merely provided as a tool to assist you in understanding yourself better.

2. The business competency assessment.This is also completed online. This self assessment is designed to help you gain an understanding of the kinds of skills and competencies that are of most value when running a business. The report that is generated provides advice and guidance for each of the areas covered by the assessment. Whilst it is not cannot be completely comprehensive, nor is it adapted for this specific circumstances of your business idea, it has been prepared by a team of experienced business people, and hope that it will provide useful ideas from which you can take as much or as little as you find useful.

3. Market research videos. There are a series of videos, which we would encourage you to watch, and hopefully use some more all of the ideas to support your research when putting together your business plan. This includes a video talking about networking, which is a topic people outside of a network often dismiss or misunderstand value and be derived from being part of a network. One of the videos talks about the amazing research resources, reports and databases that you can find in many libraries, most of it for free. 

4. The AI business plan chatbot. As part as this project we have put together an interface with a chatbot who will ask you a series of questions about your business, and provide ideas, feedback and guidance. After about 15 questions it will generate a summary which you can use as a starting point for your draft business plan.

As part of your application to be part of this programme, you will have been provided with a template business plan. Our recommendation is that you copy and paste the summary generated by your AI chatbot into the relevant sections of this template.

You should then look to expand and edit those sections, including an adding any market research, competitor research, and other data that you have found into the report. 

5. Submit your Business Plan. Once you are happy that the business plan provides a comprehensive summary of your business idea, who is involved, the resources required to get it started and running first year, along with details of how you will market the business, how you will make money, how much money you think you might make (which means you need to understand what your costs are), along with details of the market where you will be selling and who else you will be competing with. Once that has been completed, please submit it for review to hello@digitalislands.org for the attention of Gavin McWhirter.