ACCELERATING THROUGH THE NATWEST HUB

Speechy has just graduated from the NatWest Entrepreneur Accelerator programme.

For those of you who don’t know about it, well, you should. Certainly if you’re running a start-up or business that wants to grow rapidly.

Google it. 

As the spiel says it’s a fully funded (yes, free!!!) six month programme for business entrepreneurs, with hubs dotted around the UK. The tagline is ‘taking your business further, faster’ with a promise to help businesses scale and succeed. 

But in our experience, it’s a hell of a lot more than that. 

EXPERTISE, TRAINING AND MENTORING 

The Accelerator team are awesome. They present training days in everything from Finance to Funding, Vision to Infrastructure, Team Building to Leadership. But they also, crucially, offer one-to-one mentoring and get to know you and your business inside out.

Our acceleration coach, Andrew Jackson, was able to push our ambitions, question our strategy, and still make us laugh. Charly Patrick is the networking queen and her black book is bigger than a Kardashian’s suitcase. If you need an introduction, she’s your woman. Ollie Reid was crucial to our learning, making us realise a ‘give it and a go and hope for the best’ business strategy doesn’t quite cut it.  A vision needs to be supported with a credible path. 

SWANKY OFFICE SPACE 

As writer types, us Speechy folk can get far too comfortable working from coffee shops and our dining room tables.

Yes, there’s a certain creative romance about typing away whilst you haven’t got out of your dressing gown, but actually a super glassy top floor office where you can meet your team and some vibrant, ambitious entrepreneurs can prove much more inspiring.

Especially when the canteen offers up vegetable tempura and massaman curry for ￡3.40.

COMMUNITY 

As well as the official support, one of the biggest bonuses of Speechy being accepted onto the programme was getting to meet so many other entrepreneurs and businesses. Their achievements and various business strategies inspired us, made us think differently. There was such a range of companies there – it was easy to throw out a niche question and get numerous helpful and insightful responses. 

The people we met at the hub have become allies and friends as well as helping to build our network. If anything, we’ve found some excellent drinking buddies. 

SO WHAT HAVE WE ACHIEVED? 

Speechy was established in 2015 but it’s only in the last six months that we can now proudly claim to be a fully fledged business success.  

The idea is working. The plan is coming together. We have a team; a great team in fact, signed up to the vision and bloody good at what they do. Hiring Gemma would only have been possible through the Hub and having access to the office space. She's been a godsend.

She’s bloody amazing at the social media stuff but she also just ‘gets it’. We already never want her to go – though she does seem to have this dream of setting up an NGO and doing something truly meaningful with her life (we will try to put her off this, of course). 

We’ve launched one new product and one new service. We’ve investigated loads of different marketing strategies and have finally found an ally in this area. We’ve meet face to face with some excellent mentors and stolen all their ideas. We’ve got publicity in The HuffPost, Metro and The Daily Mail (yes, we know). And we’ve finally got our infrastructure shit into place (yep, we even understand our GDPR small print). 

Financially, we’ve increased our turnover by 160%, and although we can’t say the same for our profit, we’re blaming this on the fabled J-curve and know how we can increase this in 2020. 

On a more fundamental note, as NatWest alumni we now 100% believe in Speechy’s future and have a much clearer understanding of how we can help more people create amazing, powerful and influential speeches in 2020. 

The Hub has made us excited by our business prospects and we can’t thank the team enough.

If any other business owners fancy applying, go for it! We're also happy to give you the low down on the interview process (slightly terrifying) and how to nail your 60 sec pitch. Just email us.