Born To Do It! - StartUp Disruptors Partners with Solent LEP For Start-up Support

This original content forms a press release about our partnership with Solent LEP.

StartUp Disruptors Partners With Solent LEP and Solent Growth Hub for Start-Up Support

StartUp Disruptors, the start-up online business support brand and brainchild of Becky Lodge (Founder of digital marketing agency Little Kanga Ltd), that started with just 9 people in a Portsmouth pub in 2016; has partnered as a professional services provider with Solent LEP; to help early-stage/ideas stage start-up business owners, to begin businesses from home.

This partnership includes 'StartUp Disruptors', being officially listed on the Growth Hub website as a support provider for entrepreneurial success. This is the first phase of a UK roll-out to other LEP’s across the UK to provide support to fledgling business owners with the support of a dedicated digital platform and community that understands the specific needs and challenges of starting a business from home.

Becky Lodge says:

“We started the online community at StartUp Disruptors, using Facebook and social media channels, as these were easy to access for people. We also worked long hours holding start-up support meetings in the evenings at pubs and locations across Portsmouth, Southampton and Chichester for a few years, to help people with questions and queries and to guide and coach them on their early business journey. It was simply a case of wanting to help people get better support, more quickly, by bombing around in my Fiat 500 across the south coast and answering people’s questions to find out what they needed and then signposting them to it.

One of the biggest things that was missing for them, was a safe and receptive community, that didn’t have a funding agenda and could answer the questions that they had.

My primary driver for creating the community, was wanting to take care of people’s wellbeing, which later led to us partnering with the charity Solent Mind (one of our members also works there!) to help people with additional needs to balance and cope with the demands of starting a business from home. It’s tough and demanding and nobody seemed to be talking about this, so we did.”

Becky continues:

What I could see, was the evolution of people wanting to have an online provision and community of supporters to help them to start a business and to work that around their other demands at home, such as working a full-time job (with a dream of escaping it and building a business), or caring responsibilities. We were first to market and people thought we were slightly ‘out there’ as this was pre-COVID when the world was still a very different place.

We also tapped into the fact that women and minorities were/still are very poorly supported and vastly under-valued and represented, although their businesses are often much more successful and profitable in the longer term, adding GVA to the local economy that is invaluable at this time. I felt public sector money wasn’t reaching the right people, so I thought let the private sector have a go!

StartUp Disruptors has brought together funding partners such as Transmit Startups and Faster Capital for early-stage loan funding and venture capital tech funding respectively, there’s a wealth and diversity of start-ups in the Solent region, so we have built a one stop shop to help people. More importantly, we own and have created a vast community online, of peer led support that’s delivered via Zoom, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. People can simply connect immediately to other like-minded business owners and get emotional and psychological support from over 2,500 other small home-based business owners. One of our early corporate supporters was Uber, we were super grateful for their input and insights, they also provided their Southampton and Portsmouth offices for meetings alongside Fullers in Gunwharf Quays (Old Customs House Pub) and Basepoint Business Centres in Chichester and Gosport helped us, we will always be grateful for our early supporters for helping us to get started, a bunch of like-minded good people that wanted to help us.

There’s a myth that start-ups are successful straight away and make millions; this simply isn’t true for 99% of companies, but even Google started in someone’s garage!

We wanted to make sure that people get the right advice at the correct time, this coupled with the correct business model is paramount. We worked extensively on our business modelling in the early days in partnership with the University of Portsmouth Business School, who offer outstanding support through their Business Consultancy Project initiative and Small Business Charter. I am also proud to be a guest lecturer and facilitator working on the Small Business Leadership Programme with them at this time, helping SMEs with 5-249 employees to get access to free government backed training to help make companies more robust through COVID and Brexit.

I would encourage anyone to think about starting a business to just get on and do it! Now is absolutely the right time and pandemics are filled with opportunity, there is a great deal of instability around for everyone at present and we can help to guide people in the right direction as part of a safe and inclusive community; that is here to help people take their first steps into the unknown.

Becky concludes:

We are excited to work with the team at Solent LEP who we have known for some time, this partnership marks the next stage of our roll-out plan.

My own company Little Kanga Ltd has expanded from the kitchen table to 6 people in just 5 years with totally organic growth online via our flagship start-up and SME event and growth brands StartUp Disruptors and Hampshire Meet The Buyer. So, we are looking forward to our next target of helping 10,000 people (from across the UK) to start a home-based business and scale them up (in the next 5 years) and we are also building a virtual learning environment to accelerate this growth too. So far, we have helped over 3,000 people to start a side hustle and many are now employing people with their own shops and offices.

That’s simply awesome!

About the author:

Becky Lodge (BA Hons) CIM is the founder of Little Kanga Ltd and one of Sky News 100 Women in business. Tech mentor at Faster Capital Venture Capital (Dubai) and Founding Supporter of the 50/50 Pledge with Notion Venture Capital (London), her career spans the globe as an international sales and marketing director and now CEO.

Find out more about StartUp Disruptors here: www.startupdisruptors.co.uk

Link to the LEP partnership page: https://www.startupdisruptors.co.uk/solentlep/

Press and other enquiries to: info@littlekanga.co.uk