Business Advisory Services for Startups & SMEs

We have a number of very experienced Advisers who work with clients across a whole range of engagements that include corporate structure, governance, investment strategy, dispute resolution and commercial strategy. Essential if your senior leadership team is facing a non-business as usual project or challenge, we’ll co-create the most effective plan with you and support you over the long term as you grow your business.

We get to know you, your business and your objectives so we can create a completely bespoke proposal for you. We bring together the wider team at Dragon Argent, where we curate knowledge across our accounting, legal and strategy consultants to provide you with a comprehensive plan of action. Where possible, it will be costed and prioritised so you can make an informed decision and delivered at a pace that suits you.

Traditionally, founders have had to seek advice across a number of professional silos. It is then incumbent on them to make sense of the advice they receive, which often doesn't take into consideration their commercial objectives. The process can be slow and frustrating and can take attention away from the business. Dragon Argent remove the onus from the founder, freeing up their time to scale their business while we help to mitigate risk and enable opportunity.

In 2021, the UK Digital Economy Council reported that the UK tech sector not only attracted record levels of venture capital investment of £29.4bn, but experienced a significant uplift of 2.3x that recorded in 2020. It is against this backdrop that the landscape has shifted in 2022.

The Times reported that the Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS), which offer huge tax breaks to investors to back early-stage businesses, mainly in sectors involving software and technology, have had a 33 per cent drop in investment since March. The wider social and economic factors that have prompted this drop are clear. The question for founders is, what can we do to protect ourselves? Learn more.

For many startup founders, one of the chief causes for concern is availability of cash – often referred to as runway. We’ve all heard a variation of the phrase, cash is king, and cash often forms the stepping stones between funding rounds for startups on which their business moves forward without which they would quickly sink.

It’s for this reason that regular, accurate cashflow forecasting is essential – which is why our accountants in London have taken a detailed look at in this week’s newsletter. Learn more.

Many new businesses spend the first season of their existence researching and developing a concept or a prototype. If any project on which the company works is seeking to make an advance in the fields of science or technology, the costs of that project may be eligible to provide the company with extra tax relief, through its annual corporation tax return.

We have taken a brief look at R&D Tax Relief and the costs that are eligible for tax relief. This extra relief could be as much as 25% of the cost of the project. For a loss-making company, a cash rebate of up to 33.5% is available in lieu of tax relief, which is often paid within 4 weeks or a successful claim being made.

This relief or rebate could make a huge difference to a bootstrapping startup and as HMRC believe that 75% of business who could be claiming R&D tax relief do not, it is too often a missed opportunity. Learn more

For businesses that VC funding may not be appropriate for, there are many alternative ways to finance what can become extremely successful, profitable, and fulfilling businesses. We have included a short summary of some alternatives, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. Learn more.

There are a number of reasons why a founder might want to do this, but primarily for our clients it’s part of the process of raising equity investment. Whilst using an analytical process to determine the current or projected worth of a company (or asset) is a key component, there is much more to a valuation than purely mathematical analysis or economic modelling. Consideration of factors such as economic climate, industry, political climate, and technology must also be considered when valuing a company and this provides what is known as an Enterprise Value. Learn more.

As a founder, have you stopped to ask yourself what your long-term goals are and what assets drive the value of your business?

If you haven’t, your corporate structure may not support these ambitions and could even slow you down. A company structure should facilitate the ambition of founding teams and protect the intellectual property or assets the value of a business is built on. Too often, entrepreneurs are poorly advised at the point at which a company is formed, creating issues that are time consuming and costly to unravel later. Learn more how to protect your business.