Thames Valley SME Business Breakfast

This week we hosted our first SME Business Breakfast in partnership with EY in our Work.Life offices in Reading. As an SME ourselves, we are always interested in supporting our clients by providing them access to leading advisory firms to help them with hints on scalable growth. 
In this session, we were joined by David Rutherford who is responsible for EY’s activities with Fast Growth Private Businesses across the Thames Valley and South Coast. David shared some of the key headlines from a new study that EY is shortly due to publish into the strengths and economic growth prospects across the Thames Valley. 

David was joined by two colleagues, Viv Sedov responsible for a number of activities for EY across the innovation agenda, particularly working with organisations to help them articulate the commercial benefits from innovation spend and activity. This included EY’s recent review of the UK Government’s Catapult Programme, which in-turn helped to inform the recent industrial strategy. And Chris Lowe who is responsible for a range of EY’s corporate finance activities across the capital and debt advisory markets. He has and continues to see a range of developments across the marketplace in which an increasing amount of debt capital is focused upon financing high-growth businesses in the low or negative EBITDA range across banks and private debt funds.

They shared their insights on how spend on innovation can drive real commercial value and on the value of debt as a good alternative to traditional equity finance for growth companies. Our breakfast event facilitated a great discussion around these two themes that they continue to see across the marketplace.

We would like to thank the 25 senior finance and business leaders who attended this session, the conversation was flowing and we hope to welcome everyone again to our next event which we plan to hold on our rooftop terrace (British weather permitting).