Embracing cloud and digital technology is essential for Small and Medium Enterprises
Embracing cloud and Digital Te...
Everyone likes your idea, and when you mention it to family and friends, they think it is brilliant. So you gain that sought-after reassurance to pursue your dream. The research into your idea starts, and soon you have a presentation ready to attract investment.
When you begin to seek funding, initial discussions sound promising, and you remain focused and open-minded that your project will receive the funding it needs to scale.
Now comes the shock, as you explore all your different avenues for no real explainable reason funding does not materialise. If you ask for feedback to help improve for the next funding search, you don’t get any, or the feedback you do get doesn’t make any sense.
You know that your idea is worthy of investment, and the research suggests there is a gap in the market, but what happens if you are a business owner who is black, female or from the LGBTQ+ community?
Could this be the reason why you didn’t receive funding?
SimpleInsight was founded in 2018 based on a single mission: to support underrepresented startups, small and medium-sized enterprises within the technology, financial technology and creative industry sectors to adopt cloud and digital technology. To help them scale robustly and increase the value of their business.
The tech ecosystem needs to become a more diverse place. There is enough research to suggest that diversity is profitable for companies, but why are we still discussing this issue following countless industry reports in areas such as gender, race and sexual orientation? There are parallels in how discrimination is enacted against these groups of people. One way is to ensure diverse groups never receive the funding they deserve. It is now time that all this changed and it became a poor decision by the investor community to ignore startups and SMEs led by women, the black community and the LGTBQ+ community.
Gender, race and sexual orientation diversity must improve within the tech ecosystem, as everyone deserves to influence the direction of new technology.
All diverse groups must be included in creating technology that enables future technological advances. As technology becomes more augmented into our daily lives, if everyone is not involved, the development and output from emerging technology will contain the same bias currently present in the tech ecosystem today.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies will inevitably be used to propel the world forward. We have to be careful how these and other emerging technologies are developed.
The collection of data and how this data is processed will become increasingly important as newer technologies progress. We must ensure that the data and technologies the future is built on are balanced and represent everyone.
The future for diverse groups is a connected one. Change comes in numbers and for a prolonged period, we have divided ourselves for too long when unity is required to fight against discrimination within the tech ecosystem.
Diverse groups receive discrimination in many ways, but the result is the same. A lack of diversity in the tech ecosystem and for diverse founders their idea will lack the critical funding needed for development and expansion.
Without funding diverse startups cannot scale. Restricting investment is the easiest way to stop the progression of diverse startups, along with increasing the difficulty of the criteria needed to attract funding.
When any tightening of funds within the tech ecosystem occurs, the default position is to protect those startups which have received funding previously. Unfortunately, this act by default means the investment community will continue to overlook diverse startups for funding when it would make sense to diversify the risk in their portfolio.
Many organisations are fighting diversity on different fronts, but what would happen if all of these entities pooled their effort and collectively pushed the industry for better inclusion levels while demanding accountability to be measured?
This is something that we hope will happen in the future, as all diverse groups can learn from the experiences of other groups suffering discrimination within the tech ecosystem.
The tech ecosystem in the UK, Europe and beyond is such that certain groups of people are underfunded and underrepresented. At SimpleInsight, we are here to help those people who are continually left behind, especially black startup founders, female startup founders and LGBTQ+ startup founders. The tech ecosystem has realised that diversity is important, but will it act and put its money into companies led by these groups? Talk is cheap, and investment into diverse groups is everything, to help build our inclusive future in technology, as everyone belongs to be involved in helping to shape the future of technology.
Our goal is to help you as a diverse business owner, build a company that can scale and is sustainable. We want to help you by focusing on your finances, business strategy, systems and processes that need to be improved as your business grows.
We believe that startups and SMEs should focus on these building blocks and ensure they manage them continuously, as this will ultimately increase the value of their business.
We are here to add value to your business before your company gets to a size and scale where implementing tools to control and improve your company, becomes too slow and complicated because of the natural evolution of your company and how it has worked historically.
I worked with Michael on a project to improve reconciling revenue to cash for the Benelux countries. We worked together to build his understanding of the retail business, and within three months we had proof of concept which was a fully auditable reconciliation. The main subsequent issue was the scalability of the proof of concept. The volume of data was an issue when we moved to different countries within the region. Michael built a Power BI model to replicate what we created manually, which removed the heavy lifting within the process. Michael's ability to communicate with several stakeholders enabled him to produce an interim solution, which was fully hosted in SQL Server by our IT department. A pivotable dashboard was created, to aid with the completion of the reconciliation, along with a process map and a short suite of videos to help explain how to complete the reconciliation. A reconciliation that had previously never been reconciled to zero, was now available for my team to use and would only take a couple of hours to complete, whereas previously there had always been a delta to explain to external audit. I'm grateful for Michael's perseverance on this project and wish him well as he expands his services and skills to the diverse startup and SME community.
Chet Mistry, Finance Director (Benelux), EG Group
We at BlockRocket fully support Simpleinsight and its vision to help underrepresented founders build robust startups in tech. Having been involved in creating innovative projects ourselves, we understand the value of creating diverse teams in the tech ecosystem. Simpleinsight is a mix of accountancy and digital transformation, which is a unique blend of the ability to advise on the use of cloud platforms and emerging technology to give startups and SMEs a competitive advantage when it comes to scaling.
BlockRocket
Embracing cloud and Digital Te...
Why LGBTQ+ founders are hiding...
Why aren’t there as many black...