Appointedd has been massively supported—we have had a very positive experience of financial support and support for skills and training. We were one of the first Scottish EDGE award winners: that was how Appointedd became a company. Until that point, I was working on my own and outsourcing our development. We were awarded £30,000, which enabled us to hire our first developer, who is still with us, and we have since built a team of 14.
Our development has been assisted at each stage by Scottish Enterprise, and we have received match funding through the Scottish Investment Bank, which in my view is one of the most impactful ways in which Government money can help business. It allows private investment and, from a management perspective, it takes a fairly light-touch approach.
We identified match-funding investment partners and were able to take the angel money—in Scotland, we are fairly well provisioned with angel investors. The amount of money is relatively small in comparison to the funding that a business might get in London, but the match funding from the Scottish Investment Bank has been amazing. Those touch points have allowed us, each time we have needed to scale up or invest in infrastructure or staffing, to do so. We have been able to access resources that have allowed us to compete with businesses elsewhere.
There are undoubtedly restrictions in building a company in a smaller region outside London but, in our case, the benefits have certainly outweighed the downsides. We have been able to punch above our weight at each stage because we have been supported, as I have described.
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Outside that system, organisations such as Entrepreneurial Scotland or Women’s Enterprise Scotland are able to provide support. For me, Scotland is probably the best place in the world in which to build a small business, and to take that business from an idea to the point at which it is making a positive impact on the economy.