Help spread awareness of our vital training and support for Croydon’s potential entrepreneurs
As I reach my fourth month in my new position as CEO of StartUp Croydon, I am delighted to be working towards impacting the charity and its beneficiaries in such a positive way. The charity has been in existence for nearly 40 years and has a reputation that precedes it as a place for potential entrepreneurs to go for mentoring and training as they start their business journey.
I’ve inherited a well established 3 day course that’s known by many stakeholders across the borough as a great starting point for anyone thinking of starting up on their own.
“We started as strangers and left as friends” (April 2021 Bootcamp Delegate)
Myself and the team here have spent the last 3 months pulling apart the content and reformulating it to encompass much more up to date content as well as the fundamental accountancy advice answering those hard questions, such as “should I be a sole trader?” “when should I register with HMRC?”
One of the best things that comes out of spending 3 consecutive days together on a training course is the comradery of meeting others at the same stage of their journey and leaving with a network. We’re now using Slack and WhatsApp to enable people to continue their communication after the course.
“It was interesting to hear about what networking programmes are around locally. I had previously wondered if networking was too corporate for my new career but it seems not the case”.
Many successful entrepreneurs are accidental leaders, and often do not intend to be business owners. They get going providing their services and or products and before they know it, are turning over an income, and wondering how to keep the plates spinning and to grow their enterprise. Our new refreshed 3 day course now known as StartUp & Go Bootcamp will help those that have found themselves in this position by giving them real insights into how others have done it, as well as helping them to develop the mindset of a leader.
“I really loved this and it made me realise what strengths I had and that I was actually doing ok so far, even though I have imposter syndrome pretty much every day!”
We have reached out to our local network of experienced professionals and brought in experts to deliver modules that will educate delegates as well as keeping them entertained.
Speakers include experts from AskTheBoss, as well as Claimer and the Small Business Research and Enterprise Centre, all giving advice on Government incentives that support entrepreneurs to keep our economy going.
Our mission is to support unemployed ambitious people. At the moment there are many more people in this position than there would usually be.