Dragons Den Doug Richard to Advise 100 UK Entrepreneurs with Mentoring Club

Sept. 23, 2010 - PRLog -- Raising capital for early and growth stage businesses, increasing sales through online and brick & mortar facades, designing new products and services, search engine and social media marketing, team building and strategic planning are just a few of the tasks mentors will assist entrepreneurs with for £95 + VAT a month.

Doug Richard, speaking after the Made Festival in Sheffield, said “Entrepreneurs need exactly the right help at exactly the right time in order to thrive.  A business professional wondering how to find investors or private lenders to cover the costs associated with a sudden surge in orders won’t be helped by advice on how to set up a limited liability company.  Someone who needs to learn how to close sales doesn’t need advice on team building. One size does not fit all when it comes to business support and training, but that’s how it’s usually delivered.  Furthermore, entrepreneurs need advice from entrepreneurs.  They need practical, pragmatic, real world solutions from folks who have built businesses from scratch and from people at work in the current global market. The Mentoring Club will deliver the kind of support experience tells me startups and small businesses need . . . Our program is unlike any other in the country in its ability to support the hard working, innovative and determined entrepreneurs working in the UK.”

Nancy Fulton Mazur, Director of the Mentoring Club continues, “Doug, with support from other experts in the UK and around the world, will be delivering two live lectures a month based on Mentoring Club member questions.  Then two additional podcasts will be released to answer topics not addressed in live lectures.  We are also building an interactive, mentor moderated forum to provide adhoc advice at any time, and we will be hosting four face to face networking and training events a year for our members.  They will also receive deep discounts to any product or course the school offers. All that for £95 + VAT per month because we’re determined to ensure that working entrepreneurs can afford our program.”

Triona Maddick, School for Startups Marketing Manager, adds “Thankfully we’re a social enterprise and our sponsors, like O2, work with us to make programs like this possible.  The price is likely to go up as we expand our expert database and add additional resources to the program, but the price people join at is the price they’ll pay going forward for at least a year.”

Joost de Valk, a Mentoring Club Expert and internationally recognized search engine and online marketing analyst continues, “Though the program hasn’t launched yet, we’ve already started supporting some of our entrepreneurs. I have to say, the program looks more like a national “incubator” to me than anything else, and I notice that already we are seeing members joining from outside the UK.  School for Startups is a world leader in entrepreneur training and support.  This is going to be a great program from every perspective, and I look forward to seeing the careful expansion of the pilot program into something truly global.”

On September 8, Doug Richard received an outstanding achievement award for his contribution to training a new generation of entrepreneurs from Professor Alison Price, the director of educator development at the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship. Doug holds a BA in Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and a Juris Doctor at the school of Law, University of California at Los Angeles. In 2006 Doug was an Honorary Recipient of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion. In 2007, Doug became a fellow of the RSA.

Speaking about the Mentoring Club from Cambridge, Richard “I’m determined to find a way to effectively train and support UK entrepreneurs, startups and small business owners.  They are absolutely critical to the health of the economy, and they are the single most important source of innovation, jobs and wealth development nationwide.  I look forward to helping a hundred businesses grow in October and I’m very hopeful the program will soon expand to support hundreds more. I and my mentors will be working closely with this first group of members to ensure we provide exactly the solution they need”.

For more information on Doug Richard’s Mentoring Club, visit http://www.schoolforstartups.co.uk. The Mentoring Club application is already online. Members of the press, and entrepreneurs who have questions about the program, can email the director Nancy Fulton Mazur at nancy@schoolforstartups.co.uk.

Contact:
Nicola Coleman
School for Start-Ups
Wellington House, East Road
Cambridge
CB1 1BH
+44 (0) 7702 313 226
www.schoolforstartups.co.uk
info@schoolforstartups.co.uk
 

About School for Startups

School for Startups was started by Doug Richard in 2008 to provide accelerated instruction to entrepreneurs. Courses cover how to start a business, how to grow a business, how to seek financing, how to build an effective management team, fast growth marketing, search engine marketing, managing social and mass media, and how to design great products and services. School for Startups provides on going support and services to its students. Visit http://www.schoolforstartups.co.uk for more information, or follow the school on twitter at @s4s.
 
About Joost de Valk

Joost (pronounced Yoast) de Valk, is an SEO consultant and web developer living in Wijchen, near Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He routinely lectures in search engine marketing and online marketing analysis at SEO events worldwide, and he had managed campaigns for like KLM, Wegener and Amadeus.  His WordPress SEM and SEO plugins are used by tens of thousands of businesses around the world. For more information, visit http://www.yoast.com.

About O2 UK

Telefónica O2 UK Limited is a leading communications company for consumers and businesses in the UK, with 20.7 million mobile customers and 457,000 fixed broadband customers as of 30 June 2009. Telefónica O2 UK Limited is part of Telefónica Europe plc which is a business division of Telefónica S.A. and which owns O2 in the UK, Ireland, Slovakia, Germany and the Czech Republic, and has 46 million customers.O2’s UK mobile network covers 99% of the UK’s population. O2’s 3G network covers over 80% of the UK population and is fully HSDPA-enabled, providing speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps for customers with an HSDPA-enabled device. O2 was ranked highest in customer satisfaction for both UK mobile and fixed broadband customers according to the J.D. Power and Associates UK Mobile and Fixed Broadband Studies 2009. Visit http://www.O2.co.uk.

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School for Startups was started by Doug Richard in 2008 to provide accelerated instruction to entrepreneurs. Visit our site at www.schoolforstartups.co.uk. Follow us on Twitter @s4startups.