This article is from page 79 of the 2008-05-27 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 79 JPG
WHY NOT give your fledgling business lift-off with the help of a €280,000 prize fund from the Seedcorn Business Competition 08 — that’s the message from InterTra- delreland.
Small companies North and South have leveraged €65m of additional equity investment over the past five years through Seedcorn, which of- fers the biggest prize fund of any business competition on the island.
“‘Treland is rightly renowned for its spirit of entrepreneurship and that 1s something we want to continue to support, So we would encourage even more young firms to sign up for this year’s competiton,’ said Liam Nellis, chief executive of InterTradelreland.
Pat Lucey of Aspiracon, last year’s winner of Emerging International Company, Munster region, said: “We
entered Seedcorn to help drive our business development and it gave us a framework for our business plan as
well as valuable feedback through expert judging panels and Master- ESNet
‘“Seedcorn forced us to address ar- eas which we had been missing — I Suppose you could say we took a step back in order to look forward. Ulti- mately, it accelerated our develop- ment by about six months and we are now engaged in negotiations with the VC community. The publicity has been very positive as well, as it all helps to get your foot in the door!”
All entrants to the competition must be able to demonstrate new equity requirements in excess of €75,000. Entrants to the Emerging Company category must be in existence for less than three years by September 26, 2008, and have sales targets of less than €5m. Entrants to the Emerg- ing International Company must be in business less than five years by September 26, 2008, and have sales targets of more than €5m.
Following the scoring of written business plans, the top entries from
each region and category are selected to make a short presentation to a pan- el of judges, followed by a question and answer session.
Winners are selected in each cat- egory in each of the four regions and all eight will be asked to make their presentation again to a separate pan- el of judges at the final in Belfast on November 26, 2008. The panel will then select the overall all-island win- ner in each category.
To register your interest in entering the Seedcorn Business Competition, log on to the new dedicated website: WWww.seedcorncompetition.com. Business plans must be submitted by Spm on the closing date of Septem- ber 26.