Support and Contact

Another Good question! Over the years we (CPG, the company that owns this platform) have been providing business support programmes to local government councils across London and beyond. Last year Richmond Council asked us to build something innovative and different and thus the StartUp Richmond Enterprise Challenge Step Up Start Up, Scale up was born. 

The Enterprise Challenge was version 1 of what you seee today. That platform also included live events and one to one consultancy. The programme supported over 900 businesses in just 10 months. 

Alas, the funding was available for a short term project only and as we were still getting many requests for help, we decided to expand the programme ourselves and bring it to the next level. 

We are delighted that it does! The original platform was a test. We wanted to see if people would use it and what parts of it they wanted most. It wasn’t supposed to be social interactive platform. Thanks to all of the feeedback you have given us we have now been able to create a really good (in our opinion) platform. Easy to use, familiar layouts and with the functionality that you have asked for. We hope you enjoy it. 🙂

Basic membership has been designed to allow you to have a look around and to get a feel for the community.  For instance, perhaps you are not quite ready to start your business just yet. So, you can see the members, see the posts and read the support and resources section. If you want additional functionality then we suggest you upgrade. 

You also get access to our live events. You must pay to attend, but that’s usually enough for people to realise that full membership is really worth it. Monthly membership costs 50% less than the price of an event. 

Essentially paid membership gets you everything.

Full functionality of the platform with the directory, private messaging & posting. (there are many more features that will be coming on line soon).

Full access to all webinars and training. Thats over 300 hours of traiing, specifically for the SME sector.

Full access to all our live events. Meet our consultants, get advice and expand your business network. 

Access to our consultants and mentors. We have experts across every field, specially chosen by us. Whatever you need we have an expert who can help. 

Access to the community. This is key. You will learn most from talking to ther business owners. You will also do business with the community you mix with. People get clients all the time from coming to our events. 

Need we say more?

Good question! We see thousands of businesses every year and the majority of them all have the same problems. One of those problems is lack of finance. We understand what this is like, we were a startup once too. Therefore, we want to make it as accessable as possible to everyone. We want to help the maximum number of businesses and we can’t do that one at a time.  The platform and the training is there to make sure that a much higher % of businesses succeeed. We could charge more, but we don’t want to. We want this available to everyone.

That’s easy. We will send you regular updates of what is happening. This includes events and training and anything else that we think will interest you. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Yes you can, however there is a charge of £15 + vat. Just click on the event you want to attend (in our events section) and register from there. 

In 2018, that was the case as it was a Richmond Council supported initiative. Now however, we are not locked into a geographical location and have expanded the programme to a wider audience, initially concentrating on South West London (and surrounding areas). In reality however, anyone who wants, can join.  If we get more members outside of south west London, we’ll expand it to accomodate that too. Essentially, you all control that.

All of our training is specifically designed for SME’s. We cover all the important topics like planning, strategy, marketing, sales, operations, HR, Import/ Export etc. We even have a special section for food businesses. 

The webinars are topics that we have covered over the last year and have been produced in house by us. We have done our best to include our community members and all of the webinars have been done by experts in their field. We have over 60 hours of training in this so far and we add new topics every month.

The on demand training is training that we have curated from across the world. Again, run by experts in their fiels, howwever not specifically targeting UK businesses. As we progress we will be replacing a lot of this training to cover the topics with a UK focus, therefore more relevant to local businesses. 

The topics cover a wide range of topics from markeing, sales, technology, operations, planning, excel skills and things like that. Essentially we wanted to cover topics that added to what we are doing in our own webinar training.

It is likely that you can. We do plan our webinars well in advance and we are unlikely to repeat a webinar that is very similar to what we already have. If however you are an expert in your field and have something that you think we should all know, then yes, please get in touch and talk to our training team.

Yes you can. We have consultants available who will be happy to answer any quick questions you have. If you are looking for a more indepth session, we can provide that too and its best to speak to one of our consultant to understand what format will suit you best. Just email us at hello@startuprichmond.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Everyone who is part of the platform, paid and basic.

This is down to the amount that each individual member has filled in. We are not in control of that, however will be doing our best to encourage people to be more proactive in this area. 

There is a quick search bar at the top of the directory. just type in a name, job title industry name or whatever you like and the results will come up. 

There is an advanced search that you can use to narrow your results down. Please note that the search can only filter for the information people have put in. For instance, if you search for “Accountant” only those with accountant in their profile will turn up. 

No, there is no limit. 

This has to do with your security. We did this so that no-one can steal your details and spend your money on our site. They would need access to your email adddress to get the password and this means it is safe for you. 

You can change your password to something more memorable in the edit settings (account setings) tab. If you do this, please keep that password safe. We do not have access to it.

This is controlled in your “Edit profile”. Simply navigate to the “Account Settings” tab and you can change your security settings there. 

We don’t hold your payment details. All of that is managed by our payment platform Stripe. This is for your security. Stripe has the highest level of encryption and we wanted to make sure that you were as safe as possible. 

That’s no problem. In your edit settings go to the last tab to (account settings) and then scroll down to payment update. There is a button to press there that will take you to a secure area within Stripe where you can update your details safely. 

The annual membership as a year long agreement and we don’t offer refunds on this. You will still have access until the end of your payment period. Please let us know if you intend to leave at the end of your year as membership will automatically renew.