James Pattison MD of Start Up Direct Talks to The Startup Magazine

Start Up Direct provide funding, mentoring and support for people who want to start their own business. This service is available for anyone who has a business idea to those that have been trading up to twelve months. Start Up Direct is part of the Start Up Loans scheme, and has been in operation since the summer of 2012. Since then they have lent over £2,000,000 to over 300 startups in the UK.

Start Up Loans is a government scheme started in 2012 and Start Up Direct is an official partner of to this scheme, the two organisations have been working together since a very early stage. Now Start Up Direct is working on developing the successful startups it has worked with to grow their businesses further, with the aid of crowdfunding, angel investment and educating them around venture funding.

They have found that in a short space of time, startups, especially in the tech industry can raise funding very quickly. For example several of the startups they work with have gone on to raise over £100,000 and one has recently raised over €3,000,000.

The team at startup direct is relatively small, they are currently a team of four, soon to be a team of five, growing their business advice team.

James’s  inspiration for Start Up Direct came from his time in investment banking, over ten years he quit his job three different times to start his own business. Unfortunately his attempts did not succeed, however from those failures he learnt a lot of valuable lessons. Over the past few years James has been working as a freelancer at startups, helping them raise funding, build their business plans, and kickstarting their business. When this opportunity with Start Up Direct came along it felt like the “perfect opportunity”, to fulfill his passion of helping startups.

The biggest challenge James believes he has faced was to get the word out on Start Up Direct and the fantastic program of Start Up Loans. Making sure