Let’s Do Business Finance: Growth through the years

4 Sept

Established 20 years ago back in early 2004, Let’s Do Business Finance has helped over 6000 businesses across the Southeast and East of England to gain access to finance.

Let’s Do Business Finance is the finance arm of Let’s Do Business Group, an Enterprise Agency which was set up in Hastings more than 30 years ago. The finance arm was created later to help small businesses access finance where high street and mainstream lenders couldn’t. With backgrounds in commercial banking and seeing first-hand how clients were struggling to obtain funding to support their businesses, Sean Dennis, Managing Director of Let’s Do Business Finance, and Graham Marley, Chief Executive of Let’s Do Business Group, saw an opportunity to access funding and set up their own finance company.

Now, 20 years on, Let’s Do Business Finance has become a pillar of support for startups and established businesses, empowering them with the financial assistance they need to ‘launch, grow, and thrive’.

Let’s Do Business Finance commenced trading in Spring 2004, initially covering only East Sussex, and then quickly expended across the South Coast into Kent, West Sussex and Surrey. To begin with, Let’s Do Business Finance supported pre- and very early start ups to access finance and grow their businesses. One of the very first businesses we supported, who have since seen substantial growth and become a multi-million-pound international company was ‘SourceBMX’. With a passion for BMX, brothers Rich and Marc Moore came to us when they were looking for new premises. Setting up in Bexhill and then later moving to their current home in Hastings, taking over the derelict underground Victorian Turkish Bath, SourceBMX went from a tiny shop which carried bikes and everyday essentials to support the BMX scene, to the world’s largest underground skatepark and the world’s largest online BMX store.

“We were able to provide them a range of funding over several years, much of which was to help their working capital as they developed and grew. We’re still very much involved in supporting them, even though they’re now an international company trading in America, across Europe and the UK.”

— Sean Dennis, Managing Director, speaking about SourceBMX’ s journey over the years

Later down the line, Let’s Do Business Finance started to support more businesses including early start-ups and micro enterprises. In 2009 we became an Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) accredited lender. Launched by the British Business Bank, EFG supported the provision of over £3.3 billion to over 35,000 smaller businesses in the UK. It enabled lending to smaller businesses that were viable but unable to obtain finance from their lender due to having insufficient security to meet the lender’s normal security requirements.

Following the credit crisis of 2008 came the inception of the Start Up Loans Scheme in 2012. Administered by the Start Up Loans Company, the Start Up Loans Scheme is a government-backed initiative aimed at providing business loans and mentoring to support entrepreneurs. This is a personal loan intended for business use, where businesses can borrow between £500 up to £25,000. Let’s Do Business Finance has been a provider of Start Up Loans since the scheme was first established, and over the years has supported 6023 start-ups across London, the Southeast and East of England to access a total of £42,169,095.

Read some of the case studies of who we’ve helped:

We Are Shapes

Jim and Steve from We Are Shapes, Kent, have created a new type of agency with the help of a Start Up Loan – blending together accounting and marketing services to serve small businesses across the county and beyond.

Read on

RiRi’s Cookout

Renee Roberts, from Laindon, Essex, used a Start Up Loan from Let’s Do Business Finance to take her new catering business RiRi’s Cookout to the next level.

Read on

SplashRobe

Eleanor Ward from Chichester, West Sussex, secured £25k in funding from Let’s Do Business Finance under the Start Up Loan scheme to bring her idea for company ‘SplashRobe’ to life.

Read on

LMJ Painting

Jaider Mindiola, Owner of LMJ Painting and Decorating, Hastings, tells us how Let’s Do Business Finance supported him to access a Start Up Loan, priming his business to take the next step for growth.

Read on

In February 2020, Let’s Do Business Finance had the opportunity to take over the Foundation East loan book. Foundation East were a similar finance organisation that operated across East Anglia, lending money to new businesses, existing businesses, charities and social enterprises that couldn’t access finance through banks or required additional funds to match bank lending. This enabled us to begin branching out further across the UK, to support businesses based in Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

Just a month later, the Covid-19 pandemic hit which ultimately had a crucial impact on the day-to-day operations of businesses up and down the UK. Workers were furloughed, the country was on lockdown and a mask mandate was introduced, how could businesses recover? That’s when the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) was introduced. CBILS provided financial support to smaller businesses affected by the coronavirus. This scheme was succeeded by the Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS), a scheme designed to support businesses as they looked to invest and recover from Covid, which has now been extended and rebranded to the Growth Guarantee Scheme (GGS).

Despite the knock-on effect Covid-19 had on many businesses, Let’s Do Business Finance continued to grow. Today, we now help established micro, small and occasionally medium sized enterprises as well as continuing to support start-ups. We went from lending a total of £1.675m between 2004 and 2011 to £31.75m lent since 2020 – an increase of over 1796%. From originally covering East Sussex, we are now able to offer loans to businesses across the whole of Sussex, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, London, Hertfordshire, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk.

So, what’s next for Let’s Do Business Finance?

Looking to the future, we plan to continue growth and further develop relationships as a business. We are the South East Region’s business support partner for the Start Up Loans Scheme and are an accredited lender for the Growth Guarantee Scheme. In terms of expansion, Let’s Do Business Finance plans to continue moving beyond our traditional areas of Essex, Sussex, Kent and Surrey to help more businesses access the finance they need to start, grow and thrive.