In today’s episode Adrian Lawrence one of our CFO’s discusses the new Department for International Trade grant to boost SME’s exports, its a match funded grant of between £1,000 and £9,000 being 40% or 50% of eligible spend depending on the location of your business.   What it supports are things such as attending international trade shows, Geo-targeted SEO, professional fees and related areas such as Intellectual property and translation services.

The process is to first speak with an advisor who acts as a filter, typically they let you know after the first meeting if your application or project is eligible.  If it is then over a couple of subsequent meetings they work with you to build up your application, sometimes drawing in specialists from within the Department of International trade to assist, such as SEO experts, or translators.

Then once your application is ready for submission they generate a link which your then use to submit the application with.  Because each application is pre-screened in this way, the actual approval process is really fast, typically just one or two days to get approved.  Funding is paid only at the end, when all tasks are completed, which can be a couple of years ahead.

The benefit of this approach is that only companies with realistic export plans, and companies that are robust in the first place, so not small scale companies or start-ups, get approved.  This makes sense for all parties concerned, companies can be reasonably sure of success if they spend the time to work with the advisor, and HM Government only funds viable projects.  It is a win win for all concerned.

Its a great scheme and the team at FD Capital have already gotten our first client application approved.  To learn more about our team and how we seek to be a leader in Chief Financial Officer / CFO and Finance Director / FD recruitment please visit our website at https://www.fdcapital.co.uk