Keepsite has been a client of ours for a good few years now so we’ve had the pleasure of witnessing the business grow and develop. The team, led by founder and CEO Adam Hyde (pictured below), provides construction project management software. The software features ‘a suite of great tools for the whole construction and international development supply chain’. It covers things like enterprise risk management, work planning and scheduling, along with document management. One of the things we’ve helped them with is investor reliefs.
During a routine catch up at his current stomping ground over in London Fields, Adam was kind enough to chat to us a bit about his business and also speak to the positives of seeking and obtaining investment through SEIS (the government’s Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme).
Adam’s background is in construction and engineering, and during the course of his early career he began to notice something which eventually set him on the path to creating Keepsite. What was his observation? Simple: “No matter where you go in the world or what type of project you’re working on, the fundamentals of the process are the same.”
This being the case, Adam began to wonder why, considering the huge technological advancements that have taken place during the last half-century or so, we’re still managing construction projects in pretty much the same manner as we were back in the fifties and sixties.
What do we mean by this? Well, the majority of projects, no matter how generic or routine they might be, have historically been implemented as though they’re something entirely unique and, as such, require bespoke planning and management.
“Every project manager always thinks that their project is unique and they have to do it in a certain way”, Adam explained. However, in reality, this approach is costly, time-consuming, and, according to Mr. Hyde, in most cases entirely unnecessary.
Check out Keepsite’s website
“No matter where your project is, no matter what it is, you should be able to set it up and run it within Keepsite.”
He could plainly see that the construction industry as a whole was begging to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century. And the way to accomplish this? One word: software. Keepsite is great because it recognises that, although every project is at least to some extent unique, there are certain processes that almost never change. So, instead of starting from scratch every time, project managers can use Keepsite, which provides them with a basic structure or game plan, if you like, which they can then build upon. “No matter where your project is, no matter what it is, you should be able to set it up and run it within Keepsite”, Adam explained.
Keepsite were on an accelerator program so Adam reckons he would have already been aware of the scheme. However, knowing about a scheme and actually obtaining eligibility and investment through said scheme are, of course, two very different things. This is where Optimal Compliance was able to help.
It was back in 2016 when Ben Crampin, one of our more senior consultants, began working through the process of obtaining investment through SEIS, on Adam’s behalf. The first step was to compile a ‘business plan’ which, according to Ben, was fairly time-consuming as it involved jumping through a series of bureaucratic hoops in order to obtain eligibility from our friends over at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
Adam was happy to let Ben take the reins on this one as he was busy growing the business. He said: “When you’re starting a business you don’t know the linear sequence of events. OC were able to package up everything I’d already done and put it into this business plan, to make it work, and then to navigate through those stages of the SEIS process which, I’m told, can be quite complex.” Once HMRC approves your business plan, the real work begins, i.e., attracting investors…
As well as guiding business owners through the process of obtaining investment, we also work closely with angel investors once a deal has been reached. Helping the investors themselves is key because when people get into angel investing, they know that a lot of their investments won’t necessarily pay off so that’s a given but, as Adam put it, “you do need to remove the complexity from the process for them [the investors] if you want to make it appealing.”
Our consultants work with both parties to ensure everything goes through with minimal headaches, all the right paperwork is submitted, and everyone goes away smiling.
Another great thing about this scheme is that investors can carry the relief back a year so if they paid a lot of, for example, PAYE the year before, they can invest through the scheme and use the relief to offset some of that. A couple of Adam’s angels did this and it was likely an added incentive for them. This is another thing we can help with, i.e., not just taking advantage of government schemes, but getting the absolute most out of them – the optimum amount: ‘Optimal Compliance’, if you will
If you would like to find out more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
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