Joe writes about his cycle lane to work with a little humour.
Have a look at the picture in that blog post and read the description:
Yes, if you manage to negotiate the telegraph pole, that is a waste bin behind it.
I’ve been accused of this before (turning pong into a philosophy) but this cycle lane really reminds of what it’s like starting a business in Northern Ireland and getting assistance from InvestNI.
There are some superstars I’ve bumped into within the organisation, but without exception they have been guys I know from my days in Nortel (Hi Dave S, Cormac K) and if you don’t get one of those guys (as I didn’t when starting Mac-Sys) then things become a lot more opaque. In those days, InvestNI made us jump through hoops just to get to talk to someone who wasn’t a landlord in an enterprise park and even when we’d made our pitch, they were no help at all.
That’s one of the reasons why we didn’t bother with their business start programs with the last couple of ventures.
They say:
We can offer all the encouragement, advice, information and financial support you need to Go For It and get off to a flying start.
What they mean is:
We have heaps of paperwork for you to fill in before we even look at you.
I’m sufficiently frustrated with InvestNI that I simply cannot be bothered with the runaround. Is this damning? Not necessarily. Some people are paperwork gurus. They can afford to spend hours and hours trying to interpret what they need.
I’d rather do it myself anyway. At least then I’m to blame.
MJ,
As somebody wearily said to me today, talking about angel investors (but it works for EI and InvestNi as well),
“I don’t want anymore advice, I just want your money”.
It’s a fair enough point.
We just started two new ventures this week, hired two people and the LAST thing on my mind is to go anywhere near InvestNI. Every time I’ve just been hit with setback after setback and the only people I know who did manage to get a heap of money out of them had a ex-Director of their company working as their Client Executive. I’m not saying anything untoward happened – but it helps when the Client Exec knows your business as well as you do.
Its a real shame when the people that are supposed 2 help u (and are getting paid 2 do so via your tax money) are all about process/paperwork and don’t know diddlysqwat regards what u’re about and trying 2 do.
Heh! thats goverment 4 ya!
Lal