Business Advisory Services for Startups & SMEs

Yao is a highly experienced corporate and commercial solicitor and has worked closely with startups and SMEs throughout her career. Yao advises on a variety of matters including company formation, equity investments, corporate reconstruction, shareholders’ agreements, joint ventures and asset and share sales. Yao has also advised clients across a range of sectors. Her vast experience allows her to provide clients with straightforward, friendly and commercially astute advice.

Yao is a trusted business partner to executive management teams, advising on legal risk, compliance obligations and with reference to the corporate documentation of the business, always ensuring good governance in decision making.

Yao also acts as a representative when dealing with third parties, including outside counsel or as a key negotiator for strategic transactions such as investment rounds, acquisitions or disposals.

Finally, as clients thrive and grow, Yao can take an active role with either supporting an inhouse team or ensuring a smooth transition, passing on the corporate memory and ensuring consistency with managing legal risk.

Julia Elliott Brown is a highly respected entrepreneurial advisor with a 25-year proven track record in building, funding, scaling and supporting high-growth businesses across multiple sectors, and a passion for empowering female founders.

As a serial entrepreneur, Julia has trail-blazed and ridden the start-up rollercoaster with the award-winning online shoe design brand Upper Street, internet pioneer UpMyStreet.com, and coaching and advisory firm Enter The Arena. She's a commensurate action taker that shakes things up, and gets things done to make real impact. She's visionary, inventive, direct, practical, organised and incredibly driven.

Now, as an experienced business advisor and board member, she's supported over 1,500 high-growth founders in building long-term value for their businesses, providing straight talking strategic and tactical guidance, objectivity and perspective, and her heartfelt and unwavering support. Supporting entrepreneurial businesses every step of the way, Julia is committed and highly involved with her clients as they progress through their growth journey, navigating the scaling and investment process effectively. She's eternally curious, challenges constructively, and operates with complete integrity. She connects the dots and open opportunities with her powerful and extensive network and is a fierce champion for the founders and businesses she works with.

Julia is also a member of the Women and Enterprise All Party Parliamentary Group, contributor to the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, and a long-standing judge at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards. She regularly chairs and presents at leading start-up events including the Evening Standard’s SME Expo, London Tech Week and Enterprise Nation, and speaks regularly in the media, representing the voice of the female founder.

Building Enterprise Value – Support in building value for a scaling business on the journey to exit, including strategic business review and assessment, business planning, commercial and growth strategy.

Fundraising Advisory - Strategic guidance on Seed to Series A equity deals, including fundraising strategy, commercial deal structure, investment pitch assets, campaign strategy and execution, and deal negotiation.

NED / Board Advisory – Corporate governance planning and development, investor relations, taking an active NED / Chair / Advisory role on the board.

A highly experienced lawyer and commercial negotiator, with over 25 years’ experience in international law firms, prominent global businesses, and SMEs in the UK, Europe, Hong Kong and the US. Louise takes responsibility for helping people think through their decisions, highlighting factors that may not be obvious to others. CIPPE accredited, an independent and original thinker, with an extensive experience in TMT (technology, media & communications), GDPR and data protection, she is invaluable to any data-dependant organisation.

Louise has a depth of experience within the technology, media and communications sectors, bringing a wealth of insight and guidance into technology enabled businesses to protect and support clients as they grow.

Louise serves as a Data Protection Officer to several clients with a mandate to enhance their ability to exploit their data with maximum protection and legal maintenance.

Louise advises clients on complex data regulation relating to GDPR, use of a varied tech stack, data processing and protocols, mitigating risk, ensuring compliance and protecting business as usual activities.

Having spent 12 years in the City working for one of the UK’s biggest banks, Jenny decided that her breadth of expertise could be useful to smaller businesses. Since 2017, she has helped small businesses scale effectively, picking up qualifications in coaching and digital marketing along the way.

Jenny uses her depth of operational experience gained from both large corporates and SME-sized businesses to advise clients on how to put the people, systems, processes and culture in place to thrive.

Jenny helps clients design and implement policies to promote company culture and vision and oversees operations to keep businesses on track.

She helps senior management teams oversee the day-to-day administrative and operational functions of a business, helping to mitigate operational risk and to build a sustainable platform for growth.

We have a number of very experienced Advisers who work with clients across a whole range of engagements that include corporate structure, governance, investment strategy, dispute resolution and commercial strategy. Essential if your senior leadership team is facing a non-business as usual project or challenge, we’ll co-create the most effective plan with you and support you over the long term as you grow your business.

We get to know you, your business and your objectives so we can create a completely bespoke proposal for you. We bring together the wider team at Dragon Argent, where we curate knowledge across our accounting, legal and strategy consultants to provide you with a comprehensive plan of action. Where possible, it will be costed and prioritised so you can make an informed decision and delivered at a pace that suits you.

Traditionally, founders have had to seek advice across a number of professional silos. It is then incumbent on them to make sense of the advice they receive, which often doesn't take into consideration their commercial objectives. The process can be slow and frustrating and can take attention away from the business. Dragon Argent remove the onus from the founder, freeing up their time to scale their business while we help to mitigate risk and enable opportunity.

In 2021, the UK Digital Economy Council reported that the UK tech sector not only attracted record levels of venture capital investment of £29.4bn, but experienced a significant uplift of 2.3x that recorded in 2020. It is against this backdrop that the landscape has shifted in 2022.

The Times reported that the Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS), which offer huge tax breaks to investors to back early-stage businesses, mainly in sectors involving software and technology, have had a 33 per cent drop in investment since March. The wider social and economic factors that have prompted this drop are clear. The question for founders is, what can we do to protect ourselves? Learn more.

For many startup founders, one of the chief causes for concern is availability of cash – often referred to as runway. We’ve all heard a variation of the phrase, cash is king, and cash often forms the stepping stones between funding rounds for startups on which their business moves forward without which they would quickly sink.

It’s for this reason that regular, accurate cashflow forecasting is essential – which is why our accountants in London have taken a detailed look at in this week’s newsletter. Learn more.

Many new businesses spend the first season of their existence researching and developing a concept or a prototype. If any project on which the company works is seeking to make an advance in the fields of science or technology, the costs of that project may be eligible to provide the company with extra tax relief, through its annual corporation tax return.

We have taken a brief look at R&D Tax Relief and the costs that are eligible for tax relief. This extra relief could be as much as 25% of the cost of the project. For a loss-making company, a cash rebate of up to 33.5% is available in lieu of tax relief, which is often paid within 4 weeks or a successful claim being made.

This relief or rebate could make a huge difference to a bootstrapping startup and as HMRC believe that 75% of business who could be claiming R&D tax relief do not, it is too often a missed opportunity. Learn more

For businesses that VC funding may not be appropriate for, there are many alternative ways to finance what can become extremely successful, profitable, and fulfilling businesses. We have included a short summary of some alternatives, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. Learn more.

There are a number of reasons why a founder might want to do this, but primarily for our clients it’s part of the process of raising equity investment. Whilst using an analytical process to determine the current or projected worth of a company (or asset) is a key component, there is much more to a valuation than purely mathematical analysis or economic modelling. Consideration of factors such as economic climate, industry, political climate, and technology must also be considered when valuing a company and this provides what is known as an Enterprise Value. Learn more.

As a founder, have you stopped to ask yourself what your long-term goals are and what assets drive the value of your business?

If you haven’t, your corporate structure may not support these ambitions and could even slow you down. A company structure should facilitate the ambition of founding teams and protect the intellectual property or assets the value of a business is built on. Too often, entrepreneurs are poorly advised at the point at which a company is formed, creating issues that are time consuming and costly to unravel later. Learn more how to protect your business.