By Hasna Haidar at Carphone Warehouse 

Whether you are a start-up owner or a business leader, your mind is the best tool you can use when creating your business empire.

No matter how much of your capital is directed towards personnel, marketing or attracting further investors, neglecting your mind can spell catastrophe. Which is why giving it challenges like optical illusions quizzes, difficult crosswords and strategy or problem-solving games might just be the secret key to business success.

Leah Hutcheon, founder and CEO of the Edinburgh-based software company, Appointedd, and former EIE participant, shares her experience as a female founder and offers advice to the ten female-led companies pitching on 24 April in Edinburgh.

There’s one thing we continue to hear from our SME customers right now and it might surprise you that it’s not ‘Brexit’. In fact, it’s ‘the future’. Despite the doom and gloom of Brexit causing concern for 90 percent of SMEs, the reality is that 2019 still holds a lot of opportunity for growth. As a result, many businesses are taking control and tackling these challenging times head on.

For investors, the need to know what occupiers want, where they want to be and what they need to thrive are crucial factors to help seek out areas where performance could be maximised. Saul Western, Partner, Capital Markets at Bidwells provides an in-depth insight into why the science and technology sector are the frontrunners for investment and what ultimately makes them tick.  

Ahead of EIE next month, one of the investor panellists, Deborah Magid of IBM Venture Capital Group, shares her thoughts about what catches an investor’s eye when it comes to tech start-ups.

Invested Investor focuses on the co-founder of Cambridge based CRFS, Alistair Massarella.

Nikki Howes is Investment Associate at Heartwood Investment Management, the asset management arm of Handelsbanken in the UK

Following the widely reported news of Tengai, the latest robot allegedly developed to remove bias from hiring processes, Juliet Eccleston, co-founder and CEO of crowdsourcing talent platform, AnyGood? has called for caution over so-called ‘miracle solutions’ to the problem of human preconceptions influencing recruitment decisions.

Luke Davis, CEO and Founder of IW Capital, and Small business expert, comments on the Spring Statement.

“The Chancellor rightly recognised the importance of the UK’s fantastic entrepreneurs, small businesses and investors, as they lead the way in our private sector economy. Brexit has dominated the political and economic landscape recently but despite this we have seen a huge amount of investor confidence and deal-flow at IW Capital in supporting small businesses.

Tim Mills, Management Director of the Angel CoFund has made the following comments on the Chancellor's Spring Statement and its focus on science and technology.

By Sophia Matveeva, CEO and Co-Founder of Enty, talks about why female start-up founders are missing out on billions of pounds of investment and what can be done to change the status quo.

In  this month's Startup Spotlight Invested Investor speaks to Ramona Liberoff, an experienced and dynamic investor with decades of business experience.

She is currently a Fellow of the Zinc VC programme and is an active angel investor, and was formerly the chief operating officer of the Innogy Innovation Hub and CEO of SPRING Accelerator. She is passionate about global system challenges that create major opportunities such as energy access, electromobility, automation, the use of data and machine learning.