Features

£426,500 is a lot of money: the B&GT share offer update

Published

10 years ago

August 8, 2014

Simon Leadbetter

£426,500 would buy a studio flat in Sloane Avenue or a four bedroom detached house in Burnley. You could buy 8 Tesla Model Ss or 62 Renault Twizzys. Or you could buy a slice of Blue & Green, and that’s what 428 of you have said you’d like to do.

We said what we’d do with the first £200,000 pledged and the subsequent £50,000. So what would we do with a further £176,500?

Once we’ve merged and fixed our websites, increased our writing team internationally, added an investigative reporting team, built a leadership team to take us to new heights, launched a weekly webcast and got smartphone, tablet and print editions in place, while inexorably growing our readership, then the fun really begins.

We want to launch an academy to help sustainable fast-growth, innovative start-ups, those that prioritise the interests of planet, people and prosperity at inception and have sustainability encoded in their DNA, rather than retrofitted. This academy would incubate a small number of businesses and then use our growing media platform to promote their product or services, while helping them raise finance and taking a share in them. Our shared purpose with their success will help fund and secure our future growth.

We also want to set aside a reserve that would mean if times get tough economically, we could survive.

Finally, it means we won’t rely on the corporate shilling as we move to an impartial reader-funded model – not a paywall, but small and transparent commissions from products and services that our growing readership buy through us.

There’s still time to register for the prospectus in our reader survey, as this will be a private stock offering to registered subscribers.

Simon Leadbetter is the founder and publisher of Blue & Green Tomorrow. He has held senior roles at Northcliffe, The Daily Telegraph, Santander, Barclaycard, AXA, Prudential and Fidelity. In 2004, he founded a marketing agency that worked amongst others with The Guardian, Vodafone, E.On and Liverpool Victoria. He sold this agency in 2006 and as Chief Marketing Officer for two VC-backed start-ups launched the online platform Cleantech Intelligence (which underpinned the The Guardian’s Cleantech 100) and StrategyEye Cleantech. Most recently, he was Marketing Director of Emap, the UK’s largest B2B publisher, and the founder of Blue & Green Communications Limited.