Back in March, none of us were expecting that, come Christmas, we would still be largely working from home with all the challenges that brings to businesses. It’s been a year of huge change, and it’s been wonderful to see the way our business community has pulled together and supported each other through the ups and downs.

I’m particularly proud of the way that our consultancy and support teams at Sussex Innovation have responded, continuing to deliver great work for our members and clients while adapting to remote working, unfamiliar technology and asynchronous schedules.

There’s sometimes no substitute for the close relationships you can have while working face to face with start-ups and scale-ups in the real, physical world, and it was great to see some familiar faces from the Sussex Innovation community – from a safe distance of course – during that all-too-brief period when the country started to open back up. We’re remaining open for business and providing a space for those companies who simply can’t keep doing their work from home, but our centres are far from their usual busy hive of activity.

Luckily, we have a whole lot more to offer than being simply a space. We’ve been working hard to create meaningful value for businesses across the South East during the second lockdown and have an exciting new offering to support your business at this time. Become one of our co-working members, and while you can’t physically join us for the moment, you can still access our powerful network remotely, and receive more than $100,000 in benefits.

As an accredited university incubator, we have three exclusive deals with leading platforms and cloud technology services which you, as a member, can access through us:

• Up to $100k Amazon Activate credits, enabling your business to improve your cloud infrastructure through Amazon Web Services and be able to effectively add scale without adding cost at this critical time

• Up to $20k Google Cloud for Startups credits, providing access to their Spark package of Cloud and Firebase credit, access to Google engineers and in-depth 1-on-1 architecture reviews

• 90% off Hubspot for Startups fees for your first year, enabling you to maximise your marketing communication and touchpoints with your customers, increasing leads and conversions from your CRM data 

That’s an immediate return of more than $100,000 in benefits for your business, when you become part of our community for around £1,000. If you want to join us and claim one or more of these incredible deals to drive your business forward, you can call me on 07719 305796.

“AWS provides Uniqodo with a secure scalable cloud infrastructure that enables us to focus our resources more on product development and less on infrastructure management. Not having to dedicate a lot of resources to infrastructure management helped us launch Uniqodo by delivering our MVP quickly at a much lower cost. 

“At the early stages of the business, the $10,000 AWS Activate credit that we received through Sussex Innovation allowed us to upgrade our infrastructure and improve our technology without having to worry about the additional cost incurred for a few months. Our entire platform is now powered by AWS with plans to incorporate more AWS services in the future.”

Julius Somoye, CTO at Uniqodo

If you’re planning to use the next few months to prepare and get your plans in place for 2021, our members can also access a full range of consultancy and coaching products to help address key business challenges:

• Strategy: work with our experienced mentors to redefine your business model, assess the opportunities and threats in your sector or build out a roadmap to launch a new product

• Marketing: reboot your sales plan, audit your social media and content marketing channels, or refine your PR tactics with media training and copywriting advice

• Funding: get investment-ready with help building a compelling story, feedback on your pitch deck or support from seasoned grant bid-writers

• Research: develop new insights with industry reports, competitor analyses and white papers prepared by our team of market researchers

• Finance: navigate risk and get on top of your cashflow with plans from our scale-up accountancy team to maximise your financial position for the year ahead.

These products are available part or fully-funded to qualifying businesses through our partnership with the European Regional Development Fund
visit www.sinc.co.uk/products to find out more.