Focusing on pitching and funding and laden with great advice for business starters, The Next Women’s second event on Wednesday was a real success.

Although the organisation targets female internet entrepreneurs, the info applied to all businesses trying to raise that all-too-crucial cash from investors.

Smarta’s founder Shaa Wasmund was speaking, and said that it’s vital when you choose your investors that they bring more to the table than just money. Their relevant  experience and passion for your business is vital, and the right expertise is worth swapping equity for, even when money isn’t changing hands. She pointed out that you must listen to your investors – particularly when they’re all saying one thing and you’re saying another. If you bring on investors that you respect and trust, she said, you’ll always realised how valuable their opinion can be.

Anna Sofat from angel investment firm Addidi argued that cash is king, highlighting the government’s Entrepreneur Finance Guarantee as a useful source of funding for fledgling businesses. She recommended that start-ups have enough funds to live off for 12 months, and that they assume that their business won’t earn anything for at least that amount of time. She also pointed out the government seems keen to lend to women at the moment.

Judy Gibbons, a venture partner at Accel who makes key decisions on investing in internet businesses, explained what she looked for. If she was going to seriously consider putting money in, she said, she would want to see a clear strategy for disruption of the market and value creation, large growth in an emerging market, a world-class business and technology team, evidence of traction (meaning customer numbers, as the businesses wouldn’t yet have revenue), agility and a credible plan to scale the business. And credibility didn’t mean forecasts of £25m in five years, she explained – over-ambitious figures would be an immediate turn-off for an investor.

Other investors agreed with her. Julie Meyer of Adriane Capital and Cmypitch’s Emmett Kilduff pointed out that “pie-in-the-sky” sales forecasts are a real no-no. You can hear more great advice from Julie by watching her Smart interview here

Bill Morrow of Angels Den followed on from the figures comments by explaining that the first thing he wanted to know when someone pitched to him was what percentage of equity was being offered and for what price – and any pitch should make that very clear. Get more info from Bill in his Smarta column here.

Emmett expanded on advice for the actual pitch. He recommended using lots of visuals, but keeping everything really simple as well.

The super-engaging Andrea Blakesley from pitching consultancy Mudhut Communication said that you should be able to explain your business in 30 seconds to anyone – and warned of entrepreneurs tendency to talk and talk and talk the ears off people when they tried to explain their idea. She said that it’s far more important to keep it succinct and clear. There should be an immediate “grasp and gasp” – a grasp of what the idea is, then a gasp at how exciting it is.

She added that, to get investors interested, you need to prove that there was a need for your business.

All in all, a great event, so well done and thanks to the team at The Next Women. If you’re a female entrepreneur of you have a great idea and need funding, contact them to find out how to get a three-minute pitching slot at the next event.

Smarta’s new favourite craze sweeping the net is the Wikipedia band name game. It works like this:

• Go to Wikipedia and hit ‘random article’. The first one which comes up is your band’s name.
• Click on random article again. That's your album name.
• Go to Flickr and click explore the last 7 days – the third picture is your album cover. Put it all together on a photo editing programme and hey presto - you have your first album.

Smarta is impressed with a) how some people always seem to have enough time on their hands to come up with things like this but more importantly b) what great viral marketing it is for Wikipedia and Flickr.

While certain people have their suspicions Wikipedia may have an evil genius of a marketing team, we’re choosing to take a brighter look at the situation and celebrate how good it can be when your business goes viral.

Crazes like this are near impossible to predict, but when they do happen, they can be great for traffic. After a slight dip in traffic figures in mid-December, Wikipedia is now firmly back on top.

All hail the consumer trend – and look out for the first album by Smarta’s band, Calwood Township, in a record shop near you very soon.

The Times website today offers two handy podcasts on redundancy rights - one for employers, one for employees. Definitely worth a listen if you've been affected or are at that tricky stage where you need to let people go. Click on this link for the podcasts.

After that, for an in-depth view of how to handle redundancy as an employer you might like to read the Smarta feature Getting Redundancy Right. It contains insights into how to turn redundancy to your advantage, how to maintain your reputation whilst you do it, how to treat everyone fairly and how to stay on the right side of the law.

Happy Pancake Day everybody! What’s that, you don’t give a toss? You think it’s a flipping waste of time? You think pancakes taste like crepe? You need the joyous celebration of this blog to get you all sugared up and in the mood then. (And if nothing else, it serves as an insight into just how far one food type can be spun into sales and news.)

First up, Pocket Lint’s exploration of the five must-have gadgets for Pancake Day. There’s the Salter Add and Weigh Jug Scale, £19.99, the Waring Waterfall Blender, £145, the Tala Pancake Maker, £6.99, the Tefal fryingpan and the Remida Manual Citrus Juicer Midnight Blue, £249.99. Bringing your Pancake Day total to more than £400. Pretty steep, we agree. But the perfect toss doesn’t come cheap.

But if you enjoy splashing the cash, why not get on eBay and bid for the Krampouz CEBPA4 - Electric Crepe Maker Machine Pancake, currently coming in at £345.99. Not bad profit to be made there by the by, if you have one spare to sell. Providing you can persuade customers that they really do need this souped up frying pan for one day of the year.

For those of you on a more Lent-like budget, and with weaker arms, cut out the mix and machine all together and spray on pancakes with Batter Blaster. See the pic above - that’s right, it’s pancakes in an aerosol can. Simply spray away and fry to your delight. And it’s Organic! With no clean-up! What are you waiting for?

For an idea of how news sites bulk up their content, take a look at Yahoo’s video feature on the cake that flips (that’s not upside-down-cake or apple turnover.)

It’s our personal fave, harassing unsuspecting passers-by on the streets into an impromptu flip and judging them on their tossing skills with commentary that Des Lynam would be proud of.

“How does experience measure up to youth? Not too badly actually – this silver-haired lady’s motion is slightly out of control, requiring a bit of compensation at the last minute, but she gets the job done,” explains the news reporter (and in this case I think it’s fair to say that we use the label ‘news reporter’ loosely).

And in beautifully euphemism-laden conclusion, we learn that “a confident approach, a firm grip, a fluid motion and a good wrist action will guarantee you a perfect toss.”

And if all that’s not enough to get your lemon juices flowing, then you’re obviously feeling too miserable for Pancake Day. We recommend that you go and get battered instead.

Despite figures out last week showing bank lending was up in 2008, most entrepreneurs are acutely aware of just how little interest banks have in handing out loans at the moment.

It’s perplexing: the chancellor and the prime minister have put small businesses at the top of the agenda, repeatedly calling them the ‘engine room of the economy’ and injecting billions of pounds to make sure they stay afloat – but with 30,000 businesses predicted to go bankrupt this year, why hasn’t it worked?

Dragons’ Den investor and Smarta board member Theo Paphitis looks into it on this evening’s Panorama: Credit where it’s due.

For many small business owners, the programme looks set to be painfully familiar viewing: one entrepreneur tells Theo about a meeting with his bank manager where not only was he refused credit, but his overdraft was halved and his bank charges were increased ‘substantially’.

“A lot of businesses have had the same experience,” he explains. “We were not in any way unique.”
This view of banks’ heartlessness is echoed by another frustrated entrepreneur Theo speaks to, business owner Sean Reed. “Do you think the banks understand what’s happening?” asks Theo. “I think they most definitely understand what’s happening,” replies Reed. “If you asked me do they care? I’d say no.”

• Panorama: Credit where it’s due will air tonight at 8.30pm on BBC One

BBC iPlayer's got an interesting Radio 4 programme on toxic lending, that focuses for the first half hour on banks not lending to small businesses or suddenly changing their terms. Worth a listen if you have been or might be affected:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hkc70/File_on_4_17_02_2009/

Big thanks to lovely PR company Henry’s House which sent Smarta with a large and very delicious tin of biscuits this morning to back up research it did for Holiday Inn last year which found four out of five businesses believe the biscuits they serve to clients will make or break a deal.

No one can buy Smarta’s love but feeding us biscuits will probably make us write nice things about you.
 

One of the few advantages of recession is that charming way it has of disposing of outdated, inflexible companies which refuse to adapt to modern practices and ideas.

Only the very sentimental shed a tear when Woolworths sank into insolvency at the beginning of this year, and other businesses have found themselves in a similar predicament: Land of Leather, JJB Sports, and most recently, music retailer Zavvi all went into administration without so much as a puff of smoke to hail their departures.

And so it was with great indifference we discovered the plight of US 'icon' Playboy, which has been put up for sale after it registered losses of $145m in the last quarter of last year. We were told sex is a recession-proof business, but apparently not: whoever takes on the magazine will be making a serious loss - the business' revenues were only $69m in the same period.

Though we're sure it's a crying shame for teenage boys everywhere, we can't see a buyer coming forward particularly soon: the internet has completely transformed the porn industry, and anyway, the idea of owning a magazine with a misogynist octogenarian at the helm is unlikely to present itself as an appealing business proposition - American 'institution' or not.

Interesting debate on yesterday morning’s Today programme, which was covering the big business story of the day: the question of whether we should give a state-funded boost to the manufacturing industry, which is struggling under the weight of low consumer confidence.

Think tank The Work Foundation released a report yesterday saying we should. It maintained the sector is ‘extremely important for jobs, exports and GDP’, but others argue the government needs to find somewhere to draw the line – after all, what happens when hairdressing hits a record low? Will that require a bailout?

The sector also represents a vast portion of the economy: manufacturing employs almost three million workers and makes up roughly 13% of the UK’s GDP – but some argue it’s a dying industry. “We have to understand what a modern manufacturing sector is going to look like in the United Kingdom, and it’s not going to look like a mass market manufacturing sector,” said Richard Jeffrey, chief investment officer at Cazanove Capital Management on the programme.

He’s right: as businesses have outsourced their manufacturing to cheaper countries, the sector has been transformed – but that doesn’t mean it’s dying. Ian Brinkley, associate director at The Work Foundation, argued while money is no longer coming in from product manufacture, the money now is in servicing manufactured goods.

“A company like Rolls Royce, for example, gets most of its value added and most of its profits not from its engines, but from the services which go alongside them. I think we will see production go overseas but I think we will hold on to the high-value service end, and that’s the base we really must support, because that’s the thing we are competitive in,” he pointed out.

The report’s point is, Britain needs a manufacturing industry, whatever form it takes, and Smarta is inclined to agree. It's like John Humphreys noted: “We can’t all end up cutting each others' hair”.

Apparently the length of skirts shortens in a downturn and in a fully-blown recession women take to wearing blankets. Er, hang on, that doesn’t sound right! But apparently it’s true. Well it is if you take a glance out how those crazy Yanks are responding to the economic crisis.

Out of work and broke, Americans aren’t just burying their heads under the blankets they’re donning them in a (frankly bizarre) new craze.

The Snuggie, exposed to these shores by The Guardian (click to see a pic), and its competitors Toasty Wrap, Cuddle-wrap and the Slanket, are all the rage in the US with Americans looking to save on heating bills.

Essentially blankets with holes for your arms, they’re selling out coast-to-coast with 4 million Snuggies shifted since launch in October and featuring on the Jay Leno show.

All those fashionistas desperately praying things don’t get ‘that bad’, another a New York designer Sebastian Errazuriz might have a more palatable option. How about trying on the Zipper dress (above) for size... and again and again and again. Yep, made with 120 zips this stylish little number can be worn in no fewer than 100 different ways, from belt to crop top and evening dress. Get me.

“Women can adapt it to fit their taste or mood of the day. It’s particularly poignant in the current economic climate,” he says.

So there we have it, how to keep warm while looking stupid or like you buy everything in the same pattern on a budget. More fashion tips from Smarta as and when we spot them.

More pointedly, now we’re seeing plenty of recession-beating businesses (burger or pizza, anyone?), are we about to see an emerging fashion for recession-busting products?

Possibly not, but it’s definitely a sign the recession will be the key message pumped at consumers this year. Where people wanted solutions to make their lives more fun, affluent or sexier, now read ‘save money’. Make sure you're not looking too behind the times...