South West businesses have benefitted from £100m of Start Up Loans financing through the Start Up Loans programme, with Cornish businesses receiving over £16m of this support.

The Start Up Loans programme has a 12-year legacy of delivering funding to smaller businesses who may otherwise find it difficult to secure loans from traditional lenders. Entrepreneurs and businesses can access personal loans of up to £25,000 on a fixed 6% rate of interest to start up or grow their business. Through a partner, Newable, the programme also offers mentoring to recipients in their first year.

One of the latest businesses to benefit is surfing collective, House of Glass, based in Newquay, who have launched a café as a community space for surfers.

Partners Ellen Caldwell and Kourosh Zahedi were keen to launch a cafe that would also act as a base for their surfing collective. “We wanted to revive surf culture by providing a space where people could come together,” says Ellen.

The House of Glass café, in surfing mecca Newquay, was born, and the duo received a £15,000 loan via partner GC Business Finance to fund premises and four staff (including a chef and baristas), stock and marketing. The result is a trendy coffee shop serving a single-estate roast (sourced from The Roasting Room, a mere stone’s throw away) with French pastries and in-house baked savoury focaccia bread.

Ellen said the financial boost from the Start Up Loans programme “enabled us to take a seasonal trade year-round, providing higher class facilities and services than we would otherwise be able to afford so we can hit a premium market. Without that money, we wouldn’t have been able to make the year and would have had to pare back massively. It was a survival bucket, a steady hand over the summer that will now enable us to grow.”

The Start Up Loans programme helps people start or grow their business and is part of the government-owned British Business Bank’s remit to make finance markets work better for smaller businesses. They can borrow up to £25,000 at a fixed interest rate of 6% per annum and repay the loan over one to five years. The programme also provides 12 months of free business mentoring which is delivered through a post loan support partner. In the South West, there are a range of support partners, primarily SWIG Finance but also national programme partners such as GC Business Finance.

To learn more about Start Up Loans support, visit: https://www.startuploans.co.uk/