0

As we announced last month, we’ve been delighted to welcome some incredible new brand partners at Yena to round-out the year and start 2019 with a whole suite of incredible professional support for our now global community.

We’ll be releasing individual pieces about each partnership and this week we’re excited to talk about our new finance partners Ultimate Finance.

It’s a common thread among all these brand partners that it’s been of vital importance to us to find companies who align with our core values and finance was a daunting industry that is usually money-focused over all else, with any other agenda seeming more like ‘green washing’ than an actual representation of core values.

Ultimate Finance changed this opinion, for me.

When I set out for a finance partner, I didn’t have any intention of finding a local company to partner with as we now have very public global ambitions for Yena as a brand but, when I discovered that their offices were just 5 minutes away from where I live, it seemed like an opportunity not to be ignored.

In getting to meet not only the team but the group directors and CEO all in one day on the very first meeting at Ultimate Finance with no airs and graces, over a coffee in the well designed canteen area (designed by our friends at Interaction, no less), I realised there and then that this was a company I wanted to work with.

Their notion of ‘Good Funding‘ aligned to ours of ‘Good Business’ and their genuine hunger for innovation and understanding the next generation of business owners was something that saw us get on instantly, immediately searching for ways to work together.

We’re delighted that this has come to fruition in the form of an exclusive brand partnership as our Finance Partners and I am personally excited to know our community will have someone we truly trust to go to for when needing finance.

The generation of startups coming through seem to have gotten over the glamorisation of equity funding, seeing it for what it is – a means to scale – and are now more open minded to the idea of debt funding, based on their wanting to ‘do the work’ and generate traction in a lean way first, to help them maintain ownership of their companies where possible (although we do still actively help our community access equity investment where suitable too and it’s up to them to assess the right finance for their business on their own accord).

Here’s what the Ultimate Finance team had to say about our partnership:

“2018 has been a brilliant year for the Ultimate Finance team. We’ve been nominated for awards and reached a new lending milestone which has enabled £200 million to be made available to small and medium-sized businesses across the UK, but we are by no means done yet! As a part of our ambition to support the future of the small business sector, we have teamed up with Yena to help support the next generation of small business owners through their acceleration community and meetup events worldwide.”

Read their full press release here.

We’re looking forward to 2019 where we’ll be producing specific content with the Ultimate Finance team via our Vision product, and providing support to our community on a global basis, using the new developments we’ll be rolling out in Q1 of 2019.

If you have any queries regarding partnerships with Ultimate Finance contact Adrian Stalley, Head of Partnerships.

Any partnership enquiries regarding Yena, please direct to me at ash@yena.co.uk.