Metodichka_-_Anglysky_yazyk

and employ yourself? But how do you launch a business during an economic downturn? Peter Day, presenter of Radio 4's In Business, has interviewed generations of young start-up entrepreneurs over the years, and here he summarizes the words of advice they have shared with him on taking the DIY route.

B.In my experience, young entrepreneurs know how to tell it, both their own and that of the business they have set up and the needs it is trying to address - plus the adventures they have had on the way. Arnold Sebutinde, aged 27, from Birmingham runs Spontaneous Portraits. His story, which helped him get funding and a mentor from the Prince's Trust, is compelling. Arnold got into trouble, and spent two and a half years in prison. While serving his sentence, he made use of his talent for drawing with both hands and started to sell portraits of inmates and their visitors, for £2.50 a time. After being released, he continued to build his business, and posted internet videos to highlight his special talent. Story-telling is a vital part of running any kind of business, but it gets neglected as companies get bigger and bigger and more and more arrogant.

C.Most homes and most students are already equipped with quite a lot of the tools any business needs to reach a worldwide audience from day one. Computer power is so cheap that many school or university leavers have their own machines, with processing power unimaginable a few years ago. Laptops can edit sound or movies, design software, and keep track of all the details of a start-up business at minimal cost. Internet connectivity allows a start-up entrepreneur to collaborate with video conferencing at almost no cost, an extraordinary breakthrough. The internet also enables a new business to reach a specific, even worldwide marketplace with a minimal outlay. Clever viral marketing can pull in curious customers seduced by ingenuity alone. And very young people are often instinctively able to use the new technology that makes all this happen. They already know things

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that great big companies have to pay specialists huge sums to get done. Starting any kind of business always used to need money: from savings, relatives, angel investors, a bank loan.

D.Why not start a business based on a need you yourself have, that is not properly addressed by existing suppliers? You experience the gap in the marketplace, and you fill it: easy-peasy. University campuses are full of ideas for businesses. For example, David Langer was at Oxford University when he co-founded Group Spaces. It started as a service for Oxford University clubs, and is designed to make life easy for secretaries and treasurers trying to do admin for clubs, societies, and hobby groups. Group Spaces now has two million users worldwide, helping club administrators in more than 100 countries. The company employs 10 people, working near East London's start-up hub Silicon

Roundabout and has recently raised £1m ($1.54m) in investment.

If you have got the need, and the idea, then come the operational problems - but even they are less daunting than they used to be.

E.The latter is reputedly horribly difficult at the moment. For several reasons, including the technology mentioned above, not having pots of cash is now much less of a problem than it used to be. Several of the start-up entrepreneurs needed only credit-card loans to get their businesses up and running.

Warren Bennett, 30, is co-founder of the bespoke tailoring service A Suit That Fits. Now 6 years old, the company sells around 15,000 suits a year. Warren had the idea while volunteering as a teacher in Nepal, where he had stumbled on a good local tailoring business. Back home in the UK, Warren and a friend started what he says was the world's first online bespoke suit-making business. The company now has studios across the UK for people to drop into to have measurements taken for a suit that is made thousands of miles away in Nepal. A Suit That Fits was funded solely through credit cards and by asking customers to pay in advance. It is a business that lives off cash-flow, not

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bank borrowings. Whether you are pitching to a potential sponsor, mentor or customer, it helps to tell a good story.

F.The way the start-up entrepreneurs tell it, it is tricky to start a business at any time - not just during a recession - but their particular business idea is so niche, so focused, and so special that they shrug off the gloom and just get on with it. The upside of starting a business during a downturn is that things can only get better as the economic climate improves, and you will have learnt an awful lot in the difficult times that you can use in the easier ones. Lots of people go about finding their niche by using business school tools such as market analysis or sector research. Clever, but remote. [9]

Listening

STRATEGY POINT

1.Use the pause before you hear the recording to read the notes carefully and to think what kind of information could go in each gap. Guess the type of answer before you hear the talk.

2.The speaker may say two or three possibilities for each question, so don’t just write down the first that you hear. Listen carefully to decide which is correct.

3.The speaker may not use the same words as are used in the questions. Listen for the same idea expressed with an alternative word or phrase. Try to think of some in the pause before you hear the recording.

4.Use the pause before the first and the second listening to decide what questions you will need to concentrate on.

5.Use the second listening to check the answers you already have.

Ex. 15

Look at the notes about the launch of a new clothing company.

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Some information is missing.

You will hear part of a welcoming talk by the company’s

Managing Director. [28; p.137]

For each question 16-22 fill in the missing information in the numbered space using one or two words.

You will hear the talk twice.

You have 10 seconds to read through the notes.

Now listen, and fill in the missing information.

Company Launch Event

New company:
Name :	1.(16) ________________ Clothing Ltd.
Staff change:
Davis Shaw to become:	2. (17) _________________________
New premises:
Location: close to	3. (18) __________________________

Biggest area of expansion: 4. (19) __________________________

Future staff facility:	5. (20) __________________________
Future company plans:
Next new product range:	6. (21) ____________________ clothes
New market:	7. (22) __________________________

Lesson 2

Pre-listening

Ex. 1 Answer the questions:

1.What are the main ways governments can raise money?

2.What are the main ways established companies can raise money?

3.If you were starting a new company, how could you try to raise money?

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Listening

Ex. 2

a)Listen to an interview with Tara Ganesh, the marketing director of a business support service called Entrepreneur. [28; p.86] How many ways to get money which you listed in the previous exercise does she mention?

b)Listen to the interview again and complete these notes.

Which three kinds of advice can Entrepreneur give

1. legal 2._____________ 3._______________

Most common way to fund a new business: 4.________________________________________

Bank managers want to see 5.__________________

Types of assets to guarantee bank loans 6.______________ 7._____________________

Company which provides start-up money is called a 8________________________ firm.

Minimum percentage growth these companies require: 9 ________________________

Business angel is 10.______________________________

Can find business angels through 11._________________

Text 1

Reading

Ex. 3

a)Read the title of the text. Try to predict what types of entrepreneurial finance it is about. Skim the text to check your predictions.

b)Read the text again more carefully. For questions 1-5, choose the correct answer (A, B, C or D).

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STRATEGY POINT

1.Read the text quickly to get a general idea of what it is about.

2.Look at the first part of the question, and underline key words. Don’t read the options A-D yet. Find the part of the text the question refers to.

3.Go through the choices and underline the key words.

4.Choose the answer that fits best. Keep in mind that the information may be rephrased.

5.Even if you think you know the correct answer, always check that the others are not appropriate.

6.Check your answer against the text.

Alternative Types of Entrepreneurial Finance

An inherent problem that entrepreneurs face at the very beginning of their entrepreneurial initiative is to attract outside capital, given the lack of collateral and sufficient cash flows and the presence of significant information asymmetry with investors. While different investors exist for larger amounts of capital, entrepreneurial initiatives that require much smaller amounts to start with need to rely on friends and family or own savings.

More recently some entrepreneurs have started to rely on the Internet to directly seek financial help from the general public (the “crowd”) instead of approaching financial investors such as business angels, banks, or venture capital funds. This technique, called “crowdfunding,” has made it possible to seek capital for project-specific investments as well as for starting up new ventures.

In theory individuals already finance investments indirectly through their savings, since banks act as intermediaries between those who have and those who need money. In contrast, crowdfunding occurs without any intermediary: entrepreneurs “tap the crowd” by raising the money directly from individuals. Crowdfunding is an open call, essentially through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donation or in

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exchange for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes.

Several platforms have emerged that help mediate between crowdfunders and individuals with a project. One that has helped in making the concept famous is Sellaband.com. Launched in 2006, it acts as an intermediary between new music bands and their fans, who can invest in the production of a band's first CD. In exchange, investors obtain rewards, like a free copy of the CD or benefits from its sales. In roughly three years the company raised more than U.S. $3 million from individuals in order to promote new artists. In total, almost four thousand artists received support from more than sixtyfive thousand “believers”.

Some main characteristics of ventures emerged:

•They need to raise a reasonably low amount of capital that will accommodate a relatively small number of investors, first because some legal forms have limitations in respect to that, and second because managing very large groups can prove to be difficult, even with new technologies. There are, however, a few cases that have shown how to circumvent many of these problems.

•They have an interesting project to offer to prospects, in particular something innovative. Since

crowdfunders are not only rent-seekers, they also need to be interested in the project, and are often ready to become an active investor in decision making.

•They need to be willing to extend their skill set, or at least welcome other people's opinions, because crowdfunders seek projects where they can participate and be useful. This could be an advantage to anybody.

•They need to know how to work with Web 2.0, because the whole process goes through the interactive Internet, from communicating the project to managing shareholders. All of this could be done without the web, but at a considerably higher cost in time, money, and efficiency.

Consequently, and mainly because of the first characteristic, crowdfunding works best for small ventures. Bigger ones would be

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hindered with the cap in associates. Moreover, not all small ventures can access crowdfunding, only innovative ones that plan to grow big. Finally, big ventures might not be able to satisfy shareholders' need for participation, so that excludes them too.

Our analysis of crowdfunding practices provides avenues for future research. One urgent question is the relation to intellectual property rights. Entrepreneurs making use of crowdfunding will need to disclose some of their ideas to the crowd well in advance, creating risks of idea stealing due to the fact that potentially valuable information is put into the public domain. Does this deter financially constrained entrepreneurs from tapping the crowd? [21]

1.Entrepreneurs resort to crowdfunding because

A.they need a lot of money to launch their projects.

B.a lot of different investors seek the ways to make their money work.

C.most intermediaries between those who have and those who need money are focused mainly on big business.

D.they can’t depend on the friends and families.

2.Crowdfunding has become rather popular because

A.it is a good way to raise capital without relying on intermediaries.

B.it always provides investors with shareholder voting rights.

C.it is done through the Internet, which is a very modern and fast means of communication.

D.it is aimed at starting up new ambitious ventures.

3.The Sellaband.com example proves that

A.new music bands can’t succeed without crowdfunding.

B.numerous fans of music bands are crazy about free CDs.

C.crowdfunding as a business initiative turned out to be viable and recognized by many people.

D.several internet platforms compete for attracting crowdfunders.

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4.The main characteristics of emerged ventures show that

A.some legal regulations make it impossible to involve a lot of investors.

B.crowdfunders eagerly participate in capital investment as well as in decisionmaking.

C.start-ups deal with a relatively small number of investors even though new technologies enable effective and efficient management of large numbers of

investors .

D.these companies could not be established without the web.

5.Which of the following obstacles in the way of crowdfunding were not mentioned in the text?

A.Big ventures can’t have such a huge number of business partners.

B.Big ventures have to refuse investors easy access to participation in company operations.

C.Many companies can fear stealing valuable business information.

D.Companies could need unpredictable time to raise money for innovative projects.

Ex. 4 Answer the questions:

1.What kind of problem do entrepreneurs face when they start their own business? Why?

2.What conventional financial investors working on the market are mentioned in the text?

3.What is crowdfunding?

4.What are its specific features?

5.What are small ventures emerged out of crowdfunding characterized by?

6.Why are bigger companies usually excluded from the practice?

7.Why might the issue of intellectual property rights prove a hindrance to crowdfunding?

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*Discussion

Would you like to start a business? What sort? Where would you get the capital? Where do people in your country normally get capital? What are the advantages and disadvantages of different methods? What do you think the future of crowdfunding in your country is?

Vocabulary

Ex. 5 Find in Text 1 English equivalents given in bold for the following Russian words and word combinations.

1.присущий/неотъемлемый/характерный

2.принуждать/вынуждать/стеснять

3.сталкиваться с чем-либо лицом к лицу

4.заранее

5.привлекать

6.удерживать/отпугивать от чего-либо

7.достаточный

8.иметь доступ/получить доступ к чемулибо

9.значительный/существенный

10.препятствовать/затруднять

11.требовать

12.лимит/максимальное количество

13.полагаться на

14.широкая общественность/публика

15.эффективность/оперативность

16.косвенно

17.процесс принятия решений

18.сбережения

19.обойти/перехитрить

20.происходить/случаться

21.продвигать/рекламировать

22.посредник

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