Contributors Call Out

We love to hear inspiring and insightful stories of business success including funding and investments, significant growth in your sales and recruitment, beneficial collaborations and partnerships of public interest, innovative product and service launches. Please also share programmes, initiatives and events that will benefit our network.

To help stimulate your thinking, here are some of the things we look for:

What is inspiring and motivating? 

• Transformation – from X to Y e.g. injured veteran to world-leading tree planter
• Humble beginnings 
• Hard work
• Creativity and innovation
• Positive social impact
• Heartwarming stories (love, loss, healing, reconciliation, triumph against the odds)
• Overcoming significant challenges

Success? 

• Sustained growth
• Securing investment
• Significant milestone e.g. turnover, number of years in business, number of employees (combined with other elements of a story)
• Significant achievement e.g. King’s Award, B Corp certification, business award (combined with other elements of a story)
• Launching new innovative products/services
• Significant grant results
• Business exit – sale from success

Insight? 

• Learnings
• Failures
• How you approached things
• What you recommend/advise
• What was hard that you overcame?
• What surprised you?
• What you would do differently

We welcome expert feature contributions from our network on a range of business topics including sales and marketing, HR, finance, innovation, legislation, business resilience and international trade.

Our tone is mostly positive, encouraging, empathetic and empowering. We acknowledge challenges and address pitfalls, but our main focus is on how entrepreneurs and business owners can achieve success. What action can they take in the next three-to-six months to make progress towards their goals, despite any challenges they may be facing?  

We understand that this can be a challenge with some topics where threat is central to the theme such as cybersecurity – but it’s possible! We suggest in this instance to ensure that threats are outlined briefly in a neutral tone avoiding hyperbole and catastrophic language, then most of the content should focus on practical steps that can be put in place to keep the business safe. 

If you would like to join our network of regular contributors please get in touch. 

We aim to inspire and celebrate entrepreneurship, so we avoid stories about businesses doing badly or circumstances that are having a negative effect on UK businesses. The exception is if we are providing practical advice on how to get through these times to survive and thrive.

For example we will avoid: 

• Negative forecasts
• Bankruptcies
• Companies going into administration or liquidation
• Job losses
• Funding cuts
• Crime or corruption
• Legal disputes

Although we love to hear about markers of your success such as award nominations and wins, charity fundraising, recruitment and promotions, office moves and additions and new store openings, we receive a high volume of these, so we do not usually cover them as stories where this is the only focus. 

UMi is committed to taking the hard work out of finding and using the best information, expertise and finance for our network. We have around 17,000 weekly bulletin subscribers and thousands more entrepreneurs and business professionals visit our website. We particularly appeal to start-up and scale-up entrepreneurs who are within the first five to 10 years of their business journey. 

Our team will review your article and if it is a good fit for our network’s interests then we will sub-edit it in line with our house style. Our journalists may re-title the piece, edit or create a new introduction, add key points and next steps, for example.

For contributed expert advice articles, we will ensure that the contributor is acknowledged as the author in our summary and aim to preserve your voice in the main body of the content.

Please keep a check to see if your article is published. We receive hundreds of articles each day and publish a small selection, so our team will not reply individually to each contribution. If we do not publish an article you sent that you believe is a good fit, then please feel free to send it again for consideration.

We do not currently offer paid guaranteed placement for any news stories or articles unless they are included in one of our commercial partnerships.