It has been an incredible year – for X-Forces Enterprise, as CEO of our amazing organisation, and also for me personally. Looking back at our achievements, I am both humbled and delighted by our working community; the encouragement and enthusiasm of our Corporates, the Charities we work with, the various Government departments and NGOs who have pledged their commitment and support; the individual endorsers as well as all our ex-forces personnel and spouses, ambassadors and stakeholders.
This year saw great steps in the X-Forces internal operations as we consolidated our presence in the Birmingham city-centre office and welcomed new members to our team to support both locations, London and Birmingham. Our executive team was strengthened with our new Chairman, Martin Wing who joined us early in the year.
We have also seen fantastic quarter-on-quarter growth and I am proud to report that X-Forces has officially supported over 1,200 entrepreneurs, and lent over £10.5 million pounds in seed capital to help veterans and their families start their own businesses.
This is the backdrop to our ongoing programme of training and support for ex-forces personnel and spouses and we are simply delighted with the results for our start-ups and scale-up entrepreneurs. We forged new partnership with like-minded organisations to continue building a network for our community. These include The Military Mutual – which is a fast-growing organisation that provides the community with a range of insurance products tailored to their needs – and the new Veterans’ Gateway service which promises to be the first point of contact for veterans and their families seeking support; we also joined forces on a number of occasions with our Charities and working community, including Help for Heroes, Blind Veterans UK, ABF: The Soldiers’ Charity, The Royal British Legion, The Officers Association and not least, the Forces Pension Society Charitable Fund to support widows from all three services.
We cannot discuss growth and community without touching on the generosity and support of our Corporate Partners, who are behind us in every way and whom we proudly refer to as our Magic Circle. Throughout the year, we continued to grow our networks with further signing of partnerships and covenants. We also won funding from the MOD Covenant Fund for the delivery of the Spouses Project.
Milestone Events in a Tremendous Year
Looking back, 2017 was certainly breathtaking!