Case Study
Company Overview
Alacrity Foundation UK is an entrepreneurship programme and tech incubator based in Newport, Wales. It connects aspiring founders with demand-led business ideas, co-founders, and commercial mentors to build digital start-ups.
Alacrity provides a 12-month programme with applied expert mentoring, a tax-free stipend, and access to investor networks, and also runs wider growth programmes with partners such as Cyber Innovation Hub and Media Cymru.
What Alacrity UK needed
Alacrity wanted to raise the quality and consistency of business plans across its programmes, decreasing its reliance on external expertise and also improving efficiency.
Business goals:
- Reduce advisor time spent on repetitive review and formatting work and allow more time for strategic coaching.
- Improve the clarity and funder fit of business plans so more teams reach "investment ready" status.
Solution
Alacrity chose StartSmart to supercharge its advisory model and make business plan review more scalable and consistent, without losing the human element.
Why StartSmart won
1. Built for business advisors
StartSmart is an optimisation and coaching platform, not a plan generator. It helps business advisors give precise, curated AI feedback on each section of a plan. This aligned with Alacrity's need to enhance rather than replace its advisors.
2. Deep analysis across 50+ dimensions
Each plan is assessed across more than 50 dimensions and turned into an AI assisted feedback profile. This promised more consistent, structured feedback across cohorts and advisors.
3. Focus on strategy, not form filling
The platform shifts effort away from repetitive formatting and surface level review. It allows advisors to focus on the meaningful parts of planning, such as clarity, strategy, and funder fit. This matched Alacrity's goal to free up expert time.
Direct link to funder criteria
StartSmart's proposition emphasises alignment with each organisation's funding criteria, sector priorities, and standards. This gave Alacrity confidence that business plans could be tuned to what investment committees and external funders needed to see.
We are here to help you build a better business plan, faster.
Results
James Lewis, Chief Operating Officer at Alacrity Foundation UK, summarised the impact:
"We now spend time on the meaningful parts of planning – clarity, strategy, and funder fit – while StartSmart handles the rest."
James Lewis, Chief Operating Officer at Alacrity Foundation
Why it works
Cuts advisor time where it hurts most
Advisors were spending too long getting plans from first draft to "investment committee ready", which limited how many teams they could support.
Alacrity embedded a "StartSmart first" workflow. Every draft went through StartSmart for AI powered, section by section feedback across 50+ dimensions before an advisor review. Advisors then focused only on interpretive and strategic work.
Average advisor time spent per business plan fell from 30 hours to 20 hours, a reduction of 10 hours per plan. That is a 33% cut in advisor time.
Makes feedback feel clearer and more useful to founders
Founders did not always understand what to fix between drafts. Feedback could feel fragmented or inconsistent across advisors.
Advisors used StartSmart's structured feedback to frame every coaching conversation. Each founder saw clear strengths, gaps, and next moves for every section of their plan. Founder satisfaction with plan feedback rose to a 9/10 net promoter score. This increase ties directly to using StartSmart feedback profiles as the starting point for one to one sessions, not as an extra report.
Pulls investment offers forward in time
Teams were reaching investment committee too late in the programme, which compressed the time available to negotiate and close investment.
By reducing advisor hours per plan and giving founders clearer actions between drafts, Alacrity shortened the journey from first draft to an investor ready plan. Investment committees could see cleaner, better structured plans earlier in the cycle.
Teams began receiving investment offers three months earlier than previous cohorts.
Creates a repeatable quality bar across cohorts
Before StartSmart, it was harder to ensure that every team in every cohort was held to the same "investment ready" standard.
Alacrity configured StartSmart with its own criteria and used the same assessment model for all plans. Advisors and programme leads used these scores and comments as the shared definition of quality.
The reduced advisor time per plan, higher founder satisfaction, and earlier investment offers all sit on top of this shared quality bar. StartSmart gave Alacrity a repeatable way to get more teams to that bar without extra headcount, while improving the quality of support existing advisors can deliver.