HeatBands Limited “Learning of the huge number of people who suffer from cold hands, designed and developed an innovative, thermally efficient wristband based upon the experience gained during 10 years working with patient thermo-regulation and hypothermia prevention.

HeatBands™ are designed to alleviate the unpleasant and sometimes debilitating effects of “cold hands”, clinically known as Raynaud's Syndrome – there are known to be over 10 million UK and 28 million US sufferers. Trials proved the efficacy of the product, and we started marketing HeatBands™ on the Internet in late 2005. With little marketing spend we had created product awareness, customer testimonials and achieved endorsement by the US Raynaud’s Association with promotion on their website.

After no success with other advisers, I approached CMR with our business plan including a budget forecast based upon a funding requirement of £100,000 to be injected in stages, whilst if it were to be injected in one go I felt we would grow much quicker and we could easily and quickly introduce more products. That forecast was based upon only the one product but we had another product ready to introduce. Nor did it take into account the three-year contract just agreed with The Neopharm Group in Israel, which had a substantial value over the contract period.

Simon Smith and Paul Barker of CMR saw the potential and agreed to work with us. At a series of meetings a new plan was developed based on their strategic inputs – the two keys being to focus on proof of concept with just the first product, and to plan for drastically reduced production costs from new alternative outsource suppliers, based on the volume required for the Israeli and other contracts in negotiation.

Simon arranged a well-received trial presentation to a small group of potential investors, but interest was then overtaken by events (discussions with alternative suppliers did produce dramatically lower quotes) and a quick re-run of the model showed I could grow the company on a much smaller funding injection which I could arrange as debt, without sacrificing equity at this stage. This is what I now intend to do, establish the proof of concept that Simon recommended, then come back to seek equity backing for an expansion geographically, with additional products, and am grateful to CMR for their efforts in steering me down this path.”

Leslie Rees

CEO HeatBands Ltd www.heatbands.com