I get a version of this call regularly.

Someone has set up a CIC. They registered it a few months ago, sometimes longer, on the advice of a friend who’d done it themselves, or after watching a few videos online, or after buying a course that promised to have them funded inside two months. It seemed straightforward. It was cheap to set up. They were excited.

Now they’ve had a rejection. Or two. Or they’ve applied to three funders and heard nothing back from any of them and they’re starting to wonder.

They ring me, and I ask them to send me their registration documents, and within ten minutes I can usually see exactly what happened.

The wrong structure. A board that isn’t independent. A name that shares three words with the director’s private business. A community interest statement so vague it could describe any organisation doing anything anywhere. A financial arrangement that looks, from the outside, like a mechanism for moving public money into a private enterprise.

None of it was malicious. All of it was avoidable. And most of it cannot be fixed without significant time, legal advice, and in some cases starting over.