Thursday October 23rd is another red letter day for Pension PlayPen.

By day we are Pitching to be Britain’s #1 start up in 2014, by night we are up for a brace of awards at the Grange Hotel competing to be Payroll’s #I auto-enrolment technology provider and technology innovator.

Proving ourselves to Payroll and Pension people comes with the territory but we’re really exited to be in with a chance of being Britain’s number one start-up!

There are 200,000 businesses born every year and to be judged one of the 30 best is mind-blowing (forgive the X-factor hyperbole). The judges are tough including the ICAEW, AVG (who protect my computer and hence this blog) and Sift Media- the Bristol based business publishers.

We’re going to have to shoot a video, I’m going to have to explain our cash-flows and income projections and somewhere along the line I’m going to have to get in front of an audience of dragons with 1/30th of a chance of winning £10,000.

Of course future, past and the current generations of start-ups are potential customers of Pension Play Pen and it’s salutary to remember that 70% of the businesses we’ll be competing with (including ourselves) won’t be in business by our staging point in 2017.

The best thing about the Pitch is that it’s there to reduce the odds of us failing and more importantly the chances of our achieving what we set out to do. Since we set up Pension PlayPen to restore public confidence in pensions, we’ve set the bar pretty high and so we’ve got to go for it- even the top 30 isn’t good enough- we need a number one smash hit!

So wish us good luck and watch out on 23rd October for tweets marked #thePitch14, you never know- you might just see @pensionplaypen top of the Pitch parade.