Tycoon's offer of £1m to help entrepreneurs turn their vision into reality could prove attractive to Future50 businesses

%image(14829885, type="article-full", alt="Undated Virgin Business Media handout photo of Sir Richard Branson being held aloft by winners of Pitch to Rich 2015 (left to right) Jeff Patterson (Fourex), Gem Misa (Cauli Rice), Colin Hegarty (Hegarty Maths) and Dan Cludenay (Approved Food) at the launch of a TV commercial for the VOOM 2016 contest. The Virgin boss is hoping the competition offering a "golden ticket" to budding entrepreneurs will enable businessmen and women to follow in his footsteps. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Tuesday March 22, 2016. The Virgin Media Business contest offers £1 million of cash, marketing and mentoring to small and medium sized companies either just starting up or looking to expand. See PA story INDUSTRY Branson. Photo credit should read: Shariq Siddiqui/Virgin Business Media/PA WireNOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may r")

Recently I got a LinkedIn message from Richard Branson asking for my help.

It read: 'Virgin Media Business #VOOM 2016 is offering a £1,000,000 prize fund so entrepreneurs from the UK and Ireland can turn their visions into reality...we're searching for 12 professional advisors to help us for a few days in June, to judge the country's most exciting entrepreneurs.

'Is that you? If you have the skills you'll also get the chance to provide them some coaching and mentorship, before they pitch directly to me.'

Ok, I know that VOOM 2016 is a kind of X-Factor meets Dragon's Den with probably a dash of the Apprentice thrown in, but I won't lie – I actually got quite excited, even though I knew it was a cute bit of marketing based on a clever bite of a computer cookie somewhere or the whirring of an algorithm.

But hey, they chose me (and I suspect many of you if you are known for your interest and prowess in business matters).

But it struck me when reading it that the competition might also be of interest to Future50 businesses and within a couple of hours my hunch was proved right.

One of our very own businesses, Extremis Technology, is set to enter and needs our help to make some noise in support.

Extremis, which was founded by Mark Aspinall, started life in Lowestoft before moving to new premises at Hethel Engineering Centre near Norwich. It specialises in producing easy to assemble humanitarian shelters, measuring 19 sq m and designed to last 15 years.

Here was a second message I got from Mark and the Extremis team.

'We have been encouraged to enter the Voom 2016 competition where the finalists get a chance to 'Pitch to Rich' [Richard Branson]. The whole campaign will last about eight weeks and we need to get into the top three. This means we need to mount a concerted campaign to get hundreds (probably thousands) of people to vote for us so we need to ask you all a huge favour:

'The easy bit, if you have a Facebook or LinkedIn Account, is to vote for us: https://www.vmbvoom.com/pitches/extremis-technology 'Then the hard bit: we need to ask you to get all your friends, relatives, business colleagues, etc to do the same. This really works. We launched last weekend and entered at 136 on the leaderboard and finished the day at 85. Lots of emails later and we finished the Sunday at 56 and are now sitting at 33.

'There is a leaderboard at: https://www.vmbvoom.com/leaderboard so you can track our progress (health warning: checking it gets very compulsive!), and if you're still reading, please follow us on Twitter - @extremistech so that we can keep you updated on what we're doing.

'If any of you have ideas on what else we can be doing then please feel free to respond to Susie: susie@extremistechnology.com as we will need all the help we can get. This looks like a tough but exciting eight weeks and we're all really enjoying it so to have you come along for the ride and help us would be really great.

'Many thanks for your support!'

So, there you go. Never mind my fledgling (or not) career as an advisor to Richard Branson – I'll keep the phone nearby just in case – here's my advice:

How about we do all we can to get behind this pioneering Future50 business and help them win a chance to 'Pitch to Rich'?

Mark's already told us what to do – so what are we waiting for?

This is a great business, so I'm up for doing what I can to help them – I hope many of you are too.