The enterprising founder making Britain the best place in the world for entrepreneurs

Britain has a few enterprising individuals who have helped the country become one of the best in the world to do business, writes Entrepreneurs Network director Philip Salter in his latest Forbes column.

“In an age of shallow celebrity, the likes of Lord Young, Sherry Coutu CBE, Lord Bilimoria, Michael Hayman MBE and Emma Jones stand out for their ethic of serving the public good. They have had – and continue to have – a tremendous impact on improving the policies, support and general climate for entrepreneurship in the UK.”

“Over the last decade, Jones has been a leading supporter of small businesses through her tireless work with Enterprise Nation. Towards the end of last year, she was made a UKTI business ambassador by the Prime Minister. I caught up with her to find out more about enterprise nation and her outlook for Britain’s entrepreneurs.”

Read Philip’s interview with Emma Jones here.

Skills, scale ups and the Northern Powerhouse

I want to do my part as chair of the Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee to encourage you, as entrepreneurs, to voice concerns into government when I’m interrogating the Secretary of State. I want to understand what concerns you have about barriers to your business.

I have a number of key priorities that I want the Select Committee to look at. I don’t want to be partisan. I don’t want to make this about petty party politics as I think you would get bored very quickly, and we would lose reputational value. By 2020 I want to make sure Britain is a more competitive, more productive and more innovative economy – with a greater number of companies starting and scaling up, and with a workforce that has the skills excel in business.

I want to talk to you briefly about some key areas we are looking at.

Skills
I would be interested to know about the problems you’ve had in growing your business. Can you attract the talent you need for your businesses to grow? I’m keen to promote entrepreneurial skills as much as possible. What do we need to do in order to make sure that we have more entrepreneurs in this country? Are entrepreneurs born or made? Can the system – whether it’s the education system, the fiscal system, or whatever – encourage entrepreneurialism in this country?

Entrepreneurs have a certain mindset, but I want the whole workforce to be entrepreneurial in its outlook. You don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs to be enterprising. But does the education system lend itself to having a workforce that’s enterprising? You aren’t going to get people fully formed, and perhaps one of your jobs as entrepreneurs is in adding value and helping your staff make the transition from school, college and university into work-ready people. But what do we need to do to make sure there is a close coordination between what the education system is doing and what the requirements of new and traditional businesses are? I was an education minister for the last 11 months of the Labour government. I didn’t have enough time to do what I wanted, but I was there long enough to observe that government departments operate too much in silos – there is no coordination between BIS and the Department for Education. Now I’ve got this opportunity as chair of the BIS Select Committee, we are pulling together the BIS and the Education Select Committee to produce a coordinated response and ensure there is a real match between the education system, the requirements of business and the skills system.

Digital
What does the digital economy look like? We are seeing a digital revolution – the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Industrial Revolution. I’m excited by disruption and the opportunities that technological innovation can bring, so how do we encourage that? How do we make sure there’s a regulatory environment that’s technologically neutral, but that encourages new entrants who disrupt the traditional market? I’m interested in how traditional sectors adapt? How will they use digital as a means of driving forward productivity and innovation?

Construction is a good example of this. Are British construction companies using Business Information Modelling (BIM) in order to make sure that design, build and whole life costs are analysed properly? Are they taking out inefficiencies and costs through their supply chain in order to make them leaner through digital processes?

Exports
The Secretary of State has said that this is one of his key priorities. He has a target to produce a trillion pounds worth of exports by 2020. While I would like him to achieve it, he is going to miss it hopelessly. But it’s very important that we are outward looking, and that entrepreneurs go out into the world and create wealth for Britain. So what do we need to do? Are UKTI doing enough? Are they responsive enough to new businesses? How do they identify market opportunities? And to what extent do you want the likes of UKTI – and private sector organisations like PwC and not-for-profits like The Entrepreneurs Network – to help you through the process?

Scale Ups
It’s relatively easy to set up a business in Britain, but it’s really difficult to scale up to be a large business, employing large numbers of people, exporting around the world and creating huge amounts of wealth for this country. How do we do that? What are the barriers? Is it cultural? Do we sell out too early? Do we discourage scaling up through the tax system? Why does Silicon Valley produce the Googles and Facebooks of the world? Is it just in Britain where we say I don’t want to be the next Google, I want to sell out to Google? I don’t think that’s appropriate and I think we need to do something about it. It’s an enormous challenge for this country and we will be carrying out an enquiry and producing a report into this issue.

Finance
What’s shocked me since becoming BIS Select Committee chair is that access to finance remains such a big issue. People are increasingly telling me that access to growth capital is really difficult to find. Banks are doing a lot and there is always going to be a place for loan finance, but what needs to happen in terms of venture capital, private equity and non-bank finance? Are we doing enough? Is the ecosystem in this country good enough to make sure that we can scale up and produce these high growth small companies? I recently spoke at an Octopus Investments event and I would really encourage you to look at their report on High Growth Small Businesses, which shows that one of the major challenges is access to finance, particularly around the regions.

The Northern Powerhouse
As an MP representing the northern constituency of Hartlepool, I’m concerned that economic activity is still far too concentrated in London and the South East, and if you’re ambitious, talented and entrepreneurial you might think the only way to succeed is by going to London. It wasn’t like that in the past. Look at the great cities in the North. They’re absolutely fantastic. Leeds is one of them, but we’ve also got Manchester, Newcastle and many more. All of these places were powering economic activity – not just in Britain, but around the world.

I’m interested in your thoughts on what we need to do to make the Northern Powerhouse a reality. What do we need to be doing to make sure the creation of wealth and jobs is across the country? I worry that George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse is just shorthand for Manchester or the M62 growth corridor. What about the North East? What about other parts of North? What do we need to ensure these great cities of the Industrial Revolution drive forward innovate in the digital age?

Iain Wright MP is chair of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee. This article is a transcript of his speech at the PwC/The Entrepreneurs Network Regional Voices event in Leeds, Yorkshire.

Going it alone in the gig economy

Freelancing can be enormously rewarding. The opportunity of working flexible hours, being your own boss and, above all, doing your own thing can be exhilarating and offer a sense of wellbeing that you may not have had from your regular job. Indeed, according to the RSA, 84% of people who are self-employed are more satisfied with their working life than they would have been working for someone else.

But it can be hard. The UK’s 1.6 million freelancers have endless challenges to overcome. On the practical side of things, finding new clients, dealing with tax issues and legal considerations can be a real hassle, while late payments from clients are a constant source of worry. And on the emotional side, freelancers spend huge amounts of time on their own, without the support of colleagues and the conversations around the water cooler that many of us take for granted. 

Running your own business is never going to be easy. Indeed, just gathering the know-how necessary to run a business as a sole trader or limited company without any training takes huge effort. But as the freelance market grows – it has increased in size by 40% since 2000 – support for protecting this segment of the economy is also growing. Given (perhaps slightly optimistic) forecasts by PeoplePerHour.com and others that half of the workforce could be self-employed by 2020, this support could not come soon enough.

Technology has started to make life better for freelancers. The growth in freelancer marketplaces (such as UpWork and 99Designs) has made it easier for freelancers to connect with their clients. ‘Co-working spaces’ now provide affordable office space, people to talk to and access to shared know-how. Freelancer-focused book keeping tools like FreshBooks have helped freelancers navigate the tricky world of accounting. And my own business, Juro, is playing a small part in speeding up freelancer payments.

But there is a role for government too in enabling a more fertile landscape for freelancers.

Think ‘freelancer’ and you probably conjure up an image of a trendy graphic designer operating out of East London, charging £500 a day advising start-ups on their websites. It is important to bear in mind though that not all freelancers are highly skilled or highly paid. The recent job creation miracle that we have experienced in the UK entailed in small part the creation of involuntary self-employment. Indeed, some 210,000 people are in ‘under-employment’ – the phenomenon of part-time workers (many of whom are self-employed) who would prefer to be in full-time employment.

For these vulnerable workers, the Government is doing a good job of stripping back unnecessary regulation, helped by its one-in-two-out policy. There are, however, some more ambitious policy plays here. Encouraging banks to consider future capital gains in mortgage lending would be a game-changer for the self-employed, who often cannot raise the funds necessary to buy their own place. Reforms to national insurance and automatic pension enrolments should be on the table. And considering a more holistic approach to UK employment policy to take account of the full spectrum of our modern workforce would be a welcome step.

That currently only 14% of freelancers think the Government adequately supports them is a fact we can no longer ignore. In the digital economy, freelancing will become as mainstream as regular employment. Government needs to be more proactive in creating an ecosystem for freelancers that will boost our productivity, competitiveness and wellbeing and provide much-needed support for those brave self-starters who decide to go it alone.

Richard Mabey is the CEO of Juro, a start-up that helps freelancers cut down on paperwork and get paid on time.

Why founders need good networks

Barely a week passes without a conference to celebrate entrepreneurs – and quite right too. This week I popped along to Toucan’s The Nest 2016, which counted Brian McBride (chairman, Asos.com), Fanny Moizant (co-founder, Vestiaire Collective) and Alexander Woollcombe (Gates Foundation) among its diverse range of speakers.

I was there for the “Wonderwomen in Business” event, featuring Kathy Harvey of Said Business School and Carolina Bucci, whose eponymous jewellery brand is currently stocked by Harrods and Net-A-Porter – and I wrote up my thoughts for the Huffington Post.

“Some important points were raised. Harvey addressed what the MBA can offer future entrepreneurs. Other panellists discussed the scale-up puzzle: why so few women led businesses reach the same economic scale as their male counterparts. And Harvey mentioned an interesting Insead study, which found women exploit networks differently to men.”

Read my piece in full here.

Do large corporates do more harm than good by donating to the “In” campaign? | Philip Salter argues NO in City AM

The Entrepreneurs Network’s director Philip Salter argued against the idea that Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were wrong to get involved in the EU debate.

“Companies have a single overarching responsibility: to deliver for their shareholders. How they do this will vary buy ativan cod from one company to another.. but some will think it reasonable to back organisations they see as aligned with the interests of their business. This is all well and good in a democratic state.”

Read the article in full here.

Female Founders Forum: Our new group to boost women entrepreneurs

While news that UK businesses raised $3.6bn in VC funding in 2015 is encouraging, it is important to note that women still face far greater difficulties scaling up their businesses than their male counterparts.

As I write the Huffington Post this week, male entrepreneurs in Britain are 86 per cent more likely to be VC funded, and 59 per cent more likely to secure angel investment, than female entrepreneurs.

Which is why we’ve set up our Female Founders Forum – a group of some to he UK’s most inspirational female entrepreneurs, including Kathryn Parsons, Sara Murray, Rita Sharma OBE, Laura Tenison MBE and Julie Meyer MBE.

Find out more about the project here, or read my HuffPo article on the group here.

In conversation with Unruly founder Sarah Wood

ideo ad tech company Unruly hit the big time and the headlines in September when it was sold to News Corp for a reported £114m. The deal will mean up to £68m in proceeds for the company’s co-founders – Scott Button, Matt Cooke, and Sarah Wood.

While the tech startup scene is often dominated by male-led businesses, Sarah says that for the first six or seven how to buy ativan online years in her startup, gender wasn’t even something she considered. She speaks to our programmes director Annabel Denham about balancing her home life with running one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech companies, her role as a London Tech Ambassador, and seizing every opportunity to promote (women’s) entrepreneurship.

Read Annabel’s Huffington Post interview with Sarah here.

The entrepreneur behind a Revolutionary new fintech startup

In his latest Forbes column, The Entrepreneurs Network’s director Philip Salter interviews Nikolay Storonsky – who founded global money app Revolut.

The app, connected to a multi-currency card, has over 55,000 active users and has processed more than $140m, equivalent to $1.3m a day since its launch in July. It has the backing of Venrex, Point9, SeedCamp and Balderton Capital.

Find out more about the ex-Credit Suisse trader and his mission to tackle foreign transaction fees here.

In conversation with the entrepreneur giving kids credit

Alick Varma – Osper founder and member of the Leap 100 – speaks to our programmes director Annabel Denham about his mission to change the world.

In her Huffington Post interview with the inspirational entrepreneur, Annabel writes:

“Investors are showing a growing interest in the double bottom line. As Mishcon de Reya partner Charlotte Davidson points out, ‘Entrepreneurs have to demonstrate not only the financial efficacy of their business model but also the social impact they will deliver’.

“While even social impact businesses do need to be businesses first and foremost… If they fail to deliver on their initial mission, they fail to validate their existence. 

“It could be a tough pill to swallow for the most archetypal profit-driven entrepreneurs: you might have to put bettering the world ahead of making money.”

Read the interview in full here.

Experiences of a female entrepreneur

It’s interesting being asked to talk about “Trailblazing Women: Challenges Facing Female Entrepreneurs,” because for the first six or seven years working at Unruly gender wasn’t something I considered. I wasn’t really aware of the broader context because I was just getting on and building a business.

I had come from a career in academia, where there were lots of successful female lecturers and at school, I was taught by female teachers – including for maths and science. So it never really occurred to me that gender might be an issue. 48 per cent of our team at Unruly are female, including half our senior management and half the board. It was only in 2011, when we were securing a Series A investment round to help us expand and diversify our product, that I realised something was different. Until that point, I had been buried in work, building out the publisher network, building an ad operations team, design team and marketing team. When I resurfaced, I saw that other companies weren’t like ours. And it was only then that I thought gender might be an issue because our team, with a female founder, looked very different from other teams in tech.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time with other female entrepreneurs – who are incredible and hugely inspirational. They recognise how difficult it can be, especially when it comes to funding. It was during our funding round, when we met many venture capitalists, that I realised that, as a female, you are looked at differently, and unconscious biases come into play, but it highlights one of the great things about running your own business: people underestimate you at their peril. So there is a lot of unconscious bias.

Since then, I haven’t let stereotyping affect me. I speak a lot within the advertising industry about gender issues facing women as they move through their careers. In advertising you see so many talented women at the start of their careers, but when they leave to start a family they often don’t come back. There isn’t the flexibility of working buy real ativan online hours, childcare is perceived as being too expensive, there are too few female role models, and there aren’t enough supportive managers.

I always recommend the benefits of getting networked with other women and this has been an important part of my own perdonal journey. Some of my best friends are female entrepreneurs and businesswomen who I respect and learn from – I was lucky enough to meet Divinia Knowles of Pact Coffee back in 2010 at the London Tech COO Roundtable. Edwina Dunn has been a huge inspiration and the brilliant Deborah Wosskow, CEO of Love Home Swap, joined me on a panel just yesterday for City Unrulyversity – a pop-up university for entrepreneurs, which I run with Cass professor Caroline Wiertz. We bring academia and business together to help the next generation of tech entrepreneurs.

Which brings me to another point: people sometimes struggle to grasp my transition from academic to entrepreneur. It’s not the traditional path they expect from a tech entrepreneur. So it turns out I’m the wrong gender and from the wrong profession – but that just goes to show that anyone can help to build a successful tech company if they have the right team around them.

And this would be my message to anyone setting up a business: have a good team around you – both the team without and the team within. Work to make your team as diverse as possible, because then you can connect with as many different people as possible. Diversity is a highly strategic and under-rated business asset. If Scott, myself and Matt were all alike, we wouldn’t have the same impact. When you have a diversity of people, of styles, ages, backgrounds and skills, it makes you more powerful.

Sarah Wood co-founded video ad tech company Unruly in 2006 with Scott Button and Matt Cooke. It has since grown to become one of the world’s most innovative ad tech businesses and in September 2015 was acquired by News Corp. This article is a transcript of her speech at a Leap 100/The Entrepreneurs Network breakfast on 3 December 2015.

Experiences of an impact entrepreneur

When I was 11 years old, my parents sat me down and said: “Alick, we’d like to talk to you about the P&L of your life”. I responded by asking what a “P” and an “L” were. They explained how much money was being brought into the household, how much was being spent on me, and they said they wanted to give me as much responsibility as possible for the money I needed to survive.

Whereas the average teenager gets pocket money of £5.36 a week, I was given £250 a month from the age of 11. With that, I had to buy my own clothes, pay for my own travel; I even bought a new tennis racket. At one point my parents suggested I pay my own school fees! But apparently my bank account had limits which prevented that from happening.

When I arrived at university, I was handed a £3,000 loan – the second largest loan we are given in our lives. Because I had been managing my own money for seven years the first thing I did was get out a piece of paper and write out a budget. It wasn’t until then that I realised no one else had been taught to manage money. Similarly, when I went to work at McKinsey, my colleagues – people who were incredibly intelligent and earning a good salary – had the same problem. I even had analysts offer to buy my Excel spreadsheets, because they’d never set a budget before.

We are living in a world where over 75 per cent of 18-30 year olds say they have made at least one major financial mistake in their lives by the time they reach 30. This is a big problem, worsened by the fact that we have financial systems which benefit from those mistakes.

I realised that the way to help people manage money was to start young, because it’s in childhood that our habits and confidence around money are built. So I started working on the business in 2012 and launched 18 months ago. Our belief then, as it is now, is that the best way to empower young people to manage money is through learning by doing. So we decided to look at a children’s bank accounts and try to rebuild them in a way that is both educational and empowering.

The first bank account we get is often the start of a lifelong banking relationship. It’s probably the longest standing relationship that humans have with an organisation during their lives: I set up an HSBC account when I was 12, and 20 years later I still bank with them. That’s not a reflection on HSBC’s performance, it’s because there’s nothing better out there.

Setting up a first bank account is an opportunity to empower and delight children, but as with a lot of things with banks today, they were missing out on an opportunity. So we built the children’s bank account with our own orange debit card, which parents order online and attach to their own bank accounts. There’s an app for parents and an app for children.

It’s the start of a bigger journey we’re on to transform financial services from the ground up, from a very young age to university and beyond.

Since our June 2014 launch, we’ve grown at around 20-25 per cent every month. We are shipping hundreds of debit cards every day and are set to become one of the largest banks in the UK for children – without actually being a bank. Over 60 per cent of children who use Osper log in every day, which is exciting as it shows how engaged they are with the service.

Interestingly, unlike high street banks which offer a free account, Osper is a service which is paid for. It’s fascinating to see parents sign up to something that costs £1 a month when they could get it for free, but I think they see value in what we’re doing.

In our early stages, we were approached by a couple of social impact funds, which were excited about what we were doing. And we are excited about having a social impact. But our belief at Osper is that the way to achieve a social impact is to start with the individual. If you can get a service that children and adults love and use, and which builds good habits, then that will amplify itself to a social level. At Osper, we think about having social impact by having an effect at the individual level which then scales to the masses, rather than having social impact which is entirely separate to the individual.

People often ask what came first: the bottom line or changing the world. Our starting point was how we empower children around the world to manage money responsibly. With a mission like that, you undoubtedly have social impact. But we then started to identify the business and revenue channels which support that mission. We have the largest breakdown of the spending habits of children, by age, gender and postcode, in the UK. We could collaborate with retailers tomorrow, but that doesn’t fit into why we set up the company. When you’re building a business with a social impact and specific mission in mind, the mission has to come before profit if you’re to get where you want to be in the long term.

Alick Varma was keynote speaker at a Leap 100 Power Breakfast on 1st December 2015.

Meet Jeff Lynn: The disruptive entrepreneur behind crowdfunding platform Seedrs

In her latest Huffington Post column, Entrepreneurs Network programmes director Annabel Denham speaks to the charismatic Seedrs founder Jeff Lynn about Andy Murray, GQ, and why he set up here rather than in sunny Silicon Valley.

“Lynn saw the concept of people putting their personal money behind businesses that interest them as the future of finance. Perhaps such vision is necessary if you’ve made it your mission to shake up the finance industry. Disruption, after all, is all about risk-taking, trusting intuition and rejecting the status quo.

“Crowdfunding can certainly help entrepreneurs raise funds when they need it most. Let’s hope it continues its rise from a niche to the main financier of small businesses. With over 500,000 new companies being started in Britain every year, our entrepreneurs need all the support they can get.”

Read the article in full here.

The rise and rise of crowdfunding

Following on from a Power Breakfast with Seedrs co-founder Jeff Lynn earlier this month, our director Philip Salter has addressed the role crowdfunding plays in creating a society where more people feel the benefits of capitalism.

“The UK arguably has the best regulation in the world around crowdfunding. It’s light clear and the Financial Conduct Authority it known for being open and consultative. Lynn himself can be credited with helping create a decent buy ativan online overnight delivery regulation landscape, after making Seedrs the first regulated crowdfunder.

“Of course, investing directly in companies isn’t a one-way bet and there is nearly as much money to be lost as made. But crowdfunding isn’t just, or even predominantly, about trying to make money: it’s about investing in a person or product that you believe in. It’s an act of faith; the ties that bind people together.”

Read Philip’s article in full here.

Devolution of business rates: A welcome announcement

Philip Salter Director of The Entrepreneurs Network, comments on the devolution of business rates announced in today’s Autumn Statement:

“The Chancellor’s decision to give local councils full control of business rates is a welcome surprise announcement. Devolving rates will stimulate competition between councils and encourage local government to be more responsive to business needs. However, business leaders will need to be better buy brand ativan online engaged with local government to ensure councils are fiscally responsible. For example, city-wide mayors will be given the power to levy a business rates premium for local infrastructure projects, and as such businesses will need to make sure their views are properly voiced through their Local Enterprise Partnership.”

For more information, please contact:

annabel@tenentrepreneurs.org

07919 355290

Osborne’s Autumn Statement: Good News for Entrepreneurs

I felt sorry for Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell when he approached the dispatch box today to respond to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement, our director Philip Salter writes in his latest Forbes column. Many of his planned rebuttals – on tax credits or police spending, for example – were dud.

“But entrepreneurs and business owners in general can breathe easy. Before the Chancellor stood up there were fears that Entrepreneurs’ Relief would be cut. There were also concerns that the Chancellor would try to force contractors and consultants onto payrolls if they work with a company for over a month.

“Instead, bolstered by an unexpected fillip of £27 billion in the underlying forecast, the Chancellor announced a hoard of new spending commitments.”

Read Philip’s article in full here.

Should you prioritise style or substance when pitching your business?

In his most recent Forbes column, our director Philip Salter asks whether style or substance matter more when presenting a business.

According to India Ford, body language expert and director of Talkbodylanguage, investors will be “unconsciously picking up on non-verbal communication,” searching for indications of confidence, credibility and trustworthiness. “These important traits can only be projected through your body language – it’s not what you say, but how you say it that matters,” she explains.

On the other hand, Elena Shalneva, a communications consultant, thinks content drives style. “If you get the message right, then confident and assured delivery will follow,” she tells Salter.

Both have plenty of advice for entrepreneurs preparing for the pitching stage. Read the article in full here.

Experiences of a disruptive entrepreneur

My business partner and I started working on Seedrs in 2009. Our mission then – as it is today – was to build a platform that would make it simple and straightforward for people to invest in businesses they believe in. These were primarily start-up, early-stage, and growth-stage but pre-public companies. At the time there was plenty of access, and plenty of ways to gain access, to public markets. But the private market of investing in growth businesses had traditionally been very opaque, exclusive and clubby, and had changed little since the Victorian era: i.e. groups of rich people getting together and writing cheques. That was the case in 1870 and it was the case in 2005.

We felt that there was a great opportunity to open the process up and make it a democratised asset class. At the same time we wanted to give entrepreneurs a new source of capital, so that they wouldn’t be entirely dependent on the very limited available friends and family or angel money. But we could also use fundraising to drive value for their business by building networks – by providing entrepreneurs with 200 or 300 people with a vested interest in their success. They could then leverage those networks commercially.

But getting to where we are today has been a long and complex process. We were the first regulated equity crowdfunding platform in the world, and being the first regulated business in an industry is not something I would recommend! But we did it. My background as a lawyer has helped – especially with things like nominee structures. But we’ve also tried to create a balance where investors and entrepreneurs get all the benefits of this sort of mass participation, while all of the admin is streamlined through us. For example: if you raise finance through Seedrs, you only face us as a single legal shareholder. You have full interaction with investors but we sign consents.

We’ve funded almost 300 deals to date, having finally launched in July 2012. We’re growing very quickly and are seeing anywhere from £3-£6 million invested every month, which is constantly growing as well. We’re providing great opportunity for a wide range of businesses to seek capital, and for investors to invest in them. These businesses range from the classic Shoreditch, techy, fast-growth, first stage onto VC backing type businesses, but also include consumer products plays, finance plays, retail, and entertainment assets.

As an aside, I want to mention that when we started working on this in 2009, when we started putting out the idea, there were two types of real push back. One was from the lawyers – greatest respect to my brethren here – who said we’d never get regulatory approval. But the other, more fundamental challenge was the suggestion that this was niche: that there was only a handful of startups out there at any given time and that we’d only wind up funding a proportion of them. So fine, people said, we might do 10 or 20 companies a year – but that’s not a business, it’s a hobby.

They based this on statistics around the number of companies receiving VC funding each year. That, they thought, was the entire market of businesses we could invest in, and we’d only be taking a proportion of it. But we rejected this instinctively and on the basis of the data. We knew that one popular view said that there were only two kinds of businesses in the world: the first was super high-growth tech businesses that were shooting for £1 billion plus valuations. Everything else, people thought, was a lifestyle business that would only provide an income for the founder.

But that wasn’t true. There were a wide range of ambitious growth businesses which sat across the spectrum, and we had data to show it. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor is a very comprehensive study put out every year by a consortium of academics across the globe and it surveys entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours in many different countries. From that data, we could extrapolate a number of things.

We looked at what they defined as a growth business, and specifically looked at businesses that were aiming within the next five years to employ 20 people or more. That’s an equity fundable businesses – if it goes from zero to 20+ employees, it has done something of interest. We then asked how many of those were seed and early stage across Europe? And the answer was around 1m. That shows just how vast the entrepreneurial ecosystem is, and that huge numbers of these businesses may not be boom or bust, but instead have a risk/reward profile that can be very interesting to equity investors.

That got us thinking more broadly about the dichotomy between tech and non-tech, and this brings us to the idea of stagnant industries. Around 2009/10, government and others classified businesses into tech and non-tech. But we realised that the distinction didn’t make much sense anymore either. There are very few businesses that do not use technology in a way to drive their growth. And those that do exist may not have much future ahead of them, bar a few service industries. We’re in a world 20 years after the digital revolution where the effective use of software and technology is a core part of the business. People are starting to say that there’s no such thing as a tech business, there’s just a business.

That, I think, is one of the most interesting and powerful ways that the entrepreneurial world is evolving. If we think about the late 90s, the dotcom boom and the emergence of Silicon Valley, there was a niche called a tech company, and then there was the rest of the business world. Now, we’re seeing a spectrum, seeing more opportunities for businesses that don’t think of themselves as classically tech plays to take advantage of all the value creating potential that comes from tech plays. You talk about different types of revenue having different value – the brilliance of software: I can barely turn on my computer, I have no great technical knowledge, thank heavens my co-founder understands all this stuff. But one basic thing I understand is that if you think of a traditional factory, you manufacture a widget, you sell a widget, you make a widget, you sell a widget. With software, you write some code once and you sell it 1,000 times. And that is fantastic. Being able to leverage those economic realities is so powerful for so many businesses that if you can get it right, your ability to grow very substantially – far in excess of the way businesses used to grow in the 20th century growth model – is brilliant.

As a final point: when we started working on Seedrs, a book called The Lean Start-Up by Eric Ries had become really hot. It had a whole lot of thinking around concepts like building a minimum viable product (MVP) for your business and how you do things in a super lean, agile way. You try, you test, you iterate. Now, in the way that techies often do, they co-opted this for themselves. They said it was their way of doing business, and people started thinking about MVPs as something purely for tech products.

What people forgot was that the whole basis for the Lean Start-Up and the whole Lean methodology wasn’t an original thought had by Eric Ries, but rather an adaptation of the Toyota lean models going back to the seventies. It was a set of ideas derived from the most classic, traditional industrial company you can think of, and taking those concepts and adapting them into tech. It comes full circle. Thinking built for the industrial world was brought into the tech world, and now we’re seeing it be repurposed again for the full range of companies. I see businesses across the board, including even Companies House [of which I am a non-executive director], which are focused on lean methodology. It’s fascinating to watch.

It’s been a very interesting and entirely encouraging experience for me these past six years. I walked into a world that seemed very dichotomised between investible/non-investible, growth/lifestyle, tech/non-tech into a world that’s much more fluid and into a world where businesses in such a wide range of industries have been able to take advantage of the techniques and experience the kind of growth that used to be the preserve of only a limited sector.

Jeff Lynn is co-founder of Seedrs. He was keynote speaker at a Mishcon de Reya/Entrepreneurs Network Leap 100 Power Breakfast on 19 November 2015.

Why Britain needs High Growth Small Businesses

In a column for the Huffington Post, programmes director Annabel Denham points out that, more than setting up a company, the ability to scale is where the real value lies.

A new study from our founding supporters Octopus Investments reinforces this analysis. It identifies a group of 22,000 businesses, which have an annual turnover between £1m and £20m, and which achieve more than 20 per cent average turnover growth over a three-year period. Annabel writes:

“The employment figures alone buy ativan overnight delivery should be enough to make the government open its eyes: High Growth Small Businesses last year created one in three new jobs, despite forming less than 1 per cent of the 5.3 million companies in the UK. Almost 20 per cent of economic growth in Britain, measured as an increase in Gross Value Added, was from goods and services produced by HGSBs.”

Read more about the report’s findings here. Read the report in full here.

The UK’s first National Mentoring Day

There is a day to celebrate or commemorate almost everything. In the UK, for example, we have a national bean day, national potato day and national button day.

It’s easy to be cynical about these creative holidays, but today we have one to truly celebrate: Britain’s first National Mentoring Day, put together by Bircham Dyson Bell and the Rockstar Mentoring Group.

The day existing, however, is perhaps less important than what goes on around it. It will see a summit of mentors coming together to learn and celebrate. As The Entrepreneurs Network’s director writes in his Forbes buy ativan australia column:

“Mentoring is by its nature informal, so would benefit from more coordination, both for disseminating best practice and forming connections between mentor and mentee.

“Despite depictions to the contrary on shows like The Apprentice, starting and running a business involves significantly more cooperation than competition. Many of the best businesses are built on friendships with customers, suppliers, fellow entrepreneurs and mentors. I wish it every success and will raise a glass later to those who are helping guide the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

Read the column in full here.

High Growth Small Businesses are vital to our economic growth

In recent years, entrepreneurship policy has shifted its focus from start-ups to scale-ups, writes our director Philip Salter in Forbes.

There is logic to our latest obsession: unlike the US, the UK has a steadily growing stream of start-ups, so it makes sense that policymakers are glancing enviously at Silicon Valley’s giants, wondering when the next Google or Facebook will be created here in Britain. He writes:

“This new focus on scale-ups, gazelles and eventual unicorns seems sensible, but there is a stage between start-ups and scale-ups that I think might be even more important. In High Growth Small Business Report 2015, Octopus Investments identifies High Growth Small Businesses (HGSBs) – companies that are achieving over 20 per cent average annual growth in turnover quotecorner.com/online-pharmacy.html over a three year period, and with an annual turnover between £1m and £20m.”

Based on a survey of 500 HGSBs, the report comes up with a suite of solid policy proposals with the aim of getting 25 per cent more HGSBs within the next five years:

“If this government were to implement just half of the policy suggestions outlined int he report, it would go a long way to achieving its aim of ensuring the UK is the best place in Europe to start and grow a business. I’m going to push for the government to adopt them all though – after all, there is no reason the UK couldn’t be the best.”

Read the column in full here.