With the discourse shifting in the entrepreneurial sphere from “startup” to “scale-up”, Annabel Denham unveils three policy reforms which The Entrepreneurs Network is pushing for to help turn entrepreneurial activity into high-growth businesses:
1. Allow unquoted shares to be included in an Isa wrapper
2. End the National Insurance Contributions system
3. Scrap the seven-year rule for VCTs and EIS
Read her article in full here.
Drawing on the recommendations from Scale-up UK: Growing Businesses, Growing our Economy, a report from Barclays on the future of UK scale-ups, I’ve outlined three steps the government could take to have real impact, yet which remain largely under-exploited:
2. Working with industry to attract foreign companies and investors to the Alternative Investment Market, which lags far behind the highly-successful Nasdaq;
3. Boosting the marketplace for secondary shares by removing stamp duty on secondary purchases of unlisted shares; including private, unlisted companies in Isas and other tax wrappers; and setting CGT on secondary unlisted shares that align with Entrepreneurs’ Relief at 10 per cent.
Read my article in full here.
Thank you for inviting me to speak on leading with my mission. It was interesting to hear the missions of the entrepreneurs sat around this table. Yet around half aimed to grow a certain amount in a certain timeframe, and this is to misunderstand what a mission is. We all have objectives and goals. A mission is not what you’re trying to do, nor how you’re trying to do it. It’s why.
By way of introduction, Pact Coffee is a coffee delivery service, which operates on a flexible subscription model. We trade directly with some of the best coffee producers across the globe including Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Rwanda and Ethiopia. We import their produce, roast it, and deliver it to our customers.
Three and a half years after launch, we are likely to turn over £10m this year and are growing 10 per cent month-on-month.
Contrary to the romanticised vision of a mission’s origin, I didn’t wake one day and think: “This has been my life’s mission and now I must solve it.” We’d been operating for 12 months by the time I could clearly articulate what our mission is: to Make Coffee A Force For Good. That mission is now written in two-foot high letters on the walls of our offices.
Why? The agricultural coffee industry is one of the largest on the planet. An estimated 100m people are employed as unskilled, migrant, seasonal labourers to pick coffee. And as with all industries of this kind and scale, the opportunity for human rights abuse is vast. Earlier this year, Nestle admitted buying coffee from plantations where slave labour had later been discovered, and that it could not rule out the use of slave labour in their supply chain today as they don’t know which plantations their coffee has come from. Child labour and prison labour are also endemic in the industry.
Specialty coffee like ours requires more skilled labour, smaller farms and an obsessive focus on quality over volume. Which is why we want everyone who drinks commodity coffee – by which I mean any coffee from supermarkets, Nespresso etc – to switch to specialty. Specialty gives growers a fair rate and the price paid for the coffee is linked to its quality, which empowers growers to improve their product.
There are other people in the world with the same business model as us. But I don’t believe they have a clear mission, and I suspect their objectives are all growth orientated.
I learnt a lot about mission from my experiences at my former business Crashpadder, which was sold to AirBnb in 2012. We launched in the same month with almost the same idea, business model, and similar teams with similar backgrounds. Why, when Crashpadder was acquired, were they a £1bn business, while we were 1 per cent of that size? Because they had a clearer mission, whereas I saw an inefficiency in a market and a transaction that would generate a commission, and I sought only to scale those transactions. Their mission was woven into their DNA, which enabled them to raise money, hire visionaries and capture customers’ imagination.
For me, the core value in having a clear mission is that it builds trust – with your team, customers and investors – through transparency.
But coming up with a mission is difficult. You have to ask yourself why you chose to set up your business, and why that business over any other business. I don’t believe that growing tenfold is a mission, but I also don’t think that entrepreneurs on a mission for personal wealth should hide this something woolly or dishonest. Be clear about your mission so you can attract the right people to your business to help you realise it.
The best question I was asked when clarifying my own mission was: “If the business fails, but your mission is realised, will you be happy?” If your business fails but you’re wealthy, you could still be happy. If Pact went under but 10 per cent of the world’s coffee drinkers went specialty, I would be over the moon.
Once you’ve established what you care about above all else, you can ask what should be changed, built or fixed. Only then can you craft your mission statement. It might take a day, a week, or a month. I’m a sole founder; to me the mission statement was very personal. I came up with the core – the things I wasn’t prepared to flex. Next, I took this to my management team and got their input on the rest. Finally the whole team was able to engage, challenge and input. It may sound like a tedious process, but it led to some interesting conversations – for instance over the difference between “joy” and “happiness”. In our case, coming up with a mission statement took 10 weeks.
Stephen Rapoport founded hand roasted coffee delivery service Pact Coffee in 2012. This article is a transcript of his speech at a Leap 100/The Entrepreneurs Network breakfast on 11 May 2016.
In my latest Huffington Post column, I have the pleasure of interviewing Nancy Cruickshank, the effervescent serial entrepreneur whose latest venture, MyShowcase.com, is transforming the beauty industry.
Her personalised online beauty shopping service helps female entrepreneurs expand their beauty businesses; offers customers access to thousands of stylists and products; and gives over 40 different beauty brands access to a new market.
When she’s not working on her third venture, she finds time to champion women entrepreneurs (not least through her involvement in our Female Founders Forum), extoll the virtues of the sharing economy, and spend time with her family of four.
Read my interview in full here.
To mark the launch of The Entrepreneurs Network’s newest paper, Regional Voices: Yorkshire, Annabel Denham outlines in the Yorkshire Post why the Northern Powerhouse initiative must include the whole region, rather than just Manchester.
“At a recent roundtable hosted at PwC and chaired by BIS Select Committee chairman Iain Wright MP, Yorkshire entrepreneurs expressed fears that cities like Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford and Hull were being overlooked in favour of their neighbours west of the Pennines.
“With the North dreaming big again, as long as efforts are diversified away from Manchester and the skills gap is narrowed, we could still make those dreams a reality.”
Read the article in full here.
This week, I caught up with Emma Sinclair – serial entrepreneur, Unicef Business Ambassador and the youngest person to IPO on the London Stock Exchange.
Emma left a successful career at Rothschild to found Mission Capital, which she floated aged 29. Since, she has built two more businesses – Target Parking and EnterpriseJungle.
She has never let her age act as a barrier to her success, and she dismisses claims order ativan online canada that female entrepreneurs aren’t taken as seriously as their male counterparts. Nonetheless, she spends much of her free time championing entrepreneurship across the globe and giving back to the entrepreneurial community.
“I’m happy to do it: I love each and every interesting person, venture and event I cross paths with. I never tire of hearing their stories and experiences.”
Read my interview with Emma in full here.
In an interview with The Seed & EIS Hour, Philip Salter, director of The Entrepreneurs Network, explains why women-led businesses often struggle to reach the same economic scale as those run by men; why the Chancellor’s 2016 Budget was broadly good for entrepreneurs; and why, if there was one thing the UK government buy ativan cheap could do to support entrepreneurs, it would be to reform the Entrepreneurs Visa to attract more foreigners to set up businesses here in Britain.
Many entrepreneurs have set their sights on expanding overseas, but may not know where to start. And, as our director Philip Salter points out in Virgin StartUp, getting advice can be tricky – which is why we’ve partnered with UKTI on its Exporting is GREAT initiative.
“It has been calculated that poor professional advice from third parties and consultants has resulted in one in six small firms losing money in the last year, at a total cost of £6.4bn.”
So where should internationally ambitious entrepreneurs turn to for advice? Read Philip’s article in full here.
In response this week’s Budget, I’ve made the case for integrating employers’ national insurance, income tax and employees’ NI.
“Complexity has long been a feature of taxation in Britain, and nowhere is this more manifest than in the National Insurance regime. Constant tinkering over the last 70 years has left it unrecognisable and has reduced the likelihood of the electorate appreciating (i) what their total tax burden is; and (ii) the size of any increase.
“But what makes the NICs regime especially opaque is the employers’ part of national insurance, not least because the incidence falls squarely on employees.”
This is not to say employers are unburdened – studies have shown that administration alone imposes a significant cost on businesses and disproportionately affects smaller companies:
“SMEs are vital to the UK economy. Cutting costs creates an incentive for them to use their resources more efficiently and to transfer them into more production or more hiring. Further tweaking is not enough.”
Read my Huffington Post column in full here.
I joined Suella Fernandes MP, Dr Andrew Lilico, Tim Loughton MP and others to give my views on the Chancellor’s 2016 Budget.
“After the burdens to business of a National Living Wage, tax on share dividends, and auto-enrolment on pensions, entrepreneurs were looking for some compensation from the Chancellor in this Budget. On the face of it, Osborne has delivered.”
Read my ConservativeHome comment in full here.
Our supporting founder Octopus Investments has identified some of the best places in the country to scale a business.
Its Urban Hub League Table 2016 is based on what the teams behind 22,470 High Growth Small Businesses thought were most important to them when building and growing their companies: finance, talent and connectivity.
As Philip Salter writes in Forbes this week:
“London’s dominance isn’t a shock, but Reading and Milton Keynes are (arguably) surprising additions to the top ten. And Scotland does itself credit with both Edinburgh and Glasgow making the top ten.
Read Philip’s analysis of the findings in full here.
Commenting on today’s Budget, Entrepreneurs Network director Philip Salter said:
“Cuts to growth forecasts may not have been what George Osborne and the country at large wanted, but for entrepreneurs, this was a solid Budget. Reducing corporation tax to 17% by 2020 sends the right signal that Britain is the best place in Europe to build a business, as does the cut to capital gains tax from the higher rate of 28% to 20% and the basic rate from 18% to 10%.
“Abolishing Class 2 National Insurance for 3.4 million self-employed people will act as a fillip for the self employed. But Osborne should have also tackled National Insurance by rolling both employees’ and employers’ NI into income tax. After all, the incidence falls on employees, and the burden falls on those businesses forced to manage the growing bureaucracy of exemptions.
“Perhaps the biggest surprise for entrepreneurs and investors was the extension of Entrepreneurs’ Relief to include long term investors in unlisted companies. This should help drive more risk capital into fast-growing companies.
“The cuts to business rates will be celebrated by many in the small business community, but it should be remembered that most economists calculate that the incidence of this tax actually falls on landowners. However, reform to Stamp Duty Land Tax on non-residential property transactions, which the government predicts will see a cut in tax for many small businesses purchasing property, is to be welcomed. Stamp duties are always and everywhere inefficient taxes.”
In my latest Huffington Post column, I catch up with Love Home Swap founder and FFF member Debbie Wosskow about chutzpah, lie ins, and Hollywood romcoms.
Back in 2011, and inspired by mushy Christmas movie The Holiday, Wosskow founded a home-swap business that has now grown to over 100,000 members and 60 staff buy ativan canadaworldwide.
Equally as interesting as Wosskow’s entrepreneurial flair is her view on female entrepreneurship. “Women need a thick skin,” she tells me. “It’s easier for people to tell you all the things that are wrong with your business than all that are right.”
Read the interview in full here.
You would struggle to find a British statesman who can match the stateliness of Lord Bilimoria, Entrepreneurs Network director writes in his latest Forbes column.
The distinguished entrepreneur is not only founder of Cobra Beer, but also founding chairman of the UK-India Business Council, chancellor of the University of Birmingham and chairman of the advisory buy ativan online cheap board at Cambridge Judge’s Business School.
Philip tapped his brain on Britain’s business relationship with India, and what the UK can learn from the way business is done in the former colony.
Read the interview in full here.
In a column for the Huffington Post, I’ve asked whether small business outcry over changes to Sunday Trading Laws is justified. From Autumn 2016, prohibitions limiting large stores (with a floor space of over 3,000 sq ft) from opening on Sundays for more than six hours will be lifted – an announcement which has led to claims that this will only see more trade moving to larger stores at the expense of smaller shops.
Yet the evidence (research, polls and local borough reports), does not suggest that small businesses will suffer from their larger rivals opening for longer. A fifth of consumers have said they would do more shopping on a Sunday were the changes implemented, meaning more customers for everyone.
And rather than wishing the competition be banned from trading, small business owners – many of whom are disruptive by nature – should view this proposal as an opportunity to find new ways to innovate and outsmart their larger rivals.
Read the article in full here.
In the latest in a series of FFF interviews for the Huffington Post, I catch up with Tamara Lohan – one half of the duo behind Mr and Mrs Smith hotels.
Unlike many entrepreneurs, who sold lemonade at kindergarten and grew up wanting to be the next Bill Gates, Lohan took a more opportunistic approach to her career. It saw her launch an energy drink in Brazil, consult Ericsson and Swissair on their branding strategies and, at one point, run a dating agency.
In 2002, she co-founded Mr and Mrs Smith with her husband James. Since then, the business has grown into an award-winning booking service and worldwide travel club.
Read the interview in full here.
For entrepreneurs considering applying to an accelerator programme, what better than to hear from founders who have been there, done that.
In his most recent Forbes column, Entrepreneurs Network director Philip Salter speaks to three entrepreneurs who’ve gone through Telefonica’s Wayra retail accelerator in London. Chris McCullogh (co-founder, RotaGeek), Imogen Wethered (co-founder, Qudini) and Ben Brown (founder, Shopwave).
McCullogh went through Wayra in 2014 and says the experience with helping him transform his business. Wethered credits Wayra with helping Qudini generate long-lasting relationship and a network that opened up new opportunities. For Brown, Wayra was not his first accelerator: he previously went through Seedcamp with VouChaCha, which he exited to Monetise.
Read the article in full here.
From Economic Value Added to stand up meetings, economist Anthony J Evans makes the case to our director, Philip Salter, for entrepreneurs getting a grasp on economics.
“We tend to think of economics as being a way to understand the economy, but it is really a way to understand markets. It is the basis upon which we understand hidden costs and what constitutes value in the minds of our customers.”
“So it helps us to make internal choices about the best use of our resources, but also the prices that are generated by market exchange provides valuable feedback on the wider industry,” the economist says.
Read Philip’s interview with Professor Evans in full on Forbes here.
For the first in a series of interviews with the inspirational members of our Female Founders Forum, I caught up with JoJo Maman Bébé founder Laura Tenison MBE.
Tenison may have the drive and tenacity typical of many entrepreneurs, but her business still remains in the unemployment-ridden dock town in South Wales where she grew up. She is on a mission to help regenerate local high streets, and for her, success goes hand-in-hand with social good. And she has little sympathy for those founders who think entrepreneurship should be easy.
“‘I worked three jobs when I started JoJo,’ she says. ‘I slept on the floor of my flat and rented out my bedroom. Entrepreneurship is hard. But I feel those entrepreneurs who are really challenged in the early years are those who achieve longevity. They’re the ones who know how to solve problems.'”
Read the article in full here.
There’s more to SwiftKey’s sale to Microsoft than the decision by an ex-founder to cash in his stake in 2008 to purchase a bicycle. Octopus Ventures invested in SwiftKey from seed through to Series B. In his latest buy ativan visa Forbes column, our director Philip Salter catches up with Jo Oliver, member of Octopus Ventures and a non-executive director at SwiftKey.
Read his interview in full here.
