Francis Toye

CEO & Founder, Unilink

Francis Toye is the CEO and Founder of The Unilink Group, which employs around 150 staff in five companies in three countries.

Unilink Software is an international software company operating out of the UK. 

In July 2014, Unilink opened an office in Melbourne Australia. They have also recently opened Unilink Software BV in the Netherlands where they have a JV emates.nl and Unilink Software (Norway) to carry out their responsibilities in Norway for Kriminalomsorgen. 

Why do you support the work of The Entrepreneurs Network?  

I worked for almost twenty years in ICI and IBM before setting up on my own and I would like to encourage entrepreneurs to take that step earlier.  Now with over twenty-five years’ experience of founding and growing a business I have valuable knowledge and experience and maybe it can help others to grow their businesses too. I believe I have a valuable story to tell.

What would you recommend entrepreneurs read? 

Read anything you like that is about business, or read nothing, but mostly just get on and do stuff. Make things happen. Make mistakes and learn from them. I don’t read nearly enough but I have a great list of partially read books on my Kindle. If I had to pick one “the soul of a new machine” by Tracy Kidder about the birth of a new computer, but try and get beyond the old computing terms to see the fantastic endeavours of the project team who achieved the impossible. 

Why is the UK an attractive place to grow a business?  

The mechanics of starting a business are relatively easy in the UK compared with many other countries.  I have started businesses in the UK, the Netherlands, Norway and Australia and the UK is the easiest.  It’s easy enough to start a business, recruitment is not too hard and there are plenty of initiatives to helping micro businesses grow.  The biggest challenge is to grow from 50/100 staff to thousands, but that’s another story.