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Fixing UK Plc

Contributors

Catherine Baker is the founder and director of Sport and Beyond, which applies techniques proven in sport to the business world. She is the author of Staying the Distance, vice-chair of the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust and chair of the consultancy O Shaped.

Tom Beahon co-founded Castore with his younger brother Phil in 2015 after failing to become a professional footballer. He has since built the sportswear brand, which is based in Manchester, into a company that is now worth almost £1bn.

Szu Ping Chan is economics editor at The Telegraph. A journalist for almost 20 years, she has previously written about economics, finance and business at the BBC and The Motley Fool. She is an expert on the UK economy and its impact on businesses.

Jake Humphrey is co-host of the High Performance podcast, which explores the stories and secrets behind successful athletes, coaches and business leaders. He co-founded the TV production company Whisper and was previously a TV presenter.

Caspar Lee rose to prominence with his popular YouTube channel, which had more than 6 million subscribers. He has used that experience to start several companies including influencer marketing platform Influencer, and the investment fund Creator Ventures.

Ed Smith is a former professional cricketer who was national selector for the England men’s team from 2018 to 2021. He is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities. He is a prominent thinker on decision-making, sport and leadership, as well as an author.

Steven Swinford joined The Times as deputy political editor in 2019, becoming political editor in 2021. He has previously worked at The Daily Telegraph and been shortlisted for political reporter of the year at the National Press Awards three times.

EDITORIAL

Editor-in-chief

Graham Ruddick

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Sarah Vizard

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Josh Dornbrack

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Dougal Shaw

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Mark Shillam

Sub-editor

Jayne Nelson Design

Gio Isnenghi

Colm McDermott

Jochen Viegener

Cover illustration

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© 2025 Business Leader is published by Business Leader Limited. Registered in England & Wales. Company no 08070514.

Business Leader has taken every care to make sure that content is accurate on the date of publication. The views expressed in the articles reflect the author’s opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or editor. This commentary is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice

Editor’s letter

How do we fix UK plc? That’s the question we have posed on the front page of this edition of Business Leader. It’s a question that is vexing politicians, investors and economists as they try to figure out how to grow the UK economy.

The question is being asked because the economy grew by just 0.9 per cent in 2024 and it will be little better in future years, according to official forecasts. For context, the US economy grew by 2.8 per cent in 2024. If the economic environment feels even worse to you than that, well, that’s because it is. On a per-head basis the economy shrunk by 0.1 per cent in 2024. In other words, each person’s share of the economy is getting smaller.

The challenge is not a lack of ideas, talent or even businesses. The UK has some of the best universities in the world and only the US and China attract more venture capital investment into start-ups. By any sensible measure the UK is a great place to start a business.

But it is not good at turning promising businesses into large companies. Fewer than one in 20 medium-sized businesses go on to become large companies. Businesses in the US and Europe are more efficient at going from medium to large, or, to put it another way, going from good to great.

You can see this problem in the debate about the future of the London stock market and concerns in the City about the lack of companies looking to float. While we may bemoan Unilever choosing to float its ice cream business in the Netherlands rather than London, the underlying problem is that there are just not enough promising UK businesses looking to list on the stock market.

Through this issue of the magazine and our inaugural Business Leader Summit we have tried to answer the question I posed up top. We have spoken to those who have done it – the founders of some of this country’s biggest businesses – as well as those who have made it to the top in other fields, like sport, and experts in politics, economics and leadership.

If I was to make a sweeping conclusion from what we have learnt, it would be this: instead of wallowing in problems and weaknesses, the route to success lies in focusing on our strengths, doubling down on them and then getting out of their way. Brilliance finds a way through persistence, relentlessness and resilience, which Will Shu, the co-founder of Deliveroo, says is his superpower.

In this column I like to include a nugget of wisdom from a successful leader. So, I will finish with this piece of advice from Barack Obama, the former US president, which feels relevant to the debate about UK plc:

“Just learn how to get stuff done. I’ve seen at every level people who are very good at describing problems, people who are very sophisticated in explaining why something went wrong or why something can’t be fixed. But what I’m always looking for is no matter how small the problem or how big it is, somebody who says: ‘Let me take care of that.’”

I hope you enjoy this issue of Business Leader and thank you for your continued support. Please, as ever, get in touch with your feedback and ideas at graham.ruddick@businessleader.co.uk.

Editor-in-chief Graham Ruddick

Past Perspectives

Forward thinkers

Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates (left) and Paul Allen in 1984

Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen first met at school in the late 1960s. The two, who were teenagers at the time, both attended Seattle’s Lakeside School where a love of computers brought them together.

In the early 1970s they – along with Paul Gilbert – founded a company called Traf-O-Data, which read the data from traffic counters and created reports for engineers to use. It wasn’t particularly successful, but it gave the pair an early taste of what it would be like to go into business together.

In 1975, 50 years ago, they founded Microsoft, short for “micro-computer software”. The inspiration for the business came from Popular Electronics magazine, which featured details of one of the first personal computers, the Altair 8800. Gates and Allen were convinced these would one day be in everyone’s homes.

They proved to be right. By the time this photo was taken in 1984, Microsoft was well on the way to dominating the PC market, first with its MS-DOS operating system and then with Windows. In 2025, as Microsoft celebrates its 50th anniversary, it is one of the biggest companies in the world, employing almost 230,000 people and generating revenues of more than $250bn (£200bn) a year.

However, Gates and Allen worked together at the company for less than 10 years. Gates held the CEO role from its founding until 2000, staying on as chairman until 2014 and technology adviser until 2020. But Allen quit working at the company day to day in 1983 amid a strained relationship with Gates and after a diagnosis of Hodgkin lymphoma, although he stayed on the board as vice-chairman. Allen died in 2018.

Toy town

Husband and wife team Ruth and Elliot Handler, who founded Mattel

Husband-and-wife team Ruth and Elliot Handler founded Mattel Creations alongside businessman Harold “Matt” Mason in January 1945, 80 years ago, in a garage in Los Angeles. Despite its most famous creation being a female doll, the company is named after the two men who started it. Mattel began life selling picture frames and, later, dollhouse furniture made from scraps of the frames. A move into toys catapulted both Mattel and the Handlers into the cultural psyche. Its first successful toy was the Uke-ADoodle, released in 1947, and the company developed several other toys, many of which are on display in the picture below, taken at their offices on August 2, 1951.

It was the Barbie doll, launched on March 9, 1959, that sent Mattel stratospheric. At the time, most dolls were babies or young children but Ruth believed there was space in the market for adult dolls. The first Barbie wore a blackand-white zebra-striped swimsuit, had a topknot ponytail

and was available as a blonde or a brunette. Some 350,000 were sold in the first year. A rare first edition went on display at the Design Museum in London in 2024 (picture right).

Since that first doll, Barbies wearing a variety of outfits and with a range of accessories have been released. She may have started out as a teenage fashion model, but she has since appeared as an astronaut, vet, doctor, presidential candidate, baseball player, scuba diver and engineer. As The Economist said in 2002: “By creating a doll with adult features, Mattel enabled girls to become anything they want.”

More than 1 billion Barbie dolls have been sold and the brand generated $1.54bn (£1.20bn) in gross sales in 2023.

The Handlers, however, would not be there to witness all this success first-hand. They were forced to resign from Mattel in 1975 over fraud charges, with Ruth finally selling her stock and fully stepping away from the company she founded in 1980. Ruth died in 2002 and Elliot in 2011.

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business stories

Fixing UK Plc

Labour drops the doom and gloom for Trumpian positivity

By Steven Swinford, political editor of The Times

Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have changed their approach as they hunt for growth. What does it mean?

New year, new message

Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the government would go “further and faster” on growth in a recent speech at Siemens Healthineers at Eynsham, Oxford

As transformations go it is little short of extraordinary. Rachel Reeves spent her first six months in office warning about the dire state of the public finances, the £22bn black hole and the difficult decisions she needed to make.

Those decisions came quick and fast – scrapping winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners, hitting businesses with a £24bn rise in national insurance and imposing inheritance tax on agricultural land. But since the turn of the year the chancellor has taken a strikingly different approach.

Gone are the warnings of doom and gloom. Almost overnight, Reeves has returned to the theme that helped win Labour the election: economic growth.

Britain, she argues, must learn from the positivity of US president Donald Trump and unleash the animal spirits. “I’m trying to channel my inner American and be more positive about things,” she said.

The new approach comes with a tacit admission that Labour got it wrong. On coming into office, the party pursued the political playbook used by George Osborne and David Cameron in 2010, taking the hard and unpopular decisions first with plans to proffer hope and optimism by the time of the election.

But as Sir Keir Starmer told the Cabinet recently, politics is moving faster than ever –and with it, people’s judgements. Labour’s collapse in the opinion polls since July eclipses anything on record. Notions of a political honeymoon are dead.

Worse, there is evidence that the rhetoric from Starmer and Reeves has had a direct impact on both consumer and business confidence. A poll by YouGov found that many voters appear to have taken their early messaging to heart.

Seven in 10 people said they do not think the economy will improve this year, with voters just as pessimistic about their own household finances. Just over half of voters – 52 per cent – think Reeves is doing a bad job while only 13 per cent say she’s doing well.

Labour faces the prospect of being eaten on all sides. There is evidence that Reform UK has already taken a sizeable chunk out of its support – around 10 per cent – while there is a growing threat from the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and independents. The only sliver of hope is that as bad as the polls are for Labour, they are worse for the Tories.

Meanwhile, Britain’s businesses are in a near permanent state of revolt over the national insurance rise and the increase in the minimum wage. Barely a day goes by without a household name going public to criticise the government.

Their argument – that Labour’s jobs tax is hindering growth and will lead to job losses – is backed by official forecasts. Labour came into office saying growth was its number one mission. Yet the tax rises have produced an anaemic set of forecasts that are only looking worse with time.

The chancellor and her advisers decided in December that a change in course was needed and she went public with her relaunch in January. The contrast with the Reeves that entered No 11 is stark.

In her earlier interviews, a veritable wall came down as soon as the cameras rolled. While in private Reeves can be personable and self-deprecating, any sense of that was lost in the early stages of her chancellorship. However, she

is now in permanent selling mode, publicly banging the drum for Britain and talking about how strong the UK’s prospects are with every opportunity she gets. She is also happy to reveal more about herself, such as the fact she takes a packed lunch to work.

However, the challenge is that for all the newfound optimism and bonhomie, Reeves’ initial diagnosis was not wrong. The public finances are in dire straits and the chancellor is hemmed in by the “iron-clad” fiscal rules she chose.

There is now a near-universal expectation that the Office for Budget Responsibility will wipe out what little headroom Reeves has for her spring statement on March 26, forcing her to announce deeper cuts to public spending plans over the course of this parliament.

Given that the NHS and defence are protected, there will have to be significant cuts elsewhere. These will be confirmed in the government spending review in June. The Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government are currently going through the grim process of modelling huge year-on-year cuts to their budgets.

Reeves has insisted she does not want to raise taxes but has not ruled out doing so. Economists believe that further tax rises in the autumn Budget are likely, with an extension of the current freeze on income tax thresholds beyond 2028 – known as a stealth tax – viewed as a likely option.

In the short term, the squeeze on public spending is likely to feed into public sector pay disputes. The government’s initial offer of a 2.8 per cent increase in pay for teachers, nurses and other public sector workers led to immediate threats of industrial action. Ministers say that around 4 per cent is likely to be the “ceiling” of the government’s pay offer, but unions – emboldened by last year’s generous settlements – are pushing for more.

The fiscal constraints also have repercussions for defence spending. Starmer has pledged to increase spending on defence from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent but has yet to set a timeline for hitting the target. Senior government figures say that hitting it by 2030 – as the Tories pledged – is impossible, which could have geo-political consequences given Trump’s insistence that Nato allies should increase defence spending to 5 per cent.

But the concerns go far deeper. Most of the spending restraint is likely to be backdated to the end of this parliament. It raises the prospect that Starmer could head towards the general election having to make swingeing cuts to public spending to meet fiscal rules.

The response from both Reeves and Starmer to concerns about Britain’s anaemic growth is to insist that they can defy the forecasts, that their policies will turn the economy around, that Britain’s path is not set in stone.

However, the challenge for Labour is that Britain’s future is not entirely in their hands. Global factors – Trump and tariffs, Ukraine, Iran and China – arguably have a far more significant bearing on Britain’s future.

If Starmer and Reeves want to deliver on their promise to leave people feeling better off by the end of this parliament, they will need both the right policies and no small degree of good fortune.

Businesses must push to get young into workforce

By Szu Ping Chan, economics editor of The Telegraph

More young people are failing to join the workforce, which is a problem. What can business and government do?

On the job

Work and pensions

secretary Liz Kendall with MP for Peterborough Andrew Pakes (left) during a visit to Peterborough College to attend an apprenticeship showcase

“We know that delays entering the world of work can permanently damage someone’s earnings and employment potential

The world of work has changed so much since I landed my first job more than two decades ago. But a recent conversation I had with my other half’s younger brother made me realise just how old I am.

He may be an “old” Gen Z, but he has never wanted a 9-5 job. He makes his living from his bedroom, working with people around the world. He dabbles in cryptocurrencies. Most of his money is in a wallet you can’t put in your pocket. And he bought my son a non-fungible token for his birthday. As someone who trudges into the office every day and still pays for some things with cash, I remember feeling like a fossil.

In many ways young people today are more entrepreneurial than ever. But there is also an alarming trend among the next generation that we ignore at our peril.

I’m not talking about youth unemployment. The number of 18- to 24-year-olds out of work has fallen since its postfinancial crisis peak. In 2011, roughly one in five was unemployed. That’s now one in eight, or around 12 per cent.

What’s more concerning is that a growing share of Britain’s youth is not convinced that work is worth it at all. The number neither in work nor looking for a job has been on the rise since the pandemic.

Close to 1 million young people aged between 16 and 24 are now not working, studying or learning on the job, representing a rise of around 250,000 compared with three years ago. The increase has been driven almost entirely by men.

I have written in Business Leader before about why tackling economic inactivity is one of Britain’s biggest challenges. But getting more young people into work is even more important.

One in seven young men and one in nine young women are now classed as not in employment, education or training. The full reasons behind who and why are for another day, but it’s clear that poor health is an increasing factor.

Young people have seen the sharpest rise in post-lockdown rates of inactivity among different age groups. It’s not the so-called “great retirement” (where the older generation is leaving the workforce) we should be worried about, but the failure of a growing number to launch their careers.

We know that delays entering the world of work can permanently damage someone’s earnings and employment potential. Those held back by ill health are also less likely to go on to further education.

Research by the Resolution Foundation think tank found that four-fifths of young people who are workless owing to ill health have only GCSE-level qualifications or below, compared to a third of all 18- to 24-year-olds. It warns that this means young people who are not in work due to ill health are doubly disadvantaged.

It’s not just school leavers who are struggling. An increasing number of college and university students

are graduating onto the dole queue. Analysis by Boston Consulting Group found that students are now one of the biggest contributors to the increase in long-term sickness. In 2021-22, more than 60,000 people aged between 16 and 24 went straight from being economically inactive because they were studying to being inactive through longterm sickness. These numbers are up from just over 35,000 before the pandemic.

Why does this matter? The Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s tax and spending watchdog, has warned that the longer somebody spends out of work, the harder it is to get back in. It estimates that among those with health problems, an average of one in six returns to work each quarter in the first year after leaving, whereas only one in 20 does when they have been out of work a year or longer. Reversing this trend will be like swimming against an increasingly strong tide.

And what about those who never joined in the first place? This government is devoting a lot of time to talking about a back-to-work drive. The latest whitepaper from the Labour government is titled Get Britain Working, with one of its main areas of focus delivering a youth guarantee that aims to give every young person access to education or training to help them find a job. But I believe that it must start much earlier than this. I’d start in the classroom. Some of the post-Covid school attendance figures are staggering. There are now more than 1.5 million children –representing 20 per cent of those in state or special schools – who are classed as “persistently absent”, meaning they are skipping the equivalent of every other Friday or one afternoon each week. This has grown by 68 per cent since the country was in lockdown.

Even more striking is the fact that around 150,000 children miss lessons more often than they attend. More than 2 per cent of children are classed as “severely absent”, defined as missing the equivalent of every morning of school. This number has more than doubled since the pandemic started in 2020. Kids who don’t show up in the classroom are less likely to show up for work as adults.

There also needs to be a clear path to a job for those who don’t necessarily want to go to university. Today’s apprenticeship scheme is not fit for purpose and, in the worst cases, incentivises MBAs over real training on the job. Many small and medium-sized firms will be the ones that give young people their first shot. The government must not make this harder by introducing workers’ rights reforms that punish them for taking a chance on someone who is inexperienced.

Young people today want the same things as their predecessors: a chance to get on in life and move up in the world. Politicians must break down barriers, not put them up, if they really want to give young people a helping hand.

Success takes sacrifices

By Tom Beahon, co-founder and chief executive of Castore

Building a large company is not about business theory or even good ideas. Do you really have the passion to do it?

Work ethic

We can learn from the dedication of sports stars such as Tiger Woods, left, celebrating after holing a putt

“The cold reality is that creating something from nothing is incredibly hard, as the failure rate of start-ups attests

Much has been written about entrepreneurship. But trying to develop academic theory on a subject that is anything but academic is difficult to the point of futile.

While there are undoubtedly lessons that can be learnt and applied across different businesses and sectors, no two businesses and certainly no two entrepreneurs are alike, so self-help manuals have severe limitations.

Some things in life can only be learnt through experience – and entrepreneurship is one such thing. Having said that, let me tell you what I have learnt from building a business from scratch to £250m of annual revenues that might be of use to any entrepreneur.

While the complexity of building a business cannot be distilled into any single or simple idea, I do think there is one question that encapsulates what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur. It’s a question that often confuses people with its simplicity: how badly do you want it?

The cold reality is that creating something from nothing is incredibly hard, as the failure rate of start-ups attests. It is only an immense, relentless, often maniacal passion and energy that make it work.

You must want to be successful so badly, so deeply and so ferociously that you are willing to do whatever it takes. Those words are very easy to say but much harder to live by every day for years, especially when you may not be seeing results. As an entrepreneur, this mindset becomes deeply embedded in you, and it is this more than intellect or academic excellence (helpful though they undoubtedly are) that sets the successful apart from the rest.

Speaking from personal experience, sleepless nights, cancelled holidays and an almost constant state of paranoia and anxiety are all par for the course when building your business. If you can’t deal with the intense emotional pressure, entrepreneurship isn’t for you – no matter how good an idea you may have.

As all real entrepreneurs know (not the armchair variety who specialise in strategising but rarely have skin in the game), it’s so easy to get lost in the tidal wave of advice that comes your way when starting and growing a business.

Should you position yourself as a premium brand or mass market, focus on the wholesale channel or direct-to-consumer, prioritise domestic markets or think internationally from day one? While analysis is important and research is

valuable, I see far more entrepreneurs make the mistake of not acting quickly enough than those I see move too quickly and not analyse enough.

It is well documented that the US has a very different attitude to entrepreneurship and risk-taking than the UK does. They are far more supportive of a move-fast-andbreak-things or get-big-fast approach than us Brits, so it’s no accident that many of the world’s best and most dynamic companies are built in that market.

There is a motivational speaker in the US called Eric Thomas. His speaking style won’t be to everybody’s taste, but I would highly recommend checking him out on YouTube. He tells one story in particular about an elderly mentor wanting to teach an important life lesson to a young man in his charge.

Instead of taking the man to a classroom, he takes him out to the ocean and proceeds to hold the unsuspecting tutee’s head under the water until he is thrashing around furiously to be freed. After more than 45 seconds, the old mentor releases the young man and after a period of panic, once his breathing returns to normal, the old man calmly states, “Only when you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe, will you be successful.”

While this story is clearly an extreme example and better left as an ancient parable rather than anything for the modern world, the core lesson it imparts is still a valid one. A burning, intense desire for success is a prerequisite as a founder.

In sport, we lionise great athletes for their work ethic and tunnel-vision commitment to their craft. We celebrate Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods for putting more hours into practice than their competitors.

For reasons unknown to me, we don’t seem to apply the same standard in the business world. Instead, we talk about maintaining work/life balance and avoiding burnout, criticising anyone who shows athlete-level commitment for championing “hustle culture”.

But just as athletes need to be willing to sacrifice more than their opponents in pursuit of victory, entrepreneurs must do the same, no matter how much society may tell them otherwise. The life of an entrepreneur is a truly great one – but it’s only for those who truly understand the costs that come with it and are willing to pay that price.

Founder plc

Britain is desperately searching for ways to stimulate economic growth. The answer may lie within exceptional founders rather than any government policy

By Graham Ruddick

Let me introduce you to the founder of a UK business. A year or so after starting, he was putting together a document describing what the business was about and why people should join the team. But his advisers were uncomfortable. “You shouldn’t say this stuff,” he was told. “It’s not going to attract a lot of people.” The founder wanted staff who were ambitious, were relentless with high standards, were obsessed with the consumer and weren’t afraid to speak up if they disagreed. “This stuff sounds a little harsh,” he was told. “We need to have a message that appeals to more people.”

So the founder relented. The advice seemed to make sense – didn’t he need as many people as possible to apply

for jobs? Plus, these advisers were the experts, what did he know really?

But he now realises this was wrong. “You need to understand the type of person you want and filter for that,” he says. “You want someone to be excited when they join and not like: ‘Oh, I was expecting something totally different.’”

The founder is telling this story 10 years later as an example of what he would have done differently. There’s not much on that list, because he’s built a multi-billion-pound business. The founder is Will Shu, who started Deliveroo in 2013. The online delivery service is now valued at more than £2bn on the stock market and is one of the most successful new businesses in the UK this century.

“I think I could have had more confidence in my own decisions,” Shu says. “You start the business, it’s going well and then you hire these people who worked at XYZ company. Surely they know what they’re doing? Because I don’t know what I’m doing.

“You realise over time that actually, you, the founder, do know what you’re doing. Maybe not all the time, but certainly better than other people who might have a great CV. I think building that confidence in yourself earlier is probably important. For me, it was just a recognition that a lot of my instincts were probably correct.”

Shu is an unlikely figure to be at the forefront of UK plc. He was born in Connecticut in the United States and arrived in the UK to work as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He founded Deliveroo with childhood friend Greg Orlowski, who provided the coding expertise for the app. Shu created the business because he couldn’t believe how poor the takeaway food options were in London at night. Deliveroo was almost called Boozefood.

Since launching, Shu and Deliveroo have clashed with the establishment at times. This includes a debate about the

labour rights of Deliveroo’s delivery riders, a competition investigation about Amazon buying a stake and criticism from fund managers and City analysts over the valuation of its stock market flotation in 2021, which saw Shu get special shares that allowed him to keep control of the business even though he owned less than half of it.

But Shu’s unlikely journey to the top of British businesses is at the heart of Deliveroo. In this age of data and analysis, it is difficult to quantify the impact and influence of one person on a business, of the founder. Apart from the most obvious way, that is. Before Shu started Deliveroo there was nothing. Today Deliveroo generates more than £7bn in annual sales, has annual profits of well over £100m and is delivering products from 160,000 restaurants and retailers.

As the UK looks for ways to spark economic growth, the brilliance of the founder poses a conundrum. These founders often succeed outside the system, or even despite it. Not because of it. So how can you replicate that or encourage more success?

“I’ve realised after doing this for 12 years that there is no single way to do something,” Shu says of building a business.

Doing it right

Deliveroo’s Will Shu says that, as founder, having confidence in yourself and trusting your instincts are vitally important

“There are so many ways to approach a problem. You have to figure out what works for you. For me, being in the details is a prerequisite. Some people might disagree. But there are many different ways to run a company. You could have 50 direct reports. You could have two. Probably not great, but you could try it. You could not have one-on-one meetings, or you can have a bunch of them.

“The conventional wisdom of how a company is managed through these layers and one-on-one meetings probably comes from a good place. But that doesn’t mean it has to be that for you at all.”

The UK economy grew by just 0.1 per cent in the final three months of 2024. Across 2024 as a whole, GDP grew by just 0.9 per cent, way below the 2.8 per cent growth in the US. GDP per head fell 0.1 per cent, meaning the economy is shrinking on a per-person basis. And the Bank of England does not expect things to get much better. It is forecasting growth of 1.4 per cent in 2025 and 1.6 per cent in 2026, with much of that from an uptick in government spending. Businesses are being hit by higher national insurance contributions from April and consumer confidence is weak, according to the closely watched GFK barometer.

Various reports have proposed ways to get the economy moving. Research by NatWest and the consultancy Oliver Wyman suggests that mid-sized businesses could be the “engine of growth”. It reported that these companies, which have turnover of between £25m and £500m a year, account for just 0.5 per cent of the total companies in the UK but 27 per cent of the annual turnover. These 13,400 businesses could grow faster with support, says the research. The challenges that need to be addressed include a lack of collective identity, a lack of data and transparency, insufficient access to skills and problems with infrastructure and planning restrictions. In response, Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, said: “This government’s number one mission is growing our economy – this report provides clear evidence for the vital role that mid-market corporates can play in achieving that.”

At present, less than 5 per cent of medium-sized businesses in the UK go on to become large companies,

according to data. There are just 8,250 large businesses in the UK, the government says, which classifies ‘large’ as employing 250 people or more. Any improvement in the proportion of medium-sized businesses becoming large would have a substantial impact on the economy.

A separate report by Goldman Sachs looked at how to tap into the potential of small businesses. It proposes a series of “growth shots”, including a Small Business Investment Summit to connect funds with promising start-ups, training courses on artificial intelligence and changes to the education curriculum to include more business and enterprise, which could “foster an enterprise-ready talent pool, with the skills that employers truly need”.

These reports are noble pieces of work, but they look at what needs to be improved, not what is going well. The UK will never be better at being the US than the US or better at being Europe than Europe, so what about its strengths?

Many recent proposals to boost the economy have followed a similar path. Think of “levelling-up” under Boris Johnson’s Conservative administration. It aimed to boost the economy in other parts of the UK to the level of London and the South East. This did little to support one of the UK’s actual strengths: London’s status as a world-class city. Plus, it was perceived as patronising to places such as Manchester that were developing their own economic identity.

These proposals also risk undervaluing the one thing we know is at the heart of business success – the brilliance of founders. Shu says that resilience was the most important trait in building Deliveroo. “It’s probably the singular trait that’s been most important. I think in starting almost any type of business [it would be],” Shu says. “We compete against the likes of Uber, Meituan and Delivery Hero. When you’re playing the game at a high level, everyone’s smart and everyone has a great business strategy – that’s kind of a level playing field.

“The ability to deal with the up and downs when you build a new business separates you quite a bit. So, not being super down if something happens, not being super up when something happens. I think I’m lucky, that’s just my personality, I don’t think it was something I trained

“You realise over time that actually, you, the founder, do know what you’re doing

myself on. I can remain calm when things are high or low and I can deliver a message to my team that is positive. That is such a critical skill in business building, that ‘relentless’ bit. That ability to keep going when something’s not going well and being emotionally able to deal with that. I think that separates a lot of companies.”

Andy Gregory is chief executive of the BGF (the Business Growth Fund), a government-backed initiative. No other organisation puts more money into new UK businesses. Since its launch in 2011, the BGF has invested more than £4bn in more than 600 businesses. Gregory also picks out resilience as a key quality in building a new business.

“It’s a quality we’ve consistently witnessed across hundreds of SMEs that BGF has supported since its inception,” he says. “It’s time to celebrate our entrepreneurs – their resilience, their ingenuity and their pivotal role in shaping our economy and communities. By amplifying their voices and giving them the tools they need to succeed, we can ensure that the UK remains a global leader in entrepreneurship and innovation. Together, we can create a future where SMEs flourish, driving growth and securing prosperity for the generations to come.”

But this touches on an uncomfortable truth: that being an entrepreneur takes unique skills and resilience. And not everyone has that. Tom Blomfield is co-founder of Monzo, the digital bank, and now works for Y Combinator, an accelerator programme that invests in promising start-ups.

“An uncomfortable truth: a small minority of people are dramatically smarter and more effective than average,” he said in a social post towards the end of 2024. “Most folks have never seen these people operate first-hand. It’s both awe-inspiring and humbling. These people aren’t always particularly ‘relatable’ or ‘electable’, so we are generally left with populist dancing monkeys running the government and a distinctly average civil service.

“I know I’m going to get a world of pain for this tweet, so some caveats. Intellect is necessary but not sufficient. Empathy, communication, courage and a strong sense of moral principle would also be nice. I don’t for a second think these people are ‘better’ or ‘more worthy’ in any general sense. But I do think they make more effective decisions and have dramatically more impact than the average person – and I wish they were in charge.

“I don’t necessarily think that intellect requires expensive further education. Some of the smartest, most effective people I know never went to university. But, in general, top universities (especially in the UK) try hard to accept the smartest people they can find, and it is an increasingly strong signal that these folks are bright. Twenty per cent of Oxbridge students came from state schools in 1920, when acceptance was strongly correlated with wealth. Today, it’s about 70 per cent. There’s still progress to be made here.”

In other fields, this would not be a controversial observation. Sports teams look to improve by getting the best

Firm foundations Key to Liverpool’s title-winning success under Jurgen Klopp, far left, was finding those players with stand-out strengths and doubling down on them

“An uncomfortable truth: a small minority of people are dramatically smarter and more effective than average

talent. “With sports people, it’s easy to see who’s scoring goals in a 90-minute game,” Blomfield says.

Well-run sports teams also don’t try to win simply by copying others. They learn from rivals but use that insight to improve themselves. For example, trying to beat Manchester City under manager Pep Guardiola by being the same as them is a forlorn task. Manchester City will a) always be the best at playing like Manchester City and b) use their Middle-Eastern millions to outspend you.

The only team that finished ahead of Manchester City in the Premier League between 2018 and 2024 was Liverpool. And a key part of Liverpool’s strategy was finding players with stand-out strengths and doubling down on them.

Ian Graham was director of research at Liverpool during this period and has written a book called How to Win the Premier League. In the book he explains how Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool’s then manager, thought about football: “Rather than demanding the perfect player, he was willing to find creative solutions to maximise each player’s strengths and minimise their weaknesses. He often talked of his preference for players with one or two ‘extreme characteristics’ – game-changers. If and when those game-changers had weaknesses, he was willing to use other players to compensate for them.”

This is a path to success in any field: know your strengths and use them. However, the strengths of a founder are often not obvious and can even cause them problems in education or employment. For example, a report by Bayes Business School showed that between one in five and two in five founders showed traits of dyslexia. This is much higher than the proportion of people in the wider UK population who say they are dyslexic – which is one in 10. A separate report by Barclays found that two-thirds of founders who are neurodiverse said that their neurodiversity made them better at business. Neurodiversity includes dyslexia but also conditions such as autism, ADHD and dyspraxia. Before succeeding in business, these founders often struggled at school and to get a job. Two-thirds said they found it hard to find employment before starting their own business.

“The system focuses so much on weaknesses rather than building the strengths,” says Chris Oglesby, chief executive

The size of the mid-size market

Number of companies with revenues between £3m and £150m in the UK

Source: Beauhurst, 2025

The issues holding back mid-sized companies

Proportion of businesses saying they suffer from a lack of the following, by size of business (revenue)

digital skills

£1-£10m

£10m-£25m

£25m-£100m

£100m-£250m

£250m-£500m

£500m+ Management or leadership skills

“I needed my neurodiversity to write that software, I could do all that stuff in my head

of Bruntwood, a family-owned property developer that is one of the largest businesses in northern England.

Oglesby’s father Michael founded Bruntwood and was dyslexic. “Having a father with neurodiversity and then looking at my kids, you see how the things that make them different are such strengths, yet the system focuses so much on the weakness. I am sure my dad’s creativity was a massive byproduct of [his dyslexia],” Oglesby says. “These perceived weaknesses are often shadow sides of massive strengths.”

Source: NatWest, 2025 of SMEs say they are unable to access the finance they need

37%

58% of SMEs are not actively seeking investment in the UK

36% of ethnically diverse fast-growth small business owners would look abroad

Source: Goldman Sachs, 2024

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has been even blunter on this topic. Gates has said that he would have been diagnosed with autism if he were growing up today. However, he told The Times: “If they ever invent a pill where they could say: ‘OK, your social skills will be normal, but your ability to concentrate would also be normal,’ I wouldn’t take the pill... I needed my neurodiversity to write that software, I could do all that stuff in my head. That takes a lot of concentration. I wrote my first code as a young teenager on a hike in the snow when I was tired and wet, and I used it later for Microsoft.”

Given the challenges that founders can face before launching their business, some organisations have realised that one way to try to cultivate their success is to focus on getting brilliant individuals in a room together. Entrepreneur First is an incubator scheme that brings a cohort of individuals together after judging their applications. It then encourages them to form teams to launch a business and invests in the most promising. It was co-founded by Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, who is now advising the government on AI. “We’ve made founding not just viable but an aspirational pathway and career for a bunch of people who didn’t even realise that was possible,” Bentinck told The Economist recently.

Like Shu, Mark Slack is an unlikely figure to represent UK plc. But his story highlights what can happen when you put brilliant people together. He co-founded CMR Surgical, another multi-billion-pound business, but admits he didn’t know a lot about business. “When we started out, I used to sit in board meetings with my phone on my lap. People would talk about CAGR and so I would quickly look up what CAGR is,” Slack says. “I had a very good understanding

Going for growth

Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are desperately hunting for ways to grow the economy

of business concepts and process. Detail? Nothing at all.”

(CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate.)

Slack grew up in South Africa and was a promising 800-metre runner. Injuries held him back and he became increasingly interested in medicine. Slack became a doctor and moved to Cambridge where he became fascinated by how robotics could be used to improve surgery.

However, it took a chance meeting with future colleague Luke Hares to turn this passion into a business. “We sat around a table with Diet Coke and pens and paper. I was telling him what I wanted and he was telling me what he could do. When he left, I said to my wife: ‘I think the man’s mad. He’s overly confident of what he can do, but he could do it.’ That’s where the journey started of building a robot that would replicate keyhole surgery.”

Hares introduced Slack to Keith Marshall, Paul Roberts and Martin Frost, whom he had worked with in Cambridge. These five men founded CMR Surgical in 2014. Today CMR Surgical is valued at £2.4bn and is one of the most promising businesses in the UK. It has developed a robot that can be used for keyhole surgery and has attracted big-name investors such as SoftBank.

“We all had different skills,” Slack says of his co-founders. “It’s one of those Beatles moments where you put a group of people together with different skills. In the beginning, Paul and I, who are both quite strong personalities, would fight like hell. On a weekend, Martin, who was the first

%

of those who would consider taking their business public do not think or are unsure that the UK remains an attractive market for doing so

Source: Goldman Sachs, 2024

CEO, would calm me down and get us to talk. I’m sure the company wouldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for that.

“Luke was this amazing technical genius and Paul was bright beyond belief with an energy that drove it. Martin was the glue that kept us all behaving and kept us in the right direction. Keith was an unbelievably skilled engineer who did a lot of the primary work on the instruments, which are more complex than you can believe. We worked really well together. We went from a computer-generated image to the first human [operation] in five years, which is just extraordinary.”

This meeting of five minds could not have happened anywhere other than Cambridge, where medicine, science and technology collide. “The ecosystem that existed around us contributed hugely to the success of building the robot and getting it out there,” says Slack.

If putting brilliant founders together in organisations or local ecosystems is one way to drive business success, empowering them is another.

Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, wrote about the unique skills of the founder last year after Brian Chesky, who started Airbnb, gave a talk. He called the essay “founder mode”. Graham wrote: “The theme of Brian’s talk was that

the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarised as ‘hire good people and give them room to do their jobs’.

“He followed this advice and the results were disastrous, so he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb’s free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.

“The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful founders we’ve funded, and one after another said that the same thing had happened to them… Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me.”

Graham added: “In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Until now, most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a start-up meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who’ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.”

Chaos theory

Alex Depledge says she enjoys the challenge of working things out at the often-chaotic start of founding a business

“We like the chaos – the bit at the beginning when you’re just figuring everything out and your rate of learning is really high

Alex Depledge is one of the leading female entrepreneurs in the UK. She has founded two businesses, Hassle.com and Resi, been given an MBE for her achievements and is a non-executive director at Persimmon, one of the UK’s largest housebuilders. She introduced chancellor Rachel Reeves’ speech at the Labour party conference last year and the pair are close. Depledge founded both Hassle and Resi with Jules Coleman, who she met at Accenture.

“I probably shouldn’t say this in public, but Jules and I always laugh at ourselves and say that we’re complete shysters and just making everything up,” Depledge says. “I think what we really mean is that we like the chaos – the bit at the beginning when you’re just figuring everything out and your rate of learning is really, really high. For people who are super curious, like we are, that just suits our personality.”

Depledge worked in the venture capital industry and has pitched for investment in her businesses hundreds of times.

“I’m probably not even in the top 1 per cent of founders in the UK. But I’m aware of my own limitations and I often meet investors that are just not,” she says. “They think that everything is about numbers on a spreadsheet. Well, guess what sits behind those numbers most of the time? People. People who write your code and people who market the software. Everything can’t be dictated by numbers. There’s knowledge in people’s heads, an instinct and a sense of things that is not quantifiable. I feel like investors miss that human element.”

After more than a decade of building his business, Shu has his own views on founder mode. “I think [Graham] intentionally wrote something that was controversial, right?” Shu says. “Look, I strongly believe that people leading companies

need to be in the details. I really think that’s important. The concept that I am just a manager and not a doer is one I really hate. So that resonates.”

Shu is involved in parts of Deliveroo that would surprise people. This includes writing copy for Deliveroo’s apps, making deliveries himself to test systems and investigating why certain orders went wrong.

“I don’t think founder mode is an excuse for people not to listen to other people,” he says. “I think you have to listen to your users, your investors and your employees. But overall, I think it makes a lot of sense. It’s OK to be in the details, you’re leading the thing. It’s OK to micromanage a bit. Just make it happen and don’t let things happen to you. I think that’s really what it’s about.”

More than 50 people who used to work in Deliveroo have gone on to found their own businesses. “I think why people started businesses out of here is actually quite simple,” Shu says. “They saw something from the early stage, they saw that it got traction and they saw that there was success.

“If you have an ecosystem where you have generations of businesses being built, it’s like: ‘Hey, I worked at this company, I saw it grow. I joined this company early, it grew. Now I think I can do it myself.’ There’s enough mythology and stories about what went well and didn’t go well to make you want to take that step.”

As we look for ways to boost UK plc, this looks a surer bet than any: a virtuous circle of founders learning from each other: Founder plc.

“It’s not about how low your taxes are,” Shu concludes. “In my mind, it’s about ‘Have you seen other people succeed?’ ‘Have you seen other people fail and been OK with it?’ That’s the type of culture you need.”

Interviews & Insights

How Stuart Machin has led the turnaround of Marks & Spencer

By Graham Ruddick

S RETURN OF THE MACH

tuart Machin is the number-one menswear customer at Marks & Spencer. He is a prolific purchaser of everything from trainers to jumpers and trousers, according to data from the retailer’s Sparks loyalty scheme. This offers an insight into how Machin runs M&S. Because he is not just the number-one menswear customer, he is also the chief executive. And he is obsessed with being in the details.

“Everything new, I buy,” he says. “In fact, I just ran into a store yesterday, mainly because I’d run out with a puffer jacket on and I wanted a jumper. I wrote to the team and said, ‘Well done.’ I’m normally moaning there’s no small or medium. But there was a black, medium crew-neck jumper.

“The store manager came running up to me. I said: ‘I’m only running in to buy something. How are we doing?’ We went around [the shop] and I said: ‘Gosh, we’ve got exactly what I want available. I don’t have to moan at the team or write to them.’ One of our new denim shirts had arrived. So I looked at it and said, ‘Right, I’m buying that now.’”

Machin thought he would also be the top M&S food shopper over Christmas. “With my Christmas food order, I thought I would be number one and I wasn’t,” he says. “I was quite pleased about that because it meant many customers beat me in how much they ordered M&S food. That’s a good thing.”

Machin has overseen a remarkable turnaround at M&S alongside Archie Norman, the chairman. When he was named chief executive in May 2022, shares in M&S were languishing at around 130p per share. They are now priced at around 350p – nearly treble. We often talk about the billions of pounds of value that entrepreneurs create by starting new businesses, but more than £3bn has been added to the stock market value of M&S during Machin’s tenure. However, according to Machin there is still a long way to go. He says he is “positively dissatisfied” with the performance of M&S. “We’re still on that journey,” he says. “You have to be careful you don’t have rose-tinted spectacles, because the tendency is always to think it’s better now.”

Small change?

M&S’s Penny Bazaar shop in Brixton, above, in 1903 and its modern incarnation, below

M&S was founded as a penny bazaar in Leeds in 1884. It was run by Michael Marks, a Polish Jew who had immigrated to the city, and Thomas Spencer, a cashier from Skipton in North Yorkshire. It soon grew into a British institution. Today it is arguably the best-known business in the country.

However, M&S has struggled for much of the 21st century. It lost market share to new international, discount and online rivals, and profits slumped. A series of highly rated bosses and management teams tried to revive M&S and return it to its former glory. But they failed.

Machin initially joined M&S as head of food in 2018 after a 30-year career in retail that saw him working at Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Asda, before moving to Australia to work at Coles and Target. He returned to the UK in 2017 as CEO at Steinhoff UK, which owned the retailers Harveys and Bensons for Beds. But he rejoined the food industry just eight months later when he was appointed by M&S. It was Norman who brought Machin to M&S. He had arrived as chairman in 2017 and pledged to offer the “unvarnished truth” about the state of the business.

Norman’s corporate record was stellar. He had led the turnaround of the supermarket chain Asda in the 1990s, been chairman of ITV and served as a Conservative MP between 1997 and 2005. He had a reputation as a turnaround expert. Norman has described his career as being “devoted to restoring the fortunes of business that deserve a great future”. M&S posed a new challenge, but Norman has delivered again.

“What Archie did, which is what Archie is famous for, is to allow you to just talk the truth,” Machin says. “That shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s so powerful being able to get everything on the table. I remember one of the team saying to me: ‘I’ve worked here for 30 years and I know I’ll be leaving soon, but it’s the first time in those 30 years that all these issues are on the table for everyone to talk about.’

“Those cultural things surprised me [when I joined]. We were very defensive. The body rejects the organ quite quickly and people were very suspicious when I rocked up. I remember one of the biggest pieces of feedback when I did some listening groups was that there was no communication. So, every Monday I’d call people together and stand on a box in the middle of the office. Everyone had to come together. I would present the numbers, the things on my mind and we would do a Q&A about trade. Everybody loved it.

“But they didn’t like it when I said: ‘Well, there are really bad examples. We ran out of fish or this store wasn’t good.’ Whoa, you’re not allowed to say that. You can’t talk about things that aren’t good. So it was a real cultural shock. It feels very different to this day, by the way. Over the years we’ve got used to telling it as it is.”

Keeping the magic

Newly renovated stores emphasise the heritage of the brand while also introducing modern food halls and fashion

value

How M&S’s share price has risen since Stuart Machin became CEO

Running M&S is a unique task. It has more than 60,000 employees, nearly 1,500 shops, annual revenues of around £13bn and posted pre-tax profits of £673m in its last financial year. It also gets a disproportionate amount of attention from both the media and the public. Being M&S chief executive is the business equivalent of being the England football manager.

Machin describes his strategy as “protect the magic, modernise the rest”. That can most clearly be seen in M&S’s newly renovated shops, such as in Brixton, London, which emphasise the brand’s heritage while introducing modern food halls and fashion.

“Protecting the magic is to bring to life the heritage of Marks & Spencer,” Machin says. “That’s the same whether it’s a store or whether it’s a product – quality, innovation and making sure it’s good value. Not premium, but you always pay a little bit more because it’s worth it. Modernise the rest is the significant transformation that we’ve been

going through and will be for the next few years.”

That transformation includes closing shops, reducing the amount of space that M&S dedicates to clothing and improving its online capabilities – and therefore growing online sales. “We have a target that 50 per cent of our clothing business will be online,” Machin says.

However, detailing this strategy and getting feedback from staff is one thing, delivering and executing the plan is another. That is where Machin’s passion for detail comes in. He keeps a black book where he writes down every product, the price, his views on it and comparisons with competitors. Store managers have his phone number so they can text him with questions and feedback.

“Today three colleagues from stores have messaged me,” he says. “But with that comes responsibility because you have to go back and say: ‘No, we’re not doing it’ or ‘No, I don’t agree’ or ‘Yes, and let’s do it now. Brilliant. Thank you.’ You have to own it. You can’t just get all these messages

MSN Finance, 2025

Machin joins M&S as MD of food

Machin becomes CEO

“You have to be careful you don’t have rose-tinted spectacles, because the tendency is always to think it’s better now

and fudge them.” M&S also runs a scheme called “Straight to Stuart”, where any member of staff can contact him with ideas and get a reply. More than 25,000 people have written to him in his first two and a half years as chief executive. “Everybody has a responsibility to improve and grow Marks & Spencer. We’re all here for the same thing,” says Machin. The M&S chief executive has another tactic for being in the details of the business. Not only will he walk around

shops, speak to customers and get feedback from staff, but he makes surprise appearances on online message boards.

“I thoroughly enjoy looking internally at our communications and our community page, which is sometimes quite challenging. There are some comments on there and I read them and I reply. I say: ‘I don’t agree with this at all.’ And people go: ‘Is that really Stuart or a bot?’ And I go: ‘No, it’s me.’ Then it all goes quiet.”

Face to face

Machin (right) makes a point to keep in contact with the company’s 60,000 employees, both by phone and in person

THE CEO BURNOUT CLINIC

By Dougal Shaw

Dougal Shaw visits a luxury rehab clinic in Switzerland to learn about the pressures that cause executives to succumb to stress and how to guard against them

Leading businesses can be a stressful job. It may come with a sizeable pay packet, but that doesn’t protect chief executives and founders from developing mental health issues – and in some cases it might cause them.

For the very wealthiest, treating these issues might include a stint at the £85,000-a-week Paracelsus Recovery clinic in Zurich. It’s an exclusive facility designed for those used to the finer things in life, promising round-the-clock care from dedicated therapists in a luxury residence with “five-star service”.

The exclusive treatment begins as soon as you land in Switzerland. I was greeted at the plane’s door and whisked through a side exit to a car marked VIP on the runway.

From there, I was taken to a separate passport control zone complete with a VIP lounge and, of course, no queues. While waiting for my transport to Paracelsus Recovery, I was offered canapés and exotic drinks. It was at this point I fear I gave myself away – I kept stopping to photograph everything I was witnessing, from the BMW with VIP plates to the ornate food dishes. And the assistants seemed surprised that I was content to pull my own luggage, despite their repeated offers of assistance.

A chauffeur drove me in a Bentley to the clinic. As we glided through the frozen streets of Zurich listening to the Swiss jazz station on the radio, I couldn’t help but think of jaded CEOs suffering mental burnout who had made this journey before me.

The Paracelsus Recovery clinic has been treating high-net worth individuals in Zurich since 2013. It is named after the famous Swiss physician and alchemist who helped pioneer a medical revolution in the Renaissance.

Nowadays it is known for the single-client rehab technique. Patients are assigned therapists who live with them during their stay and are on-call 24/7. A team of 15 people, including psychiatrists, nurses, nutritionists and personal chefs is responsible for each client. The clinic owns three apartments on the lake front in the city centre where patients are treated in isolation. Clients may stay for up to two months at a time.

I was lucky enough to stay in one of these penthouse apartments during my one-night visit. Clearly designed to calm those staying, it had a neutral colour palette and abundance of flowers and candles. It also smelt like a spa, due to the perfumes pumped into the property.

I was informed that my personal chef would visit the following morning and asked if I had a favourite dish. I opted for eggs benedict. Some patients will choose nostalgic dishes from their childhood, which are recreated with a healthy twist.

Next to my room (with a bathroom bigger than my bedroom in London) there was a second bedroom for the live-in therapist. Unlike the Betty Ford Center in California or the Priory in London, clients never mix at Paracelsus Recovery and there are no group therapy sessions. The reason that

Lakeside view

The Paracelsus Recovery clinic is based in Zurich, with clients staying in apartments looking over the city’s lake

therapists live with the patient is that a client might be ready for a breakthrough conversation at any moment, after having a bad dream or stressful phone call, for example.

Scattered around the apartment I saw the signs of impromptu sessions: a flipboard with marker pens in a cupboard, notepads and plenty of long couches and cushions for restful contemplation. There were beautiful views of the lake and a rooftop terrace too, to soothe the mind.

In the morning, I had an appointment with Jan Gerber, founder and chief executive. He is an entrepreneur rather than a trained therapist and the idea for the clinic came about by chance, he said.

Fifteen years ago, a family friend, who was a top executive, was struggling with alcohol addiction and asked Gerber’s parents for help. Gerber’s mother was a nurse specialising in mental health, while his stepfather was an addiction counsellor. They put the executive up in the family home, so he could be treated discreetly. (Gerber’s father is a psychiatrist and would later become the clinic’s medical director.)

This episode led Gerber to spot a business opportunity. Zurich has other specialist rehab clinics, such as the Kusnacht Practice, and is known as the home of pioneering psychotherapist Carl Jung, so it has an international reputation for this type of care. Gerber saw the chance to open a facility that would be a haven for wealthy clients, including CEOs, to recover from their personal traumas. Hundreds have since visited.

More than half the clients are senior business leaders, whether CEOs, founders or senior partners. Around a third are from the US, a third from the Middle East and a third from the UK. Perhaps surprisingly, very few come from elsewhere in Europe.

Some clients check in themselves, but for others an intervention is needed. This could come from the person’s family, or from the CEO’s company board or investors. This is a sign that they value the person and want them to recover for the good of the company, as well as the individual. There is less stigma around mental health than a generation ago, says Gerber.

“It’s become more and more OK for a CEO to step back and say, ‘I need to take care of my mental health for a moment’

“It’s become more OK for a CEO to step back and say, ‘I need to take care of my mental health for a moment,’” he adds. “Some CEOs still need to be treated in secrecy though and Switzerland is well known for its confidentiality.”

So, what are the signs that burnout is happening and what types of business people come? Some chief executives and leaders check in because stresses at work have led them to develop addictions such as alcohol or painkillers. Then it may come to a point where they recognise this is affecting their behaviour and mental state, with feelings of acute anxiety or bouts of depression. In general, women will seek help earlier than men: “Before hitting a wall,” says Gerber.

The canary in the coalmine is sleep, he explains. A change in the quality of sleep is often the first symptom to suggest that burnout is imminent. Even though it’s not ideal, sometimes the individual will continue to work while receiving treatment, taking calls or even travelling to a vital meeting. This could happen because the CEO doesn’t want people to know about the treatment, but in some cases it is simply vital for the survival of the company, so compromises are made.

Shortly after arrival, patients will be taken to the medical room where initial medical tests that will guide treatment take place. The medical team uses measures such as ultrasounds of the heart or blood tests, which are used to produce a baseline report. In this room they can also do blood draws (a phlebotomy) or oxygen therapy. Next door

is a boardroom with a view of the lake that is used for meetings with clients, their family or perhaps a CEO’s trusted entourage who travel with the patient.

Gerber says there is a noticeable rise in referrals and inquiries on two occasions: economic downturns and before company results, when a CEO must face investors or shareholders.

“Moments like these can throw them over the edge,” says Gerber. This is the point where many must face up to issues they may be trying to ignore. Many successful CEOs also have imposter syndrome, he adds. “They think to themselves, ‘I might be found out.’”

Imminent failure means the tide will go out and their inner fears are exposed. We all define ourselves by our jobs to a certain extent, says Gerber. “But for the CEOs of large companies, the public may know of them because of this aspect of their identity. They might even think it affects the way their families think of them.

“CEOs are still human beings,” adds Gerber. “They have the same quirks, fears and abandonment issues as anyone else, but being a successful CEO throws fuel onto the fire of normal life problems.”

Certain personality types are more likely to end up at the clinic. “There’s a self-selection mechanism,” says Gerber. “We see many incidences of ADHD for instance, maybe five or tenfold [more than in society at large], and also around a five-fold higher representation of alcoholics.”

Checking in

Shortly after arrival, patients will be taken to the medical room, where the initial tests that will guide treatment take place

“CEOs have the same quirks, fears and abandonment issues as anyone else, but being a successful CEO throws fuel onto the fire of normal life problems

What is the reason for this? In his opinion, many of the personality traits that characterise these conditions also make people successful at building businesses. They both exhibit “a high-risk appetite and an ability to make on-thespot decisions in high-stakes situations. They also display high levels of confidence and resistance to criticism and are out-of-the-box thinkers who can prove the people following the consensus wrong.”

They have the compulsive and obsessive personality needed to succeed, but this can also prove their undoing, especially when business finances are hard. This can then manifest itself as mental burnout when they succumb to the negative aspects of their compulsive behaviours.

According to Gerber, “prevention and awareness is key” when it comes to avoiding burnout. He wishes that more companies would make mental health part of their risk assessment frameworks, an issue to be regularly discussed by the board and senior management. Very few companies have this in place, he says. But a more open culture around mental health means this should be discussed, for the benefit of the business and the people working in it.

That is one aspect of how Paracelsus Recovery runs its business that others can learn from. Yes, in the end it is an elite clinic for the super wealthy, but it puts a lot of time and effort into making sure every person who visits feels they are cared for and looked after.

During my one-night stay I realised I’d forgotten something: my toothbrush. Hunting through the cabinets in my bathroom, I realised they were full of all the provisions people staying could possibly need, from nail clippers to footcare products. The toothbrush I opened and used was by a brand I had never heard of, but was the best toothbrush I have ever used.

This moment made me realise part of the power of this place. You come to feel like every detail of your life has been taken care of by someone who has put a lot of thought into the smallest of things. Because these details are being run with Swiss precision, and you are here on your own, you can focus on the bigger issues affecting your life and try to resolve them.

There’s a lesson for all businesses here. Make life easy for your employees, provide them with the tools and support they need, and they will pay that back in dividends. That doesn’t mean having to provide every employee with a personal chef and 24/7 support. But it does mean putting as much thought into what they need as into the job you need them to do.

Four self-help steps

Paracelsus Recovery founder Jan Gerber, above, suggests four things you can do to reduce the risk of mental exhaustion:

ONE Our personal relationships are what keep us sane and happy. Take time to foster healthy relationships, including romantic, family and friends. This is the best prevention: don’t neglect them due to your work pressures.

TWO Exercise and eat healthily. Our physical wellbeing underpins our neurological wellbeing, so think carefully about this aspect of your life and regulate it.

THREE Journalling is helpful. This is the practice of writing out things that have gone well and badly at the end of each day. Recording your achievements builds up mental resilience, which can shore you up during the hard times. But write your thoughts down with a pen or pencil, don’t tap them out on a digital device. There is something therapeutic about the physical act of writing.

FOUR Create non-negotiable times off from your job. Gerber finds it useful to switch his phone off in the evenings at a set time. Even if you fear you may miss out on something vital connected to your work, be assured this will benefit your work in the long term.

HOW MANCHESTER BEC A ME HOME TO A WONDER MATERIAL

A new generation of engineering companies is emerging in Manchester thanks to the extraordinary strength and elasticity of graphene

By Chris Maguire

October 22, 2004, is etched into the the memory of professors Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov. That day, the two researchers at the University of Manchester were having one of their regular Friday night meet-ups, where they carried out experimental science not necessarily linked to their day jobs. They removed some flakes from a lump of bulk graphite with sticky tape and noticed some flakes were thinner than others. It was the moment when the “wonder material” graphene was isolated for the first time.

The discovery catapulted Geim and Novoselov to the world’s attention and, six years later, earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics. It also sounded the starting gun on a global race to commercialise graphene.

Graphene is a single atomic layer of graphite, a crystalline version of carbon used in pencils, that is arranged in a hexagonal lattice. It is stronger than steel, more conductive than copper and more flexible than rubber. It is also so thin that it has been described as two-dimensional.

At the time it was predicted that the miracle material would eventually become as common as plastic. And it has been used in everything from plane wings that can de-ice themselves to graphene-enhanced asphalt and treatments for patients with strokes and other brain disorders.

But difficulties in producing graphene at an industrial scale mean its full potential is yet to be realised. However, 20 years after it was discovered, many now feel use of the material is at a tipping point. And, fittingly, it is Manchester where many new game-changing graphene discoveries are taking place.

In 2015, the £61m National Graphene Institute opened its doors. The research institute enables academics and industry to work side-by-side. Four years later, the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) was opened in the University of Manchester’s £60m Masdar Building. Since 2019 it has helped more than 55 new businesses to develop and launch new technologies, products and processes that make use of graphene.

The man tasked with overseeing the growth of the next generation of Manchester’s

graphene companies is James Baker, chief executive of Graphene@Manchester. Describing itself as “industry-led, academic-fed”, GEIC is unique in UK academia.

Baker, who previously worked at BAE Systems, says: “People don’t come here to use graphene, they come here to solve their industrial challenges. We do things very quickly. Projects can last days and weeks rather than months and years. What we are really trying to do is accelerate the adoption of graphene and 2D materials.”

GEIC has helped develop several graphene products, including concrete that reduces CO₂ emissions by up to 30 per cent; a hydrogel for vertical farming; and a process to extract lithium from water for use in the batterymaking industry.

Its facilities are supported by a team of engineers and academics, helping companies design, develop, scale and de-risk new products and processes.

However, in a competitive global marketplace, the UK’s graphene industry is at a crossroads. Take the case of Dr Vivek Koncherry.

“This is the biggest graphene research and innovation community in the world for a reason – and it’s getting bigger

He is chief executive of Graphene Innovations Manchester (GIM) and has been described by Baker as Manchester’s “answer to Elon Musk”.

The company connects graphene technology with business opportunities on a global scale. In 2023, Koncherry signed a $1bn (£800m) deal with Quazar Investment Company to create a company in the United Arab Emirates to help tackle global sustainability challenges.

In December 2024, during a visit to the Middle East, the prime minister Sir Keir Starmer announced that GIM had agreed to construct a factory in Saudi Arabia. This would be used to manufacture graphene for use in the country’s ambitious Neom giga-project, which plans to build futuristic eco-cities in the desert.

He also heralded the investment of around £250m in building a research and innovation hub in Greater Manchester that will create 1,000 jobs as part of the deal.

That is good news for Manchester, but it could have been so much better. Koncherry had wanted to build a factory in Manchester but couldn’t attract the funding.

Koncherry came from India to study in Manchester in 2001 and quickly recognised the potential of graphene.

“In the materials world, graphene is still new,” he says. “Most of the materials we use today, like carbon fibre, have existed for 50 or 60 years, while steel has been around for hundreds of years.

“It’s also one of the advanced materials – it is a million times smaller than 1mm. It can be used in so many applications.”

GIM isn’t the only Manchester-based graphene company to attract attention. Vector Homes has been operating out of the GEIC for two years making affordable smart homes from recycled materials.

The company uses nanomaterial-enhanced construction materials to minimise energy consumption during construction and through the lifespan of buildings. For example, it has built a prototype flatpack bungalow that incorporates graphene and can be built for a fraction of the cost of a more traditional house made of bricks.

New order

Two researchers work on developing

“Manchester is the birthplace of graphene. We’ve taken it from the lab to the real world

Founder and chief technology officer Liam Britnell believes being based at GEIC has transformed the business. “Primarily it’s about speed,” he says. “We use a lot of different pieces of kit. If we wanted to buy that, it would be totally unfeasible. Here, you can access all that kit under one roof.

“Our ambition is to be delivering 5,000 homes a year within five years. In 10 years, I hope there isn’t a UK town that you’d drive through without seeing one of our products.”

Molymem is another GEIC tenant and is developing an energy-efficient membrane to create a water filtration solution that will result in cleaner water supplies.

Its chief technology officer Paul Wiper says: “What’s been great about this facility is that we have access to state-of-the-art lab facilities. We can get access to equipment that can analyse and test our products on the same day, so we’re not relying on an external company.

“We can accelerate our product development by being at GEIC. It’s a great ecosystem where we can call on other experts.”

This is the magic of being based in Manchester, says Baker. Molymem was spun out of the university and has created a new business through GEIC. “They’ve managed to start, scale, get investment, win grants and get some real traction. GEIC has supported Molymem from start-up to scale-up.”

Manchester’s graphene reputation is also attracting international attention. Canadian-headquartered HydroGraph Clean Power, which manufactures graphene in the US, has chosen GEIC for an R&D facility.

Another success story is Concretene, which is aiming to decarbonise the concrete industry through nanomaterial technology. In 2024, the company secured £3m in venture capital

investment to bring its graphene-enhanced concrete admixture to market. Cement production contributes more than 7 per cent of global CO₂ emissions, but Concretene can reduce those emissions significantly.

Crucially, Concretene is the first tenant of Manchester’s new innovation district. Known as Sister, it is a joint venture between the University of Manchester and Bruntwood SciTech, a property provider for the science and tech sector in the UK.

Previously known as ID Manchester, Sister will transform the university’s former North Campus into a four-million-square-foot innovation district that aims to help elevate Manchester’s position as a national centre for science and technology.

Another piece of the jigsaw is Atom Valley, which includes a sustainable materials and manufacturing hub in Rochdale.

“It’s no coincidence that the National Graphene Institute and GEIC are based in Manchester,” says Baker. “This is the biggest graphene research and innovation community in the world for a reason – and it’s only getting bigger.”

Baker admits Manchester must continue developing graphene at pace or risk losing out to international rivals. “If we don’t do that, these companies are going to be attracted to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman or China,” he points out.

“What we’ve got here is an ecosystem that is growing, both in terms of people and skills, but also the knowledge of advanced materials and manufacturing that can really distinguish Manchester on the global map.”

Manchester needs to make sure it can translate its head start and focus on innovation into commercial success.

graphene-enhanced composites at the GEIC in Manchester

THE POWER OF MANIFESTATION

Imagining the future you want and how to get there should be a vital part of strategic planning for any business, says hypnotist and author Paul McKenna

By Josh Dornbrack

Many write off the practice of manifestation as a farcical new-age waste of brain power. However, Paul McKenna says everyone does it without even consciously thinking about it. “People think manifesting fits in the category of crystals, tofu and sandals,” says McKenna. “But actually, it doesn’t. Show me a successful person, I will show you a manifester.”

McKenna was thrust into the public eye in the early 1990s through his TV show The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna Three decades later the hypnotist title has stuck but so have the connotations. “When I used to go into corporations years ago,” he recalls, “they would say to me, ‘Look, we love the motivational work you do, but don’t do any of that hypnosis stuff.’”

When he questioned why, they would say it was too woowoo. He would smile and challenge these leaders to do a thought experiment.

First, close your eyes, relax and go off into the imagined future. Look at the business environment, your product or service, where your competitors are and what the market

wants. Gather all this information and bring it back with you to the present moment.

Self-hypnosis, visualisation or manifestation all sound too obscure – so try making this exercise sound a little more serious, a little more corporate. Let’s instead call it strategic planning.

“Everything around us once started as an idea in somebody’s head. Basically, we all manifest all day long,” says McKenna. “Manifesting means imagining something and then bringing it into reality. If you have breakfast in the morning, you’re manifesting breakfast. If you get in the car and go somewhere, you’re manifesting a journey.”

Breaking down this mental barrier towards the concept of manifestation is what inspired McKenna’s latest book Power Manifesting. He estimates he has helped around 100,000 patients over the years with problems such as addiction, anxiety, lack of confidence and difficulty sleeping. His previous books have sold more than 10 million copies and been translated into 32 languages.

This focus was partly inspired by years of meeting, working with and studying the habits and secrets of the world’s

top achievers from areas including business, sports and the arts. But he also wanted to explain the science behind the practice. He likens it to a drill run by athletes called mental rehearsal.

Take, for example, a footballer preparing for a penalty kick. They will close their eyes and put themselves in front of 90,000 people at Wembley. They will envision the feel of the moment, the bright lights, the screaming fans and the raucous opposition. They will go through their preprepared run-up, think about the research on which way the goalkeeper will go, pick their spot and shoot.

Jonny Wilkinson, Simone Biles, Mark Cavendish and Novak Djokovic are just a few sportspeople to use mental rehearsal. The latter famously opened up about its power after his 2019 Wimbledon defeat of Roger Federer, saying it was especially useful for “transmuting” the noise of 15,000 people chanting for his rival. It gives someone the feeling that they have already gone through this challenging moment, meaning that when it is actually happening, you have a feeling that you’ve been there already.

“You’re programming the subconscious to use all of your motivation, energy and creativity,” says McKenna. “Of course, everything you do from boiling an egg to making £1m will come from your behaviours. What drives your behaviours is your state of mind and body, such as apathy, love, anger, fear and confidence. When we find ourselves in optimum states more of the time, first it feels good – but additionally you’re likely to produce better results.”

Sir Richard Branson provides a tangible example of someone who used manifestation in the business world. Airline travel in the 1970s was a stale market. One TV was shared between the occupants of a cabin, requiring large, gangly headphones. A grumpy attendant would throw something that looked like chicken for you to munch on. But Sir Richard saw an opportunity.

He sat down for an 11-hour flight and thought to himself, how would I do it differently? His manifestation began. When you arrive at the lounge, you could get a haircut or a massage. On the plane itself? A TV in every seat, with a plethora of movies and high-quality headphones. Great food and a bar for people to socialise. He wanted to make flying an enjoyable experience, not just something that people had to do to get to their destination.

“When he got off the plane, he had a list of ideas written down,” says McKenna, who spent time studying and

Manifest destiny

Paul McKenna asks people to envision their best future

“If you put everything into your business at the cost of your health, to me that is not success in life and certainly won’t make you happy

modelling Branson. “He phoned up Boeing and asked how much it was to get a jumbo jet. To buy one costs a fortune, but he found out he could lease one without potentially bankrupting the company. From sitting there and having this idea and exploring it, he then designed it in his mind and took action. And changed the entire airline industry.”

Immersing yourself in an imagined future allows you to visualise what it takes to get to that point. It’s not just a positive reinforcer, either. Sir Richard himself has seen Virgin Cola, Virgin Cars, Virgin Publishing and Virgin Clothing all fail. Along the same lines as business wargaming, this practice can prepare you for difficult times too – whether that’s a supplier letting you down or a senior leader in your business leaving.

But most importantly, manifestation gives you a vision or a pathway for your future. As McKenna says, you’ve got to go where it isn’t to find out where it is. One of the things that keeps you resilient and on course is knowing where you’re going. Sticking with the aviation theme, he continues: “When a plane flies from one place to another, because of wind direction, other air traffic, etc, it’s off course quite a lot of the time. But it always knows where it’s going.

“Having a direction in life – call it manifesting, call it goal setting, call it a strategy – is so important. On life’s journey, you’re going to face challenges and the state of mind and body that you’re in and the perspective that you bring to it will determine how you handle those challenges.”

McKenna likens this to the law of requisite variety. The person who can adapt to the ever-changing environments that they find themselves in will become master of their own destiny. As a business leader, it would be easy to use manifestation solely as a tool to grow your company. But McKenna says it’s important to get the balance between the personal and professional: “For many people, their business is their identity – and I get that – but you’ve got to think about yourself as a person. If you put everything into your business at the cost of your health, to me that is not success in life and certainly won’t make you happy.”

Manifestation is a tool to help you get your desired results, but stopping to appreciate what you have is just as important. He reflects on an interaction at a bar in The Shard, the tallest building in the UK, with a friend. Amid the stunning panoramic views of the glittering London skyline, his friend was complaining about how unhappy he was.

“Do you mind me asking you a personal question?” asked McKenna. “How much are you worth?”

“£50m,” was the response from the other side of the table.

“How do you manage to make yourself unhappy with £50m?” he inquired.

“Well, it’s because I’m not a billionaire yet,” his friend shot back. McKenna asked if he was going to put off being happy until he was a billionaire, to which he replied, yes –that was his source of motivation.

“That’s a dumb way to motivate yourself,” says McKenna. “I would prefer to use that constant, never-ending improvement model: am I better than I was yesterday?”

By doing this, you’re moving in the direction you want, rather than trying to achieve something the pursuit of which could make you miserable.

McKenna’s method of manifestation

Begin this exercise by imagining a straight timeline that extends in front and behind you. Your future extends out directly in front of you, your body is the present and your past continues along the timeline behind you. Visualise three months being around 10 inches in front of you, six months being 20 inches in front of you, nine months 30 inches and one year 40 inches.

Step forward in one year on your timeline and imagine it’s been your best year ever. If that’s true, what must have happened regarding your mental and physical health?

What must have happened regarding your relationships, both personal and professional?

What must have happened regarding your career, your finances and your general levels of happiness?

Now imagine living a day a year from now. What is that like? Keep that in mind and float back three months and ask yourself, what happened three months before? Get a sense of it.

Then float back three months from that and ask yourself, what happened three months before that? Get a sense of it.

Then float back three months from that and ask yourself, what happened three months before that? Get a sense of it.

Float all the way back to the present day and now you should have a succession of images that you could look at. If you haven’t, go back and do the exercise again. Now make these images big, bright, bold and immersive – the further they are away on your timeline, the bigger they get. What you can now see is a succession of images on your timeline of you healthy, happy and successful, living this amazing life.

This exercise probably takes a minute. If you spend a minute every day doing it, it’s more likely to happen because you’re putting your energy, motivation and creativity into it. This in turn will affect your behaviours and the way you interact with the world.

Scan the QR code to watch our video with Paul McKenna

Letting the genius out of the bottle

Unlocking creativity and talent can stimulate growth but you must live with potential downsides too, as Heston Blumenthal knows all too well

By Jake Humphrey, host of the High Performance podcast

There’s so much talk in business about creativity. But we often discuss the upsides and positives that come with creativity without discussing the downsides and challenges.

We recently had Heston Blumenthal on the High Performance podcast and he had a very interesting take on creativity and genius. His philosophy is that genius is not some incredible innate talent, but a manifestation of curiosity and an insatiable desire to learn.

That is really empowering because it means we can all get to genius level in what we want to do – if we are curious and want to learn.

Heston said that genius can be cultivated through relentless exploration, through a willingness to push boundaries. In his culinary career he began with a fascination with the

science of food. This led him to experiment, which led to learning new techniques, which led to using different ingredients. This set him apart from his peers. But it also highlighted the importance of curiosity rather than talent at the beginning of our careers.

True creativity arises from the ability to connect seemingly disparate things, things that you would never normally put together, ideas and concepts that shouldn’t work. When you look at the world of business, you can see things all around that you can’t believe worked. The reason why you didn’t have the idea is that you didn’t put those two very distinct things together.

In a kitchen setting, Heston encourages his team to think outside the box. He created something called the Museum of Crap Ideas, where you were given an award for having

Food for thought Heston Blumenthal recently appeared on Jake Humphrey’s High Performance podcast to discuss creativity and the culture needed to cultivate it

“Creativity can only be fostered in an atmosphere of freedom, where you’re actively looking for things not to work, because that encourages experimentation

the worst idea. The thinking behind that is that people would come up with things so ridiculous, so confusing, and so unusual that from those crap ideas would come real creativity.

He explained that creativity can only be fostered in that kind of an atmosphere – one of freedom, where you’re actively looking for things not to work, because that encourages experimentation. His most groundbreaking dishes came from those unexpected combinations. Creativity, without question, involves risk-taking and the willingness to embrace failure. It involves the desire to get things wrong.

We also spoke about Heston’s mental health. It’s well documented that just over a year ago he was sectioned. It was his wife who phoned the police. She watched on their security cameras as police, firemen and doctors entered the property and injected Heston. He woke up in a mental hospital and spent a number of weeks there.

He was candid sharing his own experiences of mental health. I think this is really important. We operate in a world where we know people who have had an ADHD diagnosis and it is spoken about a lot. But I would challenge anyone reading this column to tell me if they know someone who has been diagnosed as bipolar.

Yet in the UK more than 1 million people have been diagnosed as bipolar – so one in 60 to 70 people. It’s almost certain that anyone reading this has worked with someone, was at school with someone, or is friends with someone who is bipolar. Yet it isn’t discussed because there’s still a huge taboo around it.

Heston knows that the term bipolar conjures up images of having extreme highs and extreme lows. But he emphasised that this fluctuation is what fuels creativity. He described the intense bursts of inspiration he experienced during manic episodes, which led to innovative ideas and incredible projects. But he also acknowledged that the periods of deep lows can stifle your creativity and your motivation.

Heston’s openness about his struggles is a reminder that genius and creativity are what we should be looking for in our businesses. But employing people with those attributes requires real understanding and management. We need a holistic approach to mental health with self-care, support systems, finding a balance and working with people to work out what’s best for them.

All too often we romanticise the notion of the tortured genius or the tortured artist. This oversimplifies what is a really complex relationship between mental health and creativity. We need a more nuanced understanding. Heston highlighted the importance of nurturing talent in a creative and supportive environment, rather than romanticising the struggles that might come with it.

The message from Heston was very clear. Genius is not a solitary trait. It’s an interplay between curiosity, collaboration and resilience. That might be in cooking or any of the other creative pursuits that you might be involved in. In a world where we often glorify the notion of the solitary genius, what Heston was saying is that we should celebrate the collective nature of creativity and the diverse paths that lead to innovation. We need to create environments where creativity and genius are nurtured and helped – the high points, the low points and the lack of consistency.

We talk so often about consistency in business, but that is what people can struggle with, particularly when they have mental health challenges. Heston has given us hugely valuable information and pointers towards how we can create a business environment that allows people who have mental health challenges to thrive.

I would challenge all of you reading this article to look at the business that you are involved in, to look at the environment that you have created, and to ask yourself whether it’s the kind of environment where someone like Heston would thrive. If it isn’t, what are the steps that you can take to change that?

What a cricket auction tells us about valuation

The sale of cricket franchises for nearly £1bn shows the power of a good story over data when it comes to selling a business to investors

By Ed Smith, author of Making Decisions

Money can be a puzzling thing, especially if you have an arts background. You start off thinking money matters are going to be refreshingly black and white, flinty rows of numbers, facts and figures firmly in the ascendancy. Then you dig down a couple of surface layers and the foundations go all wobbly. It’s like you’ve turned up in the science department – it’s not your thing, but you’re hoping to watch and learn – but instead of a repeatable experiment with a Bunsen burner, instead everyone is talking about sentiment, confidence and beliefs.

How can that be the case? I’ve come all the way from the English department to see how the other side do things – and everyone is still talking about storytelling? But of course, there are stories and there are stories, a distinction we will come back to later.

This paradox provided the theme of Aswath Damodaran’s book Narrative and Numbers: the value of stories in business. Damodaran (nicknamed Wall Street’s dean of valuation) wrote his book with the opposite starting position from mine: he was a numbers guy who experienced a conversion to understanding the significance of storytelling. He wrote: “As early as the start of secondary school, the world divides us into storytellers and number crunchers. Each group learns both to fear and be suspicious of the other. You have two tribes, each speaking its own language and convinced it has a monopoly on the truth and that the other side is wrong.”

But of course you need both. And Damodaran portrays effectively valuing a company “as a bridge between numbers and stories”. Understanding value, he implies, demands interdisciplinary dexterity. Your own value, if you like, is seeing the value in uniting different modes of thought.

In the money London Spirit raise the trophy after beating Welsh Fire in the final of The Hundred at Lord’s Cricket Ground last year

(A digression. In sport, I have often been perceived as being “data-led” or “data-obsessed”, but in fact I’ve drawn heavily on intuition. I surround myself with people who arrive at decisions in more scientific ways, because I want my intuitions to improve through exposure to creative tension. Damodaran describes himself as reconnecting with his storytelling side, which he’d abandoned as a young boy. For me, who gave up all subjects except essay-writing aged 15, I’m walking backwards towards a scientific mind that is still open and curious – perhaps more so because it was under-developed academically.)

Cricket has just experienced a classic art versus science moment in the sale of The Hundred, a relatively new competition announced by the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2018 and launched in 2021. No other country plays the format. And it’s not obvious who else (beyond the existing TV buyers) would seriously bid for the rights to broadcast it. So the format has limited growth potential geographically and a questionable dependency on one principal source of revenue.

So how much is a franchise in The Hundred worth? In cold numbers on a spreadsheet, with a rational lens focused on imminent return on investment: not much. This led Lalit Modi, the entrepreneur who founded the Indian Premier League, to describe The Hundred as a “Ponzi scheme”.

And yet the recent sale of The Hundred put the combined value of the eight franchises at £975m. During the process, there were huge differentials in how experienced investors priced what was for sale. Some potential investors baulked at the gap between real numbers and future projections.

A 49 per cent stake in the franchise London Spirit, for example, was sold to a Silicon Valley consortium for £145m. The tech titans were attracted to the story of what The Hundred could become and the lure of the Lord’s Cricket Ground (where the franchise plays) brand. One of those investors is Microsoft boss Satya Nadella. It’s a brave sceptic who calls him irrational or lacking rigour.

I have a personal take on The Hundred. News of the competition was prematurely leaked to the media in the same week that my appointment as chief selector was leaked

All to pay for

A 49 per cent stake in the London Spirit franchise was sold to a Silicon Valley consortium for £145m

“The tech titans were attracted to the story of what The Hundred could become and the lure of the Lord’s Cricket Ground

to the media. (“Welcome to the ECB,” a friend within the organisation joked to me.)

In my first few days back inside cricket, I got used to being asked, with concerning levels of interest: “What do you think of the new competition?” I would reply honestly, though not very imaginatively, that 100 balls per side would probably turn out to be very similar to 120 balls per side (the format of the Twenty20 competition). On the cricket, if we really were talking cricket, how much could there be to say?

But of course, we never were talking about the cricket, we were talking about governance and power (as we still are today). Creating and launching a new franchise-based competition required a double navigation: they had to bring the broadcasters on board and they had to get the 18 county clubs to agree to it. The Hundred, in the business cliché, was the vehicle to reach those ends.

Then the question becomes, is the vehicle the destination? I suspect not. The end-state for the tournament is likely to be 120 balls per team – back where we started. (Though I doubt they will call it The Hundred and Twenty.)

And the destination for the game? That’s the real question. The sale of The Hundred has created a windfall for the sport, but a large cut will be spent paying off debts accrued by the counties. “You can’t sell off the family silver twice,” as Lord Mervyn King, president of the Marylebone Cricket Club and former governor of the Bank of England, put it. So the fundamental question is the same it’s always been: how to protect and organise the game over the long term?

Arguing about The Hundred, in the classic mode of culture war rows, has provided a vexed displacement activity. Now for the hard work: effective administration of the sport as a mode of experience, entertainment and social cohesion. That project – the richness, texture and fabric of the whole game – will be measured in memories and friendships, facilitated (but never fully represented) by healthy economics. Because the story and the numbers, once again, will be impossible to separate.

£975m not out

Value of the franchises sold in The Hundred auction

Invincibles

Spirit

Fire

Originals

Superchargers

Brave

Business must learn fast on winning cultures

By Catherine Baker, the founder of Sport and Beyond

Sport excels at coaching, motivating and improving through feedback. Why is business failing in these areas and what can it learn?

Creating a true learning and improvement culture is one of the fundamental building blocks to long-term success, even more so in today’s volatile and fast-paced world. It’s something elite sport is very good at, but an area where many businesses lag behind.

There are lessons that we can learn from sport in terms of the how. But before I share these, I want to start with an example from business. When Satya Nadella became only the third chief executive in Microsoft’s history in 2014, the company was struggling and at risk of not just falling behind but becoming irrelevant. Nadella knew he had to change things fast and dramatically.

After his own period of listening and learning, he started to understand the cause of the problems: the company had stopped listening and it had stopped learning. In short, Microsoft had stopped being open to improvement. With this knowledge, Nadella thus started to lay out his plans for change.

At the annual global sales conference in 2015, in front of 15,000 people, he said: “We can have all the bold ambitions. We can have all the bold goals. We can aspire to our new mission. But it’s only going to happen if we live our culture, if we teach our culture.

“To me, that model of culture is not a static thing. It is about a dynamic learning culture. We will grow as a company if everyone, individually, grows in their roles and in their lives.”

This approach certainly seems to have worked well for Microsoft. However, as Nadella points out in his book Hit Refresh, it’s a constant process involving organisation-wide training and coaching, alongside system and process change.

So what might this look like, and what are some of the lessons we can learn from elite sport?

Get coaching right

In some respects the job of a sports coach is relatively easy: their role each day is to help their athletes get better.

What about your role in your company, though? Wouldn’t the business benefit if you took the same coaching approach and applied it to interactions with your colleagues?

Elite sport shows us that it’s important to take advantage of the numerous “coaching moments” that occur across the working day. Don’t leave this side of your role until the formal appraisals: take advantage of all the daily opportunities presented to you to ask questions, challenge colleagues to a better performance or outcome and share insight, tools and techniques.

How you do this matters. Having a consistent approach to these sorts of conversations, and upskilling your managers and leaders to use this, is critical.

One of my favourite frameworks (and one that is backed by lots of research) is HEADS, which stands for “high expectations, assurance, direction and support”. Let your people know that you have high expectations of them and that you are confident they will achieve them.

But don’t just leave it at that – go on and provide some direction and support. For example, in order to improve in this area you need to talk to x, read y or go on z course.

Next time you’re minded to give a quick response or answer, check yourself and ask: “Is this a coaching moment?” The answer will often be yes. Take a breath, then control and direct your response accordingly.

Give clear feedback

One of the areas in which I see significant differences in approach across sport and business is in performance management. In business, too often feedback is irregular and guarded – and something for the recipient to fear.

In sport, feedback is generally clear and clinical, with an understanding that it is all aimed at helping the athlete get better. If I’m competing to make the Olympic team, feedback is my friend. I want to know what I need to change and improve to give myself the best chance of making the squad. Feedback is regular, comprehensive and welcomed. This is a shift businesses can make that can have a huge impact on both personal development and motivation, not to mention overall business outcomes. Prioritise performance review and feedback sessions. Don’t shift them in the diary when things get busy – I see this far too often. Remember they are for the benefit of the individual and the organisation. And be clear and objective.

Build a learning culture

Satya Nadella highlighted the importance of systems and processes when trying to instil and reinforce a learning and improvement culture. You need to introduce them. Set up learning forums. Develop a coaching framework and train your managers in it. Build learning goals into your reward and recognition schemes.

Conduct thorough debriefs at the end of projects. Make sure projects include regular review sessions with models such as “stop, start and continue”. Ensure that learning and improvement run through everything in your organisation.

Then communicate it. Emphasise it in recruitment. Introduce it in inductions. Make it part of your feedback.

Develop the person not the player

As a final area to highlight, a key mantra within elite sport over the past few years has been to develop the person not the player. In essence, this refers to the benefits and importance of developing an athlete not just within their sport, but as a more rounded individual.

There are some excellent examples within sport that I share in my book Staying the Distance. For readers of this column, the best business example is that of a large and very successful Yorkshire-based corporate that gives employees the opportunity to apply for funding each year in areas that develop them as a person, rather than just someone who fulfils their particular role.

Research in elite sport is showing the impact this can have on both motivation and improved and sustained performance. And why wouldn’t you want that for your people and your business?

Learning doesn’t just stop when we leave school: we should all be life-long learners. If you can encourage and embed that in your business, you will gain a critical competitive advantage.

Replace mindless habits with more mindful ones

By Caspar Lee, co-founder of Influencer.com and Creator Ventures

How to swap time-wasting activities like doomscrolling on your phone for new goals at home or work

“I bet there’s something in your life you’d like to change –a habit that eats away at your time, attention or energy

Like many people, every new year I make resolutions. The problem is that, like many people, within a month I’ve usually broken them and am left with the feeling of uselessness and despondency that this creates.

However, this year things are different. At the time of writing (and I hope at the time of you reading) I have managed not to break a single resolution. That’s unusual for me. Throughout my 20s I managed to fail to keep them every single year, usually within weeks.

I put my success this time down to taking a different approach. I’m going to detail it here because it is one that I hope can help you, whether you’re looking to introduce a new habit into your personal or work life.

Here it is: instead of trying to build a good habit from scratch, I swapped a bad one for a better one. That way, whenever my brain went on autopilot and reached for the old habit, I had a seamless replacement in place.

This process is called “habit reversal” and it is a behavioural therapy technique that involves replacing an unwanted habit with a more desirable one. By identifying the cue that triggers the bad habit, you can substitute the routine with more positive behaviour while maintaining the same reward, effectively rewiring your habit loop.

The habit I wanted to replace was mindless scrolling on my phone. I was tired of seeing couples’ gender reveals of soon-to-be-born babies and the latest madcap conspiracy theories, so I decided to start journalling.

The romantic approach would have been to buy another Moleskine notebook, only for it to be used twice before disappearing into a cupboard, eventually making its way to the tip during our next house move. But I knew that for this habit to stick, it had to feel as effortless as the one I was replacing.

So, instead of trying to ditch my phone, I turned it into the solution, using the same device I was addicted to but this time for something useful in those moments when I feel the urge to scroll. That could be when I’m watching a horror film with my fiancée (we recently watched The Substance, which turned out to be way too gory for my delicate mind) or while waiting in the queue for self-checkout at the supermarket, or for someone to verify my ID to buy painkillers to get over the aforementioned film.

Any time I reach for my phone to scroll, I had to open my journal app instead and write something, even if it was

just a single sentence. To make the switch easier, I put the journal app exactly where the Instagram icon used to be on my phone, so my muscle memory would guide me straight into a more productive place.

I know many people reading this will scoff at the idea of being addicted to social media. But I’d bet there’s something in your life you’d like to change – a habit that eats away at your time, attention or energy. My advice is simple: don’t just cut it, replace it with something that scratches the same itch.

One of the biggest reasons we fail to stick to new habits is that we expect willpower to carry us through. But willpower is like an iPhone battery that is two generations old – it slowly drains away and your old habits will eventually come back. Habit experts (I didn’t know this was a thing either) such as American author James Clear emphasise the importance of making new habits obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

You don’t have to replace scrolling with journalling. The same trick applies to any habit you want to change. If you’re trying to cut out those late-night snacks, don’t just tell yourself that you won’t eat after 9pm. Instead, swap your chocolate for fruit. If you want to stop watching Netflix right before bed, rather than going cold turkey, try swapping an episode for an audiobook.

We think of habits as things we either have or don’t have. But really, they’re just patterns that we reinforce over time. I won’t pretend I’ve eliminated all mindless scrolling – I still slip up every now and then – but the difference is that now I have a system that helps me change course.

This doesn’t just work for changes in your personal life, it also applies at work. Introducing a new process can be a real pain, not just because people don’t love change, but because change requires a lot of effort.

Rather than expecting everyone to adopt a completely new way of working overnight, the key is to make adjustments that feel familiar. By embedding new habits within existing routines, you reduce friction and make meaningful change that is far more likely to stick.

So, if you’ve struggled to stick to a resolution, rest assured that the problem isn’t always you – it also comes down to the method. Instead of trying to change your life, why not have a go at swapping instead? You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve.

How growth capital is powering the UK’s most ambitious businesses

Scaling a business is an exciting yet demanding journey. While ambition and innovation help drive success, securing the right funding at the right time can make all the difference

For many UK businesses, self-funding or reinvesting the profits they generate can only take them so far before growth opportunities outpace available resources.

According to data from the ScaleUp Institute, more than half of high-growth businesses in the UK struggle to access the capital needed to reach their full potential. This funding gap can mean slower expansion, missed market opportunities and limited investment in technology, talent or infrastructure.

That’s where growth capital comes in. This is a form of funding – usually equity – that provides companies with the financial firepower to scale, while retaining strategic control.

Unlike traditional private equity, which often involves majority ownership, growth capital investors take a minority stake in the businesses they’re backing, offering expert guidance as a supportive junior partner.

Growth capital is particularly valuable for businesses that have strong revenue streams and market traction but need additional resources to accelerate their journeys.

As the UK and Ireland’s most active growth capital investor, BGF has invested £4.5bn in more than 600 businesses to date. With a presence in 15 regional offices, BGF provides ambitious small and medium-sized businesses with flexible funding, strategic support and access to an extensive partner network.

BGF’s investments typically range from £3m to £30m, offering follow-on funding as businesses continue to grow. With a clear focus on value creation, BGF also connects entrepreneurs in its portfolio with non-executive board members, sector specialists and business advisors who can help drive sustainable, long-term success.

As Paul Baker, co-founder of international baker business St Pierre Groupe, explains: “BGF’s investment enabled us to accelerate our international expansion and scale at a pace that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Its strategic support and long-term approach were invaluable in taking our brand to the next level.”

Dr. Brian McConnell, founder of Hydrock, a design and sustainability consultancy, turned to growth capital with a clear objective: M&A.

Securing investment from BGF in 2018, Hydrock acquired seven complementary businesses within six years, strengthening its market position. This strategic expansion led to the company’s acquisition by Stantec, a leading sustainable engineering and design company, in 2023.

McConnell says: “BGF has been an excellent partner and its investment in the business has played a critical role in our growth story.”

BGF has supported many successful exits, helping companies transition to new ownership or be acquired by larger companies operating in their industry.

One example is kitchen manufacturer Uform. It leveraged investment from BGF, as well as the support on offer, to scale its operations, enhance its manufacturing capabilities and expand into new markets. This strategic growth positioned the company as one of the top businesses in its sector, ultimately leading to a high-value exit that

delivered strong returns and a bright future for the business.

“We have built a very strong relationship with the BGF team, who from day one bought into our vision and strategy of where we want to take the business and provided invaluable support,” says Eamon Donnelly, co-founder of Uform.

Another success story is J&B Recycling, which secured growth capital from BGF to modernise its recycling facilities, invest in new technology and expand its operations. This partnership enabled the company to increase efficiency, meet growing demand and strengthen its position in the waste management sector.

“BGF’s support offered us the perfect combination of patient long-term capital, insight and support,” says Vikki Jackson-Smith, chief executive at J&B Recycling.

Growth capital is more than just financial investment – it’s about unlocking a business’s full potential. Whether through acquisitions, product launches, international expansion or workforce development, businesses that secure growth capital are better positioned to scale efficiently and sustainably.

BGF is committed to supporting ambitious entrepreneurs and companies across the UK and Ireland. If your business is ready to take the next step, explore how growth capital from our team could help you scale by visiting bgf.co.uk

HIGH FIVE FOR STATESIDE SUCCESS

The US is often the first stop for UK businesses looking to expand, but traps lie in wait for even the best prepared. Here are five tips for success

By Sarah Vizard

It was the playwright George Bernard Shaw who reputedly said: “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”

Despite this, the US is an attractive market for many mid-sized businesses wanting to expand. The country offers several advantages: a skilled workforce, a huge customer base, an entrepreneurial culture and a vibrant investment environment.

Not only that, but the US economy is vast: its gross domestic product was $29.2tn (£23.5tn) in 2024, almost 10 times the size of the UK’s. Make it there and your business is probably on the way to global success.

But these factors belie the difficulties of expanding Stateside. In many ways, what makes the US an attractive market is also what makes it difficult. The market is huge, the workforce demanding, competition high and regulation more complicated.

When expanding to the US, all the same considerations apply as they would in any market. You need to assess the US market fit for your offering, the demand you are likely to see, how to price and market products, and where to sell them. There are also tax, labour, legal, structure and timing implications to consider.

Business Leader recently held a Masterclass Live event to help guide our members through expansion across the pond. Here are the five main points to consider:

1. The size of the market

With an economy almost 10 times the size of the UK’s, a population around five times larger and a landmass almost 40 times larger, taking on the US purely from a size point of view is a huge undertaking.

“The biggest thing to understand about the US is how vast it is,” says Steven Cook, nonexecutive director at the UK homewares company Mrs Alice, which recently entered the US.

“I know that sounds a tad trite, but it is understanding not just the geography but the belts within it that may or may not be for you. It is very different seasonally, markdown cadence is very different across the country, you may not sell regionally in the Bible belt versus the

northeast, California may be a key market for you. It is analysing where you’re best suited to get started.”

This, says Cook, is the biggest error UK companies make. Having had success here and possibly even in Europe, they underestimate the vastness of the US and how different each community is. “There are lot of things to consider, but scale is the one that is so important to understand.”

At Mrs Alice, the company researched which markets would suit the product and went to those areas to talk to people who understood it: retailers, suppliers and customers. The business then partnered with key retailers on pop-ups in these locations, which included the Hamptons, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas.

“You have to go to these markets, speak to people, speak to competitors, visit retailers,” Cook says. “It’s amazing what you get back and the number of people, even through LinkedIn, that will help you if you reach out.”

From there, he advises companies to build a market at a time. And to think beyond the obvious locations such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Chicago. “Go to secondary and tertiary markets because there is a lot of business to be done.”

2. The cost of hiring

Americans are expensive. The average compensation for a US employee is likely to be between one-and-a-half and three times as much as for a UK-based employee, once pay and benefits are factored in.

That might put some off hiring, especially initially. But if you’re expanding to the US, you will probably need to hire Americans.

As Daniel Glazer, London office managing partner at US law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, puts it: “Americans like buying from other Americans.”

That makes it important to consider the return on investment of putting people on the ground in the US. Any business expanding there should consider whether this is necessary, or whether they could get the same benefit by having someone in a country with a similar time zone, such as Mexico or Canada.

A few areas where you will probably have to hire locally are sales, business development and marketing – jobs that are public- or customer-facing. These are also expensive roles. As Glazer says, a head of sales in New York could easily cost north of £500,000 a year, which puts off a lot of UK companies. But, he says, the right person can make or break a business.

Compensation packages are often expensive as well. In the US, there is no universal healthcare and so employers are expected to provide insurance, which can cost up to £15,000 per person per year. Americans also typically save for their retirement through a 401k, where an employer matches funds. Options in a business are also more common.

One area you can make some of this back is holiday. In the US, the average worker will have 10 days of paid holiday a year. “Americans may cost more but they will also put in, on average, more hours working for you over the course of the year,” says Glazer.

This can also be used as a competitive advantage in the tight US labour market. Offering a British-style holiday package plus the opportunity to travel to a UK HQ is likely to prove attractive to many.

3. The complexities of hiring

There are as many as four different ways of hiring in the US, all of which have pros and

cons. The first is to hire an American directly as an employee through a UK limited company. But Glazer advises not to do that, for tax and liability reasons.

“Your parent company may come up as tax resident in two different geographies and have a direct line of potential liability from the US,” he points out.

The second option is to hire contractors directly through a UK company. That is a better option but companies must bear in mind that each state has its own employment rules and its own laws as to what constitutes a contractor and what constitutes an employee.

“The way I describe this employee-contractor distinction is this: if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, even if you contractually stipulate that it’s a goose,” he says. “You can call someone a contractor in an agreement, but if their actual day-to-day role is that of an employee under that state’s employment rules, they’re likely going to be considered an employee.”

The third option is to use an employer-of-record (EOR) service, which has become increasingly popular in the past few years. This involves a UK company entering into an agreement with an EOR service, which then employs staff for you. This often works well but again can come under scrutiny if it’s clear the staff member is really an employee of the UK. For

example, a UK company hiring a US-based CEO through an EOR could be deemed to have created a permanent establishment of the UK company in the US.

“The EOR model works very well for the right employees,” says Glazer.

The final way is by setting up a wholly owned Delaware corporation that is a subsidiary of the UK limited company. It can be registered to do business in each state where it has offices or employees, which sees employees then given state-specific employment documents.

“If you hire in New York, you give New York documents; if you hire in California, you give California documents. The tendency might be to just cross out New York and write California, the problem is that is like crossing out France and writing in Germany. It doesn’t work because the differences between the US states are sometimes quite substantial.”

4. Setting up a US entity

UK companies can sell remotely almost indefinitely, but if you want boots on the ground, you are likely to need to set up a US subsidiary. In the US, there is no such thing as a “US company” in the same way there are UK limited companies or a German GmbH, so businesses are free to incorporate in any state.

Typically, however, it means setting up a Delaware subsidiary. The state has become

“The interesting thing about a brand and reputation is you can be hot in Miami and tacky in LA

the default location because of its business-friendly tax, legal and regulation policies and well-established corporate court system. Plus, advisers from around the US know how to deal with Delaware companies, whereas, for example, an adviser in New York will probably not know how to advise on a company based in California.

“The state that long ago set itself apart as the de facto national company in the US is Delaware,” says Glazer. “The headline takeaway is ‘Delaware reduces friction.’ If you incorporate a subsidiary in a state other than Delaware, you may end up having a fair amount of administrative friction.”

Sometimes, US investors – particularly early-stage investors – will insist on investing in a Delaware corporation, especially if it is not a US-based business. And the earlier stage a company is at, the more likely a US venture capital firm will want to deal with a Delaware company. “Many early-stage US investors do not like taking the corporate governance risk they perceive comes with a non-Delaware corporation,” says Glazer. “From their standpoint,

you are introducing friction without any economic upside.”

That often leads to something called the Delaware flip, where a UK limited company does a share-for-share exchange so that the capitalisation table of the UK company becomes the capitalisation table of the Delaware company. That, says Glazer, is time-consuming and expensive – but can be worth it if the deal is good enough.

The likelihood of having to perform such a flip when raising a round led by US-based VC investors is around 80 per cent at the seed-funding stage but drops to about 20 to 25 per cent for Series A funding. Delaware flips for Series B and later funding rounds are relatively rare, according to Glazer.

5. Building a brand

The way that people buy is also vastly different across the country and so are the marketing levers. “A lot of organisations across Europe underestimate what is required [in the US] and what marketing levers will work,” says Oliver Yonchev, founder of the creative studio

Cocreatd. “The interesting thing about a brand and reputation is you can be hot in Miami and tacky in LA, that’s the reality.”

That makes building a brand important. It would be easy to pick up some sales just by dint of launching in the US, but those sales need to be sustainable and growth long-lasting.

“When you take a scattergun approach to the US, you may get some sales, but you’re not building a brand in that market,” says Cook.

Many companies that go to the US will try to trade on their Britishness. That can certainly work, says Jane Gorley, interim vice-president of digital experience at jewellery brand Pandora, but it can’t be the only point of difference. “Most British businesses have other things to tap into in terms of quality, uniqueness and design aesthetic that can be very appealing to the US market, but it’s about communicating that in a very upfront way.”

Marketing in the US can also be expensive. Typically cost-per-acquisition in digital marketing is higher. “That is certainly my experience,” says Cook. “There is a lot of noise and there’s a lot of segmentation in the market.”

LOCAL HEROES

There may be a temptation to expand internationally with remote teams or existing staff but local expertise can be the difference between success and failure

By Josh Dornbrack

Did you ever imagine you would have an international business? That you would be planting your company’s flag in a faraway land, seeing your product in a different language or having to work out time differences when meeting your team in another part of the world?

Expanding abroad comes complete with concerns around different regulations, language barriers and cultural differences. But if you take the step, what is the best way to staff your move?

Any international expansion needs to be well-planned and researched. Getting a true understanding of local markets and business practices is vital on the product or service side, but just as important are the resourcing and finding leaders to build a new team.

Sara Daw is group chief executive of the Liberti Group and CFO Centre Group. The company provides access to fractional C-Suite professionals. In 2009, when it was a “very small SME”, an opportunity arose.

The company had been growing steadily in the UK and a connection in its network inquired about launching in Australia. Fast forward to today and the company is operating on five continents, in South Africa, Australia, the US, India and Europe (Germany).

“I basically spent my life running training during those early years,” recalls Daw. “It doesn’t cost us that much to start up in a new country in terms of pound notes, it’s more around the investment of time in training people.”

A method that Daw has implemented – despite admitting that it may not be for everyone – has become a key tool to build trust. When team members visited leaders in other countries, they would stay at their house. They would get to know their partners, children and way of life, both to understand the local culture and form a strong connection as the foundation of a successful business relationship.

Although it made some mistakes with hiring, the company has now built a replicable template for international expansion. Leveraging connections to find employee number one in a new territory is also a key recommendation from Orla Leonard, a senior partner at leadership consulting firm RHR International.

“I think knowledge and experience of clients and the market is number one,” she says. “Dipping into existing networks for referrals was a helpful first step. I have been amazed by the willingness of clients and contacts to flag up talented people in their networks and I have learnt that ‘paying it forward’ is something people like to do.”

“Sending someone senior who understands the company inside-out to new markets is a game-changer

The Liberti Group and RHR International focus on hiring leaders within the new territory, but another approach has its upsides too. “You need to strike a balance between embedding your company culture and capitalising on local expertise,” says Peter Gillingwater, chief executive of Newfound Global, which helps tech businesses expand into new markets. He recommends a hybrid approach.

“Send one of your trusted team members who already knows your company inside-out to set the tone and act as a bridge, then hire strategically in the new market,” he advises. “This combination allows you to transfer your company culture while leveraging the deep market knowledge of local hires.”

He gives the example of gift card tech company Tillo, which expanded to Austin, Texas in 2022. Its chief executive moved to the US for the transition and the difference was felt on the ground. The company expanded to Australia a year later.

“Sending someone senior who understands the company inside-out is a game-changer,” Gillingwater says. “They set the tone, build credibility and drive success in a way that a junior hire simply can’t.”

Once you have a leader in place, it’s time to build the team. Gillingwater says that choosing not to engage with local talent is a fast track to failure. “Local hires aren’t just there to add to your costs,” he says. “They’re the key to understanding how the market works. The best hires bring connections, insights into cultural nuances and a deep understanding of what local customers expect.”

Much like hiring a leader in the country, leaning on a network of trusted connections can take longer to get results but can be worth its weight in gold. Leonard says RHR International’s policy of asking clients and contacts for recommendations has provided first-hand testimonials from people who had worked with candidates and significantly reduced the risk of a bad hire.

That said, it’s not as simple as hiring anyone who’s local – you have to get the right people. Gillingwater says he has seen too many businesses fall into the trap of hiring someone’s cousin or a “well-connected” friend without checking if they are up to the job. The right local hire can

accelerate your sales pipeline and provide invaluable feedback to shape strategy. The wrong hire will waste time and money and – perhaps most seriously – damage credibility.

“If you don’t have the network, bring in someone who does,” says Gillingwater. “A good talent partner or local expert can open doors and ensure you’re getting the best talent, not just whoever’s easiest to find or available. It’s worth waiting a few months if it means you get a great hire. Paying recruitment fees can be unpalatable but good recruiters often have the best access and knowledge around who is good and who should be avoided.”

Leonard suggests spreading the net wide when interviewing candidates. Narrowing the pool too quickly could lead to missing valuable candidates. She admits that one of the mistakes she’s seen is going too fast with recruitment. There is often a sense of urgency to get someone in, but this can create blind spots and store up future problems.

“Ensure there are multiple meetings between the candidate and multiple stakeholders, especially those in senior positions who are working more closely with the central HQ,” she says. “This also allows the candidate to get a sense of the organisation and make an informed decision. The most talented candidates have choices, so engaging them in a two-way dialogue is really important.”

There are creative solutions too. Software solutions company Epicor has tapped into emerging talent pools by partnering with institutions such as President University in Indonesia and the Institute of Technical Education in Singapore to provide students with hands-on experience using its software. This not only helps students develop valuable skills but also positions the company as an employer of choice for top talent in the region.

In-person interviews can give you an important baseline for what the talent pool looks like, so are rarely a waste of time. However, it’s important to look beyond the CV. Ask candidates about their values, what motivates them and how they approach challenges.

Combined with the local knowledge of a leader on the ground, you will start to understand the nuances that make this new territory unique. “For example,” says Gillingwater,

“in France, work-life balance is a big deal so employees may expect clear boundaries around working hours. In the US, it’s often about long hours and hustle.”

In the same way that US companies expanding to the UK often need to tone down the hard-sell approach not to come across as brash, insights into local nuances can also offer the chance to hone your offering or messaging. Focus on building relationships and showing commitment to the market. As Gillingwater says: “It’s about blending your culture with theirs, not bulldozing it.”

As the international operation grows, a robust local hiring plan will emerge but business as usual applies. “Be really thoughtful about each hire and the impact each role will generate for the business,” says Leonard. “I think challenging yourself to think about what is different and what bestin-class looks like here is important – and to challenge your own schema of what makes a good candidate.”

With a robust culture of transparency and knowledge sharing, expanding into additional territories becomes easier, says Daw: “We have so many fantastic leaders in the business now and they have all been through it. They have their own stories and learnings and can support each other.”

The cultural groundwork for this has been laid already. The company holds two conferences a year, leaders do country visits and meet frequently on virtual calls. “If you’ve got the right relationship, you can pretty much get through anything,” says Daw. “We appreciate that every country is different on the ground, so we have guiding principles and core philosophies as a company, but each market can tailor those and localise those to their specific locations.”

RHR International also subscribes to gathering its teams from different territories together face to face. As part of this, the company’s values are discussed, which allows the standards it sets for all territories to be consistent.

Another way of keeping tight links between offices across the globe is exemplified by the creative communications agency Irvine Partners. It has offices in six countries throughout Europe and Africa and offers its team members an office exchange programme, enabling them to travel to different regions and get to know their colleagues better.

One of the biggest mistakes Gillingwater sees is being unprepared. “Too many companies dive into a new market without validating their product-market fit or understanding local nuances,” he says. “They make bad hires or rely on remote teams and end up wasting time and money.

“The fix? Do your homework. Invest in local expertise, bring in the right people and commit fully to the market. Also, make sure you have the appropriate budget to enter a new market, as it normally costs twice as much and takes twice as long!”

Expanding internationally isn’t easy, but when you do it right, the rewards are super-sized too.

Only connect

A key recommendation from Orla Leonard, above, of the leadership consulting firm RHR International is to make use of people in your network to help find employee number one in a new territory

By Graham Ruddick

Even the biggest and best British businesses can struggle to emulate their success across the Atlantic

On February 9, 2006, Tesco announced plans to expand into the US. At the time, the retailer could do little wrong. It was a behemoth of British business. Under the leadership of Sir Terry Leahy, the supermarket chain had gone from being an also-ran to one of the biggest food retailers in the world alongside Walmart and Carrefour. Tesco had rolled out new formats such as Express convenience stores and Metro hypermarkets, and it was growing rapidly overseas, becoming the biggest food retailer in countries such as Thailand and Poland. The biggest criticism was that it had become too dominant and was crushing local high streets. Sir Terry had been knighted in 2002 for his success with Tesco and was widely regarded as one of the finest leaders in the UK.

But everything was about to change.

“This is a tremendously exciting move for Tesco, which will add a new leg to our international expansion,” Sir Terry said of the US expansion. “The United States is the largest economy in the world with strong forecast growth and a sophisticated retail market. It’s a market we have researched extensively for many years and over the last year we have committed serious resources to developing a format that we believe will be really popular with American consumers.”

The US business was based on a new convenience store format designed for the local market. This format was inspired by the Tesco Express convenience stores that had enjoyed great success in the UK and beyond. The business would be called Fresh & Easy and led by Tim Mason, one of the stars of Tesco and a marketing genius who, alongside Sir Terry, had launched the Clubcard loyalty scheme.

But despite Mason’s track record, launching a new format in a highly-competitive market was clearly risky from the start. “The risk profile of owning Tesco has now worsened materially,” City analysts at Oriel Securities declared after the announcement.

Tesco said the move into the US would cost it an initial £250m and that it expected the venture to break even by the second year of operation. But this would prove to be wildly optimistic. Fresh & Easy would never make a profit and in the end would cost Tesco well in excess of £1bn.

Tesco set up its American headquarters in the city of El Segundo in Los Angeles, California, and opened the first Fresh & Easy shop in late 2007. Over the next six years, it opened more than 200 shops in states including Arizona, California and Nevada. But the losses mounted. In April 2009, Tesco said Fresh & Easy was operating at a trading loss of £142m. It closed some of the stores temporarily due to poor sales and trading did not improve.

Tesco announced it was pulling out of the US in 2013, just six years after the launch. The initial cost of the failure was put at £1bn but in reality it was much more. By this time, the success of Tesco was unravelling in several markets around the world, with sales falling even in the UK – something that would previously have been unthinkable. Philip Clarke, Sir Terry’s successor as chief executive, admitted that Tesco had been running its UK business “too hot” as it tried to raise cash to fund overseas expansion.

Things would get much, much worse. Tesco became embroiled in an accounting scandal and in 2015 posted an annual loss of £6.4bn, one of the biggest in UK corporate history. “Shaming of Tesco” read the front page of the Daily Mail after the scandal emerged.

To shore up its balance sheet, Tesco sold businesses around the world. In 2006, the year it announced its expansion to the US, Tesco had reported international sales of £9.5bn. But by 2024 international sales were just £4.3bn. Tesco’s Central European business is the only piece left of its international empire. The company has retreated from its global ambitions.

There are clear reasons why Tesco’s US plan ran into trouble. Firstly, the timing proved to be disastrous. As the

first Fresh & Easy shop opened in 2007, a credit crisis was developing. Within months Lehman Brothers had collapsed and the global financial crisis had begun.

“It was a great business,” Mason said of Fresh & Easy in an interview with The Grocer magazine in 2016. “There were many very good reasons, not least the economy, that meant it was somewhere between very difficult and impossible to be successful in the timeframe.

“If Tesco had been financially stronger, the business could have taken everything it learnt over six years and refined and developed the model and got it to an acceptable place. Unfortunately, there wasn’t that economic firepower. There were problems all over the place, not least in the UK, and the decision was made.”

But others weren’t so sure about the quality of Fresh & Easy. Lord Ian MacLaurin, Sir Terry’s predecessor as Tesco chief executive, went to the west coast of America to see the new business – and was not impressed.

“I just thought it was a damp squib, 15,000 sq ft stores, all self-service, all pre-packed food, all very un-American,”

Lord MacLaurin said, shortly after Tesco pulled out. “That’s why I got upset with Terry. Having spent all my life building up the business with a brilliant team of people, to watch

him throw £1bn at America hurt, because the chances of success were never very good.”

Lord MacLaurin was also Mason’s father-in-law.

Tesco had developed the format for Fresh & Easy at a warehouse in Santa Monica, California. Passers-by were told it was a film studio, but inside the warehouse was a fully functioning dummy supermarket. More than 200 focus groups were invited to the store to provide feedback. Tesco was desperate to keep its plans for the US secret, so to stock the shop with food it bought £50,000 worth of products on the east coast of the US and drove it to California. At the same time as testing the dummy shop, 50 senior Tesco directors lived with American families for two weeks to understand how they lived and shopped. The families had been picked by a market research firm.

But despite the research and Tesco’s success elsewhere, the format just didn’t work. Shoppers complained about the self-service tills and, while Tesco thought there was a gap in the market for fresh and convenient food, US consumers were happy to stock up with long-lasting goods. The cost of developing a supply chain was also expensive and Tesco put kitchens into shops to make its own food.

Risky business

A Fresh & Easy store in Azusa, California. Right: Tim Mason, who was at the helm of Tesco’s doomed US foray

“From the start, Fresh & Easy bewildered and frustrated the pragmatic American grocery shopper who is already spoilt for choice,” one shopper said in 2012.

Sir Terry left his role as CEO in 2011, before the company made the decision to pull out. But he said he would take the blame if Fresh & Easy failed. “It will have been my responsibility as CEO and a clear example that goals are easy to set, incredibly difficult to achieve and must carry a clear accountability,” he said.

In his 2012 book Management in 10 Words, he discussed the problem with British/US ventures. “There are indeed many cautionary tales to deter Britons – especially retailers – from setting up shop in the US. The lure is understandable. A common language, a culture that Britons feel they

understand, exposure to numerous American brands and companies who have invested in the UK. Britons can easily delude themselves that life on the other side of ‘the pond’ is not really that different, and that competing there cannot be that hard. Therein lies the problem. These apparent similarities have blinded companies to the numerous differences.”

That, in the end, is the ultimate lesson from this saga. No matter how successful a business is in one market, entering another, especially one as competitive as the US, is a different challenge. The decision needs to be made with a clear understanding of the customer, competitors and the cost. The consequences of getting it wrong could be severe. Tesco walked away with a huge bill but also a damaging hit to its core business.

“From the start, Fresh & Easy bewildered and frustrated the pragmatic American grocery shopper

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Pip Murray

Founder & CEO, Pip & Nut

Jogging was the inspiration behind Pip & Nut, which Pip Murray founded in 2013. She now makes a range of nut-butter products, but her original peanut butter recipe was based on a power snack she developed at home to help her prepare for jogging. She wanted a natural recipe that avoided additives and palm oil. It was a hit with friends, so she began a side hustle alongside her day job at the Science Museum.

Food entrepreneurs typically want two things: investment and a product listing with a retailer. Murray took her creations to local food markets to test customer feedback – and got her big break. She met a buyer from the Selfridges department store who loved her product, which led to a much-coveted product listing. Pip & Nut’s all-natural butter range is now stocked in Sainsbury’s and Tesco, and has annual retail sales of £25m.

“I truly believe you make the opportunities for your brand by being out there, speaking to people, building your network,” she says. “It’s not just luck that got you those opportunities. Be active at every stage of your journey, making sure that you’re maximising every opportunity in front of you, to kind of build your own luck.”

Joanna Reynolds CEO, The Folio Society

Joanna Reynolds has completely changed the way publishing house The Folio Society operates since becoming chief executive in 2016 – and returned it to profit. It dropped its membership model and now sells direct-toconsumer internationally, targeting younger readers. Recent hits include illustrated editions of Dune and the Game of Thrones series.

Reynolds credits a diagnosis of dyslexia in her early 20s with helping her develop a leadership style that runs contrary to the “vertical thinking” she has seen in many other organisations. “Vertical thinkers come at a problem in a very systematic, linear way and go step-bystep to come to their solution, like building blocks in a tower,” says Reynolds.

She believes her dyslexia makes her more of a “lateral thinker”, a concept popularised by psychologist Edward de Bono. “Lateral thinkers are very creative,” says Reynolds. “They go wide and they think broadly.” It also tolerates mistakes. Reynolds believes her lateral thinking has helped her champion new authors, examine sales and other data critically and think of radical strategies. “I think it brings something different to the way I lead businesses.”

“Be active to create luck

“Think laterally, not vertically

Allan Thygesen

CEO, DocuSign

DocuSign was founded in 2003 and pioneered e-signatures for online documents. Allan Thygesen joined in 2022 and under his leadership the company is focusing on the use of artificial intelligence to manage digital agreements. It has annual revenues of more than $2bn (£1.6bn) and employs over 6,000 people globally.

Thygesen believes that business networking has an image problem. “Too many people think that networking is about cocktail parties,” he says, “but it’s actually about being helpful to others and paying it forward, about being relevant and meaningful to people. Every major job change I’ve made has been directly connected to people I worked with before who I’ve come to know really, really well.”

This principle applies to his role at DocuSign. Thygesen says he decided to apply for the CEO position after he realised that he knew the interim CEO very well, having worked under her 20 years before. She was the chair of the board and had stepped in temporarily.

This connection gave him the impetus to put himself forward. When you make the effort to build positive relationships with people and maintain them, Thygesen says, “it comes back to you in ways you just couldn’t predict”.

“Networking is about being helpful to others

Timo Boldt

CEO, Gousto

Timo Boldt founded recipe box service Gousto in 2012 and has stayed with the company as it has steadily grown. As the company needed a different kind of leadership style, he embraced the challenge by becoming a certified coach.

Gousto makes recipe boxes with the ingredients to make specific meals, which are delivered to customers’ homes. The company has annual revenues of more than £300m, having raised more than $350m (£285m) in venture capital to scale the business. Boldt used to work in banking at Rothschild before becoming an entrepreneur in his mid-20s.

“Becoming a certified coach has hugely helped me understand myself better, understand where my biases are, but also how to positively impact people,” he says. The coaching has helped him to “read” employees better, he adds.

“It’s your job as the CEO to really dial up challenge or dial it back down and increase support and constantly calibrate,” says Boldt. Some staff might need support if they are going through a tough time, like a complicated pregnancy. On the other hand, a “cocky” employee might need to be engaged with in a different way. Learning the skills of coaching has made it possible for him to help “make people happier at scale”.

“Becoming a coach made me a better CEO

Alla Ouvarova

Co-founder, Two Chicks

You may have a strong “hunch” your retail product will do well, but you never actually know who your customers will be, according to Alla Ouvarova, who co-founded the food brand Two Chicks with her friend Anna Richey in 2007. It specialises in liquid egg-white products. Richey came across the concept in Los Angeles, where it was popular with people on low-fat and low-cholesterol diets. The pair discovered they had complementary skills and decided to start a business together, making a similar product for the UK market. After they found the right factories to make it, the business began to grow.

But the business partners were surprised about their customers. “We had ‘yummy mummies’, ladies looking after their weight, but we also had bodybuilders who just wanted to bulk up; rugby players [too]. They love it for the protein content because they can have six eggs and then add more egg white.”

Today it sells around 100,000 units per week globally and is stocked in most big UK supermarket chains. It also sells in global markets such as the Netherlands and United Arab Emirates.

“For me as a mum, I love to put egg white into my kids’ porridge because it gives them the protein, but you can’t taste it!” says Ouvarova.

“Keep an open mind over who your customers will be

Eshita Kabra-Davies CEO, By Rotation

Don’t let a desire for perfection hold you back from executing an idea, says Eshita KabraDavies. The entrepreneur has been building a peer-to-peer, digital platform that lets people rent their clothes to each another since 2019.

By Rotation has 500,000 users, she says, predominantly women who share designer fashion items. There are currently 150,000 items on the platform, worth $70m (£55m) in total. It has become known as the “Airbnb for clothes” and has built communities through its app and website in both the UK and US.

“Put the minimum viable product out there and get feedback from your early adopters, who will be your strongest supporters,” she advises. “If you look at the first few versions of our website platform and app, they were hideous, they were ugly, but they did what they needed to do.”

Over time, Kabra-Davies was able to improve the branding and marketing and add lots of additional features and functionality, giving By Rotation more of an identity. She has also found that it has become a kind of social network where people can share stories about the clothes they share, from ball gowns to wedding dresses, while also swapping style tips.

“Don’t seek early perfection

Under the Bonnet

Masterclass Live

Empowering UK SMES: A connectivity and tech solution

TalkTalk Business is launching a new service that offers medium-sized businesses a secure service that scales as they grow

In the dynamic landscape of UK SMEs, staying ahead of the curve is crucial for growth and security. And with all the challenges that businesses must face in 2025, both locally and globally, looking forward and keeping secure is important because it ensures competitiveness, operational efficiency and the ability to adapt to market changes.

Are you an SME looking to futureproof or build resiliency? Then keep reading as we explore how a new integrated tech solution can keep your business secure, reduce costs and enhance productivity – all of which helps build sustainable growth.

The SME landscape: Challenges and opportunities

SMEs are the backbone of the UK economy, contributing significantly to innovation, employment and economic growth. And with the UK on a growth mission, businesses need to overcome hurdles to make sure that tech is helping take them to new heights.

SMEs must navigate a myriad of technological concerns including preventing security breaches, ensuring Wi-Fi allows for productivity, protecting themselves from the headwinds of additional data costs, and maintaining sufficient bandwidth for the increased volume of data transfers that is being caused by the proliferation of Internet of Things and new AI applications. These challenges can be overwhelming for businesses with limited IT resources.

This is where Connected Business comes in. This new and affordable service by TalkTalk Business is a comprehensive solution that integrates core tech and connectivity essentials under a single contract, simplifying IT management and enhancing efficiency.

Connected Business is built on ultra-resilient Leased Lines and includes a Cisco Meraki router with advanced security and a Wi-Fi access point, all supported by an industry-leading four-hourbreak-fix SLA. Plus, you can view your network and all devices connected to it through your own Cisco Meraki single-pane-of-glass dashboard.

Seamless integration for enhanced productivity

One of the stand-out features of Connected Business is its ability to integrate core tech and connectivity essentials under a single contract with a monthly opex payment, enabling businesses to manage and control budget effectively. This integration simplifies management and reduces the complexity of dealing with multiple vendors. For your IT resource, this means less time spent on administrative tasks and more time focusing on strategic growth.

The part of this service that drives enhanced productivity is the ultra-resilient Leased Line, a dedicated connection with speeds of up to 1Gbps. This high-speed connectivity is crucial for businesses looking to expand beyond broadband.

Whether you’re opening a new HQ or optimising the resources of a small IT team, Connected Business provides the bandwidth and reliability needed to keep operations running smoothly.

Advanced security for peace of mind

In today’s digital age, cybersecurity is a top priority for businesses of all sizes. SMEs are particularly vulnerable to cyber threats, which can have devastating consequences. Recent reports indicate that half of UK businesses experienced some form of cybersecurity breach in the past 12 months, with phishing and malware the most common attacks.

Connected Business addresses this concern with a Cisco Meraki router featuring advanced security and malware protection that automatically updates. With Connected Business, your business benefits from an enterprise-grade firewall, intrusion prevention and detection, anti-malware protection plus content filtering.

The dashboard means a user can simply check who is connected to their network and if there are any risks. The dashboard can even allow for a user to check their smart security cameras. The four-hour-break-fix SLA further enhances the security and reliability of your network, so if something happens, support is never far away.

Supporting growth with scalable solutions

Connected Business is designed to support the growth and scalability of your organisation. As your business grows, so do your connectivity and technology needs. Connected Business offers add-ons to ensure your requirements are always met.

A low monthly price covers all services and hardware, with no upfront costs, making it an attractive option for SME businesses. This predictable cost structure allows for better financial planning and resource allocation, supporting sustainable growth.

In the competitive world of UK SMEs, having the right technology and connectivity solutions can make all the difference. Connected Business by TalkTalk Business offers a comprehensive, integrated solution that addresses the core needs of growing businesses.

For savvy business owners and managers, investing in Connected Business is not just about enhancing IT operations – it’s about positioning your company for future success. With transparent pricing and no upfront costs, Connected Business offers a cost-effective solution that grows with your business. It’s time for you to focus on what truly matters: driving innovation, improving efficiency and achieving your strategic goals

Embrace the future of SME connectivity with Connected Business and unlock the full potential of your organisation. Visit talktalkbusiness.co.uk/ connected-business-sme to find out more.

Bookshelf

In this extract from Better Culture, Faster by Andrew Saffron, the change expert looks at the ways culture can hold a company back Is your culture helping or hindering?

The only purpose in talking about culture is to decide whether it will enable you to achieve your strategic goals or get in the way of them. Put simply, does your culture enhance your organisation’s performance or inhibit it?

Here’s an example that I think might illustrate the point. I was working with a high-tech, Silicon Valleybased company recently. They had a pervading culture of perfectionism. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But actually, they were going bust.

The reason? Because they polished and polished and polished before taking new products to market… by which time their competitors had already got out there, mopped up the market, had a celebratory dinner and drinks in the pub and spent their bonuses on a weekend in Paris.

Does your culture enable everyone to do things faster, better and cheaper? If yes, good. If not, you’d better get cracking.

That’s why you’ve heard the expression “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. It doesn’t matter how good your strategy is. No matter how leading edge, how profession ally managed the programme is and how market-shifting it might be, it won’t happen if your culture gets in the way of everyone performing in the way you need them to. Because it’s the people that have to deliver the strategy.

I know that’s obvious. But I thought it was worth men tioning because that rather important fact can surprisingly get ignored in the first flush of a love affair with a new strategy, or a recovery plan, or product launch or expansion plan.

OK, one last example in case you’re trying to avoid the truth. A leading insurance company I worked with had a brilliant strategy to pretty much smash and grab the market from their competitors in only one year. It was so good that when you read it, the only appropriate response was “someone fetch a Pulitzer for the author of this”. But they were struggling because at the same time as adding cool photos to their strategic road map document to be issued to all staff to engage them in the new strategy, their customer satisfaction and therefore net promoter scores were fading faster than the friendship you made with that couple on holiday.

Customers at the insurance company weren’t happy because when they phoned the call centres, they couldn’t

had a completely unempowering culture. If empowerment means “devolving decision-making authority to the lowest, most appropriate level” (and it does) then decisions here were being made two or three levels above the call centre agents.

The call centre agents didn’t have the decision-making authority to give customers what they needed. They were seriously irked, so were their bosses who were drowning in operational treacle (and therefore couldn’t retain any degree of strategic focus) and so were the customers. The shiny new strategy would be like setting off on a sea voyage when you have holes in your boat.

So once again, does your strategy enable people to perform or does it get in their way?

This is an extract from Better Culture, Faster by Andrew Saffron (Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2024)

What to read this spring

From the origins of Microsoft to the genius of Taylor Swift, these are the books you should be reading over the next few months

There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift by Kevin Evers (published April 8, 2025, Harvard Business Review Press)

Dougal Shaw’s choice

Taylor Swift dominated the cultural conversation last year. This book looks at how she became such a phenomenon and how she has managed to stay at the top for so long.

Kevin Evers is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, so he examines Swift’s trajectory as he would any business, looking at her transition from country music star to pop princess as if she was a start-up founder who built a global business. I missed out on a ticket to the Eras tour, but I won’t miss out on reading this. I wonder to what extent she masterminded it all, or if her genius partly relies on building a strong team around her.

What You’re Made For: Powerful Lessons from a Life in Sports by George Raveling and Ryan Holiday (published March 4, 2025, Profile Books)

Josh Dornbrack’s choice

What are you made for? That’s the question coach and Nike executive George Raveling asks in this guide to success. Co-authored with bestselling writer Ryan Holiday, this book distils lessons from Raveling’s extraordinary life – one that took him from the shadow of segregation to mentoring Michael Jordan and shaping global sports.

More than a memoir, it’s a blueprint for leaders looking to overcome challenges, build meaningful relationships and create lasting impact. Packed with insights on purpose, resilience and personal growth, it offers practical strategies for navigating uncertainty, compounding small wins and leaving a legacy.

Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates (published February 4, 2025, Allen Lane)

Graham Ruddick’s choice

To mark 50 years since Microsoft was founded, Bill Gates has written his first memoir. Stories of tech entrepreneurs are everywhere these days, but this is the original and it has never been told before, so here is a unique opportunity to learn from one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever.

The book raises questions about the education system: Gates struggled to fit in at school and has said if he were growing up today he would be diagnosed with autism. It also reveals that rather than being driven to success by a difficult childhood, he enjoyed a comfortable life with loving parents.

The Win-Win Workplace: How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom-Line Success by Angela Jackson (published March 11, 2025, BerrettKoehler Publishers)

Sarah Vizard’s choice

Speak to any business leader and one of their main concerns is how to attract and retain talent. In this book, Angela Jackson offers nine strategies to create better and healthier workplaces. These include making employee voices central, developing deep talent benches and reimagining benefits.

Based on research with more than 1,200 companies, it argues that evolving the role of staff from “silent contributors” to “architects of their destiny” has a profound impact not just on people’s careers but on the trajectory of an organisation. A must-read for any business leader and one that is top of my list for 2025.

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The story of how cycling brought Business Leader member John Readman together with his co-founder and investors

By Dougal Shaw

A Pedal power

bout 15 years ago, John Readman was taking part in a cycling event from Paris to Geneva –and he was struggling. He was, he confesses, more of a rugby player than a cyclist and a headwind was getting the better of him.

Just as he was considering giving up, a fellow cyclist pulled alongside him, gave him some energy bars and said to him: “Follow me, I’ll get you there.” That person was Bonamy Grimes, one of the co-founders of the Edinburghbased travel website Skyscanner. He would go on to help Readman set up his marketing businesses as a co-founder and investor in 2019.

That is businesses, plural. Readman is a very busy man, as a quick glance at his LinkedIn profile will confirm. As well as leading the digital marketing agency Ask Bosco, he is also actively involved in two other companies he founded: another marketing business called Modo25 and corporate cycling events firm Ride25, which he founded in 2014. Ride25 focuses on round-the-world cycle adventures for business leaders, which are a chance to explore the world, network and get fitter, while also raising money for the charity 1moreChild (more on that later).

If there’s one thing that connects all these businesses, it’s Readman’s passion for cycling. “If you look at my angel investors,” says Readman, “the majority of them I met on the bike.” Many of his colleagues are keen cyclists too and their headquarters in Leeds is not a bad place to be based if that’s your passion.

These days, Readman is concentrating most of his efforts on Ask Bosco and Modo25. He spends around 75 per cent of his time on the former because that’s the one currently scaling the fastest.

Running all these companies is a lot of work, but Readman knows what keeps him motivated and how to retain balance in life. “I like running at 100 miles per hour all the time,” he says.

So how does he do it? “You have to recruit super-smart people who you can then delegate to and empower,” explains Readman. All the key people in his marketing companies are people he met and rated during his corporate career.

He built up an A-team wish list, then recruited them so they could ride together in business. The underlying trust from their shared history allows the companies to move at speed – like a peloton.

He has another recommendation for multi-tasking business people. “It sounds fancy for a start-up, but I have a full-time executive assistant to organise my time, which is the best money you can spend,” says Readman.

She books travel for him, reads his emails and organises his meeting calendar. “It’s about valuing your tasks,” says Readman. This system, he says, allows him to focus more time on the “expensive tasks”.

Pivoting on an idea

The idea for Ask Bosco came from working as commercial director at Summit Media, where he oversaw growth and revenue. The company built a digital marketing forecasting tool for Argos that could predict metrics including ad spend and return when investing in advertising on Google.

It’s a big problem for lots of companies, explains Readman: how to monitor the effectiveness of digital advertising spend and get the best return. The big question is: “Where do you spend your next pound?”

Sometimes brands rely on their ad agencies for this information, but they often struggle with the metrics too, he says. “If you ask Google, they will say, ‘Give us more money.’ If you speak to Facebook, again they will say, ‘Give us more money!’ It’s complicated, but machine learning can help.”

The tool Readman and his team built for Argos only really worked for companies with big budgets and inventories, but Readman saw the potential to build a similar tool for SMEs, which had the same needs.

“I thought, there’s a product in here,” Readman recalls. He knew that small companies could feel overwhelmed with reports from companies such as Shopify, Facebook or Google and needed a helping hand.

Ask Bosco organises all the data into a dashboard that can be configured and personalised without any coding knowledge. Employees can also interrogate the data in a conversational way using chatbots, which is where generative AI comes in.

Early on, his team recruited data scientists with PhDs in areas such as machine learning to help build the tech in-house, mainly for predictive modelling around ad spend. Ask Bosco has gone on to win recognition for its work, gaining prestigious grants and loans from Innovate UK, for example. Its clients include companies such as AllSaints and Cult Beauty, but also many digital marketing agencies.

Making charity central to your business

Both Modo25 and Ask Bosco are committed to investing 10 per cent of their profits in a charity based in Uganda called 1moreChild.

“A lot of businesses talk about purpose: it’s on their website or in their annual company statements,” says Readman. “But we wanted to put it at the core of what we do.”

Once again, the connection is explained by cycling. Readman’s business partner at Ride 25, Rob Hamilton, had a friend called Harry who was working in the charity sector in Uganda. He became frustrated at what he saw as the inefficiencies of the big charities working there, so he set up a grassroots organisation supporting 280 children through an orphanage.

Modo is the name of one of the children at the orphanage and Bosco is the man who runs the 1moreChild charity in Uganda – so these personal names are embedded in Readman’s businesses as a constant reminder of their purpose. Around 70 per cent of the teams he works with choose to donate part of their salary to the charity, while they also hold fundraising events.

“I want something in my life that has a broader purpose than just making money,” says Readman. That’s the belief that has driven him to integrate both charity work and cycling trips into his digital marketing businesses.

“You have to recruit super-smart people who you can then delegate to and empower

Ask Richard

Richard Harpin, the founder of HomeServe and Growth Partner and owner of Business Leader, answers questions from our members

This issue: international expansion

What is the first step in taking any business overseas?

Challenge yourself and ask: “Are we sure we want to do it right now? Shouldn’t it be on the ‘not-to-do’ list because we’ve got more work to do on evolving our product or service, we’ve got masses of growth still to come in our UK business and inevitably going international is going to absorb some resources? Will there be an opportunity cost compared to growing the UK?”

But equally, don’t leave it too late, and then think: “Oh, the business is now going nowhere and we should have gone into a new country a bit earlier.” Timing is really important.

The second step is making sure you have the right team in the UK and the UK business is not going to suffer. If you asked who should be going to the new market to prospect the country, go to trade shows, meet some of the competitors, it’s got to be you as the founder. Nobody knows your business better.

But if you’re spending time out there, make sure you can do that and not worry that the UK business is going to suffer. That element of succession – finding your replacement – do that first before you go big on international development.

What are the main points to consider when choosing a country to expand into?

First, there must be customers like the ones in your home country, so you don’t need to adapt your model too much. I call this the 15 per cent rule. If you have to change the product or service more than 15 per cent, then you should question whether it is the right country and find one

where your product or service will be accepted with no or minimal changes.

Second, is there a competitor there already? If there is, that’s a good sign, because you can look at what they’re doing and it will give you confidence that the market is there. Going back to the first of my eight secrets to building a billion-pound business, it will enable you to copy, pivot and improve.

A good example is a business called Synergym, which I’ve invested in. It’s a twist on PureGym, but in the Spanish market. We’ve gone from 12 gyms when I invested to more than 110 and we’re opening a new one in Spain every six days.

But we’re also looking at where else we could one day go after Spain and asking: is there a competitor there already? What’s the wealth of the country and can people afford a low-cost gym subscription? What’s the population? Is it an easy country in which to do business?

What are the options between employing people in-country versus sending people over from the UK, particularly in the US?

America is a very expensive place to hire people – typically two to three times what a UK counterpart would cost. An American may well be the most expensive employee in your whole business.

So, while it is important to have people on the ground, they should be the frontline people: the general manager or head of business development or sales. Initially at least, you don’t need a whole team on the ground. A lot of the expertise on the product or service, and all the people

that are helping grow the business and can sit in the background, should stay in the UK.

My recommendation would be just a couple of frontline roles like the MD or general manager that would normally have that sales or business development background.

Which parts of the UK business can work on the business abroad?

The thing to be wary of is everybody in your UK business saying: “Oh, this is a fantastic new country we’re going into. I want to get on a plane and fly to America.” If everybody sees the shiny new stuff, what happens to your core UK business generating most of your revenue and profit today? The big danger of international is everybody takes their eye off the ball at home. There must be somebody, the UK MD or someone else, responsible for making sure your core country doesn’t suddenly go off the rails.

With that caveat, the more support you give to your new country the better, but only in areas that are not frontline. Business development, sales and potentially performance marketing are much better in country, even if the performance marketing is done by an American agency.

How do you manage payments, along with the risks of currency fluctuations, in multiple currencies?

Answering that with my HomeServe experience – we didn’t get involved in trying to hedge against currency movements or buying currency. Because we were in the UK, in continental Europe and in the US, we used the earnings we were getting in pounds, euros and dollars as natural hedging. Particularly for businesses trading in the US – and for a product business – where you might

be buying your products in the Far East and most likely paying in dollars, the fact that you’re taking in revenue in dollars and using it to buy the products creates some natural hedging.

Overall, don’t do any clever hedging because you could well get it wrong. Try to use the currencies coming into the business. But I would caveat I’m not the expert here, and you might want to seek expert advice.

Can acquisitions be a way to expand to a new country?

If you have experience of doing M&A in your home market, yes. I wouldn’t make a really big acquisition, because you don’t want to do anything that, if it went wrong, would jeopardise the rest of your business. But to go out and make a smaller acquisition would be a good thing.

We did that with the Checkatrade model with HomeServe. We wanted to be in America but we didn’t set up organically. We bought a company called eLocal.

In buying a business in America, it is important to send one of your UK people as an implant. When we bought eLocal, we sent an ex-finance person who became the FD and chief operating officer. It’s really important to have one person in the new camp, to make sure you’re imparting your culture and there’s nothing going wrong that you don’t know about.

How do you fund international investment?

Make sure you have funding in the business before you do it. The temptation is to do it on a shoestring, very low cost – let’s not hire anybody in the country that you want to go into, let’s not backfill your role, let’s dabble in it. But you won’t get it right if you dabble or it is not fully funded.

The Yoda of the business world

A members-only trip to a billion-pound business revealed a successful founder who had an extraordinary knowledge of his staff

By Craig Wilmann, head of membership at Business Leader

Bill Holmes is a remarkable man. In 1990, he founded a company called UK Fuels from a small flat above a hair salon in Cheshire. Today that company, now known as Radius, employs 2,800 people and has an annual turnover of £4.7bn. The company provides mobility, connectivity and technology solutions to more than 400,000 customers across 18 countries. Its employee share scheme has created 10 millionaires. But this is not what makes Holmes truly remarkable.

I was lucky enough to meet him at the home of Radius’s telematics division in Crewe, accompanied by a group of Business Leader members for an exclusive visit. Arriving 45 minutes early to make sure everything was set up, my colleagues and I were greeted first by a perfect replica of the Star Wars character C-3PO in the main lobby and then by Holmes himself, waiting for us and ready to go.

When our members arrived, it was clear Holmes had done his research. Greeting them each in turn, he was able to ask them informed questions about their businesses. When it was time for the presentation to begin, Holmes told us this was the first time he had ever done anything like this and he was happy for it to be shaped by the attendees. Sitting down and inviting interjections throughout, he took us through the early history of UK Fuels and how it grew into the multibillion-pound giant it is today. We learnt lots of interesting things along the way.

But what I found truly remarkable was revealed only when we went on a tour of the telematics premises. I’m not talking about the fact that this recently opened building was kitted out to resemble a Star Wars spaceship – although it is worth pointing out that it had a meeting room that looked like a command centre, light fixtures that resembled lightsabers and a restaurant called Yoda’s Pizzeria. No, the thing that truly set Holmes apart was the fact that he seemed to know exactly who everyone was.

Not simply their names, but where they were from, what their partners were called, how long they had been at the business and a personal anecdote or two. They, in turn, knew him. From the way he interacted with his colleagues, you would have thought he was still in the flat above the hair salon, building something from nothing with a small group of friends.

The colleagues for whom he had the most time were the grads. These bright people fresh out of university and in their early 20s were, according to Holmes, the future of the company. He made a point of interviewing every single one before they were accepted onto the graduate scheme. To remind you, this is a business turning over nearly £5bn a year with close to 3,000 staff.

This Yoda-like ability to know everything about his colleagues is even more impressive when you consider he is no longer chief executive of Radius but executive chairman. That role, in other businesses, can be entirely honorific but Holmes is still working in his company every single day, striving to make it bigger and better than it is already.

“Do you still enjoy it, Bill?” asked one of our members. Holmes shrugged and said: “Ah well, you know.” It was like he was being asked about running his local cricket club. At no point was there even a hint of immodesty or superiority on display. He was just a normal person talking about business, people, culture and Star Wars

Long after the event was supposed to end, Holmes was still there, answering our questions as though we really were aboard the Millennium Falcon travelling through empty space with light-years to kill. When I reluctantly interrupted him to ensure we didn’t miss our train back to London, he was polite and apologetic, and continued to speak to the members who remained behind. If this really was Holmes’ first foray into mentoring a group of fellow entrepreneurs, I very much hope it won’t be his last.

To find out more about membership scan and email us:

corporate tax consultancy and personal tax compliance director

KEY FINANCE CHANGES BUSINESSES SHOULD HAVE ON THEIR RADAR IN 2025

Last year was challenging for businesses. Our survey of south-west organisations revealed that key concerns centred around rising operational costs and unpredictable customer preferences. And with the autumn Budget raising new challenges, there is much for businesses owners to consider. Here, we cover a few changes leaders should have on their radar 2025 that are positive for workers but are likely to cost companies.

National insurance contributions (NIC) for individuals and the self-employed are staying the same this year, but the rate of employer NIC is increasing from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent from April 6, 2025. Alongside this, the threshold at which employers become liable to pay NIC will also reduce. If you are a shareholder in a small company, it’s wise to consider your remuneration strategy – for example, it may be better to extract dividends rather than salary from your business.

As of October 30, 2024, the lower rate of capital gains tax (CGT) increased from 10 per cent to 18 per cent, while the higher rate increased from 20 per cent to 24 per cent. Looking ahead, the CGT rate applicable to disposals qualifying for business asset disposal relief (BADR) will increase from 10 per cent to 14 per cent, with effect from April 6,2025 and will rise again to 18 per cent the following year. As a result, if you are considering the sale or liquidation of your business, you may wish to do so before the end of the 2024-25 tax year to crystallise the benefit of the current BADR rate.

The national living wage will increase by 6.7 per cent to £12.21 per hour from April 2025 and for those aged between 18 and 20 by 16.3 per cent to £10 per hour. This, combined with changes to employer NIC, is likely to have a significant impact on businesses, so we’d advise seeking guidance and preparing your cashflow forecasts to fully understand your position.

Investment in electric vehicles continues to be a tax efficient choice, so if you’re considering upgrading your fleet, think about doing so before April 2026 to make use of the allowances available.

Speaking with a finance professional will put you in the best stead to navigate whatever changes come your way. The UK tax landscape is constantly evolving, so regardless of any new rules, we will always advise our clients to carefully consider if a decision is right for their long-term business goals.

Stephanie Hurst,

Spring 2025

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Stuart Machin

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Ed Smith on how to value an asset

Catherine Baker on winning cultures

How to expand into America

Tesco’s Fresh & Easy disaster