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EDITOR’S LETTER

On July 5 the UK woke up to find it had a new government after 14 years of Conservative rule.

Business leaders across the country now wait to see whether Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour can boost confidence in the UK economy, cut red tape and get investment into key infrastructure. But in the meantime they will get on with building and running the companies that are the lifeblood of our economy. After years of political uncertainty, little help is expected from the government. No matter what Labour does, it is the small, medium and large businesses across the UK that will drive the economy forward, make technological breakthroughs and create jobs.

This edition of Business Leader is focused on leadership. It is full of inspiration, expertise and case studies designed to help the leaders of midsized businesses grow them into large companies. It is apt that our focus on leadership coincides with a change in the leader of the UK. Our theme was actually set before Rishi Sunak announced in the pouring rain that there would be a general election on July 4. But it will be

fascinating to see how Starmer approaches his own CEO job.

Speaking outside 10 Downing Street after the election result, Starmer spoke about leading with “respect and humility” and “free from doctrine”, as well as of the need for patience. Those who have read Good to Great, the definitive management book on building businesses by Jim Collins, will have recognised the focus on humility and determination. In that book, Collins writes about the importance of Level 5 leaders in building great businesses. These leaders, he argues, match humility with an iron will and ambition to succeed. They outperform businesses led by seemingly visionary but egotistical bosses who design the infrastructure around them as a platform to demonstrate their own brilliance.

In this issue we have put together a list of the leaders who have built billionpound businesses in the UK and are still involved with them today. Our Great British Billion-Pound Businesses feature shows the extraordinary stories behind the people who founded these businesses –from Sir James Dyson’s determination to Poppy Gustafsson’s belief that experience

is overrated and Alex Kendall developing technology for driverless cars.

We want to share these stories because they show what it takes to build a billion-pound business. If they are not shared – and they haven’t been shared enough in the past – people fill the void with their own stories and ideas of how entrepreneurs succeed. Yet, as Collins showed, these characteristics are not what you may expect. Being an egotistical maniac is not a precursor to success.

In this issue of Business Leader you will also hear about the importance of coaching and mentoring and why certain businesses were able to develop a conveyor belt of successful leaders. Plus, we look at how Newcastle-based Sage became the largest listed technology company in the UK by speaking to Steve Hare, its chief executive. And there are many other case studies about leadership for you to consider, ranging from a world-record cyclist to a 140-year-old business.

Thank you for all your support and I hope you enjoy this issue. Please get in touch with any feedback or ideas, as ever. The contact details for the team are below.

Editor-in-chief Graham Ruddick

EDITORIAL

Graham Ruddick – Editor-in-chief graham.ruddick@businessleader.co.uk

Sarah Vizard – Deputy editor-in-chief sarah.vizard@businessleader.co.uk

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Dougal Shaw – Senior correspondent dougal.shaw@businessleader.co.uk

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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

6 GROWTH STORIES

Inside the fast-growing medium-sized businesses driving the UK economy

9 DEEP DIVES

Our expert columnists help you make sense of the world, plus we speak to the chief executives of two flourishing UK companies, Sage and Modern Milkman

20 COVER STORY

The founders who have built the UK’s billion-pound businesses and the stories behind them

43 LEADERSHIP

Case studies and masterclasses on leadership, including the companies that trained the next generation of leaders, female trailblazers and a record-breaking cyclist

73 INSPIRATION

Ideas and advice on how to grow your business from the best leadership books, an angel investor and Gail’s Bakery

80 MEMBERSHIP

Find out how to join the Business Leader peer-to-peer membership scheme and get support in scaling-up your business

ASK RICHARD

Five readers pitch their questions on leadership, coaching and mentors to HomeServe founder Richard Harpin

86 DEBRIEF

Some final thoughts on leadership from those who have succeeded, including a former IBM CEO, Eleanor Roosevelt and a retired US Navy captain

King of the big night out

Ajith Jayawickrema

Turtle Bay

Ajith Jayawickrema is a two-time winner at building fast-growing, casual dining businesses that thrive on a party atmosphere. He arrived in the UK from Sri Lanka aged 15, without a word of English. At 16 he worked at McDonald’s. He read economics at Birmingham University, adding an MBA from Sheffield University (“for depth and breadth”) and then worked in fashion wholesale and at a retail consultancy. His main ambition, though, was to start a business.

A fly-drive holiday to California in the early 1990s turned Jayawickrema on to Mexican food. He returned to the UK intent on starting a Latin American-themed restaurant and went in search of a loan. “I couldn’t get a penny out of Mr Blood, my bank manager,” he says. Until, that is, he asked for £10,000 to buy a car.

Jayawickrema and his business partner and school friend Eren Ali opened two Las Iguanas restaurants within a year, the first in Bristol, where Jayawickrema is based. By the time he had opened a third, Jayawickrema felt able to tell his conservative parents what he was up to.

After three venture capital deals and dozens of restaurant openings, Jayawickrema exited the group in 2009 following a life-changing bout of dengue fever. He relinquished his holdings in Las Iguanas when the 41-site chain was sold to Casual Dining Group for £85m in 2015. It was Leona Lewis’ The X Factor win in 2006 that inspired his next venture, the Caribbean-themed Turtle Bay. “As an immigrant, I thought it was incredible: millions of people had voted for her – her race, her colour, her ethnic background didn’t matter,” he explained. Jayawickrema immersed himself in studying Caribbean food, cocktails and reggae.

He had already worked with Pitcher & Piano founder Crispin Tweddell when the latter’s private equity firm Piper invested in Las Iguanas. Tweddell invested in Turtle Bay, which opened its first outlet in Milton Keynes in 2010. Now, the business has more than 50 sites and a turnover of £90m.

Citing Piper’s 7/17/70 theory, Jayawickrema also believes there are three critical stages of development for a business: when turnover hits £7m, £17m and £70m.

“When you’re at nought to £7m, the costs are low and you work the assets hard,” says Jayawickrema. “In the process, you realise what you need to change and refine. It’s like test marketing.”

By the second stage, it’s more of a big deal, he believes. “It’s time for a new team of executives. You need a regional director,” he adds. Recruiting the right people that the business needs becomes even more important. “You have to hire a team that’s better than you,” he says.

“At £70m, it all changes,” Jayawickrema says of the third stage, when non-executive directors have to be brought in. “You need more of a focus on the process. It’s a real challenge to founders.” He describes these three phases as entrepreneurial, semi-corporate and, finally, corporate.

Even after his experience in property, finance and kitchen design, there are still plenty of hurdles to overcome on the path to fast growth. “In Sheffield we had to spend a third of the budget on a ventilation system,” he recalls. “The air coming out was cleaner than it was going in.”

In the past, Jayawickrema has tended to step back after hitting between 40 and 50 sites. He is now Turtle Bay’s non-executive deputy chair, with the ownership shared between him, Tweddell and Piper. You have to wonder whether he will be tempted to chase a hat-trick of successes.

02 Treats galore

Harriet Hastings Biscuiteers

After a career in publishing and PR, Harriet Hastings saw a gap for luxury food gifting that led her to start the Biscuiteers Baking Company in 2007. After 17 years, Hastings heads a firm manufacturing 3 million iced biscuits annually, employs around 200 people and is expected to turnover more than £13m in the coming year.

“Food gifting was an open door,” recalls Hastings. “None of the big players was dealing with e-commerce. We developed the product concept to fit the idea.”

Iced biscuits are flexible, have long shelf lives and can be put in the post, so they work well as a direct-to-consumer product. “We rejected quite a few products that didn’t meet those criteria,” says Hastings.

03 Power couple

Lee Sutton & Jordan Brompton Myenergi

It all started with the Eddi, which took the excess energy generated from domestic solar panels to heat water. These were made by Myenergi – Lee Sutton and Jordan Brompton’s business that they were funding with £180,000 of their own money. They produced the devices in an almost windowless business unit in the small village of Binbrook, in Lincolnshire.

She also created a sector in personalised gifting. “We marketed the idea that you could send iced biscuits as you would flowers or chocolates. Our strapline is: ‘Why send flowers when you can send Biscuiteers?’ It encapsulates what we expect you to do with the product.”

Hastings and her husband, Stevie Congdon, funded Biscuiteers with their own money and incubated it within his catering company, Lettice.

“We got early adoption from the fashion industry, and the lifestyle fashion media drove a lot of interest,” says Hastings. “We launched in September 2007. By Christmas that year we’d moved into our own premises, paid back our initial investment and had the beginnings of quite a big corporate business.”

In 2019, the firm opened a manufacturing facility in Colliers Wood, southwest London, to double production and “have all our employees in one place,” says Hastings, who led a £1.25m crowdfunding round on Crowdcube in 2016 before taking investment from a family office. Lessons were learnt. “We hadn’t thought through the operational and manufacturing complexity.” Not that she has any regrets.

“If you knew the problems you’d have to solve, you’d never get going,” Hastings says.

“We’re essentially an artisanal brand working at scale,” she adds. “The most difficult thing we’ve had to do is to work out how to scale by designing our own manufacturing models and learning a great deal about the art of icing biscuits quickly and efficiently.”

“We were soldering and using secondhand manufacturing equipment bought from local businesses or the internet,” says co-founder Brompton, “and getting local grants, business loans and maxing out our credit cards to build the order book.”

Brompton and Sutton had previously worked together in the renewables industry and founded Myenergi in 2016 to give homeowners energy independence.

“After the Eddi, we turned our attention to diverting spare power to car batteries. We released Zappi in 2017, which really put our business on the map.”

By 2019 the pair needed more investment. “We had the orders, but couldn’t afford the raw materials to produce them,” recalls Brompton.

The pair received £1.8m from angel investors, including former Tesco CEO

Sir Terry Leahy and venture capitalist Bill Currie, who had previously backed Asos, THG and Boohoo. Both are now directors.

Myenergi moved to a 66,000 sq ft purpose-built factory near Grimsby during Covid-19, but with this came supply chain issues and a microchip shortage. “We had to redesign our products to work on a new chip to maintain orders,” recalls Brompton.

Last year, Myenergi received £30m of investment from Energy Impact Partners to support growth, with its products now sold in Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and Ireland. HSBC has also provided the company with £30m in debt financing and accounts filed for the year to June 2023 showed that turnover grew to £67.6m against £53.8m the year before.

“You set out all bright-eyed and bushytailed and thinking of success,” says Brompton. “You always dream big, but when it comes to fruition, it’s crazy. All the time, we’ve just rolled with it and ploughed everything back in.”

Andrew Lynch

DEEP DIVES

/// Expert insight and profiles on success and failure

Steven Swinford

Congratulations Sir Keir, but now what?

Niki Turner-Harding

Taking a people-first approach to AI adoption

Sage Advice

Szu Ping Chan

The ageing economy is the big trend to watch

Zara Nanu

Confidence is a losing game for women in business

Tom Beahon

10 17 12 19 33 15 20 38

Steve Hare on the story behind the UK’s biggest listed tech company

Why setbacks shouldn’t be seen as terminal

The Great British Billion-Pound Businesses

The stories behind the founders

View from the North Founder Simon

on the rise of

Mellin

Modern Milkman

WSTEVEN SWINFORD Congratulations Sir Keir, but now what?

hen Sir Keir Starmer stood outside Number 10 on July 5, he promised to usher in a new era of politics that would “tread more lightly” on the lives of voters. The reality, however, is that the new prime minister finds himself facing a succession of crises that will require immediate intervention on almost every front.

The economy, the chancellor Rachel Reeves says, is facing the “worst set of circumstances since the second world war”. The NHS, the new health secretary Wes Streeting says, is fundamentally broken and in need of urgent surgery.

Prisons are full and officials have warned ministers they will have no choice but to let offenders out early. Hundreds of migrants continue to cross the English Channel amid warnings that record numbers could come to the UK in August.

On the international front there is growing turbulence in both France and the US as two of the biggest players on the world stage grapple with their own political futures. Meanwhile, Russia continues to ratchet up pressure on Ukraine, while the Middle East poses a significant issue

among Labour’s own voters, particularly in areas with larger Muslim populations.

All of this means Starmer’s honeymoon after winning such a momentous majority – the biggest since Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 – is unlikely to last long.

Labour, of course, has a vested interest in painting as bleak a picture about the country it has inherited as possible. Part of the party’s political strategy is to frame a narrative that the Tories salted the earth; that 14 years of Conservative rule has trashed the economy and left public services in ruins. The Tories succeeded in pulling the same trick in 2010, convincing voters that Labour could not be trusted with the public’s money, and used it to win successive elections.

But beyond the political rhetoric there are fundamental issues that Starmer will have to grapple with. Difficult decisions will come thick and fast.

In some cases Starmer has no choice. Take the prisons crisis. Officials have warned ministers that there are fewer than 700 places left in men’s jails. Unless prisoners are released early there will simply not be enough spaces to accommodate them.

It means that one of Starmer’s first decisions in government will require him to let offenders out of jail early. Not the kind of headline a prime minister who campaigned on a message of taking control of Britain’s streets would have liked in his early days in office.

There is a similar Hobson’s choice on the economy. The mantra of Starmer and Reeves is growth at all costs, with announcements on planning reform coming in their first days of office.

But housebuilding is no magic wand. Regulations may be eased, but hitting the party’s target of building 300,000 homes a year is unlikely to come until towards the end of this parliament.

The reality is that for much of the election campaign both the Tories and Labour were reluctant to talk about the reality of Britain’s finances. The think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies accused both parties of a “conspiracy of silence” and warned that whoever won would need to either raise taxes or cut public spending.

Economists believe it is likely that Reeves will have no choice but to raise taxes in her inaugural budget in

September, with capital gains tax the current frontrunner. She and Starmer have been clear that there will be no return to austerity.

But pressure on public spending is only increasing. This summer, Reeves is facing a bruising row over public sector pay, with independent bodies due to make their recommendations shortly.

Unions believe that the new Labour government will offer an opportunity to secure better pay and conditions for their members. If Reeves pitches too low, the new government could find itself on the end of another wave of industrial action.

Labour is hopeful of ending the longrunning dispute with junior doctors, but will need to be wary of setting a precedent. It is aiming to achieve a deal with the British Medical Association for a pay rise of 12.5 per cent, but if it does so nurses and other healthcare workers will demand more. As ever in politics, actions have consequences.

On illegal migration, Labour is emphatic about what it doesn’t want but less clear on what it will actually do to deter people from crossing the English Channel.

In one of his first acts in office, Starmer proclaimed the Rwanda scheme “dead and buried”, meaning that tens of thousands of people who have until now been in limbo will be able to claim asylum.

But this is an issue that needs to be dealt with. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is hoping that a twin-track approach will help deter people from crossing the channel. This involves a new border security command centre working with European partners to “smash the gangs” and some kind of returns deal with the EU. But the latter is likely to be hugely challenging to achieve. And as part of the quid pro quo demanded by Brussels, the UK may find itself having to take illegal migrants from the EU.

There are similar choices to be made over Brexit. Labour has been clear that it wants Britain to be more closely aligned with the EU, which is seen as central to growing the economy. But again the price of closer trade ties is not insignificant, with Brussels pushing for a youth mobility scheme that would enable young people from across the EU to live and work in the UK for a four-year period.

For all the domestic focus, Starmer’s biggest challenge as prime minister is likely to be foreign affairs. On Ukraine, there are concerns that the Western consensus could be fraying, especially if Donald Trump wins the US election in November. Starmer is clear that the UK will continue the previous government’s policy of backing Ukraine but tensions are only likely to increase.

Gaza also remains a hugely divisive issue within Labour. Several senior Labour MPs lost their seats to pro-Palestinian independent candidates. Starmer has strengthened his position and is calling for an “urgent” ceasefire, but is being called on to go further and formally recognise a Palestinian state. Doing so could lead to tensions with the US and other allies.

Before entering Number 10, Starmer said that he was relishing the chance to take the big decisions after years in opposition. To govern is to choose. As Starmer is rapidly discovering, some of those choices are more palatable than others.

Steven Swinford is political editor of The Times

SZU

PING CHAN

The ageing economy is the big trend to watch

few months ago I gave a talk at Eton College.

AAfter pondering what I could say to these aspiring David Camerons and Boris Johnsons to get them thinking, I decided to begin the discussion with a bet.

I argued that in 50 years’ time, when these teenagers are thinking about retirement, the state pension and NHS will be drastically different from today. The reason? Britain’s population is getting older and sicker, with more people unable to work for health reasons and too few children born to replace them.

This is not just tomorrow’s problem. The new Labour government has already set out the five missions it is seeking to deliver for the UK, including securing the fastest economic growth in the G7. I was in the audience when chancellor Rachel Reeves declared that it was Britain’s “national mission” to raise growth.

But while the Downing Street in-tray may already be bulging with issues like NHS waiting lists, overcrowded prisons and the challenge of getting immigration down, there is another problem. As the last baby boomer turns 65 this decade, Sir

Keir Starmer will be confronted by a new reality: Britain’s workforce will lose its largest contingent at a time when the talent pool is already shrinking.

The trends are clear. Analysis by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) shows there are nearly 2 million more people in their 50s and 60s today than there were a decade ago and 100,000 fewer people in their 20s, 30s and 40s.

Big shifts in the jobs market are already underway. Since the start of the millennium, employment among workingage people grew by roughly 250,000 every year amid steady increases in net migration a year.

However, this is estimated by the IES to fall to 70,000 over the next two decades amid lower birth rates and migration. In other words, there are likely to be around 3.4 million fewer people in work in 2040 than if this trend continued.

So what does all this have to do with Starmer and the next five years? Actually, quite a lot.

The International Monetary Fund is among the orgnisations to have highlighted that almost all of Britain’s growth since 2010 has been generated by an expanding

workforce and rising employment. In short, if the jobs market didn’t grow, neither did the economy.

And if the workforce continues to shrink, it doesn’t bode well for tax revenues either. Mel Stride, the former work and pensions secretary, previously noted that getting the half a million or so people who left the workforce after Covid back to work would enable the government to shave 2p off income tax.

Intense spending pressures means every penny counts, and Starmer faces a massive uphill battle to keep Britain’s workforce growing without relying on immigration.

Looking ahead, Starmer is also out of silver bullets. Former Tory chancellor George Osborne sped up increases in the state pension age at the start of the 2010s in a move that will save the government tens of billions of pounds by the end of the decade. By the end of Starmer’s first term, we will all have to wait until we’re 67 to claim it, a year later than now.

The Tories wanted to raise it again, to 68, in the 2030s, with a rough rule of thumb suggesting that each one-year increase in the state pension age saves the government roughly £9bn in today’s terms.

But with Covid pushing life expectancy back to 2010 levels, they had to abandon such a move – twice. It is difficult to see how any government will be able to justify an increase based on this metric alone. Starmer will not be able to raise the retirement age again this decade.

Of course, scrapping – or even tinkering – with the state pension is political suicide and major changes will not be floated this parliament, or even the next. But it does mean that we are already moving towards a world where private pensions will play a much bigger role in funding retirement.

That means we’ll all have to save more, starting today. The last government wanted to increase workplace pension contributions from a minimum of 8 per cent to 12 per cent. While it was thought to be too bitter a pill to swallow during a cost-of-living crisis, the issue is likely to resurface again, particularly as Labour is keen to turbocharge returns.

And then there’s the NHS. Branded “broken” by new health secretary Wes Streeting, the health service launched by a Labour government is creaking and in clear need of reform. It already employs

around the same number of people across the UK as McDonald’s does around the world. And it’s about to get bigger.

Just over a year ago, the NHS published its workforce plan, which would see the number of staff employed by NHS England alone rise from around 1.5 million in 2022 to up to 2.4 million in 2036–37. That would mean one in 11 workers in England would be employed by the health service, up from just 6 per cent today. This would leave Britain facing the biggest jump in age-related healthcare spending in Europe.

Analysis by KPMG shows spending in the UK on healthcare for the elderly is on course to rise by just under 8 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) over the next 50 years, or roughly £200bn in today’s money. This compares with an estimated rise of less than 1 per cent of GDP over the same period in Germany and around 2 per cent in France, where health insurance is mandatory. Without reform, the NHS risks becoming so large that it devours the rest of the state.

Some politicians are already asking Britons to think the unthinkable. Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor and health

secretary, used his speech after his narrow win in the Godalming and Ash seat to ask Labour to make some of the tough decisions the Tories were not able to.

“I hope they use their majority to make much-needed reforms to the NHS in a way that is sometimes difficult for Conservative governments to do,” he said.

Some employers already offer healthcare coverage as part of workplace benefits. While I don’t see the UK going the way of the US, the coming years will surely test the NHS’s principle of universal healthcare, free at the point of use. And this may be no bad thing for the health of the public finances.

Much of the focus on tax and spending in the coming months will look at what Reeves has planned for the autumn statement. But the twin challenges of pension provision and healthcare are not going away. And as the challenge of balancing the books continues to get harder, reforms will need to be brought in to tackle this in the next five years.

Szu Ping Chan is economics editor of The Telegraph

ETOM BEAHON

Setbacks aren’t terminal, they define success

xperience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” I first came across this quote when I was reading a book by the bond market investor Howard Marks and it instantly resonated with me. As an entrepreneur, it’s all too easy to get carried away when things are going well, believing that will continue forever. Real value is created in the toughest times.

The question I’ve been asked more than any other is what makes entrepreneurs different. I’ve come up with a list of things it’s not: it’s not any intellectual superiority, though a level of commercial acumen is certainly helpful; it’s not the drive and determination they have, important though those qualities undoubtedly are; it’s not even the capacity to take and bear risks –most entrepreneurs I know dislike risk and attempt to control it rigorously.

It took me longer to realise what it was, but I believe the single factor that defines entrepreneurs is their ability to deal with setbacks. The normal human response is first to take it personally and then avoid any situation where it could happen again. While understandable, these responses only culminate in one destination – the comfort zone – and nothing worthwhile is ever achieved there.

The entrepreneurs’ response is to embrace the experience and then use it to learn how they can improve going

forward. This enhances their chance of success more than almost anything else.

The idea that successful people are built differently to others is just not true. In my experience, the vast majority have simply learnt to deal with setbacks better than most and keep moving forward long after everyone else has given up. Resilience is not a particularly fashionable characteristic, but it is an incredibly important one. Maintaining a consistent work ethic and positive energy during good times and bad is far more fundamental to our success than a game-changing moment of inspiration.

At Castore, we have also had to overcome plenty of setbacks. I lost count of the number of rejection letters we received from investors when we started the company, not to mention the factories that didn’t want to work with us, potential hires that didn’t share our vision or retailers that didn’t want to stock our products, alongside the people who simply enjoyed telling us we would fail. What none of them counted on was our ability to never give up and our desire to keep getting better every day.

This approach rarely manifests itself as a parting-of-the-ocean moment when everything changes forever, but in small incremental improvements that often take longer than you’d like. Pursuing your goal when you aren’t seeing the results you want is incredibly tough, but it is exactly

this quality that separates successful entrepreneurs from everyone else.

Great businesses are built across many years, as are great business leaders. Roger Federer is a truly impressive tennis player, but his immense natural talent is hard for me to relate to. Andy Murray, meanwhile, possesses a huge amount of innate skill, but he has had to employ serious reserves of grit, determination and desire to constantly improve no matter what. That is truly inspirational.

The positive news is that grit and resilience are skills anyone can learn. They’re not easy to acquire, but then nothing worth having in life is. While few of us have the fortune of being born with world-class natural abilities, all of us can learn how to react constructively when life gets tough.

Positive energy is infectious and, in my experience, the world rewards those who keep going. The world of sport may be unforgiving for those without a natural gift, but the world of business embraces such people with open arms.

Never see setbacks as terminal, don’t judge yourself by others’ expectations, be humble and never stop improving. Do all these things for long enough and there’s no limit on what you can achieve. Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.

Tom Beahon is the co-founder and chief executive of the sportswear brand Castore

NIKI TURNER-HARDING A people-first approach to AI adoption

Over the past year, generative AI has moved from being an experimental trend to a game-changing business tool. This shift has left many SME bosses feeling overwhelmed. Concerns around how the technology can fit into a business and maximise its potential are ever-present. And the question remains: will AI mean more hiring and reskilling, or lead to more redundancies?

If you’re unsure about an AI-driven future, you’re not alone. A recent Adecco Group survey of 2,000 business leaders found that while 61 per cent see AI as a game changer, more than half (57 per cent) doubt their leadership team’s AI skills and knowledge. Only 10 per cent of organisations have made tangible progress in digital transformation.

The hesitation surrounding AI often starts at the top. Some CEOs and CFOs are cautious about AI’s benefits or worry about losing the human touch in their services. Finding the balance between technology and human interaction is possible – and it can be preferable and profitable, too. AI may change roles and careers, but it will also boost productivity and help people achieve more. Our research shows that 70 per cent of workers are already using generative AI, while almost twothirds think it will positively impact their jobs. More than half (57 per cent) want their company to offer AI-focused training.

With employees ready to embrace AI, now is the perfect time to create strategies that blend technology with human talent.

Focus on soft skills and AI literacy

A key benefit of AI is that it eliminates repetitive, labour-intensive tasks, freeing up people to showcase their uniquely human capabilities. AI literacy must be improved at all levels and sharpening employees’ softer skills is equally vital.

Businesses need workers with soft skills such as creativity and problem-solving to overcome that complexity and engineer different ways to get the job done.

Build, don’t just buy

Only a third of businesses plan to train their current workforce to fill digital and tech skills gaps. Others intend to buy these capabilities from outside their organisation, an approach that can inflate salaries and exacerbate talent scarcity issues.

To promote internal mobility, align your talent strategy with the transition from a job- to a skills-based economy. This involves defining the competencies needed to progress, promoting non-linear career paths for all workers and offering ample redeployment opportunities.

Think big, start small

At Adecco, we’re exploring how AI can enhance the recruitment process while learning valuable lessons along the way.

Where it has worked for us is our use of AI-powered candidate matching, which streamlines hiring by creating curated candidate lists based on specific criteria. This allows consultants to focus more on engaging with candidates and clients, improving the recruitment experience.

Introducing AI hasn’t been without its challenges. Overwhelming our team with too many new tools at once led to fatigue and resistance. Now we take a more gradual approach while providing ample support and feedback channels.

As a multi-generational company we’ve tailored our initiatives to accommodate different learning styles and preferences. By diversifying our pilot groups, we can understand what works across various demographics. Our plan is to integrate AI tools into everyday workflows, making adoption feel like a natural evolution.

Personally, I feel excited and curious about the possibilities AI offers for our candidates, clients and colleagues. Ultimately, a successful AI journey must be about more than embracing tech innovation. It’s about making work more meaningful, improving processes, delivering real outcomes and enhancing the human connections that are the foundation of every business.

Niki Turner-Harding is UK and Ireland country head at Adecco

bgf.co.uk

ZARA NANU

The confidence conundrum

Confidence is a losing game for women in business. They are either perceived as lacking it or overdoing it, never fitting the business book description of a typical strong, confident leader.

We are often told we aren’t ready for leadership roles or can’t secure funding for our businesses because we “lack confidence”. Yet, when women do exhibit confidence, the tables turn for the worse. Confident women are often punished in the business world, perceived as less likeable and not nice. Mean girls.

A recent analysis in Harvard Business Review highlights this paradox. Women who demonstrate high levels of typical confidence by being extroverted or assertive risk being perceived as overdoing it and, ironically, lacking in confidence. This double standard significantly disadvantages us, making the journey to leadership even more arduous.

Such a narrative is pretty much a dead end for us. It places the onus on women to do something about being promoted into leadership roles, raising money for their businesses, or making it on to a board. If only women could just get this confidence thing right.

Two people – Sarah and James – also prove that we can’t win at this. A few years ago, researchers at the Yale School of Management took a case study about a hedge fund manager James and created two case studies for the same person – one

called James and one called Sarah. Every other word except their names stayed the same and two groups of students got to read the case studies independently.

Despite identical achievements and performance data, participants rated the male manager as more competent and confident than the female manager. This highlights the deep-seated biases that are perpetuated by confidence play.

The definition of confidence itself might be part of the problem. Traditionally, confidence has been associated with traits such as assertiveness, decisiveness and dominance – qualities often viewed as more masculine. This male-dominated definition of confidence does not align with the behaviours and attributes that many women naturally exhibit, such as collaboration, empathy and inclusiveness.

Addressing these challenges requires a multifaceted approach. Here are three recommendations for business leaders to start eradicating the confidence perception gap and facilitate an inclusive approach to confidence in business:

1. Redefine confidence

Confidence needs a makeover to include a wider range of behaviours and traits. By acknowledging and valuing qualities such as collaboration, empathy and inclusiveness, we can create a more embracing definition of confidence that works for everyone. Research by Eagly and Carli in The Leadership Quarterly magazine shows that inclusive leadership

styles are not only effective but also play to women’s natural strengths.

2. Implement inclusive selection processes for candidates

The procurement process creates business and making it more inclusive can mean the world to SMEs. We can shift focus to inclusive processes for selecting leaders, creating procurement shortlists and ensuring they balance decisiveness with collaboration. This approach moves beyond traditional, male-dominated leadership models and promotes a more balanced and effective leadership style that aligns with the strengths of both men and women.

3. Changing the face of networking Networks can help accelerate your business – and it’s true. The current hold-up is that many networking events are held at times and in places that are not accessible to everyone. While breakfast meetings, golf trips and dinners are popular, we need to add inclusive options to the mix, like virtual meetings, lunchtime sessions and family friendly events.

Founder and CEO Kike Oniwinde Agoro spoke recently about her toddler and carer being accommodated in a separate room for a CEO dinner at Boardwave, so it is possible. This diversity ensures everyone can participate and benefit from networking opportunities. Supportive networks are crucial for business development and it’s time to find a more diverse way of doing it. By rethinking how and when we network, we can create environments that boost women’s confidence and career growth without compromising their personal responsibilities.

By implementing such recommendations, business leaders can create more equitable and empowering businesses. This not only benefits women but also enhances overall organisational performance by leveraging the full potential of a diverse workforce. Bridging the confidence gap is not just a matter of fairness, it’s a strategic imperative for businesses aiming to thrive in today’s competitive environment.

Zara Nanu is a serial entrepreneur and member of the women’s leadership board at Harvard Kennedy School

GREAT BRITISH BILLION-POUND BUSINESSES

Meet Britain’s entrepreneurial elite. Here are the leaders who have managed to create a UK business worth £1bn – and kept going.

These are people who have built ventures spanning everything from artificial intelligence and virtual reality to hoodies and craft beer. You’ll find discount retailers and a diamond dealer, bookmakers and the woman behind a world-leading cybersecurity outfit. The 56 businesses are listed in order of our valuation.

Some of these founders left school without a qualification, others have PhDs. There are those who toiled away for years

and are still in charge of their company after more than half a century. There are others who have catapulted their way on to this list within just a few years by developing tech for which investors have been willing to write out very large cheques in the hope they are buying into the next Apple, Google or Facebook.

One thing unites them all. At one point it was just them, perhaps a co-founder or two, an idea and a desire to try their luck. Every big business was once a small business.

A few years ago I asked the man who tops our list of billion-pound founders, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, whether he was surprised

by the growth of his chemical giant Ineos.

“Completely,” he said with a chuckle. “Look, these are extremely big numbers, but I’ve been doing this a long time. With the exception of 2008, we’ve been successful every year. So you do kind of get used to it.”

The UK needs more of these billionpound entrepreneurs with the energy and hunger to keep building. It needs more businesses that employ people by the thousand, not by the dozens or hundreds. The profiles on the next few pages may be of truly exceptional people but their stories have lessons for businesses of every size.

ROBERT WATTS

In association with

1

Sir Jim Ratcliffe Ineos

£29bn

It wasn’t a start fizzing with privilege or promise. After his early years spent on a council estate near Manchester and an unexceptional school career, the aspiring industrialist found himself sacked four days into his first job. His boss had insisted there was no way he could work in BP’s labs after a medical report had shown he suffered from mild eczema.

Ratcliffe didn’t even start his chemicals behemoth Ineos until his mid-40s, a time when many entrepreneurs start eyeing up the chairman’s office. But by then Ratcliffe was well-placed to harness the expertise and knowledge of the industrial sites and dealmaking he had nurtured in the first half of his career.

His genius has been spotting hidden value: buying up unloved chemical plants owned by the world’s industrial giants and seeing where such facilities could be knitted together with other overlooked sites. This alchemy would not have been

Sir James Dyson

Dyson Group

£16.8bn

possible without an appetite for borrowing too brave for many.

Ineos now has nearly 200 facilities across 29 countries, making the materials used to produce everything from food packaging and car parts to antibiotics and the chlorine used to purify water.

Energised by interests away from the day job, he also made his own updated version of the Land Rover Defender with the Ineos Grenadier – and is now trying to turn around his beloved Manchester United. Still completing marathons in his 70s, Ratcliffe appears to be in it for the long run.

Satisfaction doesn’t come easy to the billionaire inventor. There would be 5,127 prototypes of his first bagless vacuum cleaner before he was content. That passion for improving everyday products soon drove Dyson towards things other technologists might have considered dull: hairdryers, air conditioning units and hand dryers.

More recently this tireless zeal for innovation led him to boldly enter markets dominated by existing players – be that electric vehicles or noise-cancelling headphones. Not all of his endeavours thrive but Dyson banks the lessons learned along the way and moves on.

Not satisfied with being a force in the UK, Dyson set about turning his Wiltshirebased operation into a global group, relocating his headquarters to Singapore to maximise growth in fast-growing, Asian markets. All this has helped drive annual sales to more than £7bn.

Now fascinated by what robotics and artificial intelligence may be able to do to improve everyday household appliances, Dyson remains fully charged.

Nikolay Storonsky Revolut

£14bn

This Russian-born fintech tycoon came to the UK when he was 20 and worked as a trader for Lehman Brothers, losing around £500,000 when the firm collapsed in 2008.

Seven years later he launched Revolut, an app-based payments service undercutting mainstream banks with services such as fee-free foreign exchange. Storonsky was also quick to offer cryptocurrency trading services, attracting millions of new customers as conventional lenders bided their time.

Revolut now operates across 160 countries and has attracted more than 40 million customers. The Londonbased company’s value has fluctuated across the past few years.

Storonsky, who renounced his Russian citizenship after the Ukraine invasion in 2022, hopes an imminent secondary share sale will put a value in excess of £30bn on Revolut.

Mohsin & Zuber Issa EG Group

£9.5bn

The Issa brothers learnt the ins and outs of petrol retailing while working at their father’s filling station. In 2001 they purchased their first forecourt, paying £150,000 for a rundown site on Bury’s Brandlesholme Road. As they grew their portfolio, the brothers spotted how well they could do by selling food and drink from well-known brands in their stations, forging partnerships with Starbucks, Burger King, KFC and Greggs.

Today their EG Group has nearly 6,000 forecourts across the world, generating annual sales of £22.4bn. Heavy borrowing and a partnership with the private equity firm TDR certainly put a tiger in the tank.

Zuber, 52, is in the process of selling his stake in the Blackburn-based business but remains a director. Mohsin, 53, is still firmly in charge.

Greg Jackson Octopus Energy

£7.2bn

A member of Greenpeace from his midteens, Jackson set up businesses making mirrors and trading property before founding a renewable energy start-up in his early 40s.

Within just nine years, he has grown Octopus Energy from a small-scale disruptor into the largest electricity supplier to British homes.

By harnessing cash from investors keen to power the green revolution Jackson has swiftly amassed a portfolio of more than 400 wind and solar farms across the UK and six other countries. Octopus has also

Kristo Käärmann Wise

£7bn

Many great businesses are born from frustration. As a young Estonian working in London, Käärmann was unimpressed with the exchange rate and charges he incurred when he transferred a £10,000 bonus back home. He felt his bank had left him about €500 (£422) out of pocket. This spurred

Denise Coates Bet365

£6bn

Predicting the future is a useful skill for a bookie. Back in the 1990s, Denise Coates was running her family’s modest chain of Midlands betting shops when she realised that the internet would make it possible for her to create a global gambling giant. In 2000, amid the financial turmoil of the dotcom crash, Coates and her brother John started Bet365 from a portable building in a car park in Stoke-on-Trent. Relentlessly investing in their own technology has been critical to the Coates’s success. Bet365

grown tentacles, providing electric vehicle leasing and installing heat pumps and smart meters.

Acquisitions have helped. After buying collapsed rival Bulb and Shell’s UK household electricity and gas arm, Octopus now powers more than 7.7 million homes around the world.

Käärmann to create his own international money transfer service, quickly growing his customer base by undercutting banks and other existing providers TransferWise, as it was initially known, attracted backing from high-profile investors, including Sir Richard Branson, PayPal’s Peter Thiel and Skype founder Niklas Zennström. A spell of higher interest rates boosted Wise’s value as it was able to make money on customers’ balances. Over the past year its users have grown by 29 per cent to 12.8 million – new business largely won by word of mouth.

could adapt its website more quickly than its rivals and pioneered “in-play” or “live” betting, where punters could wager on a game once it had begun.

Betting soon became possible on the number of free kicks, the half-time score and countless other aspects of football and an ever-growing roster of sports around the world.

Tom Morris Home Bargains

£5bn

A retailer promising “top brands” and “bottom prices” was always primed to thrive during a cost-of-living squeeze. Over the past year, profits at Morris’s discount chain have grown to £332m.

This under-the-radar master of low prices has been helping shoppers make their money go further for nearly half a century. Initially called Home and Bargains, the discount chain began in Liverpool’s Old Swan district in 1976. There are now nearly 600 stores in the UK, a figure Morris intends to grow to between 800 and 1,000 in due course.

Home Bargains consistently achieves profit margins of around 9 per cent. This is far above those achieved by mainstream supermarkets and testament to the efficiency with which Morris runs the operation. He employs more than 27,000 people and is almost certainly the wealthiest Liverpudlian in history.

Richard Harpin HomeServe

£4.1bn

The first of Harpin’s eight secrets for entrepreneurs calls for patience. “Everyone is in a rush to be first,” he observes. “Second movers have the advantages. Watch, correct and adapt.”

HomeServe, a provider of emergency repairs and other services for homeowners he founded in 1993, was certainly no overnight success. But providing plumbing insurance for South Staffordshire Water in time proved to be a game changer. In 2023 HomeServe was sold for £4.1bn to Brookfield. Harpin remains chairman across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Through his Growth Partner fund and Business Leader, which he owns, Harpin is now trying to foster the next generation of entrepreneurs intent on creating billionpound companies.

Poppy Gustafsson Darktrace

£4.1bn

While building one of the world’s fastest-growing cybersecurity firms, Gustafsson has not been afraid to do things differently. Rather than winning business with a sales pitch, her staff often deploy Darktrace’s technology into an organisation free of charge, detecting previously unidentified threats and showing customers the value the company can add.

Another one of her counter-intuitive beliefs is that experience can be overrated. Gustafsson cites a young graduate who managed to speed up the company’s sales cycle by two-thirds. They questioned Darktrace’s three-month proof-of-value process, which at that point was standard across the IT industry. The new recruit

11 Mike Ashley Frasers Group

£3.9bn

Starting out in 1982 with a £10,000 loan from his parents and a single shop in Maidenhead, Ashley had opened more than 100 sports shops by the end of the 1990s. But his Sports Direct chain was just the beginning for this high-street kingpin.

Before long the retailer began buying well-known sports brands, including Dunlop Slazenger, Donnay and Lonsdale. While some of his peers have focused on websites, apps and social media, Ashley remains a passionate believer in bricks-and-mortar retail and its role in how UK consumers shop.

Over the years he has snapped up a string of ailing high-street chains, including Evans Cycles, Jack Wills and Game. In 2018 he took control of House of Fraser, renaming his own group after the department store chain a year later. A member of the FTSE 100, there are now 1,500 stores within Frasers Group.

9= Martin Kissinger Lendable

£3.5bn

Kissinger co-founded Lendable after completing a PhD in economics at the University of Oxford. The online service is something of a Tinder of finance, matching those looking to borrow with willing investors prepared to stump up the credit. The London-based fintech also aims to speed up loan decisions by using artificial intelligence to assess risk.

suggested moving to a three-week testing period. A fresh perspective and common sense can trump a forensic knowledge of the way things have always been done, Gustafsson says. Shares in Darktrace have climbed by 75 per cent since their debut on London’s stock market three years ago.

Those close to him say Ashley is a master at spotting an opportunity and moving at speed. Well, he was a squash coach in his youth.

A £210m fundraising in March 2022 valued Lendable at £3.5bn. Many so-called unicorns – the term used to describe businesses valued at $1bn (£830m) or more – don’t break even. However, Lendable is consistently profitable and growing quickly, signing up a new customer every 30 seconds.

13=

John Bloor Bloor Homes

£3.3bn

Having left school at 15, Bloor worked as a plasterer’s apprentice, giving him a hands-on introduction to the housing and construction industry. By his mid20s, Bloor had managed to set up his Derbyshire-based housebuilder.

Blending traditional and contemporary building techniques are hallmarks of the company, which has helped to make Bloor Homes’ properties attractive, cheaper to maintain and more energy efficient.

Keeping 100 per cent ownership of the company has also made it easier for Bloor to ensure that high standards are maintained across the business. Sound, attractive building and a simple ownership structure have helped boost sales and drive profits to £408.8m during the past year.

As a side hustle, Bloor saved and transformed the Triumph motorcycle brand and is now well on the way to selling nearly £1bn worth of motorbikes a year.

13= 15 16=

Sir Philip Hulme & Sir Peter Ogden

Computacenter

£3.3bn

Hulme and Ogden met in the US while studying for MBAs at Harvard Business School. In 1981 they launched the IT services provider Computacenter. The Hertfordshire-based organisation provides consultancy services on what type of computer infrastructure clients need, sources the necessary hardware and software, and can also manage systems once they are in place.

Key to the firm’s success has been landing contracts with large corporates, the NHS and government departments – clients with the means to continue investing in IT even in tough economic climates and challenging scenarios.

The pair floated Computacenter on the stock market more than 25 years ago and still serve as directors.

Laurence Graff Graff Diamonds

£3bn

During his sparkling career this worldfamous diamond dealer has sold gems to Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump and Dame Elizabeth Taylor. Graff’s life among the glitterati is quite the reversal of fortune. He grew up in East End poverty and left school at 14, scrubbing toilets in his first job at a jewellers in Hatton Garden, London.

His chain of nearly 70 boutiques includes premises in Dubai, Monaco and Singapore. Sourcing the most perfect diamonds and ensuring the highest levels of customer service have kept the superrich calling.

Although the company’s finances are not exactly transparent, Bloomberg has valued the company at £7.7bn. We are more cautious.

Ian & Richard Livingstone, London + Regional Properties

£2.7bn

The Livingstone brothers have built a real estate portfolio consisting of 114 hotels. Sons of an Ealing dentist, Ian began his career as an optometrist, while Richard worked as a chartered surveyor.

The pair concentrate on buying high-class buildings and holding on to them for the long term. For example, London’s Hilton Park Lane has been on their books for almost 25 years and they have owned Cliveden House in Berkshire since 2012.

The Livingstones’ two separate companies in the London + Regional group show assets of £2.7bn. Their hotels together have more than 23,000 rooms in locations across the UK, Europe, the US and the Caribbean.

16= 16=

David McMurtry

Renishaw

£2.7bn

Renishaw’s precision engineering technology is vital to manufacturers operating across the aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics and healthcare sectors. Apple, reliant on billions of tiny, intricate components for its products, is understood to be one of the Gloucestershire-based firm’s biggest clients. Exports have supercharged Renishaw’s growth across the years.

McMurtry – a former Rolls-Royce apprentice – founded the business with his former colleague John Deer. Renishaw’s shares now value the company at £2.7bn. McMurtry recently announced he is stepping down as executive chairman, but will remain a director.

games in his teens and 20s. But he felt the way players interacted with one another in virtual worlds was too often clunky or lacking in meaning.

In 2012, the Cambridge computer science graduate set up his London-based metaverse developer Improbable to help

Herman Narula Improbable

£2.7bn

create virtual environments where up to 30,000 people can simultaneously interact with one another.

The technology has been harnessed by retailers, event organisers and sports clubs, as well as video games makers. A fundraising in late 2022 valued Improbable at £2.7bn.

Narula adored playing multiplayer video

19 Mark Slack CMR Surgical

£2.4bn

CMR Surgical developed a class of surgical robot called Versius that has already been used in more than 22,000 operations around the world. Slack is the medical director of the Cambridge-based firm and was one of a small team to launch the business 10 years ago.

Robot surgeons can save hospitals money and increase productivity. They operate more quickly and with smaller incisions, often increasing the speed with which patients recover.

Although initially used mostly for gynaecological and colorectal operations, more recent versions of Versius can be used for a wider range of procedures.

CMR Surgical was valued at £2.4bn in a 2021 investment round.

20=

Alex Kendall Wayve

£2.3bn

New Zealand-born Kendall and fellow Cambridge university PhD student Amar Shah took their own road when they launched their software developer for driverless cars.

At the time most players in this field were feeding rules into computers to account for every possible driving eventuality. By contrast Wayve’s artificial intelligence-powered technology harnesses videos and data from real life to “teach” autonomous vehicles how to drive. This

20=

Nicholas Vetch

Big Yellow Group

£2.3bn

ensures driverless cars and vans can navigate any environment and respond better to surprises, such as a pedestrian straying into traffic.

Earlier this year Wayve attracted more than $1bn (£830m) of new investment from SoftBank, Microsoft and Nvidia. Although the price put on Kendall’s London-based firm by this fundraising was not made public, an earlier round valued the business at £2.3bn.

Vetch won respect for starting and growing retail warehouse group Edge Properties, ultimately selling this outfit for £142m more than 25 years ago.

He soon started again with Big Yellow Group. When he floated the Surreybased self storage business on the stock market two years after its launch, his

20=

Tim Steiner Ocado

£2.3bn

Next year marks 25 years since Steiner teamed up with two former Goldman Sachs colleagues to start a pioneering grocery delivery service, taking a 90 per cent pay cut to do so. The trio cleverly foresaw how millions of Britons would pay a premium to have their weekly shops delivered to their doorsteps.

Four years ago Ocado ended its longrunning partnership with Waitrose and began delivering produce from Marks & Spencer instead. Ocado has faced fierce competition from traditional supermarket retailers like Tesco but Steiner’s story reminds entrepreneurs not to overlook lucrative gems hiding under the roof.

Over the years Ocado has made a fortune from selling reconfigurations of its IT systems and software to Morrisons, the US supermarket Kroger and many other grocers and producers as far afield as Japan and South Korea.

strong business record helped pull in the institutional investors that fuelled the new company’s growth.

There are now 110 Big Yellow Group sites across the UK and the shares value the company at £2.3bn.

Who says you can’t make money out of selling empty space?

Khosla’s challenger bank OakNorth concentrates on the “missing middle”, businesses with a turnover of between £1m and £100m. He says that mainstream banks too often focus on companies at opposing ends of the scale: microbusinesses or large corporates.

Launched in 2015, OakNorth has more than 200,000 customers and has so far lent £10.2bn. Annual earnings climbed by 23 per cent to £187.3m last year.

25= Rishi Khosla OakNorth £2.2bn

Now Khosla is looking to provide services to tech firms once served by Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed last year. A fundraising led by Japanese investor SoftBank has valued OakNorth at £2.2bn.

This former banker started a food delivery service after being unimpressed with the takeaways he ordered when working late in the City of London. In 2013, he teamed up with childhood friend Greg Orlowski to launch Deliveroo and they quickly built market share with a slick, easy-to-use app. Shu urges entrepreneurs to create businesses in areas they find energising,

Bill Holmes Radius Payments

£2bn

While working as a travelling fuel salesman for the oil giant Esso, Holmes had the idea of helping filling-station

24 Will Shu Deliveroo

£2.1bn

25= Sir Richard Branson Virgin Group

£2bn

saying it will be easier to stay the course when they encounter those inevitable “bumps in the road”.

He also believes primary research is very valuable, still jumping on his bike to deliver food orders himself. Frontline conversations with customers, suppliers and partners are the best way to learn what is and isn’t working in a business, he says.

chains launch fuel cards, offering fixed prices on petrol and diesel to lorry drivers.

Although he admits the loyalty scheme concept was “not very sexy”, the business Holmes started above a hairdressing salon in a Cheshire village now has offices in 19 countries. Radius has also diversified into providing insurance and data analytics services to fleet operators. Annual turnover has hit nearly £4.7bn and investors have valued the Crewe-based business at £2bn.

Can any other businessman claim to have diversified more effectively than Branson? This posterboy for a generation of entrepreneurs has created a group with more than 40 Virgin companies operating across 35 countries and employing some 60,000 people.

Starting out with a mail-order record business in 1970, he has since turned a buck with everything from rail travel and banking to gyms and radio. One of his most audacious moves appeared to be taking on British Airways when he launched Virgin Atlantic in 1984. But setting up his space tourism venture Virgin Galactic probably trumps that.

Branson urges billionaires to master the art of delegating – and get out and have some have fun. He argues that if you’re not having fun in life, it’s hard to be inspired and have fun in business. He embodies the belief that spending time away from the desk is where you meet new people, learn from others’ experiences and hear interesting stories you can plug back into your own business.

£1.8bn

A former management consultant, Danson used four credit cards to fund the launch of Datamonitor in 1990. He sold the market intelligence provider for £502m in 2007, buying back part of the business to start his new venture, GlobalData.

27= 27= Mike Danson GlobalData

Chris Dawson The Range £1.8bn

A former trader at Plymouth market, Dawson’s discount retailer now has more than 200 UK stores. The Range is spoken of as a “poor man’s John Lewis”, with 16 different departments together selling 140,000 different products.

This London-based publisher produces reports and newsletters on nearly 20 sectors with intelligence covering almost 1 million companies. Danson has assiduously grown the company with a series of acquisitions, helping expand the range of information available to his customers. In doing so, the company’s renewal rate has climbed to an unprecedented 98 per cent. Small wonder then that GlobalData shares are up 25 per cent over the past year.

Turnover has topped £1bn for the past three years and Dawson has recently built a vast new distribution centre in Suffolk to power expansion in London and further into the south east.

A lover of a bargain himself, he paid around £5m for the Wilko brand last year. Once a rival of The Range, the low-cost chain fell into administration last summer, but Dawson realised it was a much-loved high-street name and has begun opening his own Wilko stores.

James Watt BrewDog £1.8bn

Watt was 24 when he teamed up with school friend Martin Dickie, pictured right. They got some “scary bank loans” and set up a brewer now credited with bringing craft beer to the masses.

Signing a deal to supply Tesco within the first six months was critical to BrewDog’s success. The two Scots also excelled at quirky PR stunts to raise awareness and badge themselves as the pint-sized pretender yapping at the heels of big brewers.

When BrewDog’s super-strong stout Tokyo was criticised for its 18.2 per cent ABV, Watt and Dickie responded with a low-alcohol alternative called Nanny State. Then they set about swiping the title of world’s strongest beer from a German brewery, naming their 41 per cent ABV challenger Sink the Bismarck.

Their antics also included a drink laced with “herbal viagra” released ahead of Prince William’s wedding called Royal

Virility Performance. The pair even dropped dozens of taxidermy “fat cats” over the City of London to raise awareness of their Equity for Punks fundraising. This presented BrewDog as a rebellious movement rather than a beer producer. With a $2bn valuation and more than 100 bars (and a few hotels), BrewDog is no longer a poodle-sized challenger.

Mark Dixon

£1.7bn

Starting his entrepreneurial journey by selling peat from a wheelbarrow while still at school in Essex, Dixon later established a burger van business. Having had issues sourcing the buns, he set up a company supplying bread to other fast food retailers where he would first make some real dough, selling it for £800,000.

He used the proceeds to move into property after noticing how business executives often held meetings in cramped coffee shops. That gave him the idea for Regus, the serviced offices giant now known as IWG.

The group now owns 4,000 properties in 120 countries. Disney, HSBC and Accenture are among its clients. A range of ancillary services, including executive lounges at airports and virtual offices, boosts the FTSE 250 company’s revenues.

Hiroki Takeuchi

GoCardless

£1.7bn

Enduring shocks and overcoming adversity is essential for anyone trying to grow a business at scale. Few people in this list know that better than the founder of GoCardless.

In 2016, five years after founding his financial payments firm, Takeuchi was struck by a car while cycling in London. The accident left him paralysed from the waist down.

Takeuchi said that even though he had to take three months off to concentrate on his recovery, the quality of the team he had already built around him ensured the business continued to thrive. “That was good to see – it’s nice to know something you have built has got a life of its own,” he later said.

The story of GoCardless, valued at $2.1bn in a fundraising two years ago, is an extreme but powerful example of how putting together a strong team can help entrepreneurs and their businesses endure even the toughest of challenges.

32= Henry Moser, Together, £1.6bn

32= Dame Mary and Douglas Perkins, Specsavers, £1.6bn

32= Sir Peter Rigby, Rigby Group, £1.6bn

32= Sanjeev and Arani Soosaipillai, Prax Group, £1.6bn

32= Surinder Arora, Arora Group, £1.6bn

37= Stephen Fitzpatrick, Ovo, £1.5bn

37= Vishal Marria, Quantexa, £1.5bn

39 Euan Blair, Multiverse, £1.4bn

40= Tim Warrillow, Fever-Tree, £1.3bn

40= Matthew Scullion, Matillion, £1.3bn

40= Tony Langley, Langley Holdings, £1.3bn

40= Peter Jones, Emerson Developments, £1.3bn

40= Phil Brown, Causeway Technologies, £1.3bn

45= Mark Coombs, Ashmore, £1.2bn

45= Harry Hyman, Primary Healthcare Properties, £1.2bn

47= Ben Francis, Gymshark, £1.1bn

47= Lior Shiff, Tripletdot Studios, £1.1bn

49= Steve Turner, Spectrum Medical, £1bn

49= Fred and Peter Done, Betfred, £1bn

49= Charlotte Tilbury, Charlotte Tilbury, £1bn

49= Malcolm Healey, Wren Kitchens, £1bn

49= Morgan Tillbrook, Alpha Group, £1bn

49= Bernard Lewis, River Island, £1bn

49= Peter Harris, Bourne Leisure, £1bn

49= James Basden, Zenobe, £1bn

Methodology

To qualify for our list, an entrepreneur had to be a director of a company he or she founded or co-founded that has recently been valued at £1bn or more. We also included founders who are still the majority owners of their business but are not directors, such as Mike Ashley. Valuations of public companies were derived from stock market prices at the start of July 2024. The valuations of private companies were set by figures made public after a recent fundraising or sale. If this was not available, we used a multiple of their annual profits, or in a small number of cases, their net assets. Businesses focused on financial or property trading were not included.

 Copying and pivoting

 Finding and attracting

 Getting some CoachMent

 Thinking omnichannel

 Building

 Going

 Embracing

 Following

SAGE

ADVICE

Steve Hare on the story behind the UK’s biggest listed tech company

GRAHAM RUDDICK

ewcastle-upon-Tyne. Home to Geordies, Newcastle United and one of the UK’s biggest companies. St James’ Park, Newcastle United’s stadium, looms over the city centre like a cathedral. Football here is like a religion.

The home of Sage is far more understated. A 20-minute drive from the city centre takes you to C22 and C23 Cobalt Park. About 2,000 people are doing world-leading work here. This is not Silicon Valley, California or even Shoreditch in London, but what is being developed here rivals anything from those tech hubs.

Sage was founded in 1981 as a spinout from Newcastle University. David Goldman, Graham Wylie and Paul Muller used new IT technology to develop computer software that allowed businesses to automate their accounts.

Today, Sage is the biggest listed tech company in the UK and is worth £11bn. It is exactly the sort of company the UK needs more of – a promising technology business that has developed into a FTSE 100 giant and is based outside London. Its tech now includes a range of onlinebased services that allow small and medium-sized businesses to perform administrative tasks faster.

Steve Hare has been chief executive since 2018 after initially joining as finance director in January 2014. “We’ve built a long history of being here and therefore we are an attractive, well-known company to work for,” Hare says. “We can attract the very best talent in the north-east.

“We’ve expanded into Europe, the US and South Africa. Now 45 per cent of our

revenue is in the US and only about 20 per cent is in the UK. But this is still our home. This is where our roots are. I think that really matters.”

One of the keys to the company’s success is how it has developed and trained its own staff. Since 2015 Sage has employed more than 600 people through apprenticeship schemes in the UK, mainly in the Newcastle area.

“We work very, very hard to create the right environment so that people choose to come and work for us and they want to develop their career here,” Hare says. “Even when they decide to move on and do something else, that alumni are very important. I want people to leave and still be Sage evangelists.”

That hasn’t always been the case. When Hare took over as chief executive there was a downbeat mood among staff. Stephen Kelly had stood down as chief executive in August 2018 warning of “execution issues”. Sage was struggling to shift from being a business that sold licences to use its software to one that offered subscriptions to online services.

A glance at the share price of Sage shows you that Hare has turned it around. It stood at £5.95 on the day that Kelly stood down. In early 2024 it reached record highs of more than £12.

Initially, however, Hare did not want the job of chief executive. Having been finance director for four years, he felt partly responsible for the poor scores that Sage was receiving on workplace review websites such as Glassdoor. “It was a wall of negativity about working at Sage, which I found very painful,” he says. Hare also wasn’t sure whether he knew enough about technology to drive the business forward.

Hare was named interim boss while the board, led by chairman Sir Donald Brydon, hunted for a new chief executive. He spent this time travelling to Sage offices around the world, speaking to staff, meeting customers and listening to what they said about the business. At an allhands staff meeting in Atlanta, Hare had a rethink about whether to go for the chief executive job.

“I’d come up with this format where I never did any presentations or anything. I just did a Q&A and had someone interview me. I just said: ‘Ask me any questions. I want to know what’s on your mind. If you don’t tell me, I can’t do anything about it.’”

The interviewer in Atlanta asked Hare a straightforward question: “How is the search for a chief executive going?”

“I gave him a slightly political, noncommittal answer,” Hare recalls. “He

PHOTOS: Rory Lindsay

I hadn’t prepared myself for what it’s like to be truly at the top of the tree, just how many people rely on you

replied: ‘Steve, that's not like you. That’s not a direct answer to a direct question. Are you in the running?’”

Hare’s said he wasn’t. “I don't think I’m the right person,” he told the audience. The interviewer disagreed: “Well, if you changed your mind and decided you wanted to be CEO, a lot of people here in Atlanta would get right behind you.”

The audience of about 200 people all started clapping. Hare was taken aback. “I thought: ‘Hmmm, maybe I’m making

some progress here’. In the meantime, I’d also been digging into the technology. I got to a point where I went back to Donald [Brydon] and said: ‘I don’t know where you’ve got up to with the selection process, but if you decide that I’m the right person – and it is important you think that I am the best person – I’d like to give it a crack.’”

That is indeed what the board decided. Hare was named chief executive in November 2018.

You’ve just got to be really tough

“I found the first year incredibly hard,” he says. “I hadn’t prepared myself for what it’s like to be truly at the top of the tree, just how many people rely on you. All the different stakeholders – customers, colleagues, shareholders, everything… there’s a lot of moving parts. When I first became CEO I didn’t really have a system or take control of how I spent my time.”

Hare started to make progress after receiving advice from another chief

executive and former finance director, who began mentoring him. “You’ve just got to be really tough, Steve,” the mentor told Hare. “You must only do what only you can do. If you’re doing things other people can do, you should let them do it. The CEO should only do certain things and you need to really focus on those. It tends to be people and culture. The culture starts with the person at the top of the tree. You’re a technology company so you’ve got to work closely with the technologists to ensure you’re making the right products.”

The mentor, who Hare does not name, gave him some other advice, too: “When you’re a CFO, you tend to spend a lot of time planning, looking for risk and trying to eliminate that. When you’re a CEO, you have to be prepared to be out of your comfort zone, take calculated risks and push boundaries.

“If you have the right people around you, there will always be the checks and balances taking place anyway. But if you’re conservative as the CEO, you won’t be successful. You have to be bold, you have to push, you have to test and you have to look for areas where you can get some differentiation.”

Other parts of the job – such as meeting Sage’s customers – came more naturally to Hare. As a trained accountant himself, Hare had a sense of what these businesses needed from the company and its tech.

“What I love about serving small and mid-size businesses is the stories of how people came to be where they are,” Hare says. These conversations have also given him a unique insight into the challenges and opportunities for businesses. He says that optimism and resilience are two attributes that really stand out.

“At least 90 per cent of the small business owners I talk to will tell you all the things they tried that didn’t work,” Hare says. “It’s very rare that someone has this incredible idea, acts on it and it’s immediately successful. They have all these stories about the barriers they hit and how they got around them. There is this consistency of resilience and not being prepared to let something get in the way. I think successful small business owners have a way of making things happen.

“Of course, that’s true in the case of most successful people – they’re driven

to overcome challenges that present themselves and to get things done.

“I think this is especially so with small business owners, where they don’t have the luxury of hiring lots of people or an abundance of excess capital. They have to do the best they can with what they have got. That makes them very determined.”

Businesses need a support ecosystem Hare thinks that medium-sized businesses in the UK are held back by access to capital and the lack of a support system.

“We tend to be very good in the UK at having money available to back ideas at the very beginning, but once they need to scale-up and require access to more capital that can be a bit harder,” he says.

“The second thing, and I think this is where the US is very good, is that you also need a support ecosystem. If you’re doing something where you can network with other people who are in a similar field or period of the business journey, they can put you in touch with people who can assist you – whether that be mentors or financial assistance. That tends to create a reinforcing effect.

“We’ve done things in the UK to try and promote that – Cambridge as an ecosystem has been a successful model, there’s talk of creating Silicon Roundabout in Shoreditch – but it’s a bit inconsistent,” he says.

“Newcastle is a great place for talent and a great place to start a business but a supportive ecosystem for building that business doesn’t exist. This is why so many people end up going to London, to access the contacts that you need to successfully grow a business. I’d like to see that more balanced across the country.”

Hare was born in Yorkshire but also spent time in Hong Kong as a youngster after the family moved due to his father’s job in engineering. He knew from an early age that he wanted to work in business and trained to be a chartered accountant after university because he thought it could open up possibilities.

It did. Hare joined the engineering group Marconi in 1989, where he quickly gained a reputation for getting things done and being a troubleshooter. He rose through the ranks and 10 days before his 40th birthday became the finance director of the company, then one of the biggest

organisations in the UK.“For me, that was the pinnacle of everything I’d set out to achieve,” he says. But things quickly went wrong. “It all blew up and we had to do two profit warnings. We ended up having to undertake a considerable debt-for-equity swap where the banks and the bondholders took control of Marconi.”

You’ll never work in the City again Hare led negotiations on the debt-forequity swap. The deal saved the company, but it cost Hare his job. He was told by the chairman that the price of the deal would be his exit as finance director. Negotiations with the banks had been tough and they told the chairman that they could no longer work with Hare.

“Nobody was very happy because everyone had to take their share of the pain in the debt-for-equity swap,” he says. “So I ended up losing my job. I went from being one of the youngest CFOs to having to re-evaluate what I was going to do next.”

Newcastle is a great place for talent and a great place to start a business but a supportive ecosystem doesn’t exist

One of the bankers who had worked on the deal told Hare he would never work in the City again. “I am a stubborn Yorkshireman really, that runs quite deep. I really don’t like being told that I can’t do something,” Hare says.

“I took a bit of time. I ran my own business for about 18 months doing consulting work and then I thought: ‘Well, you know, I’m not done.’ I worked really hard to get to that point where I was on a public company board. I didn’t want that to be the last gig.”

Hare decided to try again. He got a job as finance director at a smaller engineering group, Spectris, and rebuilt his career from there. That set him on the path to joining Sage in 2014.

Hare is now 63 – an older and wiser figure than the finance director was at Marconi in the early 2000s. “I’ve learnt a lot,” he says. “It’s very important that whatever age you are and whatever experience you’ve got, every day you look to learn. It’s about maintaining that growthlearning mindset.

“When I was younger I was very much driven by getting things done. That’s what kind of made me famous – going into difficult situations and making stuff happen. But I was less aware of the impact I was having on others. To use the phrase, at times I could be a bit of a bull in a china shop. I wasn’t too worried about some of the collateral damage that occurred along the way. I wasn’t the sort of person who would deliberately do things that adversely impacted others, but I just lacked that awareness and the empathy that’s required to build truly high-performing, sustainable teams. I was driven to short-term outputs.

“I’m naturally an introverted person. While I like people – it’s not like I’m a loner and I don’t like interacting with people – I prefer very small groups really. When I was younger, I wasn’t very good at realising the impact of how I behaved when I came under intense pressure. Introverts tend to go more into themselves when they come under immense pressure, whereas an extrovert goes the other way and will engage with lots of people.

“The way I reacted to pressure was to become a bit withdrawn. I didn’t always take people with me, whereas I think now I’m much better at that and certainly more aware of the impact that I’m having on the people around me.”

Now that Hare has reached the top and Sage is thriving, he is determined to stay there.

“One of the most dangerous things about having experience is that you can look at something and say: ‘I’ve seen this before’. The world’s changing extremely quickly, particularly in technology. It’s really important to get input from wherever you can find it,” he explains.

“I will often talk to younger colleagues at Sage who were born in the digital age and I want to understand how they see something – how do they decide which applications they use? They’re driven by social media.

“When I had my first job – and this makes me sound really old – there were no mobile phones, no computers and no social media. I have learnt to operate in the digital age and I have learnt to drive what we do at Sage in a digital world.”

The rise of the modern milkman

Serial entrepreneur Simon Mellin founded Modern Milkman during the anti-plastic movement prompted by Blue Planet II. Here, he talks about his journey as a founder and what he has learnt along the way

CHRIS MAGUIRE

Simon Mellin doesn’t fit the mould of what a tech entrepreneur looks and sounds like. That could be due to his broad east Lancashire accent, his tattoos or his cauliflower ear – a “trophy” from his love of mixed martial arts.

“Most people can’t understand me,” he says. “I have to talk quite slowly. There’s a stigma attached to northern businesses that you can’t raise money or do what you want. I think it’s b*****ks.”

Earlier this year his business, Modern Milkman, was the highestplaced UK company when it was rated eighth in the FT 1000, which ranks Europe’s fastest-growing companies. Still, Mellin didn’t let the attention go to his head. “I haven’t changed anything about myself,” he says. “You have to be different, and that’s all right. I’m a very honest person, it’s important to stay true to who you are. I call a spade a spade.”

What has led to his success, he believes, is a clear understanding of his company and its mission, purpose and strategy. “You’ve got to be confident in doing what you do,” he comments. “I really understand my business; I’ve worked in every aspect of it, from delivering milk, milking cows, building relationships with suppliers and moving stock. I’m driven by the numbers and the data, not the limelight.”

Mellin grew up in a farming family in Pendle, Lancashire, and is the son of a butcher. He spent much of his childhood working in the family’s butcher shop, and left school in year 10 after, as he says, “not going very often”. What he may have lacked academically he more than made up for with his business acumen.

“I got zero qualifications from school. Eventually, I think I passed two GCSEs,” he says. “I’m a very curious person, though. I like to understand problems and learn how

to fix them. I set up a mobile disco business with a friend when I was 13 called Kids by Kids. We loved seeing our first advert in the Yellow Pages. That was the start of my entrepreneurial journey.”

It’s a voyage that has taken him to the top of a company worth £250m. He co-founded Modern Milkman in 2018 after watching an episode of Sir David Attenborough’s cult BBC series Blue Planet II and was shocked at the impact of single-use plastics on the environment.

At the time, Mellin was convinced that the traditional milk delivery sector was ripe for disruption through technology, so he bought his own milkround and the idea for the firm was born. It offers customers an app where they can order milk and juices to be delivered in reusable milk bottles, along with other products.

The firm’s mission, to reduce plastic waste and enable consumers to shop ethically and sustainably, immediately resonated with the public. In 2020, the company experienced 1,000 per cent annual growth and attracted attention from politicians, including then prime minister Boris Johnson.

Johnson, who was swept to power in part on a pledge of levelling up the north, was visiting the Modern Milkman’s offices in 2019 when he was doorstepped by a TV crew. Looking for an exit, Johnson followed Mellin and a colleague through the nearest door – and found himself in a fridge. “When the door shuts, the light goes off,” recalls Mellin. “There’s three of us in a dark fridge, so I got my phone out and switched my torch on. We didn’t talk about much, just a bit of chit-chat and laughing.”

Modern Milkman is not Mellin’s first stab at running a business. In 2009, he started free-range chicken farm company Roaming Roosters and grew it into a business turning over a few million pounds in revenue. After being approached by brands to resell their products,

he launched his next venture, Grassroots Wholesale Foods, specialising in packing food for online retailers.

“At that time, no one was thinking about online. Everyone was thinking about supermarkets,” he says. “We were one of the early suppliers for brands such as HelloFresh and Gousto, backing their growth. We went from zero to £15m revenue in a couple of years.”

That growth didn’t last, however. Grassroots Wholesale Foods was eventually sold for asset value. Mellin admits he and the company overestimated the market potential. “That was a huge learning opportunity for me,” he says. It was valuable experience that he took into Modern Milkman. Blue Planet II provided the lightbulb moment, but it was spotting a gap in the market that made Mellin think he was on to something.

“Sir David was a big part of it, but there were a few other things that got me thinking,” he says. “I’d worked with HelloFresh and Gousto, and I’d also watched Ocado and Just Eat. A lot of firms were trying to take food digital, but nobody was thinking about smaller basket sizes and a higher frequency of deliveries.”

It was Mellin, however, who believed that in order to reduce waste, people needed to buy little and often, even online. The rise of supermarkets meant consumers were doing huge weekly shops and often wasting food. “I had a belief that food needed to go back to the oldfashioned way with little-and-often habits, but in a more convenient way,” he says.

The other aspect that needed solving was deliveries. Businesses such as HelloFresh were scaling by using third parties for the logistics, which Mellin assumed had to be inefficient. So instead, he bought a local milk round in

Colne, Lancashire, and tried out his own particular model.

“We wanted to find a solution to the three pillars of sustainability, small baskets and logistics,” he says. “[The milk round in Colne] had 100 customers and that was the epiphany moment. Those customers wanted this service, but there were two major issues: the provider couldn’t get paid because nobody had cash, and the customer couldn’t manage their order because there was no way to interact. If customers wanted an extra pint of milk, they’d put a note in the bottle. This was impossible to manage or scale.”

Mellin’s solution was to build a tech platform. The Modern Milkman app enables people to log on and order products from there. Customers set up a regular delivery for a particular day of the week, but can pause or edit that up to 8pm the night before. They can also request one-off deliveries on other days of the week (depending on when the milk round arrives at their address).

“The milk round, along with the paper round, were some of the first pioneers of the subscription model.

Above: Boris Johnson visited Modern Milkman’s offices in 2019, finding himself in a fridge while trying to avoid a TV crew. Opposite page: Modern Milkman’s founder Simon Mellin.

We wanted to use that as a foundation to build our business,” says Mellin. “I always talk about the ‘oh s**t’ moments. You open the fridge and think ‘Oh s**t, I’ve got no milk’. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve from the doorstep, adding convenience to the core grocery needs.”

The company works with around 70 suppliers and focuses on providing breakfast goods and core groceries such as dairy, bakery, fruit and vegetables, but it is not a manufacturer or food producer itself.

“We’re a platform that acts as a conduit and connects producers to users,” says Mellin. “The end goal is to enable people to be more sustainable.

Modernmilkman.com as he wanted a more direct route to market for his milk.

“We got to know each other through that. I approached him in late 2022 and asked how he would feel about doing something together, and we got on really well. There were great synergies there: he had all the supply chain knowledge and we had all the front-end knowledge. We decided to merge the businesses on January 1, 2024. It really was fate.”

I had a belief that food needed to go back to the old-fashioned way with little-and-often habits, but in a more convenient way

We’re not a manufacturer or a food packer, we’re a technology business with an integrated logistics vertical.

“We were very data orientated when we started the business. We were clear on what we needed to do to make as efficient as possible.

Modern Milkman found traction early on. It used direct sales, knocking on doors in areas where its service was available and putting leaflets through letter boxes. Mellin says growth rates were between 3 per cent and 5 per cent week on week and were boosted by Covid-19, which put the focus on sustainability and convenience.

To date, the company has raised around £50m in investment and makes in the region of 300,000 deliveries a week in the UK. It moved its headquarters from Colne to Manchester in 2023 in search of talent (50 per cent of its core staff are developers, data scientists and product experts). “It was about

people,” says Mellin. “We’re a tech company and we needed the calibre of talents and skills.”

For a long time, Modern Milkman placed growth above profit. It expanded into France in what Mellin describes as a “very bull market”, but closed those operations when the financial landscape shifted in 2022 and 2023.

“There’s an old saying: ‘Businesses don’t die from starvation, they die from indigestion’. You can put too much capital into a company, and you see this a lot in tech companies,” he says.

“We had to go very quickly from growth at all costs to optimisation of capital efficiency. Luckily, we had a strong underlying business that we knew could generate margins. All we did was shut down a lot of the moonshot stuff – and France was one of those things we were trying to get to work – and focus on the core market in the UK.”

That doesn’t mean expansion is off the table in the future. Mellin turned his attention to the US after a chance discovery on the internet. “It’s a funny story,” he says. “We founded Modern Milkman and bought the domain name Modernmilkman.co.uk around the time of October 2018. At the same time, Seth Bahler, a fifth-generation dairy farmer from Connecticut, bought

Mellin expects much of the business’s growth in the next few years to come from the US, as it focuses on profitability in the UK. The company reported pre-tax losses of £23m in 2022, while increasing turnover by 84 per cent to £45.5m in the same year. The figures for 2023 are yet to be published but are expected to show a consolidation of turnover and a narrowing of the losses, with the plan to break even at group level in 2024.

As for what’s next, Mellin wants to up the company’s commitment to sustainability. That is part of the reason why, in its last funding round, it brought the Fortune 500 company Avery Dennison on board. It is a material sciences business working with Modern Milkman to develop a new range of reusable and returnable packaging –including a washable, recyclable silicon-based bread bag.

“I think that’s the next step for us,” says Mellin. “What are the other core grocery products we can’t do yet? What are the products that are hard to package? Modern Milkman is only five years old, but we’re just getting started.”

LEADERSHIP

/// Case studies and masterclasses on how to be a better leader ///

The CEO Factory

The companies that trained the next generation of leaders

Against the Grain Knocking down the corporate hierarchy

We’ll do it our way

Three female founders on how they learnt to lead

Lessons from Another Field

Emma Jones

Why you need a mentor

Jake Humphrey

Caspar Lee Fake it till you make it

44 63 50 65 58 69 54 66 60 70

If you need some time to relax, try mowing the lawn

Crittall Windows

Record-breaking cyclist Mark Beaumont on the importance of resilience

Turning around a 140-year-old company

Catherine Baker

Ed Smith

Why anything goes with Carlo Ancelotti

The 3Ps that provide the key to long-term motivation

THE CEO FACTORY

Some companies have become as famous for training the next generation of leaders as the services they provide. We explore what makes a good C-level training facility and whether they are still relevant in today’s business landscape

JULIA FINCH

When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” So said Jack Welch, the chairman and chief executive of US multinational conglomerate General Electric from 1981 to 2001.

On his watch, General Electric became almost as famous for its leadership training as its explosive business growth. There

was his “rank and yank” management system, which fired the bottom 10 per cent of the workforce each year. On the flip side, the company’s Crotonville learning centre was alive and well in upstate New York. It had a $1bn budget to produce a steady supply of chief executives for General Electric’s collection of global businesses, but also generated scores of bosses for other US corporations.

General Electric isn’t the only firm producing first-class management talent. IBM, Procter & Gamble and McKinsey have also run CEO production lines. Nor is it a US phenomenon: Hindustan has produced 400 chief executives, now leading firms from Nestlé India to Chanel.

The UK has its own CEO factories to the extent that most of the senior executives running UK PLCs during the past 30 years have previously been colleagues. They learnt their trade at companies –such as Mars, Asda, Tesco and BP – that had a tradition of strong, successful and charismatic leaders.

At Mars the bosses of the future were identified straight out of university and cultivated on a graduate training scheme, while Asda and Tesco fast-tracked the highest-flying thirty-somethings they could find. BP, meanwhile, opted to hothouse individuals that were handpicked by the top boss.

The 1980s graduate intake at Mars were a vintage cohort. Overseen by general sales manager Allan Leighton, many went on to run businesses that ranged from supermarket chains to TV stations, airlines and even English football. They included some of the

best-known business-people in Britain: Adam Crozier and Justin King.

Most graduates began by touring small shops selling sweets or pet food and stocking shelves out of the back of their company car. There was an egalitarian culture where everyone clocked on, there were no reserved car park spaces and open-plan offices.

Even without any special favours, however, some female recruits still managed to climb the ladder: Sara Weller became MD of Argos, Helen Stevenson became group marketing director of a major high street bank and Angela Spindler moved on to Asda and then to three CEO roles. All have also had multiple non-executive roles.

Cambridge graduate Richard Baker joined Mars in the mid 1980s and succeeded Leighton as sales and marketing director. Some 10 years later Baker joined his former boss at Asda, before becoming the chief executive of Boots and chairman of a plethora of companies, including Whitbread and Virgin Active.

There were several reasons why the Mars trainees became such high achievers, Baker says. The two-year scheme provided training in almost every aspect of management, from how to give a presentation to how to write a paper, do an appraisal or conduct a disciplinary.

The financial benefits were also quite welcome. “Mars paid more than anyone else, intentionally. It wanted the absolute pick of the crop,” he says. “We also never talked about a graduate training scheme; it was a management training programme. Its sole aim was to produce managers, not take in graduates.”

Those who failed to make the grade were asked to leave. “If you weren’t good enough, they moved you on. It really was up or out. A lot of people were exited, but it was done fairly and kindly. They paid for people to be out placed.”

The steadfast dedication to training, Baker remarks, was not the brainchild of Leighton or any other executive at the time, although they clearly recruited a particularly talented group. It was instead “a corporate thing: hire the best and train professionally. It had already been going on for decades.”

THE BANKER’S BANKER

Sir Win Bischoff

There was a time a few years ago when it seemed that to chair a FTSE 100 company you had to have worked at Schroders. And, more particularly, for Sir Win Bischoff.

There was Dame Alison Carnwath at property developer Land Securities, Lord Gerry Grimstone at investment firm Standard Life, Sir Richard Broadbent at Tesco, Robert Swannell at Marks & Spencer and Nick Ferguson at Sky.

Other Schroders veterans who made their mark in finance included James Bardrick at Citigroup, Karen Cook at Goldman Sachs and Will Samuel at TSB, as well as the investment manager and philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer.

Unusually for the Square Mile Bischoff, as the most senior executive, was key to the hiring regime at Schroders, conducting first rather than last interviews of potential recruits, according to the Financial Times. Also, again unusually for the City at the time, women were encouraged and promoted.

Despite his double-breasted pinstriped suits, Bischoff didn’t have the usual City pedigree, which perhaps explains the meritocratic culture that took hold at Schroders under him. Born in Germany in 1941 he was brought up in South Africa, went to university in the US then entered banking. Bischoff eventually joined the Anglo-German Schroders in London in 1966. He ran the merchant bank’s operations in Hong Kong –where he led tycoon Li Ka-shing’s debut on the stock market in 1972 – until his return to London in 1982, appointed to chair the corporate finance division a year later.

As chairman of the Schroders group, which included an asset manager, Bischoff was responsible for offloading the investment bank

to the American behemoth Citigroup for £1.3bn. (The whole company was worth only £30m when Bischoff became chief executive in 1984.)

Bischoff subsequently joined Citi and was drafted in as its chief executive and then chairman in New York during the global financial crisis in 2007. Two years later, he was appointed chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, which had to be rescued by the UK government during the crisis, and hired Antonio Horta-Osório, who nursed the bank back to health. He also took a gamble by sticking with Horta-Osório when he needed a break from his role early on after suffering from stress.

Exploring “Win’s World”, the Financial Times described “the characteristics essential for the Schroders way of doing business: low-key, trustworthy and with no ego on show”, quoting Grimstone as saying: “We were all client-driven people.”

Similarly, in a tribute to Bischoff published in the FT, Sir Philip Augar said: “Bischoff’s life-long belief was that banks should put client interests first and their own interests second. He saw it not only as the right thing to do but the best way to build longterm shareholder value.”

Augar, who worked for Schroders from 1995 to 2000, wrote of the firm’s place at the heart of business in his chronicle of the City after the Big Bang, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism. His colleague David Challen, Augar wrote, “was one of a handful of corporate financiers most trusted by the chief executives of British companies”.

And in The Sunday Times, Challen recalled the ethos that prevailed at Schroders, which he joined in 1972: “It knew itself. It represented some powerful values.”

Yet Bischoff could see that the legacy investment bank he had done so much to build could not survive alone in a global marketplace.

Andrew Lynch

Sir Win Bischoff

Dame

Alison Carnwath

Sir Richard Broadbent

Robert Swannell

Gerry Grimstone

Nick Ferguson

Karen Cook

The training was centred on Mars’s five principles of business, which, Baker recalls, were writ large “on the walls of every room”. They underpinned the training and still trip off his tongue: quality, responsibility, mutuality, efficiency, freedom.

Mutuality, he believes, was the key business value he learned. The Mars’ definition says that a “mutual benefit is a shared benefit; a shared benefit will endure”. It means, he explains: “Don’t kill your counterparty. Treat them fairly because you will want to do business with them again. It is not always about winner takes all.”

Several of the mid 1980s Mars intake – including Baker – later jumped ship to Asda, lured by Leighton, who had joined business wunderkind Archie Norman in a bid to resurrect the supermarket chain, then regarded as a basket case. Their turnaround became a sort of CEO finishing school that ultimately produced chief

executives who ran companies ranging from Sainsbury’s in the UK to Levi Strauss & Co in the US.

There was a rapid recruitment drive. “It was a hotchpotch of random hires,” recalls Baker. “They wanted to reboot the business fast with an influx of talented thirty-somethings. It was a rapid turnaround and we had to get on with it.”

Norman and Leighton opted for shirt sleeves and name badges, but the working environment was anything but casual. “It was relentless…brutally hard work,” says Baker. “Archie Norman was such a disciplinarian. Very demanding and challenging”.

As at Mars, underperformers were moved on, “but it was much tougher at Asda. A lot of people simply got fired.” Baker, however, says there was one benefit to the exacting environment: “It toughened people up, big time.”

Norman never set out to build a future CEO factory, he was focused on needing to turn around the business. He admits that

at the time Asda was not the most attractive place to work, but that they managed hiring a lot of talented people from good places, including Mars, although they struggled to poach people from Tesco or Sainsbury. “They thought they were elite,” he recalls.

One of the draws, he suggests, was that people were given a lot of responsibility early on. “People had a licence to do stuff and they learned from each other. The essence was smart people, in at the deep end,” he says. “Some would swim and some would sink, but for those who did make it, they had an experience that catapulted them forwards.”

Norman admits he ran a tough regime with high standards. He admits that by today’s standards it might not be thought of politically correct, but believes it is what young people want. “There was a tension in the air, and they got a kick out of it if something went well. And if it didn’t, there was no b******t,”

General sales manager Allan Leighton oversaw the 1980s graduate intake at Mars, many of whom went on to run businesses that ranged from supermarket chains, TV stations and airlines, to The Football Association

Some would swim and some would sink, but for those who did make it, they had an experience that catapulted them forwards

Archie Norman

he admits. “We had to elevate the quality of work and we expected our people to work hard for it.”

They did indeed enhance the quality of work. Just eight years after Norman took over the near-bankrupt business, it was snapped up by Walmart for £6.7bn.

By the early 2000s there was a new CEO school at supermarket chain Tesco. At that time the grocer was growing at breakneck pace, dominating the UK as well as multiple overseas markets, from Poland to Thailand, and constantly moving into new sectors – from the mobile phone business to opticians and coffee shops.

Like Norman, Tesco chief executive Terry Leahy targeted young high-flyers, recruiting people in their early 30s, often with an Oxbridge degree, an MBA from

a top business school and a short spell in management consultancy. A few even had an armed services background. As at Asda, they were quickly placed in senior jobs where they could make a rapid impact.

It was another very tough environment. Meetings would regularly start an hour before they were scheduled, leaving even early arrivers looking like latecomers. Praise was unusual and even stellar sales numbers were never quite good enough.

John Browett joined Tesco in 1999 and was swiftly installed as chief executive of Tesco.com with a mission to build a new internet-based, home-delivery business and make it a profit centre.

No sooner was it up and running than Browett was hired as chief executive of the sprawling Dixons/Currys group. He

then moved to California for a spell as Apple’s head of retail, returning to the UK as chief executive of Monsoon Accessorize and then Dunelm. Today he is chairman of seven private companies, including Octopus Group.

Browett says the high achievements of his colleagues at Tesco were the result of targeted recruitment and the fact the company was a booming business. “Because Tesco was successful it was able to recruit good people. It was the biggest retailer. The gloss had gone off Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s was struggling and Asda had been sold to Walmart. Many people just didn’t want to work for Walmart.

“Terry [Leahy] was keen to recruit and there were huge opportunities for people. I got to launch Tesco.com. Others went abroad. You had the chance to run some big businesses internationally. We were the biggest in Thailand, Korea and many other places. They got good people in and then they had good opportunities.”

The tone, he says, was set from the top, and business discipline was tight. “Terry was a very good retailer and the atmosphere was very commercial. You learnt how to make money and there was pressure to perform,” says Browett.

“I wasn’t allowed to lose money. We never had quite enough money to do what we wanted to do and that was a great discipline. There were always trade-offs you had to make and you had to learn how to deal with people.”

Some executives were sent to business school, recalls Browett, and the on-site Tesco Academy taught leadership skills. Tesco’s famously flat structure and short reporting lines was a big plus. There were just five work levels from the shopfloor to the CEO, with 100 executives on level five. “I was lucky because Terry and I got along really well”, recalls Browett. “I had a direct line to him.”

The culture was one of hard graft. “We weren’t workaholics, but if you had a big job you had to apply yourself. Everybody was busy so you had no chance to play politics. We had stretching targets, which means you can’t just do the same things every year. Everyone was fully stretched all the time. We worked hard and were all quite competitive.”

Some bosses were even more directly involved in the development of future bosses. Lord Browne, chief executive of oil giant BP between 1995 and 2007, always employed two, hand-picked executive assistants who could learn at his knee. These were known as ‘turtles’ after the comic strip Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – young superheroes, all males. Being a turtle was not a glamour gig. Lord Browne was dubbed The Sun King in recognition of his demanding management style. The chosen few worked punishing hours but got to watch and learn every aspect of running a vast business up close – from mergers and acquisitions to redundancy programmes. But they were also charged with making sure Browne didn’t run short of his favourite Cuban cigars or white Burgundy.

A London Business School professor who used the turtle programme as a case study in his lectures once described it as “a dog’s job”. He did admit it could not be bettered “in terms of exposure”.

By the mid-point of Browne’s time as chief executive, all but one of the top managers younger than Browne had been one of his dedicated turtles. And after his departure the next three chief executives – Tony Hayward, Bob Dudley and Bernard Looney – were also former disciples of that particular leadership religion.

Moira Benigson, founder and chairman of executive search firm MBS, has placed many of the former Mars, Asda and Tesco protégés in top jobs. She says it takes great leaders to develop the next generation – and she believes they will soon be coming from Marks & Spencer:

“To make a great leader you must have a great leader at the top who believes in building bench strength and the leaders of the future. Allan Leighton did it at Mars and then again at Asda with Archie Norman,” she says.

“Now Archie is chairman of Marks & Spencer and is working with Stuart Machin, the chief executive and another great leader. Together, they will make the next generation.” But it will take, she estimates, between five and 10 years for the next raft of star executives to emerge.

Baker, however, is not so sure. He suggests it is not yet clear where the next

To make a great leader you must have a great leader at the top who believes in building bench strength and the leaders of the future

Moira Benigson

generation of leaders will come from.

“There seem to be far fewer graduate schemes and so many of the best graduates want to go straight into start-ups.”

Browett agrees that a lot of the best young talent and smart executives of the future have moved into VC and start-up land. There is no single company or overarching organisation, he reckons, that is a standout future boss factory for the mega companies of tomorrow.

The Mars scheme – now called the Mars Leadership Experience – is still going strong, but with a £33,000 starting salary it is no longer the top payer or attractive career setter. Investment banks

such as JP Morgan, the City’s numerous “magic circle” corporate law firms, and powerful management consultancies are now luring many of the brightest graduates with year-one pay of more than £50,000. Norman suggests Google could also be one such powerhouse of a company. “It does have a lot of talent,” he says.

Norman also believes the era of CEO factories might be over. He recounts the story of a bright young tech worker he met the previous week. She didn’t go into an office, she didn’t work directly with people, her boss was in the US.

“I am scraping around now,” he says. “The world might have moved on.”

We’ll do it our way

Three women who have built and run businesses tell Andrew Lynch how they learnt to lead

Romi Savova Chief executive, PensionBee

Like many entrepreneurs, Romi Savova was inspired to start her business to solve a problem. In her case, she saw how hard it was to move a pension after changing jobs. In 2015 she founded PensionBee, the pension consolidator and provider, with Jonathan Lister Parsons (now chief technology officer).

“To begin with, it was two of us in a room,” she recalls. Today, PensionBee is a FTSE-listed business with a market capitalisation of £350m, which manages assets of £5bn for 250,000 customers and employs 200 people.

Yet Savova had little experience of either leadership or entrepreneurship. Born in Bulgaria and brought up in South Africa, Savova was educated in the US. At Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, she started a Model United Nations, which she had run at high school. Likewise, when she left investment bank Morgan Stanley to join Credit Benchmark as a financial data analysis provider, it was her first experience of start-up culture.

“I entered an environment where you have to do everything yourself,” Savova says. “I got a lot of hands-on experience about how to make things happen, whereas in some of the bigger banks, they tend to happen to you.” Leading a company is very different. “You can see the output of what you do. It’s very tangible.”

Skills: “To be able to lead you need to motivate people and look after them.”

Communication: “This is probably the biggest challenge as you grow. In the early days when we were all in one room, you could just stand up and say something. These days, you have to think much more strategically. What we say at 8am is not going to be heard by our team in New York.

“That means you have to think carefully about how people receive their information, making sure it’s delivered by

To be able to lead you need to motivate people and look after them

the right people at the right time so we can continue to maintain the cohesiveness of our culture.

As a leader, what is sometimes so obvious in your head is not necessarily obvious for anyone else. They don’t always see the information that you see and it’s your job to make it clear.

Change: “Lots of things come out of nowhere, whether it’s big market downturns or Covid-19. Responding to change is not easy, but it is necessary.”

Challenges: “They change with time. What seemed big in the early days is quite small now. We want to challenge the legacy pension providers. Some would argue that we are quite well established, but no one had heard of us back in the day. We now have about 55 per cent brand awareness, so things have changed.”

Influences: “I tend to follow what other female CEOs do, although there aren’t that many to follow on the FTSE. If you’re in a leadership position, you need to do things your way and in a method that’s right for you. It also has to be

genuine and authentic, it’s not like you can’t take a playbook from elsewhere. Across the years you develop the confidence to know what you’re doing is right, based on experience.”

Mentors: “I have a very good relationship with the chair of our board [insurance veteran] Mark Wood. We speak weekly. It’s important to have someone in that position who has done what you have and has all that hindsight and experience. I would characterise that relationship as the closest to mentorship. One of the reasons why I think it works is because there isn’t the distance between us. Sometimes with a mentor, they don’t necessarily get it.”

Coaching: “I haven’t been coached, but I went to [Harvard] business school and I certainly got a lot out of it because I was one of the younger students there. One of the things that you do, day in and day out, is case studies. Every day you pretend to be the CEO, and because you’re in a class of 100 people and everyone is discussing the same case, you get challenged. They’re designed to be hard situations.”

As the CEO, you are the glue that keeps everything together, you are the visionary

Sam Smith Founder, finnCap

Sam Smith qualified as an accountant with KPMG before joining a private client stockbroker, J M Finn, in 1998 where she ran the small-cap corporate advisory and broking division. In 2007, she led a management buyout to create finnCap and in 2018 bought mergers and acquisitions adviser Cavendish Corporate Finance, before floating on London’s AIM sub-market for small and mediumsized companies.

The first female chief executive of a City stockbroker, Smith stepped down in 2022. She now holds a series of non-executive directorships and helps scale-ups to grow as a strategic adviser to Excelerators Partners and a patron of The Entrepreneurs Network. Smith still holds 5 per cent of finnCap, which has merged with Cenkos Securities to operate under the Cavendish brand.

Learning: “When I took over as CEO, I went round to meet other competitor CEOs and, obviously, they were all men. You start conforming because you have no other female role models. I found that I wanted to do it my way, based on how to make a team feel like they belong and as if they really matter. Then they can be much more productive, much happier and drive your growth.

“That took a lot of confidence, to do it in my own style, but I think it was the reason we grew in a sector that was shrinking. You could see first-hand that the different style of leadership was leading us to growth in a market that wasn’t moving forward.”

Being open: “Being open and approachable and relatable – the human touch element –is really important. That style is much more suited to women and also to those leaders from different backgrounds who may have different skills.”

Listening: “As the CEO, you are the glue that keeps everything together, you are the visionary. Ideas come from everywhere,

though. I’ve got some of my best ideas from lots of places, from my reception team all the way through to very senior people in the business.”

Communicating: “Wanting to put the time into internal culture and communications and how you talk to people absolutely matters.”

Diversity: “People always ask me about being a woman leader. Well, I didn’t find being a woman any different, it was probably a positive because I could do it very differently to the guys. What I did find difficult and made me feel much more excluded was coming from a state school background, because everyone in the City was from private school.”

Coaching: “Geeta Sidhu-Robb has been brilliant. She specialises in coaching senior women, and, of all my coaches, has been the most instrumental, particularly when I had my daughter.

“In those first couple of years, I felt I was going to have to sell the business, I just couldn’t do it. She helped me get through that period.”

Mentors: “The best mentor conversation I had was with Antony Jenkins, who used to be CEO of Barclays. I met him on a CEO retreat. He’d just left Barclays and made me see the blocker to my growth, which was my own view of where I thought I could take the business.

“When people ask, ‘With limitless time and money, could you get to this size?’ you think, of course I could, and that opens the growth window.

“That was a groundbreaking change, because we were stuck at about £17m turnover. That conversation shifted my mindset so I could see the acquisition of Cavendish, look at the IPO and consider growth in additional services.

“Growth is all about a new product, a new service, a new geography. That’s really it, apart from a new sector. There are only four ways to do it.”

Other inspirations: “Jon Moulton, my chairman, was brilliant and Rosaleen Blair of Alexander Mann Solutions really helped me see the wood from the trees.”

Clare Elford Chief executive, Clue Software

Clare Elford went into the family business when her father became ill two decades ago. “I had no intention of joining, but wanted to spend some time with him,” she says. The business, once called Bristol Office Machines, comprised three divisions: airline retail software, IT support and services, and Clue, a software provider dedicated to fighting fraud, but then in decline. Elford spent the best part of a decade with her brother Tom building up the airline retail unit before it was sold to a Canadian competitor, where she continued to work for three-and-a-half years.

“It was a really great experience for both of us, having been thrown in at the deep end in terms of the family business, but then becoming part of a much larger organisation,” Elford recalls.

As her children were growing up, Elford tired of her hectic travelling schedule and joined Clue to, as she says, “figure out what to do with it”. “It had a rich heritage with the police, but we hadn’t really been investing in the products, or in sales and marketing,” she says. “However, we saw an opportunity to put in all the learning we’d had for the past 15 years.”

The siblings invested some money from the sale of the airline retail business into Clue. At the time it was doing around £400,000 in annual revenue, employed five people and was focused on countercorruption and policing. Elford saw an opportunity to re-platform and move to supplying organisations that were managing intelligence and investigations beyond police forces.

In the second year after Elford joined, the business brought on clients including Sellafield Ltd, the RSPCA and the International Test Integrity Agency. Her siblings – Tom is chief commercial officer – then spent six years growing the business organically. By 2020, the

Financial Conduct Authority and Oxfam were customers.

Now with more than 80 staff at its headquarters in Bristol, Clue enjoys £7m annual recurring revenue and has won backing from Frog Capital and angel investors in a Series A funding.

How it started: “We used to call ourselves ‘Gloucester airport’ in the early days. It’s a very small airport. Tom was flying to Ireland and went to check in and the lady said: ‘Hi, I’ll take your tickets please, would you like to go through this door?’ Then he went through the door to security and she went round the back and there she was again, and this continued through the airport. That was how we worked.

implementer. As soon as I’ve figured out something, I like to move on to the next thing. It’s never plain sailing, because one minute something’s working well and the next minute it isn’t, and you’ve got to jump back into that Gloucester airport mode.

“I’ve never really liked hierarchy, I prefer collaboration to get people to buy in, it’s much more powerful. We’re quite purpose led. It’s very powerful when you get people to buy into that mission, you empower them.”

Finding help: “I’ve always been in a very male-dominated environment, but I’ve never had a problem with that. From a peer point of view, I belong to Boardwave, a community started by Phill

I was CEO but I was doing everything. My journey has been to remove the various hats

“I was CEO, but I was doing everything: onboarding customers, project managing. My journey has been in removing the various hats I’ve worn over the years. With the Series A, that was a big leap because my main priority was to hire the executive team, to bring on some real heavyweight people, with the money.”

My perspective: “I’ve got a very clear view on where we need to go. I just absolutely know what we need to do for our market and the customers, just absolute clarity.”

My style: “My ideal scenario is I’m pointing everyone in one direction and I’ve got a team of people that can do the hack, because I’m not really an

Robinson, formerly of Salesforce, and it’s brilliant. It’s for the European software community: investors and CEOs. I haven’t necessarily felt the need to network only with female peers but now I’m involved, I really appreciate the female founders and female CEOs group.”

Who I admire: “I do have an amazing exec team. Some founders find it tricky to get good people and then feel like they’re better than you. I’m totally the opposite. I love dealing with people who are older than me and have a lot more experience in their positions. Even though I’m a leader and I’ve got a clear view of where we’re going, I learn loads from them. I think we’re really punching above our weight with the executives.”

By he conquers endurance

Mark Beaumont is a record-breaking cyclist, adventurer, documentary maker and writer. Now he is using his expertise in endurance, team building and resilience to help start-ups grow

Mark Beaumont has a rare but valuable gift –he can turn absurd ideas into reality. He can get things done even in the most trying circumstances.

Take this example from his childhood. When Beaumont was just 11 years old, he wanted to cycle across Scotland. For most children his age this would be a silly daydream that didn’t progress any further. But Beaumont actually did it.

Then, as a teenager, he decided he wanted to study at Harvard University in the US. So he applied, got an interview and was offered a place. The only reason he didn’t make it to Massachusetts was that his parents couldn’t afford to send him to the east coast of America. Beaumont shrugged off the disappointment and got himself a last-minute place at the University of Glasgow, despite initially being told it was too late to apply.

These early adventures were the start of something much bigger. Beaumont

had noticed that the record for cycling around the world was 276 days. This, he thought, could be beaten. However, there were some problems with this idea –Beaumont was fresh out of university, had little money to fund an attempt and was not a professional cyclist. But he found a way. Beaumont approached the BBC about making a documentary about his record-breaking bid and then sold sponsorship for the expedition off the back of that. He completed the 18,000-mile journey in 194 days and 17 hours.

In 2017, he went for the record again. This time he went around the world in 78 days, 14 hours and 40 minutes – more than twice as quick as his first adventure. In between the two trips, Beaumont tried to row across the Atlantic (but capsized 500 miles from the finish and had to be rescued), rowed from Canada to the magnetic North Pole and cycled the length of both Africa and the Americas, all the while making documentary films and writing books about his adventures.

His record-breaking exploits mean he has a unique perspective on what it takes to turn ideas into reality – a vital attribute for any growing business. Today Beaumont is helping companies to do just that as a venture capital investor.

Beaumont grew up on his parents’ farm in Scotland and was home-schooled until he went to secondary school. He thinks that this childhood environment is important to what came next.

“My quiet confidence to back my own ideas and not care too much about whether it was the ‘done thing’ or not goes back to those formative years. There wasn’t a class around me or a peer group to say: ‘That’s cool’ or ‘That’s not cool’,” Beaumont explains. “If I have an idea, I tend to do it. I’m not trying to be countercultural about it. I think it comes from not interacting in a normal way in a classroom environment until I was a teenager.”

While Beaumont’s early adventures were something of a voyage into the unknown, his second attempt to cycle

GRAHAM RUDDICK

around the world was a logistical triumph as well as a physical one. It was a very different adventure to his first. It meant covering more than 240 miles every day for two and a half months. He had to cycle for 16 hours and sleep for less than five hours every day. He amassed a team of 40 people to work on the project, which took two and a half years of planning.

“We went out there with an incredibly detailed plan to break an 18,000-mile race into four-hour blocks and come home in sub-80 days,” he says. “There is nothing in the history of endurance cycling that suggests that might be possible.

“I had one job during the trip: ride the bike. Beforehand I could build the team, raise the finance and do the deals. But when it came to the actual race, I couldn’t be the leader. I had to hand over the entire project and say: ‘Right, you get me around the world, I’m just the athlete now.’ That was a real task in delegation.”

During the ride Beaumont crashed in Moscow, fracturing his elbow and breaking some teeth. But that was not the hardest part. Despite the pain of having to eat 7,000 calories a day through broken teeth and having to take painkillers to deal with the heavily strapped elbow, he thinks it gave him something to focus on.

“Believe it or not, I didn’t consider giving up at that point,” he says. “It actually gave me incredible determination. The pain and the issues from the crash throughout Russia and Mongolia were never something that gave me a reason to give up. It gave me something to focus and fight back from.”

Instead, he suggests, the most difficult aspect of any expedition is the monotony of it. “The hardest point on a big expedition is the opposite of crisis, it’s the sheer attrition of it. It’s the point when you’re two months in and it feels like Groundhog Day – it’s just this incredibly brutal routine. There’s no crisis, there’s no moment in time that threatens the whole project, it’s just the consistency,” he says.

“You need a ruthless ability to get up and execute on the plan, even when you’re going through the Midwest of the US and Canada with cracking headwinds. Everyone just thinks you’ve done it, everyone is cel-

Mark Beaumont’s

LESSONS

The key to getting things done is not bouncing back from crisis moments but the sheer attrition of consistently delivering every day.

A performance mindset is more important than a positive or growth mindset. It focuses your mind on how to deliver even when it is obviously a bad day. A growth mindset wrongly assumes that tomorrow will always be better than today.

Not being aware of the expectations or standards of others can encourage you to innovate by setting your own standards and following your own interests.

ebrating for you. But you’re still thousands of miles from the finish. People always imagine that a crisis is what makes failure, but I think a crisis is what you fight back from. Where people give up on most big projects is just the sheer attrition of it.”

This explains a lot about how Beaumont thinks about endurance and how to get things done. He believes that a performance mindset is more important than a growth or positive mindset and has issues with some of the terminology in modern businesses that imply people always need to be positive and that tomorrow is always better than today.

“What’s the difference between a performance mindset and a positive mindset? When people say ‘Well, you just need to be positive, you just need to be focused, you just need to be driven’ – life is not like that, some days just don’t work like that.

“It is much better to acknowledge when a bad day is bad and a good day is good, that things go right and things go wrong.

But the performance mindset is acknowledging that you still need to be relevant, you can’t just not get out of bed. When things are going badly, your choices, your actions, your behaviours and your body language count just as much. Encouraging myself and my team to turn up and be relevant even when they don’t want to is about performance and accountability.”

Beaumont worries that a growth mindset can hold people back from achieving what they want to. “I’m not completely against it, but it does slightly encourage the idea that you’re never good enough, that tomorrow always needs to be better than today and next year is going to be better than this year. It’s some sort of strange capitalist idea that everything is growing, everything is bigger and everything’s better. That today only exists to make tomorrow a better reality,” he says.

Beaumont recounts a story about competing in an off-road cycling race from Land’s End to John O’Groats called GBDuro. Some 60 people started the race, but only 13 finished. He admits that “blew his mind” as he questioned what happened to the other 47 people – did they not finish due to their bikes breaking?

When he looked at the 13 people who did finish, he found “no commonality”. It was not the youngest or the fittest but an “eclectic bunch”, Beaumont explains. He spoke to them all about their rides, why they were doing it and how they got through it. What he learnt was that it was more to do with the difference between what people want to do and what they are prepared to do.

“To be glib about it, 47 people at some point along that long and winding road stopped riding their bike. The road in front of them became too hard. Now you can always ride the road in front of you. But the idea of how long that road is –the bit beyond the horizon you can’t see – that is what stops people riding their bikes,” he says.

“Everyone had the dream, everyone had the ability, and everyone set out to race 2,000km. But 47 people quit. Why they quit is normally because of the psychology of just how hard reality is versus how big the dream is.”

Beaumont is now putting his approach to work at Eos Advisory, a venture capital firm based in Scotland that invests in promising science, engineering and technology businesses. This is less of an anomaly in his career than it might first appear. Beaumont had been an angel investor in his 30s and had shown an entrepreneurial streak by raising money to fund his adventures, including from private equity firm LDC, which asked him to speak with management teams and founders.

In 2019 he met Andrew McNeill, the managing partner of Eos, and discussed how he could go from being an angel investor to working with the venture capital firm. He has been there ever since offering guidance to the businesses that Eos backs

on how to deliver ideas, build teams and ensure they have the right skills.

“It’s amazing,” he says. “It’s an unplanned part of my career but it’s incredibly fulfilling, and I can see that in the next 15 to 20 years we are going to have a lot of fun doing this.

“I can talk all day about high performance and do keynotes about it, but I much prefer sitting around a table and helping founders map out how they’re going to achieve this. To help them understand the skills gap, understand the relationships that they need to have and how to nurture them, and how to communicate what they do better.”

Building teams is something Beaumont is adept at. “The only people who have left

my teams over the last 20 years are people where there is a lot of behavioural change under pressure,” he says. “We’re always trying to do quite disruptive, high-pressure projects. There’s real accountability around getting stuff done when you say you’re going to do it. I think quite often people like the idea of it more than the reality. The only people I’ve seen come and go from my teams are people who got in touch and said they’d love to work for me and then when they do, go: ‘OK, this is hard work.’

“I’ve had amazing people stick with me throughout my career, but there’s got to be an incredible work ethic, real conviction and real personal accountability around what you say you’re going to do. I think technical skills are always important, but attitude is probably the thing that counts for most.”

What he is looking for in members of his team is a quiet confidence and an ability to communicate, but also an ability to get the best out of others.

“I’m always looking for people who can look up and out and understand how other people can thrive as well. People can get very good at driving their own desk, showing how good they are, how productive they are. But you get to a point in your career when you realise that you don’t care how hard you work, that’s not enough,” he says.

“The best you can do is understand how as a collective and as a team everyone does better. What I often look for in my team is that ability to really step back and understand how everyone else in the team can be the best they can be. It takes a real selflessness to be able to do that.”

SCAN TO LISTEN

This is an extract from Business Leader’s podcast with Mark Beaumont. To listen to the full interview, scan the QR code, or search for us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Above: Beaumont surrounded by fans as he arrives at the Place de l’Etoile, Paris after completing his circumnavigation of the globe by bicycle in 2008. Right: After breaking the world record for cycling around the globe by 44 days in 2017.

Knocking down the corporate hierarchy

Jellyfish co-founder Rob Pierre tells Sarah Vizard how he pioneered a system that ripped up traditional ways of managing and promoting people in favour of something more equitable

e are all used to having managers at work.

WSomeone we report to who sets our objectives, monitors our progress, provides support and guidance. Who listens to our gripes and puts us forward for pay rises and promotions (or performance plans and firings). Someone who we answer to. Now imagine a company where that isn’t the case. Where employees are almost all individual contributors responsible for their own progress and career advancement. Does that sound better – or does it sound

like chaos? Most companies have a corporate pyramid structure, but at the digital consultancy Jellyfish that was not the case. It did away with line managers and heads of department, instead offering career “levels” and linear progression. The aim was to eradicate the typical corporate pyramid structure that, as founder, former chief executive and chairman Rob Pierre believes, can hamper careers.

It meant that in every role, progression went as follows: executive manager, senior manager, director, senior director, executive, vice-president and chief

solutions officer. Each level had a salary band standardised across the company but then weighted by location and capability. So, for example, the standard salary band for a director might be £50,000 to £60,000 but for an HR director that would be weighted to 0.9 but for a data scientist to 1.4. Equally, a role in Mumbai, India would be weighted to 0.4, while one in San Francisco is 1.8.

Instead of line managers, each team member has what Pierre dubs a “support network”. This breaks down the roles of a traditional manager into areas such as developing key skills, supporting on personal matters and mentoring career progression. The person doing all of these will be someone different, meaning no one’s job is solely managing people and that you don’t have to have someone more senior than you leave the business to progress.

“That means we don’t have all our best practitioners doing all the administrative tasks around managing teams,” Pierre says. “It means you don’t

need management in the same way. But everyone has to be clear on the initiatives they’re working on and how that contributes to the objectives of your department – and the business.

“What that leads to is people autonomously creating development plans and structuring work to prioritise initiatives and tasks, so they have maximum impact. Everything is plotted on an impact versus effort graph. Everyone is educated and encouraged to not do the things you feel comfortable doing but have little impact, rather to keep looking at what has the maximum impact.”

Progression was also different at Jellyfish. Rather than yearly pay review cycles or a manager having to put someone forward for a promotion, everyone is responsible for their own career. Every six months (although this becomes less regular the more senior someone becomes) staff can put forward a business case for why they should be promoted, highlighting how the value they bring has increased. The cases are anonymised and judged by a panel, which determines if the person who applied should have a pay rise and/or promotion. More than 2,000 people were promoted through the process, with Pierre crediting it for creating a more egalitarian organisation that offered promotions based on performance and outcomes.

initiative that ladders up to the mission and goal of the company.”

Accountability is an idea Pierre is particularly keen on. One of the things he most often bemoans in the traditional hierarchy is how it creates layers of management that mean someone higher up the chain is accountable for something you are delivering. It results, he says, in people taking credit for projects they have barely worked on when they go well and laying the blame elsewhere when they don’t.

At Jellyfish, one person – the best person for the job, not the most senior – was responsible for a project. They worked with a steering committee of around eight available to offer help, advice and expertise to ensure it is delivered.

“People don’t need someone else babysitting them,” he says. “The first thing a company needs is its vision and missions,

senior staff, retention increased from less than five years to more than seven. That also helped Jellyfish save on recruitment and training fees – as well as meaning it kept knowledge and experience inside the business rather than seeing it leave.

“It’s evidence that people felt a purpose, that they weren’t being suppressed and that there was future opportunity for them at Jellyfish,” says Pierre. “We also had a culture that we weren’t fighting against each other, it was us against the problem. We didn’t have the company politics that manifest in meetings and team dynamics.”

We match capabilities and attributes to tasks and initiatives. That quickly eradicates the role mindset

then its objectives as a company, then all its departmental objectives. Then you create the initiatives that need doing and match people accordingly.”

He blames hierarchical structures for many ills in modern business. So many executives feel a need to keep knowledge and expertise to themselves to prove their worth and wield power over others. In the case of Jellyfish, they were encouraged to share and be transparent. That, he believes, led to a shift in how the company did business. “Most businesses are constantly busy and trying to deal with the symptoms. We wanted to go straight to the cause and systemically change things. We started off with a thematic goal: we wanted to be the biggest boutique agency in the world. That made us think, as you’d find in a boutique, how do we get the most skilled person doing the task?” he says.

One of the big mindset shifts that was required was a move away from roles and responsibilities to meeting business objectives. Pierre describes how the traditional job description, with its list of what people should be doing, merely creates an even longer list of things people don’t have to do. He does not want staff to think like that. Instead, he wants people to take the initiative and match their skills and capabilities to the projects the company needs doing at any time.

“What you’re doing is matching capabilities and attributes to tasks and initiatives,” he says. “It’s quite interesting how quickly that eradicates the role mindset. People realise they have the skills, knowledge, experience and even the passion to take accountability for an

Not everything Pierre introduced went down well with staff. During Covid, he introduced a work health dashboard that monitored when people were working. He likens it to a Fitbit that shows when you haven’t hit your 10,000-step target. Glassdoor reviews suggest staff were not so keen.

However, Pierre points to key areas of success. One was that the best and most senior people were doing more work with clients, rather than spending time on administrative tasks, so they had more billable hours and clients were happier. It also improved diversity, because people didn’t have to wait for a more senior person to leave to progress their career.

The company also saw retention rates increase because senior people didn’t hit a ceiling and then leave. Among the most

Jellyfish grew rapidly from its founding in 2005 to a company with more than £330m in revenue and more than 2,200 staff across 38 offices and clients including Disney, Netflix, Uber and Spotify. It was bought by The Brandtech Group last year in a deal that creates a company with more than $1bn in revenues. Pierre is no longer in charge of the day-to-day running of Jellyfish, having stepped down post-acquisition. And while it isn’t clear if the agency will retain its structure going forward, Pierre believes it’s a system that can work for other organisations.

“I think any service business, any peopleheavy business, can work like this. We’ve got something that can really work. But it is the whole vector versus jpeg analogy: you don’t want to run a business like a jpeg so that as soon as it starts scaling it loses pixelation, it loses integrity. Instead, it needs to scale with the opportunities.”

Turning around a 140-year-old company

JOSH DORNBRACK

There aren’t many firms whose products have become a byword for a whole category. Google, Hoover, Sellotape and Velcro have all managed it, but there’s one you might not even realise was a company to start with: Crittall. This style of steelframed windows is also the name of the firm that originally made them.

The company began making windows in 1884 under the supervision of Francis Henry Crittall. Since then, it has produced munitions during booth World Wars, manufactured curtain walling and developed the pressure chamber weather performance standards still in use. Today it still produces windows, making it the world’s oldest and largest steel window manufacturing company.

Crittall’s current managing director, Russell Ager, joined the business when he was 18 conducting material testing in a lab. His father was a lifer with the company, producing handles and window fittings in his role as a design draughtsman. Ager worked his way up through the company before leaving for a three-year stint at the Danish manufacturer Velfac, the sister company of roof window brand Velux.

“That was a great experience and I learned a lot working with a European business, but the draw of coming back to Crittall… it’s like going back to your family.” Ager rejoined the company in 2006 as a board member before rising to the chief executive role in January 2019.

The company he took over was in a torrid state. It posted a £1.4m loss for the 2019/20 financial year and some of

the machinery it was using dated back to the 1920s. They still worked, of course, but they were very temperamental.

“A lot of the old machines could only be run by, say, Fred,” Ager says, “because Fred knew how you tweak it. Whereas with modern CNC machinery, you don’t need that.” Computer numerical control (CNC) machines are driven by software in which windows and doors are configured for manufacture, such as bar lengths.

The other aspect that needed to be addressed was culture. Ager admits the company was “very siloed”, making it difficult for people to work together to solve problems or better service customers.

“There was a lot of backbiting and antagonism between departments, as well as a lack of collaborative working. This all took time to change,” he says.

The solutions needed to inspire this were in Ager’s grasp – he knew Crittall inside and out. He still admits having doubts about if his plans would work, but even the “Freds” of the business proved more adaptable than he first thought. “They could see that if they did things in a certain way, it had a better outcome. It was a gradual drip-feeding of palpable improvements. As they began to feel it, they adopted it.”

The key has been bringing people on Crittall’s journey. He recalls a presentation he made to the company soon after he’d taken the top job. In it, he detailed exactly what the vision was, what he planned to change and why. “That was one of the things that got them on board,” he recalls. “They could see where we were going and, more importantly, their part in it.”

One of the primary changes was implementing lean manufacturing into Crittall’s factory. To do that, the company enlisted the help of the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) to provide a fresh perspective. The research firm examined Crittall’s production processes and workflows to identify inefficiencies and improve productivity. Crucially, it provided a framework for adopting lean manufacturing techniques across the entire production process, from raw material to finished goods.

MTC also got buy-in from Crittall staff. “The team are so proud of what they’ve achieved,” Ager says. “It was small things such as cleaning an area, so it went from dark and dingy to bright and welcoming. I’d visit the factory and team members would say, ‘Come over here and look what I’ve done’. Then it started to spread so we had people in other zones saying, ‘When can we be part of this process?’.”

Despite this progress, a difficult few years lay ahead. The pandemic, hyperinflation and the war in Ukraine saw the price of steel and glass rise relentlessly. Operations were made even more demanding because Crittall manufactures under fixed-price contracts, making it a struggle for the company to maintain profit margins and continue to function.

“It was immensely challenging because a large part of our business is contracting,”

he says. “A lot of the main contractors went bust because of increased costs. However, our supplier relationships meant we got a lot of relief and, because of our changes, we created headroom within our processes.

“The lesson is don’t wait for difficult things to occur. Ensure you’re as lean and as efficient as you can be because you never know what’s going to happen.”

windows have incorporated thermal brakes to make them more thermally efficient.

“Our challenge was not to alienate customers and keep the look,” says Ager. “While we produce an advanced thermally broken steel window, we managed to innovate and get the same performance out of the standard product. That was possible because of our investment in technology

The lesson is don’t wait for difficult things to occur. Ensure you’re as lean and as efficient as you can be because you never know what’s going to happen

There’s another major challenge on the horizon for the business. Home energy efficiency is squarely in the government’s plan to hit net zero. The changing regulations mean Crittall must push the boundary of what is possible for a steel window.

Perhaps one of the greatest assets of a Crittall window is its aesthetics – they are slim and elegant to look at, and instantly identifiable, too. But plastic or aluminium

and computer systems, and to be able to do something that other firms can’t.”

Ager is proud of Crittall’s ability to push the boundaries of what is possible in the fenestration industry. He’s guided the company from a £1.4m loss in 2019 to a £623,000 profit in 2023-24. Persistent improvement and unwavering employee buy-in have set the company up to continue to build on its prominent legacy.

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EMMA JONES

Why you need a mentor

fter years of challenging economic environments, business owners are beginning to raise their heads and optimism is on the up. Many founders who have navigated lockdowns, cost-of-trading cycles, Brexit and political turbulence believe their survival is due, in part, to the support of a co-founder, mentor or coach.

I write from experience. When business gets tough, I turn to a long-term and trusted mentor with whom I share what’s on my mind and, in so doing, seek resolution. I’m also not alone in doing so.

In October 2022 to mark National Mentoring Day, we released a Mentoring Matters report, which revealed that 82 per cent of business people are interested in being mentored. Of those who already had a mentoring relationship, 66 per cent said it helped their business survive and three quarters (76 per cent) claimed it had been key to business growth.

For many years, I’ve delivered hundreds of events for early stage start-ups and I always advise budding entrepreneurs to seek three different types of supporters. First, peers who are at the same stage in business for the cohort-based effect. Second, industry veterans with lived experience and from whom you can gain anecdotal inspiration and a treasury of top tips. Third, a trusted mentor or coach who can carefully and patiently guide you, while helping you solve your own problems.

There is often debate and confusion about the terms ‘coach’ and ‘mentor’ and their respective uses. Both are methods to help people develop and achieve their potential, reach their desired goals as well as manage the challenges of life and work. Practitioners will use a mix of mentoring and coaching to help clients get the best results.

Many leaders have several mentors who are experts in different areas, and many work with mentors throughout their personal and business lives. Coaches, meanwhile,are often used to work on a specific goal and can be more focused on the specifics of a moment in time.

I asked my own mentor, Richard Fifield, for his view on the differences between the two. This is what he said:

“Mentoring tends to be more directive and provided by somebody who has direct expertise and experience of the journey the mentee is taking. The mentor provides wisdom and guidance on that journey. It makes complete sense to seek advice and learn from somebody who has already trodden the path you are taking.

“Coaching tends to be non-directive. Through a partnering and creative process that uses carefully framed questions, psychological tools and behavioural frameworks, it helps the coachee work through solutions for themselves. It often makes sense to use a coach to understand how to break through personal barriers where mentoring hasn’t helped.

“At their core, mentoring and coaching are built on a foundation that humans value safe conversations with someone who has their interests at heart.”

The good news is there are many people willing to offer this kind of support. At Enterprise Nation we are part of a consortium delivering the mentoring element of the government’s Help to Grow Management scheme. Our role is to recruit mentors and match them to participants on the course.

Becoming a mentor involves pledging at least 10 hours of volunteer time, as well as undergoing training. When recruitment began, we had no idea what the response would be like, but we were amazed by the thousands of people who came forward to form what is now the UK’s largest network of professionally trained business leaders and advisers willing to mentor others. This incredible community has just notched up 18,000 hours of business mentoring.

If you believe as we do that the growth of small businesses is fundamental to the success of the UK economy, then business mentoring is key. As entrepreneurs and founders start feeling more confident about trade, investment and expansion, we welcome the role of mentors who will be by their side.

Emma Jones is the founder and chief executive of Enterprise Nation, the small business support platform

A CASPAR LEE Fake it till you make it

few weeks ago, I was asked to speak at the Oxford Union, a place renowned for its prestigious debates and guest speakers, having hosted notable figures from Winston Churchill to Malala Yousafzai. Yes, I know what you’re thinking – if they’re inviting me to speak, it must have really gone downhill. I’ll have you know that they also invited Lord Buckethead to my debate, so...

I was invited to speak in favour of the motion ‘Fake it till you make it’, a topic that resonates with me because I battled against impostor syndrome throughout my 20s. As a Business Leader expert, this experience got me thinking about its implications in the business world.

The aphorism itself means to act with confidence and behave as if you are already successful. This mindset can be a powerful motivator, enabling individuals to push beyond their comfort zones and achieve their goals. However it can also, with the wrong person in the wrong situation, lead to a event similar to the one with the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Its co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in jail and fined $11bn for defrauding customers and investors in the company.

When I first started on YouTube in 2010, my videos would get about five views, a few hate comments and a couple of dislikes. To combat this, I created 20

other accounts to like my videos and add positive comments like, “Why are your eyes so blue in this video?” and “Though I don’t know you, I feel like I do.”

It was the opposite of a troll farm, but it made viewers who saw my channel believe they weren’t alone in liking my videos. In time, I was able to replace my 20 fake accounts with six million real subscribers.

In the early stages of a start-up, founders must create their own traction and it’s perfectly acceptable for this process to be manual and hands on. For example, the founders of Airbnb personally photographed the company’s initial listings to ensure high-quality images, which helped attract the first customers.

Similarly, the founders of Stripe manually set up payment integrations for early users, gaining valuable insights into their needs. Building initial momentum involves engaging directly with potential customers, managing outreach efforts and leveraging opportunities to gain visibility.

Founders may have to wear multiple hats and handle tasks that will later be automated or delegated. It’s not a sign of inefficiency, but a testament to the dedication and adaptability required to turn a vision into reality.

In 1976, Steve Jobs started Apple in his parents’ garage with Steve Wozniak. When they created their first prototype, Jobs managed to arrange a meeting with Paul Terrell, who owned one of the first personal computer stores. Jobs pitched

the Apple 1 as a groundbreaking product that could be shipped at scale when in fact it was a single prototype. He acted as if Apple was an established company, but there were no production facilities at all. Terrell purchased 50 fully assembled Apple 1 computers at $500 each.

Apple wasn’t equipped to meet the order, but Jobs sold his Volkswagen van, while Wozniak sold his calculator (quite expensive back then). They convinced electronic suppliers to extend them credit and set up a production line in the garage.

They worked round the clock to assemble 50 Apple 1 computers. Terrell was satisfied, though, marking the beginning of Apple’s transformation from a questionable garage start-up to a real company. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do,” said Jobs.

The way we act doesn’t just impact how others see us, it changes how we feel about ourselves. Do a test: quickly smile… no wider! Now stand up if you can and put your hands on your hips. Are you feeling happier and more confident?

In 2010, researchers conducted a study on what we just did, and measured levels of testosterone and cortisol before and after posing. Those who adopted highpower poses experienced an increase in testosterone and a decrease in cortisol. They were more confident, less stressed, felt more powerful and in control.

In business, I find myself talking on stage or pitching to people I want to impress. It took me ten years to work out how to make myself feel confident and tricking your mind by using your body really does help.

While faking it can be beneficial, recognise its limitations, especially in business. Balance confidence and Jobsstyle vision with authenticity and ethical behaviour, and deliver on your promises.

Building a successful business requires determination and happy customers. As my experience at the Oxford Union highlights, faking it can open doors, but genuine effort and integrity are the real keys to sustained success.

Caspar Lee is the co-founder of Influencer.com and Creator Ventures

WED SMITH

Why anything goes with Carlo Ancelotti

e are all supposed to be pragmatists now, except in sport. There is an old joke that the US lived out its socialism through American sports (where redistribution and competitive equipoise are common principles) rather than American society. With similar transference, we now delegate philosophical fervour (absent from political debate) to football managers, especially Pep Guardiola, whose faith in tactical principles – in particular possession and technicality – has swept his sport. Everyone is now encouraged to think like Guardiola, only without his huge intellect or access to oil money. Style of play is no longer seen as a privilege but a prerequisite.

When asked what characterised his style of play, Real Madrid’s manager Carlo Ancelotti answered, with respectful mischief, “just winning”. Somewhat strangely Ancelotti is rarely held up as a managerial type, despite being Guardiola’s main rival as the world’s best football manager. Which is just as Ancelotti likes it: hard to place but with both hands on the cup.

It’s tempting to shoehorn sporting rivalries into clear ideological divides. With Guardiola and José Mourinho, the idealist was defined against the Machiavellian. When Guardiola came under pressure from Liverpool’s former manager Jurgen Klopp, it was framed as the purist against the communicator.

There is a different kind of argument, one that ranks theses clashes of styles, and that is when one side declines to pick a style. You wish to be defined by philosophy and an ideology, but I do not. Not much of a headline, but quite a track record: Ancelotti has five Champions League trophies just as a manager. He has two more as a player.

It is often said of Ancelotti’s teams that they are all different. His AC Milan side didn’t play like his Chelsea side, which didn’t play like his Real Madrid iteration, except for the fact they all won. There is no single Ancelotti system, but there is an Ancelotti way. That is a quietly brave kind of decision: many follow a style, only a few trust in following a disposition.

First, Ancelotti believes that football is played by human beings, not cogs in a machine or data points on a graph.

And human beings require an emotional connection with their work, you can’t stay good at something without it.

“It is my responsibility to help the players stay in love [with football],” he wrote in the preface of his autobiography Quiet Leadership. “If I can do this, then I am happy.” Ancelotti’s teams may not have rigid tactics, but they do have a temperament derived from his humane interpretation of professionalism.

Second, Ancelotti believes in pleasure. Famously devoted to food, he thinks life should be enjoyed. He encourages his clubs to follow the model he experienced at AC Milan, where the training ground has its own restaurant. “Not a buffet,” he has noted wryly, “but a proper restaurant with a waiter who comes to speak with you as a friend.” In sharing meals, teams develop trust and intimacy. Eating is a necessity, but also – when done right –it is a pleasure and a way to build relationships without trying.

The metaphor of a team as a family is often overstretched (teams cannot wish away a necessarily ruthless edge). A family that doesn’t share meals risks becoming an association of cohabiting

natives sheltering under the same roof. The same applies to teams. Encouraging and convening around communal experiences is not a team-bonding cliché, but is fundamental to making groups of people more effective.

Above all, Ancelotti believes in adaptability. He learnt this the hard way, with a mistake he quickly regretted. As manager of Parma, he was offered Roberto Baggio, the definitive Italian playmaker. But at that stage of his career, Ancelotti favoured playing 4-4-2 with two strikers and Baggio didn’t fit that system because he wanted to play behind the striker.

“I should have worked with Baggio and found a way,” Ancelotti reflected. When he faced a similar challenge as manager of Zinedine Zidane, he changed the system to fit the player. It has become his trademark skill.

Leading without a policy asks for more of a rival toolkit: sound judgment. Alexander Chancellor, the former editor

of The Spectator magazine, said he used to dread being asked to define his editorial policy, to lay out his vision for the magazine. Despite deep confidence in his own judgment, it wasn’t easy to formalise what he was looking for.

If pushed, Chancellor would reply: “Well, we should publish some good articles, I suppose.” (Chancellor’s advice comes close to summarising my approach to selecting England cricket teams.) In essence, the editor was looking for good work and he was open-minded about what kind of good it was. And beyond that… well, was there anything?

Chancellor’s position is both braver and more difficult than it sounds. Effectiveness without a strategic wrapper is disarmingly rare. What’s usually termed strategy –mission statements, over-engineered theory, glossy documents laden with abstract nouns – has been misused and expanded to the point where it is now often devoid of content. Strategy is more

often a crutch and a diversion tactic, rather than anything usefully strategic.

It’s no coincidence that sport’s growing obsession with a particular style of play has coincided with another term that is used increasingly often and badly: methodology. It’s as though all activities must now pretend to be academic.

Must we really start with some kind of methodology, especially when operating in the humanities rather than the hard sciences? Perhaps not. The iconoclastic Austrian philosopher of science and author of Against Method, Paul Feyerabend, once made the counterargument: “The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.”

Ancelotti would probably shrug at the arch tone. But the evidence suggests he understands the point better than anyone.

Ed Smith is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities and author of Making Decisions

When asked what his style of play was, Real Madrid’s Carlo Ancelotti answered, with respectful mischief, ‘just winning’

Working in teams towards a common goal: A path to success

In the world of elite sports, the significance of teamwork and effective leadership cannot be overstated. Nathan Hines is a former rugby union player who is now development director at the insurance and risk management firm Gallagher. He understands the value of building strong relationships and fostering positive team dynamics.

His experiences shed light on the crucial role of communication and collaboration in achieving a common goal and provide intriguing food for thought for business leaders wishing to apply the same principles of successful teamwork in their organisations.

Trust and communication

Successful teams are built on a foundation of trust, confidence and selflessness. Reflecting on past mistakes in rugby matches, Hines recognises the detrimental impact of a lack of trust and a narrow focus on individual actions.

“Teams need to work as a cohesive unit,” he explains. “This cannot happen without building a rapport among team members, as well as fostering a collective focus on the team's objectives rather than individual glory.”

The concept of teamwork in sport extends beyond the playing field and encompasses various critical elements. Honest and direct communication is an essential component of team success, as is the need for continuous improvement in team performance, which requires constructive feedback and sometimes difficult conversations. A team needs to make a commitment to ongoing development as an essential aspect of working towards a common goal.

Leadership sets the tone

The role of leadership in creating a positive team culture should never be underestimated. Coaches and managers are integral in setting the team's tone and behaviours.

“Cultivating an environment where diverse perspectives can flourish requires clear messaging, shared values and psychological safety within the team, creating the right atmosphere for collaboration and innovation,” says Hines.

The dynamics of team chemistry and personal connections are also crucial in building and maintaining a successful team. Hines believes that teams who know each other well tend to perform better, highlighting the importance of nurturing relationships, both on and off the field.

Nathan Hines

Development director, Gallagher

An agile game plan

In addition to the interpersonal dynamics, Hines also advocates having a game plan and strategy, while remaining adaptable to change.

“Teams need to work together to assess execution and make the necessary adjustments while always remaining agile and open to feedback and change,” he says.

He also believes that both talent and character are significant. Reflecting on his own experience, he acknowledges while it was his talent that got him into the team, his character played a valuable role once he was a member.

“Possessing the most talent doesn't always equate to being the best fit for a team. It's essential to consider how individuals contribute to the group dynamic,” he says.

Hines stresses that while talent is important, it must be accompanied by good character to enable someone to effectively work within a team and contribute positively to performance. He advocates for a balance of talent and character within a team, acknowledging that individuals who may have exceptional talent but exhibit negative attitudes or behaviours can have a detrimental impact on the group.

Ultimately, Hines’s insights serve as a compelling testament to the profound impact of teamwork, effective communication and strong leadership in achieving a common goal. Whether in rugby or in the context of business and beyond, his principles resonate as invaluable lessons in harnessing the power of collaboration towards shared objectives. When people join forces and work toward a shared goal, the likelihood of success will undoubtedly increase.

IIn praise of mowing the lawn JAKE HUMPHREY

hope some of you are taking the opportunity to chill, kick back and even plan a holiday soon. I’m reminded of statistics that were recently released that said people who use the full allocation of holiday in the workplace have a 60 per cent lower chance of having a heart attack or a stroke. That is sobering data that we really shouldn’t ignore.

It also got me thinking about how we can find ways to relax even when we’re not on holiday. I want to get away from this feeling that has long been pervasive –and I think is extremely toxic – that to be successful in the workplace you must push yourself to the limit, exhaust yourself and work ridiculous hours.

The antidote has been finding what relaxing thing works for me and fits into my everyday life. I posted a couple of articles on this topic on LinkedIn and got an incredible reaction. The first one spoke about mowing the lawn. We’re constantly told that if you want to have a moment of calm or a release from your job, you need to take up boxing or get up at 5am or start taking ice baths, or practise breathing exercises and yoga.

Many of these are habits or acts that appeal to and work for other people. You need to find what works for you. For me, it’s sitting on the lawnmower. Whether it’s for two hours or 20 minutes, it’s good for

my mental health and so makes me a better employee, founder and businessman. We shouldn’t be ashamed of telling the world the things that work for us.

The second LinkedIn post that seemed to resonate spoke about how, 12 months after I hosted the Champions League final on television, I took my son to an under-nines football tournament. The reason I shared the story is because society has decided that hosting a Champions League final is more important than going to a kids’ football competition. If you ask my son, he will tell you that his tournament is the most important thing in the world. It’s good to retain a different perspective.

The other reason why I wanted to discuss this was to remind people that sometimes you can’t do something new unless you stop doing something old.

I remember the England rugby player Jonny Wilkinson telling us that exploration was the single most important thing when it comes to seeking high performance. If your life is already filled with scheduled things you need to do, where does exploration come in?

There are probably three things I’ve tried to prioritise in the past 12 months that have helped me get to this point. The first one is not getting derailed by things you can’t control. I want people to realise that their reaction to what happens is far more important than whatever took place.

I love the Epictetus quote: “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” Stoicism is built around this foundational idea that we can’t control the world.

The second one – and this will seem a bit strange to some of you – is to think about death. Again, I’m going to use a quote, this time by Marcus Aurelius: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

If I was to depart the earth at this moment, would I have wished I’d been at the football with my son or the Champions League final? The answer is 100 per cent with my son. Life is long enough for us to do things that really matter, but it’s so short that there isn’t much time to waste.

The final one for helping us get that work/life balance right is how we spend our days where we do what’s important to us. The answer to that, I believe, is simply to desire less. I love the phrase: ‘Happiness is wanting what you have.’

I honestly believe there was a time in my life when I thought that happiness came from obtaining more things. It’s only when you’ve obtained more stuff – whether that is money, fame, talent or something else – that you realise it doesn’t solve any of the real issues in life. It can’t take away your problems or make you happier for longer. It might give you a sense of joy for a short period, but, in the end, it isn’t what matters at all.

Jake Humphrey is the host of the High Performance podcast and co-founder of Whisper Group

TCATHERINE BAKER

The 3Ps that provide the key to long-term motivation

here are two sisters who between them have won more than 122 professional titles during careers that have spanned 30 and 27 years respectively. One of the sisters has lifted a trophy 73 times, the other 98 times. Who are they? Venus and Serena Williams, with the sport in question being, of course, tennis.

I have always been fascinated by how they managed to sustain their motivation across such lengthy careers, especially in what can often be a brutal sport. Through the success they have achieved, what is it that kept them (and with Venus keeps her) putting in the hours when others fell by the wayside? What about when things go wrong?

Alongside their successes, both sisters have experienced defeat more times than they care to remember. This is the case for every elite athlete, no matter how successful they are. As is injury and enforced periods out of the game. What keeps them going through losses, disappointments and challenging times? And what lessons can those in leadership and business learn from this?

Why it’s all about the three Ps

Former tennis player and now TV pundit Martina Navratilova once said: “The moment of victory is too short to live for that and nothing else.” I love this quote as it shines a light on one of the three Ps that drive long-term, sustained motivation; the type of motivation that can help us and our teams continue to work hard and strive through hardship, challenges, setbacks and even through success.

While having a specific and compelling goal or outcome in mind can motivate people to work hard and perform, this only works up to a point. What happens when you achieve that goal or suffer a setback which then makes that goal unattainable? How then can you maintain and sustain your motivation?

Both elite sport, and research and insight from the world of work more generally, demonstrate clearly that while there is some merit in a focus on shorter-term, concrete and tangible goals, something more is needed to drive long-term performance.

1

Process

Imagine you have a bin in your office that is five metres away from your chair. Your

goal could be to throw your apple core into the bin. But imagine if your goal is to master the technique of throwing your apple core into the bin? To come up with the best method to land the apple core in the bin.

Which of these is going to drive the more sustained effort? Not the former –once you’ve got the apple core in the bin, why continue? However, the latter will have you carrying out multiple attempts – at least until someone comes into your office and asks you why you’re not working instead.

The latter is of course a focus on process, the former a focus on outcome. We have huge amounts of evidence, both from sport and from business, to support the fact that a focus on process and the aim for “mastery” that goes with it is much more likely to lead to sustained motivation.

This is summed up brilliantly by the swimmer and cyclist Dame Sarah Storey, who will be competing in her ninth Paralympic Games this summer. Storey consistently talks about her focus on a process-driven approach: finding the peak of her physical capabilities, which

allows her to keep adding different stimuli and trying different approaches alongside her tried-and-tested methods.

As the saying goes, focus on the process and the outcome will take care of itself.

2Purpose

The Williams sisters haven’t just wanted to win a few tournaments and be world number ones. They are driven by a much bigger purpose: showing that women can be resilient, strong and beautiful at the same time. They also want to be role models for young black athletes in their sport. As Serena has often said, she is a black woman in a sport that wasn’t really made for black people.

Developing and articulating your higher purpose is key to sustaining motivation. Driving towards something that’s too goal-focused and short term will likely mean that you come up for air and wonder what it was all for. While these can act as the scaffold, supporting and motivating you on the journey, you are much more likely to thrive and achieve in the long term if you are working towards a higher purpose.

I was once privileged to be in a room of successful CEOs, all of whom had been in the world of work for a very long time. They had all had achieved so many of their goals already. So, what was it that helped them maintain their motivation –

and reignite their enthusiasm – for the next period of their working lives? All agreed: identifying and working hard towards a higher purpose. What’s yours?

3Perspective

Many believe that to succeed in elite sport, you must be totally focused and single-minded, with a commitment to your sport that transcends everything else. Yet the vast amount of anecdotal evidence would suggest this is not the case – and research is emerging that supports this.

The moment of victory is too short to live for that and nothing else

As in sport, so in the world of work. Work and leadership can be relentless and all-consuming. There’s always something else to do, some other task to fill your time. But if you let it take over, to the exclusion of everything else, you are unlikely to be able to maintain your motivation. That means you need to keep an eye on other areas of your life. One senior recruitment consultant said that he measured CEOs and their ability to keep perspective by hearing accounts of how they spend their weekends. So, how do you spend yours?

Catherine Baker is founder and director at Sport and Beyond and author of Staying the Distance: The Lessons from Sport that Business Leaders Have Been Missing. She is also vice-chair of the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust and chair of O Shaped.

By Business Leader

The winners

AI/Machine Learning

Best Mobile Technology

Edtech Business of the Year

Fintech Business of the Year

Go:Tech Awards winners revealed

The best of the technology industry gathered at Hilton London Bankside in London on 20 June to celebrate the winners of this year’s Go:Tech Awards. More than 300 investors, entrepreneurs and founders joined the showcase of the best the UK tech scene has to offer at a gala dinner and awards ceremony. Categories included Incubator or Accelerator of the Year, Most Innovative Use of Technology and Sustainable Tech Business, as well as the Tech Entrepreneur, Tech Start-up and Tech Scale-up of the Year.

Congratulations to all our winners –and the companies shortlisted. Entries for next year’s awards open on 1 October.

Centuro Global

Vuyu.app

Texthelp

True Potential

Healthtech Business of the Year Intelligent Lilli

Incubator or Accelerator of the Year

IT/Telecoms Support

Most Innovative Use of Technology

Sustainable Tech Business

Tech Entrepreneur of the Year

Tech Start-Up Business

Tech Scale-Up of the Year

Plexal

T-Tech

True Potential

Octopus Energy

Vaayu

AIME

Holibob

My biggest challenge Angel investor Peter Cowley on dealing with personal tragedy

Sauce

Kitchen

Bookshelf

How to discover your team’s hidden potential

Forget brainstorming, try brainwriting, says the organisational psychologist Adam Grant in an extract from his new book

When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills but the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. Research shows that groups promote people who command the most airtime – regardless of their aptitude and expertise. We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.

It’s not just the loudest voices who rise to lead even if they aren’t qualified. The worst babblers are the ball hogs. In many cases, the people with the poorest prosocial skills and the biggest egos end up assuming the mantle – at a great cost to teams and organisations. In a meta-analysis, highly narcissistic people were more likely to rise into leadership roles but were less effective in them. They made self-serving decisions and instilled a zero-sum view of success, provoking cut-throat behaviour and undermining cohesion and collaboration. Collective intelligence is best served by a different kind of leader. The people to promote are the ones with the prosocial skills to put the mission above their ego and team cohesion above personal glory.

They know that the goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the room, it’s to make the entire room smarter.

When we’re confronting a vexing problem, we often gather a group to brainstorm. We’re looking for the best ideas as quickly as possible. I love seeing it happen except for one tiny wrinkle: brainstorming usually backfires.

In brainstorming meetings, many good ideas are lost and few are gained. Extensive evidence shows that when

stupid), noise (we can’t all talk at once) or conformity pressure (let’s all jump on the boss’s bandwagon!). Goodbye diversity of thought, hello groupthink. These challenges are amplified for people who lack power or status.

To unearth the hidden potential in teams, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately, then you pool them and share them anonymously. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own.

The worst babblers are the ball hogs

we generate ideas together, we fail to maximise collective intelligence. Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more – and better – ideas if we work alone.

The problem isn’t the meetings themselves, it’s how we run them. You’ve probably seen people bite their tongues due to ego threat (I don’t want to look

Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.

Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity, but it doesn’t end there. Individuals produce a greater volume and variety of novel ideas when they work alone. That means they come up with more brilliant ideas than groups— but also more terrible ideas than groups. It takes collective judgment to find the signal in the noise.

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, published by WH Allen, is available now

Take me to your leader

We asked five business school professors to name their favourite books on leadership

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005) Lincoln’s brilliance in leading through a period of extreme political polarisation has important resonance with the modern world. His insights and intricate understanding of human behaviour contain important lessons on how to bridge vastly divergent personalities and ideologies and unite a diverse team. Lincoln’s willingness to hear all positions on an issue, even those he found objectionable and others preferred to exclude, encouraged everyone to engage with him and the decision-making process. Randall Peterson, professor of organisational behaviour, academic director, Leadership Institute, London Business School

Power: Why Some People Have It – And Others Don’t

by Jeffrey Pfeffer (2010)

This book did not change my life, but I think it would have had I read it much earlier in my career. Many people take the view that if they work hard and are good at their job then success will naturally follow. Pfeffer makes the point that unless you play the politics game your career will be limited. It takes both

political acumen and job capability to make strong career progress. Pfeffer’s book is hard hitting and leaves little doubt about what you need to be doing. John Colley, professor of practice, strategy and leadership, Warwick Business School

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear (2006)

This is the story of Plenty Coups, the leader of the Crow tribe, native Americans from southern Montana. Coups led his people through their first contact with white colonists and helped them to change their way of life and what it meant to be a Crow. The lesson is that when you are faced with radical change, you often need to give up attachments to outdated rituals and rethink who you are to go forward into the future. André Spicer, executive dean, Bayes Business School

Think Like a Leader, Act Like a Leader by Herminia Ibarra (2015)

I keep coming back to this book. Ibarra has spent many years working with real leaders

in middle-to-senior management and this book is full of practical advice for anyone suffering from impostor syndrome who needs the confidence to experiment with different leadership styles and approaches. I get most of my inspiration from talking to students and alumni who have experience of leadership challenges across so many countries and industries: from the civil servant in charge of nuclear warhead safety, to an Olympic gold medallist rower, a drug addict who became a successful entrepreneur and an alumna bringing more investment to African start-ups. Kathy Harvey, associate dean, MBA and executive degrees, Oxford Saïd Business School

Compassionate Leadership: For Individual and Organisational Change

by Kirstie Drummond Papworth (2023)

This book broadens our understanding of compassionate leadership with a new and refreshing approach. Drummond doesn’t leave the journey to compassionate leadership to individuals, instead she looks at how to design a compassionate organisation, expanding the footprint of compassionate practice and “weaving it into the fabric of everyday organisational life”. She demonstrates that going from insular and disconnected capacity to a systemic approach changes an organisation, enabling members to engage and perform. Bernd Vogel, professor in leadership, Henley Business School; founding director, Henley Centre for Leadership

From grief to growth

The angel investor and entrepreneur Peter Cowley speaks to Josh Dornbrack about how his business success has come despite enormous personal tragedy

Peter Cowley has, as he puts it, lived a life of extremes. On one hand, he’s had a hugely successful 40-year career as a founder, entrepreneur and investor. On the other, he has experienced great personal tragedy. He is also, following a cancer diagnosis in 2021, dying.

Cowley wrote his first book, The Invested Investor, in 2018, drawing on his 40 years of experience of founding and running businesses. The Cambridge-based entrepreneur has established a dozen companies, including Camdata, a supplier of terminals for traffic light controllers. He’s also invested in more than 75 early stage tech businesses, the most successful of which – James and James Fulfilment –returned all the money he’d ever invested. Cowley is not just about the successes, though. One of the tabs in the menu of his website reads ‘Exits & Failures’. It shows the companies he has invested in, but with detailed explanations of what went wrong. He doesn’t have to do this, but he believes that transparency is important.

It’s a mantra he applies to all aspects of his life. Cowley has been through unspeakable tragedy, including the loss of two children to suicide. He is also living with a terminal cancer diagnosis. In 2021 he was told he had lung cancer that had already metastasised. Nine months ago he was given 18 months to live but is optimistic medical advances will allow him to live to 70 and beyond (he is 68). The drug he takes that will hopefully help him beat the odds was developed in Cambridge by pharma firm AstraZeneca. Cowley estimates he has seen more than 14,000 pitch decks in his career, but committed to only 75 investments. What is it that made those companies stand out?

“At the stage I invest, which is very early, maybe they only have a pitch deck that’s not even a minimum viable product yet, so I look at the people. I feel that you have an introduction slide and then a slide about the team. Unfortunately, in many cases, they forget the team altogether. My mantra is we invest in people with a plan, rather than a plan with people.”

Cowley also loves entrepreneurs who are a little rough around the edges. “Raising capital early is the easiest part of growing

a business. Somebody who is charismatic can sell well, but there’s no guarantee they can execute well on the growth of the business. I would rather invest in entrepreneurs that tried before and failed but are open and honest about the failure.”

While Cowley’s professional career is a success, he has experienced profound losses in his personal life. Aged 23, he was working and living in London when his brother, who had been in New Zealand, had to return to the UK for chemotherapy. He passed away not long after.

My mantra is to invest in people with a plan, not a plan with people

This event was to have a significant effect on Cowley’s actions, and believes his brother would have survived had he been diagnosed today. “I closed up a bit,” he recalls. “I was a middle-class male in the 1970s. The grieving didn’t really start until some years after he died.”

He turned to alcohol in the 1990s in what he now refers to as his “lost decade”. Cowley hasn’t had a drink in 24 years, but he attributes his recovery with giving him a foundation to deal with catastrophe and regret. “It is not a good emotion, because you can’t do anything about the past,” he says. “You can analyse it, learn from it and not repeat mistakes, or do things differently, but you can’t change the past.”

This way of thinking is particularly poignant when he recalls the tragic suicides of two of his three sons, Ian in 2009 and Alan in 2022. “The things I’ve thought about since my two sons who died... ‘What could I have done? What should I have done?’ That could be so consuming that I could end up in a situation where, God forbid, I might be thinking about taking my own life or picking up another drink.”

Cowley’s mindset is almost intoxicating. He radiates positivity

when talking about these unfathomable events that would break many others. He attributes this to post-traumatic growth. “With the assistance of others and some internal processing,” he says, “I’ve redirected my grief to other things, including being busy helping people.”

If the doctors are to be believed, Cowley will be lucky to still be alive by the end of this year. Such a diagnosis would have been too much for many, but Cowley is determined to make the most of the time he has left. He’s been to Antarctica, scaled the Rocky Mountains and completed two half-marathons. However, it’s not the big adventures he’s most looking forward to.

“I’m spending quality time with very close friends,” he says. “We’re doing some unusual things, a butchery course with one and a train ride through Switzerland with another. We’re not saying goodbye, because I might do it again next year, but it’s a matter of having that quality time because life is about relationships.”

In his prior roles as the president of the European Business Angels Network or as chair of the Cambridge Angels, the power of relationships extended to being a mentor to around 1,000 people. So, what advice does Cowley have for leaders today?

“You’ve got to grow faster than the business is growing,” he says. “A great business leader is someone who runs a great business that is culturally sound, profitable and doing something good for society.”

Cowley has published a new book, Public Success, Private Grief, which covers business, alcoholism, cancer and loss. It is not easy reading but it is essential, especially as £2 from each sale will be donated to Papyrus – a charity dedicated to the prevention of young suicide. Cowley has lived an extraordinary life with an attitude we could all learn something from.

SCAN TO WATCH

Watch the full video interview with Peter Cowley on the Business Leader website by scanning the QR code

Small, but perfectly informed.

Boutique, creative, switched on. Ready to help you grow your business and brand.

Thirty and Thriving

TO THE TOP Rising

The chief executive of Gail’s Bakery, Tom Molnar, explains the chain’s values

It’s been a mixed journey for Tom Molnar. Brought up in Florida, he studied aquatic ecology at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, before spending almost a decade energy trading for the food giant Cargill. He left in 1998 to take an MBA at the French business school, Insead, and joined management consultancy McKinsey. In 2005, Molnar and colleague Ran Avidan decided to start a bakery. They joined forces with Gail Mejia at the Bread Factory, which supplied top chefs, to open the first Gail’s Artisan Bakery on Hampstead High Street, northwest London in 2006. Today the chain has more than 100 outlets and turns over £135m a year, according to its most recent accounts.

QWhat’s your secret sauce?

“Every business has something they lean on. That’s what I think of as secret sauce. Nothing’s really secret, you can see us trying to do it every day. We’re a craft bakery and the fundamental thing about

to Andrew Lynch

this is that people care a lot about what they’re doing. When I first met Gail and started getting involved in the bakery, that’s what I fell in love with – the focus on just caring about what came in, what you do every day and what the output is. And every day you have to do it again.”

QHow do you keep that going?

“We’re makers more than sellers. That means we focus on caring and improving, and embracing complexity. You accept that to do something well is complex, from figuring out the best tomato, the best flour to use, or the right fermentation time. You have to accept that those are complicated choices if you’re going to get something that’s out of the ordinary.”

QHow much do people matter?

“One of the most difficult things we’ve found in growing is making sure we’re teaching people along the way. The

selection process is rigorous, but we give a lot of room for people to make mistakes, and to make changes and make things better. I don’t believe in rule books. Instead, I believe in a culture that says: ‘You’re a human being, you care, you have an education, you have a breadth of experiences, apply them to your every day to what you do every day’.”

QHow do you connect with the community around your outlets?

“We’re a bakery that is very ‘neighbourhoody’; you don’t send a loaf of bread around the world. You have to care about the community. We bake fresh every day and if we have products left over, we have a partner that we donate that food to, so it goes to people who are having a tough time. There’s no reason to have good, healthy food go to waste. Everybody’s had a hard time in their past, so we should be there to help people going though that. It’s really fundamental.”

Join the private community for leaders of fast-growing companies

Business Leader is a highly vetted membership community for CEOs and founders of medium-sized businesses

We help ambitious leaders turn their medium-sized businesses into giants

Our mission is to double the number of large businesses in the UK from 7,500 to 15,000.

Our founder Richard Harpin took his company HomeServe from humble beginnings in 1993 to a sale for £4.1bn.

Like all successful business leaders, he suffered many setbacks along the way. No doubt we’ll have our share of failure, too. It’s true that failure is often the key to unlocking success.

That’s why we have created our peer-to-peer membership, where CEOs and founders can learn from and challenge each other in a safe and confidential environment.

Will you come with us on our journey?

We are recruiting members for our Founders 250 who will form the bedrock of our community.

If you’re ambitious, motivated and willing to share your expertise with others, come and see how Business Leader can help your company reach the next level.

APPLY NOW Businessleader.co.uk/membership

Who really runs Britain?

Business Leader’s head of membership, Craig Wilmann, considers where the real power lies in our country

hat would happen if every single business leader in the UK took six weeks off at the same time? If they collectively decided that they wouldn’t attend the office, wouldn’t make any decisions, wouldn’t talk to any of their staff, wouldn’t run any meetings – wouldn’t do anything at all? And what if they all did this at the drop of a hat with barely any notice?

WSome readers might quite like the sound of this, but I think it’s hard to argue that the result wouldn’t be chaotic. Staff would probably go on an extended break as well. Several businesses would likely go under, jobs would undoubtedly be lost – it could take the economy years to recover.

And yet, during the general election campaign, this is exactly what every member of parliament did. It happens whenever an election is called. For a six-week period, MPs cease to be MPs. The UK’s 650 constituencies have no representation whatsoever. And does the country fall apart? No. It carries on.

It’s true that there is, nominally, a government, but without a legislature in place, there is very little it can do.

There are other examples of countries thriving without a government. From 2010 to 2011, Belgium went 589 days without one. During that time, the country enjoyed faster economic growth than the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland and Switzerland. When the philosopher Roger Scruton was asked to name his favourite prime minister, he said Lord Salisbury because “he was in power for 13 years and nobody can name a single thing he did.”

So, as we welcome in a new government, let’s hope it remembers that doing nothing can sometimes be the best option. Above all, let’s hope it remembers that while politicians may run the country, it’s business leaders who keep the country running.

There is one area where inaction is not the best course – and that is talking to each other. MPs are better than business leaders at this, they do it a lot. Debate after debate after debate. MPs spend their whole time talking to other MPs.

The country’s founders and CEOs, on the other hand, very rarely take the time to have detailed business discussions with fellow founders and CEOs. When they do connect, at a networking evening or conference, they’ll often end up talking not about business but about the weather, football or, god forbid, politics.

That’s why we’ve put peer-to-peer at the heart of our new membership programme for founders and CEOs of mid-sized companies. Our members will be placed in focused forum groups of no more than 10 people. They will meet eight times a year for three hours. During these meetings, they will share their challenges and opportunities with people who fully understand what it means to be a leader. Unlike bickering MPs, they’ll ask: “What can I do to help you grow your business and what can you do to help me?”

In the US, where peer-to-peer forums are more prevalent, a CEO of a mid-sized business is almost twice as likely to turn that business into a large one compared with their UK equivalent. And the US hasn’t exactly been blessed with wonderful political leadership in recent years.

If we want to generate growth in this country, we need to get successful UK CEOs talking to each other and sharing ideas. So, if you really want to change this country for the better, you don’t need to become a member of parliament. You need to become a member of Business Leader.

Why you should join us

Personal forums

Join a peer group with up to nine other like-minded founders and CEOs in your local area and exchange first-hand insights. This is a safe and confidential space to share ideas with people who truly understand the challenges you’re facing.

One-on-one coaching and mentoring

Connect with expert coaches and seasoned mentors, including our founder Richard Harpin. Gain insights from successful leaders who understand the challenges of leading and scaling companies, and tap into a network that fuels growth across industries.

In-person and online masterclasses

Learn from experts and network with peers at our exclusive events. These include expert workshops, monthly needs and leads sessions, site visits to relevant businesses, a quarterly event with Richard Harpin, and an annual summit.

Exclusive digital platform

Access our private community platform, your exclusive hub for connecting with fellow members. Forge meaningful connections, share insights and explore collaborative opportunities in a space tailored to your needs.

Business Leader magazine

Enjoy full access to our high-quality magazine and online content, with interviews and columns from some of the nation’s most inspiring business voices. You can help shape it too, by letting us know about the issues that truly matter to you and your business.

CEO growth centre

Our mission is to help you grow your business and we will do everything in our power to make this possible. Whatever the challenge or opportunity, we will provide the services you need to take your business to the next level.

Are you the founder or CEO of a mid-sized UK company?

Join Richard Harpin and up to 12 other founders and CEOs for a free growth workshop.

Richard Harpin and Business Leader are looking for 250 ambitious founders and CEOs to help launch our new membership programme. The Founders 250 will be drawn from all corners of the UK and represent a variety of industries. What unites them is a desire to share ideas and grow their company.

As we build our waiting list, we will be hosting events across the country, including growth workshops with Richard, where he will talk about his eight secrets for building a billion-pound business and how this can be applied to your business directly. We’ll also talk about Business Leader and our plan to help double the number of large UK businesses.

We have held four such events so far, with CEOs from a range of industries and locations,

and the waiting list for our membership is building at pace.

If you’re a founder or CEO of a mid-sized company, let us know where you’d like us to host our next event and what you’d like us to focus on.

Contact membership@businessleader.co.uk and, while you’re at it, why not apply to join our Founders 250?

Q&A

business school INSEAD and training as a business coach with 36 other people. That was 12 days at Fontainebleau in France in five-day, four-day and three-day sessions, with online coaching, learning, assignments and assessments in between. Ideally, if you have a coach, you need to have somebody who is qualified, then it’s about meeting a few times and deciding if they’re the right fit. Are you comfortable having hour-long meetings with this person and feel that you could build a coaching relationship with them?

A mentor is about going and finding somebody who is ahead of you in their career and has done something you want to learn. With me, it was Morris because he was a British businessman who built a successful business in the US. I wanted to find out how he did that and what I was doing wrong in America with HomeServe in the early days.

Richard Harpin, the founder of HomeServe and Growth Partner and the owner of Business Leader, answers your burning business questions. This issue: coaching and mentoring

Q. How early in your career did you recognise the power of coaching and mentoring?

Not early enough. I had role models, such as Sir Richard Branson and Lord Alan Sugar. I would watch their careers, read their books and follow their story.

I would also meet people who were more experienced and successful than me and take learnings from these one-off meetings. One example of this was Sir John Peace, who was the chief executive of Great Universal Stores (GUS) and who cofounded and led CCN Systems – a credit checking and data business in Nottingham [which later became Experian and part of GUS]. Otherwise it tended to be one-off meetings and through reading.

It was 16 years into my HomeServe journey before I tracked down Nigel Morris, who co-founded Capital One Financial Services, in Washington DC and persuaded him to give me three hours of his time. Since then, I have changed mentors a few times.

When I bought Checkatrade and wanted to know about online marketplaces, I

managed to get Jeff Boyd, who was the chief executive and then chairman of Booking.com, to meet with me and help me. It was the same with Stephen Kaufer, the co-founder of TripAdvisor, and Scott Forbes, an American who was chairman of Rightmove in the UK.

You need to keep changing your mentor depending on your career and what you want to do next. That’s why my mentor today is the chief executive of a highly successful European private equity house –I want to learn how to be a better investor. I think more people should have coaches and mentors, but the message about how important they can be is not out there. That’s one of the things Business Leader is keen on doing: encouraging people to get a coach or mentor.

Q. What makes a good coach and what makes a good mentor?

A good coach is somebody who has trained to do it. In my transition from a hands-on entrepreneurial chief executive at HomeServe to a non-exec chairman and investor, I spent 12 days going to the

I’d also say what makes a bad mentor: that they’re too dominant, they tell rather than suggest or they aren’t quite applying the right business experience to the situation. It can be dangerous if it’s taking an experience that doesn’t quite fit with the business or the model that the mentee is responsible for. There are some definite things to watch out for.

The magic combination is CoachMent, which involves speaking to an experienced businessperson who has taken the time to train and qualify as a business coach, so they can use both skills.

Coaching and mentoring also doesn’t have to be formal or one-on-one. My most enjoyable three years in business was when I was an economics graduate, arriving at Procter and Gamble in Newcastle upon Tyne with 12 other peers who were all given a lot of responsibility as assistants on a different brand. Mine was Fairy Liquid. We were learning on the job and then socialising in the evenings and talking about business. That made business fun and meant we could all learn from each other.

It’s quite lonely being an entrepreneur at the top of a business. I never had a peer group of other entrepreneurs and chief execs who I built long-lasting relationships with and met regularly, but the power of that is enormous. There are some good organisations offering that in America, but there isn’t a good British equivalent.

It’s great to be able to learn from my eight secrets, and our articles in Business Leader and on the website. Putting those learnings into action, discussing them and hearing other entrepreneurs’ experiences, mistakes and successes: that’s the power of having a peer group and it’s the biggest part of our Business Leader membership.

Q. As a CEO, should I pay my direct reports to get coaching or mentoring and ensure they have time to do it?

All managers should have access to support with a combination of on-the-job, in-house and external training. That could include one-to-one coaching or mentoring. I don’t think it should be forced on people, but it should be made available to anyone who would benefit from it. We have that for senior leaders in HomeServe. A good example would be Taylor Hall, who originally worked for our private equity owner Brookfield. We were really keen that two people from Brookfield came and worked in

HomeServe because that would help us understand our owner’s culture and how we get the most help and advice from them. It was also a career opportunity for people in Brookfield who were investors but hadn’t been involved in running a business.

One of those was Hall, an experienced finance guy who hadn’t run a big team before. We wanted to throw him in at the deep end and give him that responsibility, so we made him CFO at HomeServe EMEA. As part of that and to give him extra support, we found him a business coach to help him develop his team management and interpersonal skills. That series of coaching sessions has really helped.

I think every manager at every level should think about having a mentor at some stage in their lives. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be to develop business skills, it could be about their life skills, their overall career and life objectives, or finding somebody who can help them with the next steps on their journey.

Q. How do you blend the advice received from a CoachMent with your own experience and gut instinct?

You must share your thoughts and experience with your mentor so that you’re both working together to come to the right solution. You can’t say, “Oh, well, I’m taking some experience from this person but I’m not sharing what I think and why that causes me a specific problem because of something that happened in my childhood or my early business experience.”

An example of that is an entrepreneur I know who was reluctant to think about hiring their replacement. They had tried it before, and failed, which made them nervous about trying again. But, unless you know it failed previously, it’s going to be very difficult to talk about it.

Q. How do you set goals for a mentorship and how flexible should the mentor be with changing those goals midstream?

The mentee needs to be setting goals based on their specific problems, needs or opportunities. A good mentor will use coaching skills to ask questions, collect information and get the mentee to think more about the subjects. They can set out potential options that will help the mentee to think about and decide for themselves what the right next steps are. Certainly, those goals should change. If there’s a series of booked-in coachingmentoring sessions, they would develop over time, particularly in a longer-term relationship. What is really important is that mentors ask questions and gain an understanding of the problems or opportunities before they rush into thinking about the advice they offer up. Otherwise, it might be the wrong experience applied to the wrong situation. I think you should be as much short term as long term. If you’ve got somebody who’s a trusted advisor and you’re facing an immediate difficulty, then you should ask them: “What should I be doing right now – I’ve got a crisis or a short-term problem”. If you don’t fix those first, then you might just go out of business.

“If you want your people to think, don’t give instructions. Give intent.”

David Marquet, retired US navy captain

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Muriel Strode, author and poet

“To handle yourself, use your head. To handle others, use your heart.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, former US first lady

“I learned to always take on things I'd never done before. Growth and comfort do not coexist.”

Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM

“Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.”

John C. Maxwell, leadership expert

Coming up in our next issue . . .

“What you do has far greater impact than what you say.”

Stephen Covey, businessman and author

The September/October edition of Business Leader will focus on consumer trends. Please get in touch with ideas, feedback and stories at thoughts@businessleader.co.uk

HOW TO CREATE A FINANCIAL PLAN FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to expand your business, a financial plan plays an integral role in setting realistic goals, effectively managing the bottom line and creating a strategy for future growth. Ideally it will be made up of three financial elements.

The first includes the cash flow statement that tracks the flow of funds through a business, providing insights into a company’s financial health and operational efficiency. It also provides an accurate representation of a business’s income streams and where they are being allocated, which can typically be categorised into operations, investing and financing.

Second is the income statement, which highlights a company’s revenue, expenses, gains and losses over a specific period. This offers invaluable insights into the operations, management efficiency, underperforming areas and performance of the organisation compared to industry peers.

Finally, there is the balance sheet, a financial statement that details a company’s assets, liabilities and shareholders’ equity at a specific moment in time. In essence, it offers a snapshot of what a company owns, what it owes and the amount invested by shareholders. It can be used alongside other key financial statements to analyse a company.

Once the statements have been provided, business owners must outline a clear plan that considers both short- and longterm goals. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This can involve targets such as reaching a certain revenue milestone, expanding into new markets or launching new products. Once objectives have been selected, finances can be assigned to achieve them.

As part of the financial plan, a budget should also be created to outline expected income and expenditure over a period. It serves as a guideline for managing finances and ensures a company is working towards its financial goals.

Tax planning is a key part of preparing budgets. It’s essential that businesses understand their requirements but also take advantage of any deductions and credits they may be entitled to. For example, companies that invest in research and development typically qualify for tax relief.

A financial plan also enables forecasting to take place, helping a business to make informed decisions based on predicted peaks and troughs in revenue, as well as play out potential scenarios that may impact the future of the company.

Taking time to establish and maintain a comprehensive financial plan sets the foundation for sustained business success and stability.

Becky Young, director at Monahans, the South West’s leading accountancy and business advisory firm.