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Welcome to OxTalks, powered by OxLEP and supported by law firm Mills & Reeve. OxTalks is your partner in tackling business challenges and achieving your goals, giving an insight into the great work that OxLEP does to support local organisations and communities. OxTalks host Howard Bentham talks to successful leaders from Oxfordshire and beyond to hear their advice to help your business flourish.
[00:00:00] Howard Bentham: Hello there and welcome to OxTalks, the podcast powered by OxLEP, the local enterprise partnership for Oxfordshire and sponsored by leading national law firm Mills & Reeve. If you haven't tuned into OxTalks before, we aim to air current issues in business and explore topics of interest with the help of some truly remarkable leaders in the county. I'm Howard Bentham and throughout these podcasts, I'll be in conversation with some of the best people in their field, getting their advice and tips which in turn, may help you achieve your goals. Every one of my guests is keen to acknowledge the valuable support that's available from OxLEP and how it could be crucial in helping your company or organisation thrive.
Our focus, as you would expect, is on Oxfordshire's businesses and issues in these podcasts, but naturally you may well be listening to us outside of the county. Many of the issues we experience here will be very similar to the ones that you're potentially facing where you are. Please join in the conversation and share any thoughts. Our social media is a great way to get in touch. We are @OxfordshireLEP on X, and Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership on LinkedIn. Why not raise a question for future discussions? Please use the email address in the podcast description. We look forward to hearing from you.
This edition is entitled Top Tips for Starting a New Business: Feasible versus Fantasy. We'll explore guidance and advice for starting a new business in 2024, including how to become a successful entrepreneur. The word entrepreneur conjures up many images in one's mind in popular culture, the entrepreneur has a fascinating relationship with television audiences. From the aspiring business people seeking investment from Dragon's Den, the young upstarts currying favour with Lord Sugar in The Apprentice, to the hilarious character of Del Boy in the long running comedy Only Fools and Horses. The path to success is a journey that genuinely enthralls us. But what marks out an entrepreneur? What are their qualities? How do they manage risk and cope with failure, creating something from nothing and seeing a gap in the market? The word entrepreneur today truly sums up what it means to be proactive, innovative and passionate about business, ready to seize the opportunity. Our OxTalks guest is the founder and former executive director of the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship Innovation at the University of Oxford and is now an associate professor for the MSc Bioscience Entrepreneurship Programme at University College London. In 2002, she founded the Oxford Entrepreneurs, which has since grown to be the largest. Entrepreneurship Society in Europe with 12, 000 Oxford University members and more than 77, 000 network members. I'm delighted to welcome to OxTalks Fiona.
Fiona, welcome, great to see you. I tried to paint a picture of an entrepreneur in the introduction. Define and describe what an entrepreneur looks like in your mind's eye.
[00:03:08] Fiona Reid: Well it looks everything that's not the stereotypes that you've just given me because it's very, a common narrative that entrepreneurs look like a certain type of person they look like somebody off Dragon's Den or The Apprentice or some version of a Silicon Valley Teenager in a T shirt, et cetera and in fact those stereotypes are they're only for a small number of people, only a small number of people actually look like that as entrepreneurs. Many entrepreneurs come in all different shapes and sizes and it can sometimes be unhelpful because it allows people to self select out of being an entrepreneur because they think they're not like the entrepreneurs they see on television. So I think it's a sort of unhelpful way of looking at entrepreneurship is to look at these stereotypes and single them out.
[00:03:51] Howard Bentham: So would you sort of sum up what one is then or are literally that it's the broadest of all broad churches?
[00:03:58] Fiona Reid: Okay. Well, I think when we ask this question, I will go back to what the social science researchers say about this as well, which is actually quite different from the popular opinion of the stereotypical entrepreneur. They do have a particular attitude towards risk, often they're thought to be risk takers, but in fact, actually they are actually very good at calculating risk. So, every move that is made, every strategic change is always calculated in terms of the downside, so what happens if this fails? So, they are very good at calculating it every step of the way and recalculating that profile of risk.
They are often very anxious I, think that the social science will say that in spades. Then they're also always in pursuit of opportunity beyond what they currently control. So they are looking for new territory, new things to conquer that they don't necessarily have the resource for now. So their vision goes beyond where they are currently at the moment and I think those are probably three quite common characteristics of entrepreneurs. Their personalities may be different underneath that.
[00:05:04] Howard Bentham: We'll explore that some more later. Let's have some of your experiences cutting it as an entrepreneur if you like, what were you doing exactly? Take us on a bit of a trip.
[00:05:13] Fiona Reid: Okay, so I've started two businesses. One's in precision engineering and the other one's a consultancy business and been involved with sort of dozens more as mentor and non-executive director and sometimes investor and board member as well too. So it's been a mixture of, very happy mixture actually, between half working in business schools and helping others and half doing it for real in many different contexts.
[00:05:39] Howard Bentham: And are you still entrepreneur? I mean, is that something you ever stopped being? Well, once you've been there, that's it. You've taken the genie out the bottle.
[00:05:48] Fiona Reid: Well, that's an interesting debate in itself, whether entrepreneurs are born or made or whether they just sort of arrive with entrepreneurial characteristics or whether you can actually teach people to be entrepreneurs and I, of course, because I work in universities believe that you can teach people.
[00:06:04] Howard Bentham: So glad you answered it that way.
[00:06:08] Fiona Reid: But I think very much so in terms of I, to use an American expression, have a sort of growth mindset. If I'm doing something, I kind of want to make it bigger and larger and more successful and I like to have that pedal pressed firmly down on accelerate and it's not always the wisest thing to do and sometimes it comes at a cost, but I think I just have that mindset.
If it's something that you're passionate about and really believe in, particularly when it involves partly working in an educational environment and new businesses are always, they're always growing, they start from somewhere and they have the opportunity to grow. I think I like that growth curve, helping others and also doing it myself.
[00:06:54] Howard Bentham: You founded Oxford Entrepreneurs and the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Probably worth explaining what they are, firstly.
[00:07:04] Fiona Reid: Okay. So about 20 years ago when the new Oxford University Saïd Business School opened, a very small part of that was a very small entrepreneurship centre called the Science Enterprise Centre, which was myself and one other person attempting to introduce entrepreneurship across the Oxford University and particularly for scientists to train scientists to become better at the practical application, the innovation process arising from their ideas and it was a new business school and in some ways was symbolic of Oxford University kind of opening its doors to businesses more and inviting small businesses to come in and network with the academics and others and just generally bringing people together. So that was part of the ethos and that came out with a strongly sort of entrepreneurial hat and it was, I suppose, a question of being in the right place at the right time and nice new building right next to the station and we are built out from there and I believe the university is a very entrepreneurial university. I mean, that's not exactly the adjective that many would use about it, but it's full of ideas and full of very good people as indeed is also is Oxford Brookes as well. So there's this big talent pool of academics and young students and researchers who are keen to know more about business, which is not something they do every day.
[00:08:35] Howard Bentham: So you, if you like, went to the university with this idea, we want to launch this. So it was from your, or did the university say, you'd be great at launching this?
[00:08:44] Fiona Reid: Well, the university had a small amount of money from a particular government fund called the Science Enterprise Challenge, which it had to set up. I was actually already doing the same role at Imperial College, and they said, come and set up this, centre in Oxford for us and yeah, so it was a wonderful opportunity to kind of create something new from the ground up in a department, the business school, which was itself a start up department.
[00:09:11] Howard Bentham: What did you learn about entrepreneurship and talent in Oxford? You were at the university, of course.
[00:09:16] Fiona Reid: Well, I think the first thing I learned was how many people were interested in the area and interested in learning more about business. We had a program which we set up which was called The Basics of Building a Business and it was running in the evening once a week for 10 weeks as a course and we were inviting scientists from Brookes and also from Oxford University and some other local entrepreneurs and it was so immediately successful. We had to create a separate lecture theatre as an overspill and we had a waiting list instantaneously and hundreds of people turning up every night to have this business education which was good, it was free for delivery, nobody was paid to teach it, lots of business school academics did it for free and so from there, lots of good connections were made, you know, businesses were started, young people were kind of given perhaps the tools to think about how they could turn their ideas into reality and many of them did.
[00:10:17] Howard Bentham: I'm intrigued by the fact that people are prepared to give up their time and do that for other people's benefit in terms of their financial benefit.
[00:10:24] Fiona Reid: Yes, it wasn't so much, I mean there's part of being an entrepreneur which is about making money and then that's perhaps, a part that is less attractive within the university environment. What is attractive is seeing their ideas out there in the world and for students perhaps, they're motivated sometimes to set up a business to actually make money for themselves, but it's not at the forefront as it is indeed with many entrepreneurs, it's a bit of a myth that people are in it primarily for the money, they're in it for all sorts of other reasons, but money is rarely at the forefront actually.
[00:10:59] Howard Bentham: That is so, so interesting. Again, the stereotype we were talking about at the start. So what other things are they in it for then? I guess if you're creative, you want to see your idea come to fruition, but what else?
[00:11:12] Fiona Reid: I think as they want to maybe show something of themselves or to the world to really, they often really believe in what they're doing and they're just very motivated to see it work and once it does start working, the growth in itself, I think people find exciting. There's a very interesting link in the research about the link with dyslexia, so lots of very successful entrepreneurs were dyslexic and often struggled at school in the traditional academic sense, but had accentuated qualities in terms of being good leaders, good communicators, good delegators, able to network and have often have got a lot of the very good personal communication and leadership skills for being an entrepreneur. Richard Branson, for example, is the same. But many other people who perhaps didn't succeed in traditional academic senses are motivated to build a successful company because what better way is there of showing your parents and teachers and everyone around you how great you are than building a fantastic, successful company from scratch.
[00:12:20] Howard Bentham: Genuinely fascinating that is. Just coming back to your story, Fiona, if we can, from Oxford you went to London to teach at UCL, we've touched on that. Tell us about your decision to move from the School of Management to the MSc Bioscience Entrepreneurship Programme, it's a great title. I can tell from how you've been talking already, you're passionate about science. How does this link science and business?
[00:12:44] Fiona Reid: Well, yes, I've always been interested in that sort of science business interface and really working quite closely to the science as well. There's, in many universities, there's this, the formal technology transfer office, which is the place that processes university owned patents and turns them into sort of companies. There's not quite that space that I'm really keen on. It's about teaching and using education as a tool for new venture creation and from the science base. So I think it's more about empowering scientists to be able to negotiate better with business and industry that comes and wants to work with them too, because there's a slightly asymmetric power relationship there.
If you're a scientist and you do your one thing and you're in negotiation with a very large multinational with ranks of expensive lawyers, you know, you're not necessarily going to be getting the best outcome for you and your science out of that and perhaps it's never occurred to you that it would be a good idea that you could actually take your ideas and run with them and build something for yourself. So it's really just about planting the seeds, the tools, the language, the vocabulary, and giving a little bit of confidence for smart people to be able to speak a different language when they need to.
[00:14:00] Howard Bentham: Without taking us through the curriculum, but I've, just got the picture in my head here that your lecture theatre full of masters doing their masters, if you like, and they've got all these great ideas, how do you get them to be good business people as well? Because just because you've got a great idea doesn't make you... Einstein wasn't necessarily the greatest businessman ever, was he? So how do you make that happen?
[00:14:22] Fiona Reid: Yes. Well, at UCL, the master's course that I run, which I went, I left Oxford to go and set up, because it's a very specialist curriculum degree, whereas a lot of the training perhaps is off curriculum and, you know, doing a master's program is a chance to really sort of build the space. Scientists like and dislike a certain, very sort of nuanced set of things and it depends really whether they're students or whether they're career researchers as well, so the career researchers prefer the word innovation to entrepreneurship because they don't see themselves as being entrepreneurs and they kind of dissociate a little bit from that whole idea. So you don't talk too much about entrepreneurship and Silicon Valley stereotypes. The students that I teach are mostly, almost all have a science background and want to do something with science, even if that doing is not clearly defined what it is they're going to do. So we teach them about marketing and communication, which is the bit they like the least because it involves simplification.
[00:15:24] Howard Bentham: Well, and also probably it involves there isn't a straightforward answer, it isn't black and it isn't white, it's all very different shades of all sorts of colors in between and scientists don't like that.
[00:15:35] Fiona Reid: No, and I think they find it quite painful sometimes, simplifying things to the point when it feels to them that it's actually wrong. So you give them, you know, you train them to do a sort of pitch statement or something, or a 30 second pre-see of what it is that they do and what they're planning to do. And even if you practice with them, when they actually get to speak it out loud, they tend to look at their feet or just look away and somehow sort of try to divorce themselves from the situation they're in as well because it feels, it sort of feels uncomfortable.
[00:16:04] Howard Bentham: Yeah, I can share your pain. I do some media work with scientists as well, and sometimes it's about a feel for something and I guess making a decision to go into business to make your idea work, there's an element of feel for it. You're not basing it on data or anything absolutely concrete. So that must be, must make you very popular. You often emphasise the importance of entrepreneurs dealing with uncertainty and problems. What do you think is the biggest challenge that the entrepreneurs of today face, particularly in Oxford?
[00:16:37] Fiona Reid: I think there are levels of uncertainty all around. I mean, we're living in sort of uncertain times, you know, the nature of the economy is changing quite quickly, we've got technology sort of splicing with science and business and in some ways there's lots of areas where there's really no rule book and there's also no, in some cases, no regulation around spaces that are being innovated in where there is not sort of strong regulation too. So I think having a experimental mindset, you know, the ability to iterate very quickly, you know, you have an idea, you have a business model, you have to be prepared to change that very quickly based on failure, based on the risk associated with going down a particular path, which if you take it and take it exclusively, you may end up crashing your business too. So I think there's a lot of uncertainty around money and financing as well. I mean, I think it's a sort of huge area of challenge for, you know, all small businesses as well. So when, how can they make their financials feel safe enough to grow?
[00:17:36] Howard Bentham: But focusing on the innovation ecosystem in these parts, in Oxford and Oxfordshire, I mean, you must be on the edge of your seat. It's an exciting place to be, isn't it?
[00:17:47] Fiona Reid: Oh, absolutely. Yes, no, it's a fantastic place and you know, the power of the ecosystem is known, but it's probably, there's even more that could be realized by untapping more potential for, I mean we have these two great universities, 50,000 plus students a year, lots of ideas, a space where ideas are listened to as well. I think that's one of the features of both universities is the openness about ideas.
[00:18:12] Howard Bentham: What about the support systems that are out there for young innovators and wanting to start their own business or maybe find a business partner?
[00:18:21] Fiona Reid: Well, I think the challenge is around space, and it's that space for housing, space for people, and I think that space sort of sits behind some of the labour shortages that are seen in the county and you know, they're a real struggle for many businesses as well. If you need to have specialist skills in some of the newer technologies, you're going to be hard pushed to find them locally. As the same is true incidentally, in London as well. I mean, the UCL spin outs and startups as well have problems attracting people on the sorts of salaries they can afford.
[00:18:53] Howard Bentham: And I guess the danger is that you have the brain drain to use the phrase and they'll head off to the States or wherever else. So how do you counter that?
[00:19:02] Fiona Reid: Well, it's a bit of a problem sometimes. I mean, certainly the early days of Oxford entrepreneurs, there was, you know, really mass exodus to Silicon Valley, which I found very disappointing. I kept thinking, well, you should, stay here, you know, it's a wonderful environment in which to innovate. But the, I think the access to venture capital was very different. It's probably now less different twenty years later, but most of the early Oxford entrepreneurs who Oxford students went and made, you know, some very considerable fortunes in Silicon Valley.
[00:19:33] Howard Bentham: What about some of the great ideas you're seeing now, innovative approaches that have caught your attention recently? Share a few sort of things that are on the drawing board right now of people you're talking to.
[00:19:46] Fiona Reid: Well, I think I'm quite focused on a lot of the ideas that come out of where I sit in UCL at the moment, which is the Institute of Ophthalmology, which is attached to Moorfields Eye Hospital as well, so everything to do with the eye, and I like to say, you know, this is all about vision, and vision is a very business word and a very entrepreneurship word as well. The eye is the only organ of the body that you can see, and you can actually see a lot of the body through the eye and so the scientists there do everything from genetics, cell biology, imaging, public health, lots and lots of AI, and everything from very basic science right the way through to very applied science.
So there's lots of very interesting stuff happening with eyes and imaging and diagnosing your health through the eye and of course that splices with the increases in digital health, the ways in which we can access data and genetics and put it all together in something that looks like a sort of consumer health app but is actually providing quite substantial quantities of healthcare and we're trusting these things because they're in our phone. So that's a very interesting, it's an interesting space to be sitting in the middle of and listening to what's going on.
[00:20:56] Howard Bentham: You play it down quite nicely, if you don't mind me saying so. A lot of other people might go, that is amazing. Do you ever have those, Good Lord, that's incredible what they're doing there.
[00:21:06] Fiona Reid: Yes, I still do get very excited about, you know, about hearing some of this as well and again, you know, I sometimes hear that from the scientists who are talking about it and they're very low key about it and they don't really, they don't really sometimes know what they're looking at themselves, the insights that they've made and also, the things that are adjacent technologies that could be put together with that to really create something that's very interesting and good.
[00:21:31] Howard Bentham: Fascinating. Let's bring into the conversation OxLEP's Communications Manager, Rob Panting. Good to talk to you. Of the people you support at OxLEP, are a good number of those entrepreneurs?
[00:21:42] Rob Panting: Thanks, Howard. Yeah, a considerable number. In fact, I think what we find quite often is those entrepreneurs are coming to us at different stages of their business journey. So we might have a number that come to us pre-startup stage, perhaps unsure as to what their journey might look like, and Fiona touched on this a little bit in her opening discussion around perhaps not having the sort of overall business acumen and they need support in that area to help make their venture become commercially viable. So we get a lot of people coming to us at that early stage, but equally, you know, once an entrepreneur moves into sort of, full flight as it were, the ongoing sustainability of that business and the, we've mentioned it in previous podcast episodes, the peer support that might be needed. That's quite significant for those entrepreneurs. Again, we've touched on this just a moment ago, Oxfordshire is a great place for entrepreneurs, but probably very biased in saying that in terms of the organisations that we've, that we represent or have represented, but there is great ideas in Oxfordshire and in many ways that makes our life a lot easier because it's about harnessing those great ideas and creating the space and opportunity for those ideas and those entrepreneurs to flourish. There's always been entrepreneurs in Oxford and Oxfordshire and I think our role is trying to ensure that the sustainability of those organisations remains strong.
[00:23:16] Howard Bentham: Fiona, you're scribbling away there, you've got ideas. But as Rob's talking, obviously thoughts are coming into your mind. Share them with us will you?
[00:23:23] Fiona Reid: No, absolutely, I was just saying one of the, one of the reasons why Oxfordshire is so good at supporting entrepreneurs is that there is, it is quite well networked and in some ways it's better networked than some of the much larger cities because like Cambridge it's all fairly sort of, there's a sort of dense population of entrepreneurs in one place and lots of opportunities for peer support and that's again something we know from the research is that entrepreneurs learn very strongly from each other and, you know, small business owners do as well, they pick up so much from being in a place where they can listen to others. So, all those opportunities are a really important part of the small business growth, if you want to put it generally, in the county.
[00:24:07] Howard Bentham: Rob, is it fair to say that you see more entrepreneurs, should we say, breaking the shackles since the pandemic? The world has changed shape hasn't it? I'm going to seize the moment.
[00:24:16] Rob Panting: I think so, we've seen a significant number of people come forward, perhaps approaching their approach to work very differently now. So whereas in the past, I think many were very happy to be part of perhaps a bigger wheel as such and be a cog within that wheel generating ideas. I think a lot more people now are feeling sort of bolder and they feel impassioned to go away and actually put their ideas into practice and try and turn them into a business. Like Fiona says, I think entrepreneurs have... they're ideas people, and maybe the pandemic perhaps reassessed and realigned a lot of people's thoughts and thinking. As we mentioned earlier, Oxfordshire has never struggled with entrepreneurs. We've got two great universities, we've got a great, in particular, science and innovation, a great community with the likes of Harwell, Milton Park, Oxford Science Park, etc. You know, lots of great areas for people to develop great ideas within great companies, but I think a lot more people are perhaps feeling ready to put their own ideas into their own practice and if we can harness those ideas and give them support that they need, then OxLEP are doing a great job, through that.
[00:25:35] Howard Bentham: Fiona, what's your advice for an entrepreneur? Rob's sort of talked about the situation that, they're struggling to evaluate an opportunity. You see ideas people every day of the week. How do you get them to decide what is worth the investment and time and what clearly is not?
[00:25:53] Fiona Reid: Well, just getting back to what Rob mentioned about perhaps what is we're seeing more of, which I very much agree post pandemic, is a more sort of values led startup approach and you talk to certainly sort of younger people and students and researchers, and they said they want to have a sort of purpose behind their work and that's becoming more and more important and I know that's very more important, more generally in the workplace. So that's almost like a starting point. So the, whatever the business you want to set up needs to fulfill something of your purpose and include something of your values and in fact, it's actually quite a sort of good way of expressing your values in the workplace is by doing something for yourself and in terms of evaluating a business, I think, you know, a very hard hat of realism is a very good thing to have on your, whether actually something is going to be feasible and for that, really you need to have quite good skills in prediction and planning and costing and quite a lot of really quite sort of boring detail about is this actually going to work? Am I going to be able to get the people to do it? I'm going to find space, how much does it cost? So that whole mapping out, a little bit of mapping out, enough to know whether you can actually make the bare bones of it work is a useful sort of first step of stress testing your idea.
[00:27:12] Howard Bentham: Heartbreak or not, it's what it comes to, doesn't it? Rob, what support can OxLEP offer here? I've got a great idea. I can't quite see how I'm going to make this work, help me!
[00:27:23] Rob Panting: We do get that a lot, most of our support tends to be around trying to ensure that entrepreneurs feel ready to go into the world of business. So most of our support looks at things like communications and marketing, finance, those key aspects to support businesses run day to day. That's the vast majority of requests that come our way from entrepreneurs. Going back to the peer network elements as well, there's big demand for that with the clients that we support and learning from not only like minded entrepreneurs, but people from across different sectors, how they've perhaps responded to a particular challenge or a particular opportunity and our ability to perhaps convene people is, it is one of our biggest strengths, and that's something that we're constantly trying to ensure works really well for our business community, in particular entrepreneurs who might be coming at things, you know, very embryonically and offering that support is something that is in big demand.
[00:28:28] Howard Bentham: Setting goals, Fiona, is an important part of starting a business for sure, isn't it? So is it a case of sometimes managing expectations of the people you're working with to decide what's feasible and what's fantasy?
[00:28:40] Fiona Reid: I think it's quite difficult to have a homogenous set of rules for testing the feasibility of a new business startup, because there's a really huge difference between setting up a new retail business and setting up a new venture which is trying to make a new bioscience, therapeutic, a new drug, and at every point, from the idea onwards, everything is different. So, in the bioscience case, extreme example, you are going to be having to raise money and you're going to have to raise money at the start, be it from grants to begin with, or various types of soft financing, the government de-risks a lot of early stage startups. So you're in the business of managing investors from the start. Whereas if you are setting up a business where the barriers to entry are lower, you can grow organically, you can take it more at the pace that you want to, the priorities are different, the parameters are different, the risk feels different as well. So I think, you know, the most important rule is that there are really no rules and entrepreneurs tend to sometimes pick up and roll with that quite successfully is to say, well, I'm just going to do things that work best for my particular company in this particular setting, dealing with these particular customers and I'm going to slightly make up the rules as I go along too. So I think, you know, feasibility is a difficult one. I quite often say to new entrepreneurs or new teams that doesn't sound very feasible and it doesn't sound like a good idea and I'm very often proved completely wrong. So I think sometimes the nature of our advice needs to be quite targeted towards the particular business.
[00:30:22] Howard Bentham: Yeah, and that makes your job quite difficult for a start if you have to hold your hands up and say actually...
[00:30:26] Fiona Reid: It does, yes.
[00:30:27] Howard Bentham: Yeah, I didn't see that coming.
[00:30:28] Fiona Reid: You get routinely ignored and routinely sort of look at things and think, I've now learnt never to say crazy, actually. I've now learnt that things that sound crazy turn into real business three years later. So, I very much, and all my colleagues who do the same sort of work, would agree with that too.
[00:30:44] Howard Bentham: Yeah, I guess timing is, when you've got this great idea, timing is everything,
[00:30:50] Fiona Reid: Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I think that's the critical quality and I'd add that to my list of critical qualities of entrepreneurs is they have a very good sense of timing. They know when to go to the market, when to raise money, when to hire another person, and just have a sort of almost a sixth sense of what timing is going to work well for their business, and particularly, you know, going into the markets as well, you know, the point at which maybe the first, two or three businesses doing something very new have set up already and the timing is now perfect to do it really well.
[00:31:23] Howard Bentham: What about luck and serendipity? Does that play a part?
[00:31:27] Fiona Reid: Well, it plays a big part in the stories that we hear about it, doesn't it? You know, the narratives around it, you know, I just bumped into this guy in the lift and I was chatting away to him and I had a business plan and an envelope in my pocket and suddenly I was funded. So, luck does play a part in really, I think, everyone's career path to some extent and entrepreneurs often talk about the chance meeting, you know, the meeting at a conference or a networking session, they met somebody who gave them the essential pearl of wisdom that helped them very much with their particular business. But I think entrepreneurs are pretty good at calculating what they need to do and because they're working with stretched resources all the time, they manage risks quite carefully. I don't think they leave that much to chance.
[00:32:08] Howard Bentham: Yeah, the famous golfer, Gary Player, back in the day always said, yeah, the more I practice, the luckier I get. It's, I think there's possibly a lesson in there too. Give us a story, an example of a successful startup that you've come across recently, inspire everyone with a tale.
[00:32:27] Fiona Reid: I'm going to use one from a little while ago, actually, which is one of the original Oxford entrepreneurs who, he was actually studying medieval history. He was doing a master's in medieval history and he got together with a PhD student who was studying the mathematics of war, and what they turned up creating together, you know, after a long period of time and quite a lot of experimental error and failure. You know, university is a good place to fail your businesses. It's better than doing it for real and putting all your money into it, and they came up with a business which was based on data analytics and so they now run a very successful company called Quid in San Francisco and they thought that the merging of their two academic disciplines was extremely sensible because medieval history is all about picking up small bits of evidence. from a long period of time, and trying to make sense of it and the mathematics of war, equally, is a strategic picture and putting those two disciplines together, they were able to work out how to do data analytics in a very sophisticated way, very early. So I think that was a sort of, a useful, a successful start up story emerging from a chance encounter at the university, even though it ended up in Silicon Valley and not in Oxfordshire, which it could have done.
[00:33:42] Howard Bentham: Not so many people knocking your door down with the mathematics of war, Rob, I'd imagine, at OxLEP. Fascinating! That's another podcast on itself, isn't it? But what about some local examples of some great stories that have, ideas that have turned into big things?
[00:33:54] Rob Panting: Yeah, picking up a strand actually that Fiona mentioned earlier, probably around social entrepreneurship, which I think is, this is anecdotal really, but I think I've seen emerge quite a lot within Oxford and Oxfordshire over the past decade or so. Fiona made a good point earlier on around how entrepreneurs, particularly in Oxfordshire, try to put a purpose behind their entrepreneurship. A couple of really good examples, which, you know, they'll likely be familiar with a lot of people, a company called Oxwash that you see quite often in and around the city centre, which is essentially a extremely sustainable laundry service, I think, created also by two Oxford graduates. I may be incorrect on that, but we've supported Oxwash a little bit with their initial stages and the growth of the company's been phenomenal. But at the heart of it is sustainability and how, laundry can be better for the environment or trying to make laundry better, laundry servicing better for the environment and the company is there, very much for that purpose, the products that they use are highly sustainable products and they've created a, you know, a fully fledged business off the back of that.
Another really good example, again, around social entrepreneurship is an ororganisatn called Tap Social. But Tap Social have, I think, created an organisation that not only has entrepreneurship at the center of it, but it also looks to reinvest in people. So the purpose behind Tap Social is it's a brewery, but it's a company that very much has reintegrating people who, you know, may have served time in prison, found themselves in difficulties within that particular workplace.
So I think we've got a lot to be proud of in Oxfordshire around, I think, giving people opportunities and putting a social element, a community element at the front of our entrepreneurship, and that's another strand really which I think probably we at OxLEP would like to do a little bit more of is working with those perhaps more isolated communities in Oxfordshire, you know, we've got a fantastic city in Oxford and one where we've got the most highly educated people in the world based here, but there are communities in Oxfordshire not so well off and that the creativity exists there and perhaps making sure that pathways are available to those entrepreneurs within perhaps more isolated and diverse communities is something that we're very keen to try and push forward and I think probably collectively in Oxfordshire that's the case as well it's, that's a big area of work that probably needs to be investigated a little bit more.
[00:36:43] Howard Bentham: Fiona, by contrast, when someone fails, we've heard some great success stories there, but when someone fails to make a business work, do we judge that too harshly in this country? In the States, for example, it's just part of the learning curve, isn't it? But here, viewed as a failure, is that a fair comment?
[00:37:01] Fiona Reid: Yes, I think that's true and it's often cited as the reason why the Americans are thought to be more entrepreneurial than the British and many European countries actually as well as they have a different attitude towards failure and it is seen as a badge of honour and in fact It is the case that actually many venture capitalists will prefer if you've tried and failed at a couple of businesses and that really is the case over there too. So, the whole attitude, the sort of shame factor about failing in a business as well, I mean, I think it's not just social pressure, it's also the financial consequences of failure are more harshly executed over here than they are in the States.
[00:37:40] Howard Bentham: In terms of bankruptcy?
[00:37:41] Fiona Reid: Yeah, just our rules as well as our sort of social systems don't make it that easy for the fear about starting up a company, it's not necessarily that helpful.
[00:37:51] Howard Bentham: Interesting. Fiona and Rob, thank you both for the moment. We'll chat again shortly. You're listening to OxTalks, the podcast powered by the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership and sponsored by leading national law firm Mills & Reeve. Please get in touch with the team at OxLEP to comment on what you've been hearing. Find us on social media, we're on X @OxfordshireLEP or via LinkedIn, search for Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership. Perhaps you run a company or organisation that's looking for some specific help, or simply need a steer to the most appropriate business advice available. Why not try the OxLEP Business Support Tool?
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[00:39:40] Howard Bentham: Let's chat more to Fiona Reid, associate Professor for the MSC Bioscience Entrepreneurship Program at UCL. Fiona, you've said in a previous interview that masculine stereotype figures like, and I'm quoting you here, the man in a t shirt with a laptop who's going to take over the world are becoming the dominant image of an entrepreneur. Do you think any aspirational stereotypes of female entrepreneurs now exist?
[00:40:05] Fiona Reid: I think they're much less prominent and many of the male stereotypes are imported directly from silicon Valley, where, you know, Bill Gates originally set the mode for what an entrepreneur should look like, and indeed, you know, in this country, it used to be that Richard Branson was the most famous, you know, entrepreneur, and everyone thought that the ascribed characteristics to the entrepreneur, which are sort of pirate like, going out onto the seas, the buccaneer, and this is an established type in social science research of the pirate entrepreneur and in America, the equivalent is sort of the cowboy going out into the wild west, conquering new lands, and so forth, too. So, this sort of taps into an idea of how a particular culture is, and sometimes a particular country is, as well. It's, a great shame to me that there are fewer star female entrepreneurs. I do think that the star female entrepreneurs that there are, don't perhaps court the celebrity in the ways that the very famous tech entrepreneurs have done. They sort of get on and run their businesses really effectively and as, as with many of our business leaders, they're not necessarily pushing themselves forward to be seen in quite the same type of way too.
[00:41:18] Howard Bentham: Do you think that's a deliberate thing or do you think that's the, basically because the person doesn't want to be seen or because the media is not interested in promoting that?
[00:41:26] Fiona Reid: I think it's a mixture of both. I think it's, well, I'll go back to the figures on female founded businesses. So this is data from the British Venture Capital Association, which is pretty good data, showing that the number of female founder led businesses is below... takes about less than 10 percent of all the venture capital in the UK and that's true for teams that have got a woman on the founding team, as well as the ones that are female led. So something is going on there, and I don't think there's a really very clear picture about whether fewer women are putting themselves forward to become an entrepreneurs in the first place or whether they are not asking for enough money or whether they are not wanting to ask for money in the first place to begin with because they generally are less successful and get less venture capital to start with too. So I think the stereotypes have got a really important role to play there because perhaps, you know, it's a huge generalisation, women are not identifying strongly with some of the characteristics they see in the sort of Silicon Valley stereotypes, and not wanting to be like that, being a different type, wanting to be a different type of, perhaps more authentic, purpose led leader of their business.
But I think over the time I've been working with entrepreneurs, I've seen fewer, I see fewer and fewer females coming forward, except in the areas of femtech, female technologies where, things are both the venture capital and also the number of entrepreneurs is really expanding a lot and very fast. So it's almost as if women are allowed to run Femtech businesses because that's exclusively female and that's kind of a territory that they're allowed to do. Whereas in perhaps more traditional entrepreneurial settings we have, you know, there are problems with fit and I don't really know what the reasons behind that, except for they're disappointing.
[00:43:11] Howard Bentham: Is a part of the issue, if you rewind from what you were talking about there, back in the educational institutions themselves, could they be better supporting female entrepreneurs? It is the case, if you can't see it, you'll never be it, but if it's not being sort of pushed in schools, and somebody's got the tendencies we've talked about here to be an entrepreneur, then you're not going to follow that through.
[00:43:35] Fiona Reid: Yes, I mean, I think there's a huge role for education, I suppose I would do, because I work in entrepreneurship education, but I'm an entrepreneurship education going right the way through schools, and some schools have really centered on enterprise training and, you know, using the creativity and imagination about thinking about ideas and running competitions and that's been very successful because you can pick up sometimes, just referring to what Rob was talking about, people who are perhaps less academically successful, but they're very good leaders, you know, and they can sometimes be difficult, you know, difficult students in the classroom sometimes because they're always thinking in a slightly different way and I can, you know, enterprise and entrepreneurship can often pick up people like that and give them enough skills to think about different pathways that they can take. I like this word enough, you know, you don't need to know everything about finance and marketing and communications, you just need to know enough that you can start having those conversations.
[00:44:32] Howard Bentham: And I think you touched on dyslexic pupils earlier, and I guess on a spectrum of autism and Asperger's as well, where the thought processes are quite clearly different, but maybe schools, colleges, universities are not picking up on that difference and augmenting it and giving it a chance to fly.
[00:44:53] Fiona Reid: Yeah, I think it's an interesting one because, I mean, business has never really had a place on the UK curriculum, which perhaps is an issue and we tend to teach, and until quite recently in universities as well, enterprise entrepreneurship were taught off curriculum. So my first work at Oxford in the business school, most of the entrepreneurship education was off curriculum. Sort of open to many types of people and that actually worked quite well. But without the formality and of being a piece of an educational topic that you have on the curriculum, it's difficult to carve out enough time for people to really experience it. So you tend to get, in university settings, the people who self select to come to those types of courses and find out about enterprise, be involved in the competitions, which is not a bad thing, but it would definitely be good to have it more established on both school and university curriculums. I mean, it's the engine of economic growth, you know, the people like that, if you give them enough skills to start thinking about creating businesses, they will go on and do a number of great things.
[00:46:01] Howard Bentham: Anything you can add to that, Rob? And just with the sort of educational side of things, with OxLEP's support, particularly around apprenticeships and getting young people into that world of work.
[00:46:13] Rob Panting: Yeah, there's a number of strands to our work which support that. Probably one of the interesting areas is our work alongside the Careers and Enterprise Company and trying to create a knowledge for young people within Oxfordshire to understand not only what businesses are located here, but in terms of the entrepreneur side, give them an idea of the ecosystem that exists in Oxfordshire, very much sort of following on from what we were saying earlier around understanding your, who your peers might be once you get into the world of work, the work with Careers Enterprise Company, in particular, the teacher encounters program that we run, we work with some of the leading businesses in the county to ensure that the teachers in our schools in Oxfordshire are very much aware of what career pathways might look like for young people and educating young people to understand what they are in the businesses that are located here, we've said already. The key science and innovation that exists within Oxfordshire, how we are a genuine world leaders in areas like fusion, other energy fields, cryogenics, you know, really quite significant sectors of industries. So, yeah, a big part of our work is, opening the eyes for the entrepreneurs of tomorrow really and, you know, we, get great support from a lot of businesses in Oxfordshire to make sure that, we're able to do that.
[00:47:44] Howard Bentham: Anything you'd add to what Rob's just said?
[00:47:45] Fiona Reid: You know, it's very good to hear that there is this reach into schools, to give people at least the experience of what the world of work looks like, and also how companies start and how they can grow too, so it's good to hear that's the case.
[00:47:58] Howard Bentham: Let's talk about money. You've mentioned venture capital a fair part in the conversation, but sitting down, I've got an idea. It's very difficult to sit down and impress a whole bunch of venture capitalists that they're going to back your idea. What do you tell your master's students and others about getting their hands on some money for startups or just to make that next step in their business?
[00:48:22] Fiona Reid: Well, I tell them for as long as they can, just to try and survive off free money and there are sources of free money there.
[00:48:28] Howard Bentham: That sounds like great advice, I must admit!
[00:48:29] Fiona Reid: Which are, you know, grants to do certain types of things, and there are lots of organisations. We're lucky in the UK to have some quite chunky bits of finance that are available to experiment with, to spend money on research and development of various types as well that don't involve having to go out to investors and selling half your company. I mean, venture capital basically starts at half a million pounds. It's, a fairly sizable amount of money to be going for, everyone always thinks that's the first step. A more usual first step is the friends, family and fools, of people who give you small amounts of money to get going, to experiment, to start validating your idea. The process of validation adds value to your business, whereby you can then go to a perhaps a financial provider, a bank or other forms of debt and say, well, I need this amount of money in order to become successful in the future. So it's not always just it's again, it's the dragon's den effect is that everyone thinks that you've got to do this big shouty performance to a bunch of slightly aggressive people who are sitting there and asking you about have you done your homework and it's not really like that in practice, you know, you'd have a much more sober business case presented to probably a much more sober bank manager to say this is what I want to do and can I have the capital to get going?
[00:49:49] Howard Bentham: And it's not a shouty meeting, if I come to you, OxLEP Robert, say, well, find me some funding.
[00:49:55] Rob Panting: I personally never shout Howard. I mean, to be under no illusion, I think the type of grant funding that OxLEP perhaps offered certainly immediately after the pandemic outbreak, that type of grant funding unfortunately, we don't necessarily facilitate to that degree, but as Fiona rightly says, there are other avenues available to entrepreneurs to those who are beginning their business journey. I know a couple of organisations that I've worked with who have used, for example, the Prince's Trust as an option to secure some initial grant funding, which I think is for 18 to 30 year olds. So very much you're sort of entrepreneur, I know once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, but as they're starting out as an entrepreneur, that early stage, eighteen to thirty year olds, that's quite sort of fruitful ground to go to organisations like the Prince's Trust and it's not just, obviously, financial backing there, again it's a suite of business support opportunities. I mean, we would always try and provide a variety of support via OxLEP, but there are lots of avenues to go if it goes down, if entrepreneurs are looking for funding.
[00:51:05] Howard Bentham: I like your idea of free money best. Yeah, large chunks of free money. There's the marketing campaign already. Let's pick up a couple of questions for our social channels. Rob, given the cost of living crisis and people's finances being stretched in all areas of life, will this ultimately lead to fewer people embracing risk and take a safer option versus entrepreneurship?
[00:51:27] Rob Panting: I think the answer is probably I and many others hope not. I think we're a poorer place without entrepreneurs. I think we in Oxfordshire perhaps know more than most that great entrepreneurship can bring solutions to lots of problems and we're very lucky in Oxfordshire that there's an ecosystem in place to I think support people to bring their ideas to fruition, whether that's in a creative industry, whether that's in a science industry. We've worked hard to create, and Fiona more than most, to create an ecosystem that supports entrepreneurs in Oxfordshire. I would be saddened to see that fall back. I guess the reality is that the current economic climate might move people away from that, and it's safer to perhaps ensure that you've got your salary coming in at the end of each month. But let's hope that the entrepreneurship does continue.
[00:52:24] Howard Bentham: Fiona, are you seeing that on the coal face that people are going, this is not a good time?
[00:52:29] Fiona Reid: I think a little bit in amongst the student population as well, they're thinking, well actually I know I would like to start something myself, but it's going to be a few years after I paid off my student loan. So I think that sits there as a shadow. I don't think that necessarily means that people are going into safe, comfortable careers, but I think it's just, well, we're riding out a particular wave of economic instability and then I will do something later. I think sometimes it takes years and years for people to actually sort of plant that seed and get going. So some of them always have it in them, but it just the timing has to be right for the individual and their personal circumstances and their setting and to some extent, the state of the market, access to finance, you know, lots of things have to kind of come together at the right stage. But you know, then also the research also would say that. Starting a business in a recession is a very good time to start a business because you have to be, you know, you have to be pretty ruthlessly efficient, you have to make sure that you stress test everything before you actually do it, you fail things fast, and you know, it's a tough climate and the nature of the challenge means that you're problem solving perhaps faster than when it's really easy. Lots of entrepreneurs think it's a problem if they have raised too much money. I once had a panel coming into the business school and there was like 10, 11, 12 entrepreneurs and I'd given them all questions. You know, what's been, what was your biggest problem when you were setting up? And many of them got financed in the early internet.com booms, 2000s onwards, and they said one of the problems they had was having too much money, too much investment. So the pressure from investors to do certain things and take certain directions was hard and it was not the appropriate rate of organic growth that they would have wanted had they had their time again and in fact, the organic growth that doesn't have lots of venture capitalists and investors, is a path that's taken by a lot of high growth entrepreneurs.
[00:54:23] Howard Bentham: That is genuinely fascinating. You can have too much money.
[00:54:26] Fiona Reid: Yes, it sounds strange, doesn't it? I mean, it's not, you know, your own money, it's money that comes into your...
[00:54:32] Howard Bentham: That makes it even harder.
[00:54:34] Fiona Reid: Yeah, and you're dancing to the tune of a bunch of people who want to see return very quickly on their investments and that's a big problem with some of the science and tech based businesses is that you, know, there might be a problem with the technology, it might not work, you might have to sort of pivot and do something else and investors are impatient in this country, you know, they are less patient than in America.
[00:54:54] Howard Bentham: Another question from our socials. Rob, it'd be amazing if you don't answer this one positively. Is Oxfordshire a good place to be if you're an entrepreneur?
[00:55:02] Rob Panting: I mean, I think...
[00:55:02] Howard Bentham: If you say no!
[00:55:04] Rob Panting: Yeah, I be working for the wrong company if I did say no. No, I mean, we've touched on it in dispatches earlier on. Oxfordshire is a good place. to be an entrepreneur. As I say, one area which I think we would be very keen to just try and perhaps make more inroads is those communities, those less affluent communities in Oxfordshire that, you know, the great ideas exist and, you know, people are just looking for the opportunity and the ability to move their idea to something a bit more commercialised. That's an area we're quite keen to get into, I think, you know, the city and the universities, they've got sort of good established networks that can be used well. I think we just want to reach out to those sort of more isolated communities and support those entrepreneurs.
[00:55:54] Fiona Reid: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think there's, I think there are as many people who want to be what we might broadly call social entrepreneurs, the next Oxwashes and others, as there are people who want to make money and cover themselves in financial glory. You know, social entrepreneurship is really difficult, because you're answering not just the sort of financial performance measures but also to social performance measures and we haven't really got a good way to measure, you know, how you're making a social impact.
[00:56:22] Howard Bentham: And your conscience as well.
[00:56:23] Fiona Reid: And your conscience and much other stuff besides it's a problem to scale, it's a problem to make those financially efficient too. So the social entrepreneurs are, you know, some of the most phenomenal people I work with. I mean, they are really amazing because they have just expanded the whole toolkit to the knowledge and mindset needed to become a successful entrepreneur. They have included lots of other things as well and so they're pretty amazing and it's good to hear that OxLEP is looking to support those because their path is harder and it's particularly harder to make really big.
[00:56:56] Howard Bentham: Let's bring our conversation to a close with some final thoughts, Fiona. Can you share any valuable tips, nice punchy tips and experiences that could help startups looking to grow, if you're going to give them a little checklist, what would be on it?
[00:57:09] Fiona Reid: Practice delegation. Lots of high growth entrepreneurs become very deeply and personally involved in their company and they can't let go. They can't let go any set of responsibility because they feel somebody else is not going to do it as well as they are. So they end up with, you know, 500 people all running around a little bit like headless chickens and it's a well known documented stage of development of high growth individuals is the leader doesn't want to let go. So delegate as much as possible at all times. You know, who else could do this? Who else could I bring in to do that task? And you don't need to be opening the envelopes. You know, in year five of growth.
[00:57:49] Howard Bentham: What a great tip. And let's try and sort of distill down those qualities that mark out an entrepreneur, the top three qualities in your view.
[00:57:59] Fiona Reid: I think a very good sense of timing of what to do when. An intelligent attitude towards risk and calculations that sit beneath that and there's probably something of the dreamer in there as well. The ability to latch onto something which doesn't exist and may sound fanciful to almost everyone you talk to and to be able to hold on to that potential for that to become reality. It sounds a bit sort of fluffy to say that, but there is something of that in most of the successful entrepreneurs I see. There's something of the dream that's there and that dream can sometimes be, I want to employ lots of people in my, the community where I grew up. I want to have 500 people, I want to be that sort of organisational pillar of the community too. So, but it's just seeing that dream out there and making steps towards it is really important.
[00:58:51] Howard Bentham: And what would be your main piece of advice for someone wanting to start a business in 2024?
[00:58:58] Fiona Reid: Gosh, is it possible to make one piece of advice? I would say get on top of the technology. Get on top of what technology can do for you, what you can effectively outsource to technology to have within your business the skills that will be able to use it intelligently for the future. I think that's a very important sort of bedrock for growth. To have that sort of future proofing by having the technology awareness in your company.
[00:59:25] Howard Bentham: Fiona, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you. Thank you.
[00:59:28] Fiona Reid: Thank you so much. It's been a great joy.
[00:59:31] Howard Bentham: Huge thanks to Fiona Reid, Associate Professor for the MSc Bioscience Entrepreneurship Programme at University College London. A big thank you also to OxLEPs Rob Panting as well, and thank you for listening to OxTalks, sponsored by leading national law firm Mills & Reeve.
There are now a number of editions of OxTalks available from where you'd normally get your podcasts. Check out some of the previous editions featuring Tim Bestwick from the UK Atomic Energy Authority discussing Oxfordshire's place on the global technology stage. The CEO of Blenheim Palace, Dominic Hare, on the vital role of the visitor economy, and Emma Gibson, senior partner at KPMG Law, on the importance of SMEs. Every episode is well worth a listen. Please spread the word, tell your friends or colleagues about us, and if you feel so inclined, leave us a review. You can share your thoughts and suggestions on our social channels, and you can email your questions for inclusion in future editions too, the address is in the podcast description. We'd love to hear your contributions.
Remember, business support in Oxfordshire is very close at hand. The OxLEP business support tool can signpost you to expert help in just minutes. Why not take a look? Find it on our website, OxfordshireLEP.com. But for now, from the whole OxLEP team, and from me, Howard Bentham, it's goodbye.