Speaking to an audience at The Business Show 2022 at London’s ExCel Centre, Kaur dished out some practical business insights.

“I’ve been classed in recent months as an overnight success, but I won’t accept that because this business has taken me years of mistakes, costs, highlights, lowlights and so many different obstacles that I’ve had to overcome,” she opens.

Here are six core lessons from The Apprentice winner’s seminar.

Be flexible and don’t look too far into the future

“Why are you running your business?” Kaur quizzes the audience. “I’m going to unashamedly say that there is absolutely no harm in you setting up a business and running it because you want profit, because you want to be financially free and because you want to be successful. There can be a lot of pressure on finding your ‘why’ and this innate passion.”

Having it in writing is crucial, though. “You need to put pen to paper. There are so many of us that never actually get around to it. Write down your goals. My twist is ‘Don’t think too deep into the long future’.” She talks about the pressure to think what the goal is in two years’ time or three years’ time. “A couple of years ago, we had no idea there would be a global pandemic. I think about the next six months, because I don’t know how the world is going to change in future.”

Don’t be afraid if those goals change, Kaur advises, saying that her goals change all the time. Another door will be opened and she doesn’t want to go in the same direction anymore: “Another thing that can often get in the way of you achieving success with your business is being fixated on this big fancy goal that you thought of two years ago, so maybe it’s time to reassess.”

Nail your branding

“This might not be a tip that’s suitable for everybody,” she continues. But has helped her enormously since winning The Apprentice. “I sell waffles, crepes, ice cream. I did not invent cake, there was definitely cake on the scene before I was there,” she says in a self-deprecating manner. “In my head, I just thought, ‘Great, let me pop up a logo and have a few cool colours and let me get trading Nothing wrong with that whatsoever.’” Often that’s what you need to do to get the ball rolling. But, as she says, we’re talking about scaling up and growing your business.

“I’ve actually rebranded twice,” Kaur says. She rebranded Oh So Yum in line with The Apprentice because you have to rebrand as part of the show. “I’m so glad I did. I didn’t want to because guess what? Rebranding costs money and we all know that we want to save as many costs as we possibly can.”

Be warned about falling into the trap of believing that brand is all about logo. “If you are looking to promote your business, you need a lot more than a logo because you need to be able to stand up and be proud of what you do, and have an overriding theme that can then transfer into the physical and digital world.”

For Kaur, it was thinking about what feeling the products she sells evoke. “A few years ago, I would have said I own a dessert parlour. I make waffles, crepes and ice cream – and that’s it,” she says. Now, because she’s invested in her brands and figured out what Oh So Yum’s message is, the company had improved. “We deliver a taste of happiness, because everybody deserves that. How much better does that sound? That way, if you are reaching out for investment or expanding over different platforms, then you have a language, you have a tone and that can then be transferred across these other channels.”

“I’m probably the worst at branding. I don’t enjoy it,” she admits. If you’re struggling, and you’re not sure how to grow that logo or grow your identity, Kaur lays out a couple of options.

“I used a branding agency and they were amazing. They can help you with packaging, marketing, absolutely everything. But it’s really expensive, or it can be. What you want to do is if you do go for a branding agency, or anyone that you work with, you want to make sure that they understand why and that you’ve got the same goals out of the project, especially if the person you’re working with hasn’t worked with your industry style before.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to go down a branding agency route, or you haven’t got quite got the budget, Fiverr, Upwork and 99 designs are good options. The key is not to ask for a logo. “If you want to change your logo, go for a brand package and have that conversation, have a very detailed brief. “The more time you invest in making it clear for that person, the better the result you’re going to get,” The Apprentice winner says.

>See also: The lessons your business can learn from the world’s best logos

Go digital, but don’t go crazy

Kaur shows a slide with platforms including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Shopify, Amazon, Snapchat, WhatsApp Business… “I can’t count them on all of my fingers, how many platforms there are to be able to sell your product or service online. However, I would implore you to think about what strategy and on which platforms you want to be on.”

She’s really had to work on the right offering for Oh So Yum. “Naturally, we’re salespeople at the end of the day. We want to cash in on those sales, so let’s be on every single platform going. I wouldn’t recommend that.”

Instead, select a few that you feel comfortable with and that you know that your target market or demographic use on a regular basis and get comfortable with that. Look at the tools and resources that they’ve got that can help you market your products and capitalise on the sales on those channels first, then you can think about hitting the other platforms. “Otherwise, trust me, you’re going to be at your laptop, doing admin day in, day out, uploading products onto all these crazy platforms. You’d then have to get someone to help you and pay them extra on top. It just turns into a mess.”

These platforms take a commission as well, so you have to be comfortable with your finances. Kaur says that you should be asking yourself whether you can afford to be on these platforms and if these selling methods are a viable strategy.

Automate your systems

As every entrepreneur knows, when you first set up a business, you pretty much have to do everything by yourself and that no one else can quite do it the same way. “It feels like you’ve asked someone to do something, but they just can’t do it the same way that you did,” she says. “It’s really difficult to let go as a business owner.” You do have to accept it, if you’re delegating some sort of a task to someone: “We’re talking about scaling your business here, not just nurturing the one that you’ve got – we want to grow, right?”

Kaur says that you have to accept that you are going to have to take a step back from some of the tasks and responsibilities, even if you really enjoy doing them. “You need to offload it because it’s not actually growing the business. Your time and talent should be focused on growing the business, not doing the daily to-do tasks. Someone else or something else can do that for you.”

Have the right mindset

This is a mainstay of entrepreneur advice articles and Kaur acknowledges this.

Everything is to do with mindset for the Oh So Yum founder, crediting the hard work she’s done on herself over the past two years for her accelerated business growth. “For me, anything is possible. There is no ‘Can’t do’,” she says. “If you think you can’t do it, guess what? You’re completely right. It’s all about self-confidence. Internally work on yourself, believe you can do it with every bone in your body, be really positive about it.” What you do need is that respect for what you’re trying to achieve, your goal while harnessing all the tools, resources, team and support network that can get you to that goal.

“Every single person has their own personal journey and experiences that have led them to this point and that is completely unique. Your insecurities, strengths and weaknesses are completely unique to you,” she says. “You’re nervous about something or you’re not experienced in something? Whatever it is – let’s say you don’t take the risk because you’re too insecure and you don’t feel confident or feel qualified – then don’t do it. It’s your choice. But you’re the one that’s losing out on that benefit, that experience and the opportunity to learn and grow.” She prefers the approach of trying to learn from someone who has more expertise in a certain area than she does: “Always flip the insecurity, turn it into a positive.”

In the past, Kaur has tried to set up a handbag company and a nail business. “I don’t have any beauty qualifications whatsoever – that was really silly,” she laughs. She qualifies those as two failed businesses. The good news, as she says, is that that’s the definition of being an entrepreneur. “That’s what we do. You give things a go and you’re not afraid to move on. Sometimes the biggest strength is having the ability to let go, as opposed to clinging on to something.”  

Taking or leaving feedback

On being asked by an audience member whether or not they should be taking on feedback, Kaur gives a knowing nod. Negative feedback can be really hard when you are running your business or breaking your back working crazy hours and you’re doing everything that you possibly can, she says. So the minute that someone criticises that, or picks a hole and says, ‘Why are you doing that?’ you can get really defensive and almost upset to a point, because you think, ‘Hey, hang on, I know what to do with my business, thank you. I know how to run my business. I’ve not asked for your opinion or your advice.’

“Actually, that feedback is a massive gift,” she says. “Thank you to the people that do that, because it’s your choice [as the business owner] what you do with constructive criticism. You have to listen in every single situation and then you make a conscious decision what to do and how to process that information.”

She highlights four ways in which you can respond:

1. You’re going to sit on it and you’re going to think, ‘Hang on, they might be right. Maybe they’ve got a point.’ You don’t have to admit it to them. You just say, ‘Cool, thanks.’

2. You think, ‘I 100 per cent agree with them and this is what I should be doing and the direction.’

3. You say, ‘Maybe I don’t quite agree. But you’ve just given me another seed to think about and I’m going to go look into that instead. You’ve done me a favour by pointing something out to me that I didn’t realise before.’

4. You can just completely throw the feedback away, because you don’t want to listen. You’ve digested it. You’ve realised by doing an assessment with the info, not from an emotional perspective, but from a calculation based on your experience and knowledge, that actually, that person isn’t right. Do what you know in your gut.

“A trick that I use is really trying to take the emotion out of my business decisions,” says Kaur. “Oh So Yum is my baby. I have worked so hard, every single element of it: the colours, the grouting in the tiles in the bathroom, the menu prices, reaching out to designers, recruiting the team, creating these processes. Me and my sister have done that. We’ve been on that journey together.

“If you want to scale and grow your business, you have to get out of the emotional side of business,” she advises. “Yes, it is your baby. But you need to see it as almost a detached entity of its own. It’s a company. You have to think, ‘How am I going to best supercharge this, use the tools and resources around me and get the best and squeeze the best out of this separate being?’”

In closing, she summarises: “Use a combination of your gut experience knowledge and definitely listen to others, because they either reinforce what you already know or they do you the favour of pointing you in a different direction.”

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There’s no denying the power of influencer marketing. And businesses across all industries are cottoning on to this growing channel with a huge potential to expand their brand’s reach.

This is particularly true in hospitality, where word-of-mouth recommendations are invaluable.

But as a fairly new phenomenon, there are still a lot of unknowns, both in terms of measuring ROI and the logistics and processes around securing the right influencers and managing campaigns.  

Having worked for a startup that tackles admin issues in hospitality previously (and running a side-hustle micro-influencer account) Mike Radley and Jamie Frew saw a real opportunity to create a business specifically connecting food businesses and influencers.  

In this exclusive interview with Small Business, co-founder Mike shares more about why Nibble is such a timely proposition, the challenges of finding the right investors and why speaking to your customers regularly is key to success.

Tell us a bit more about your background as an entrepreneur?

To be honest, I’ve never seen myself as an entrepreneur.

Nibble was an idea we first started talking about two years ago. This is just a situation where we identified a real problem, I experienced it myself, and we figured out a solution. The timing couldn’t be more pressing and only through market research and launching an MVP did we realise how right we were.

Sum up Nibble, when did the business start and what is the big ambition for the business?

Jamie and I were on a work trip at our old company – Trail. It was out in the sticks, mid-winter, somewhere in Norfolk. We were sat in a pub round by a fire having whiskey (like the start of most romantic novels) and I told him the problem and we fleshed it out together.

Influencer marketing as an industry is booming, and it’s not slowing down. Yet when it came to process and management, it was completely inefficient for both influencers and marketers who would just spending hours emailing back and forth trying to arrange a collaboration. Then there’s the follow ups too. Unless you’re a celeb with a PR agent, most influencers struggle with admin.

The reality is most social media influencers have full time jobs and spend any free time editing content, attending events, engaging with other social accounts and researching hashtags or the right soundtrack to play over TikTok reels. Keeping up was a struggle, I wanted to make life easier really.

We realised hospitality brands were equally frustrated and there was very little way of measuring influencer marketing as a channel. Everything should be measurable. With Nibble we have the opportunity to be the leading micro-influencer marketplace for any physical location, whether it’s a salon, gym, pet shop, pub or restaurant. Local marketing that’s affordable and measurable which couldn’t be timelier considering tighter budgets and costs rising.

Why did you see such a big demand for influencer marketing in the hospitality industry particularly?

There’s no process. Most brands don’t know where to start when it comes to influencer marketing, others outsource it to agencies who can help but it’s still a manual, expensive process. We built Nibble to simplify the booking management and communication process whilst giving influencers more choice, on demand.

Restaurants need footfall and bookings. If I owned a vegan café in Clapham, it makes sense for me to work with a South London vegan micro-influencer/foodie with a local audience that suits my brand. I get authentic content creation for socials and I reach a niche, local audience likely to visit my cafe. A complimentary pizza in return for content and coverage doesn’t cost me too much and that’s less of a risk than paying a macro influencer or celebrity (and their agent) a lot of money that just isn’t there anymore for most hospitality businesses.

Marketing budgets are tighter than ever, it’s no longer viable for brands to spend heaps of money on Meta ads or PPC where it’s over £0.30p a click or impression. With Nibble, it’s about 0.001p – and we’ve made this measurable which up until now has been a struggle for marketers. Plus, influencer content is authentic and not recycled stock images used on ads that everyone’s bored of.

What’s been the biggest challenge for you in launching and growing the business to date?

Finding the right investors took us a while. There were a lot of chats, but ultimately with the wrong investors. Fortunately, we figured this out early and we couldn’t be happier with our cap table in this early stage. Everyone brings different advice and experience; we really wanted each investor to add something different and we got it.

How have you built up the network of influencers on the platform?

Fortunately, this hasn’t been too difficult. Nibble is free for influencers and saves them time whilst giving them more choice – an easy sell really. 52 per cent of influencers we’ve reached out to have signed up. Social media has been the best way to communicate with them which was expected.

You’ve recently raised external funding, what does the next 12 months look like for Nibble?

We’ve been busy making sure our product is ready for go-to-market, and we’re pretty much there now which is exciting. Massive shout out to Dan, our technical lead, for the hard work. We’re working on the brand experience now, and recently integrated to TikTok.

We’ve just launched on the App Store and we’ve got targets in place over the next 12 months associated to number of influencers, number of brands and number of bookings whilst testing and learning things along the way.

What’s the one piece of advice you would give to fellow or aspiring entrepreneurs?

Never assume you know the answer. I thought I knew what customers wanted at the start, but it changed. Speak to your customers all the time – as much as possible. I learn something new every time. We had some early adopters on the app who have been so supportive and helpful. They share our vision and really champion what we’re doing – finding those in the early stages is golden.

You can reach Michael at michael@nibbleapp.com or connect with him on LinkedIn or via Nibble App’s website.

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The post Meet the startup: Mike Radley, Nibble appeared first on Small Business UK.

Employers are increasingly committed – at least publicly – to improving workplace mental health, but what does the reality of that look like?

Whilst a growing number of businesses are introducing Employee Assistance Programmes, there has been lots of criticism that they are simply a box-ticking exercise.

After experiencing his own personal mental health challenges, Matthew Vamplew sought therapy privately and found the process of finding the right support both inaccessible and complicated. Matthew knew there had to be a better way to bridge the gap between the need for help and the vast number of qualified therapists and mental health practitioners

Here, he talks to Small Business about the inspiration for his matching minds platform, the challenges of transitioning from a prototype to a scalable tech solution and why it’s OK to be vulnerable in business.

So, tell me a bit about your background and what you were doing before starting Paranimo?

My background is in innovation management. I graduated in 2012 and began working for a technology consulting firm where I worked with emerging technology to solve business problems in the insurance industry. This gave me an interesting insight into the world of innovation. What really got me into the world of entrepreneurship was my next role with a management consultancy company. I was there to set up the innovation function within their insurance consulting team where I got a chance to work in an insurance startup incubator.

I then moved into being an innovation manager in my own right and was involved with incubating and accelerating new ideas with fintech, lawtech and insurtech startups. I’d find myself out talking to entrepreneurs on a weekly basis to try and co-launch innovative new ideas in the form of a proof of concepts. That proof of concept would then form a business case which may or may not get the green light. It was a useful experience and showed me what it takes to launch a new idea!

I’ve always wanted to start my own company and that ambition followed me throughout my career. And I’ve since used all the skills I learnt to help launch Paranimo.

What does Paranimo do? What big issue is it trying to solve?

The story behind the company came from own experience of seeking mental health support back in late 2018. I found it hard and pretty stressful to find the right mental health support provider (counsellor or psychotherapist) and get that right “match” i.e. someone that had relevant experience and I could get on with and trust. There’s no rulebook, and the current models involve you going through directories where there are loads of counsellors and psychotherapists listed. And they all say that they’re good at everything, because that gives them the highest chance of getting business. But the reality is, how do you choose who’s right for you? It’s trial and error and there’s potentially lots of time and cost wasted.

So I thought, what if there could be a way to match people to the right mental health support? I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea. I spoke to therapists and to people that had gone for support, and they all said it would be beneficial for both sides of the spectrum. I then explored the idea with my now co-founder, Dan (he was doing a PhD in neuroscience at the time), and together we founded Paranimo which in Latin means “match minds” – setting the foundations for the company and its purpose.

As a company, we help organisations (and we work mostly with tech-driven SMEs) to improve workplace mental health and wellbeing through two SaaS offerings called Personal Wellbeing and Burnout Insight and a consulting service we call Cultural Wellbeing.

Our flagship Personal Wellbeing solution focuses on matching employees to the right mental health support, using our matching intelligence system, so they feel better faster. The effectiveness of our Personal Wellbeing solution is backed by primary research. We conducted a three-month pilot study with 25 people. The result: 93.3% of therapy users found a counsellor who matched their needs with an average reduction of 58% anxiety, 51% irritability and 40% depression after therapy! This solution was inspired by own experience of seeking mental health support back in 2018.

Burnout insight is a SaaS solution that integrates with digital communication tools like Microsoft teams and slack, operating as an early warning detection system to uncover burnout risk in the workplace to mitigate the cost and impact of negative mental wellbeing on productivity.

Our Cultural Wellbeing solution focuses on increasing staff retention through a consulting service delivered by sector specific therapists with cultural change experience to build psychologically healthy cultures.

What’s your ultimate vision?

In terms of the ambition for the company, our vision statement is that we believe that everyone should get access to the right mental health support and feel empowered to live a happy, healthy, and productive life. And that’s quite a big ambition but we want to be the trusted advisor, and trusted provider, for companies that can rely on us to provide support for their staff.

When did the business launch?

After I had the idea for the company in late 2018, Dan and I formally set it up in May 2019 and officially launched in December 2020. My co-founder developed the prototype, and I was using my experience of customer testing, and working with therapists and people that needed support. But of course, there’s the big challenge, which is how do you transition from a prototype to a scalable tech platform?

We didn’t have the experience or the funds to do it, so we were reaching out to people through LinkedIn and Facebook and then the Innovate UK COVID-19 Business Response grant came out. It was created to support socially good businesses doing good doing COVID-19. There were 8,600 applications for this £50,000 grant, and only 800 places so less than a 1% chance but we won! It was an incredible moment as we then had some money to start building the right thing.

How has the business model changed your initial concept to now?

We worked with an outsource company to build our solution out, and originally in our heads we were planning to build a B2C company. We partnered with the National Counselling Society, they’re the second biggest Mental Health Association in the UK who provide us access to some great counsellors and psychotherapists. We then won another grant from Innovate UK for £85,000 (and a follow on for £10,000) and that gave us enough to launch in December 2020. What we soon realized though is that B2C is hard and takes a lot of marketing spend.

We then transitioned through accidental opportunity to B2B. We started working with charities, because they fund a lot of support for the people that we care about. And then, ultimately, we pivoted again to tech businesses. The reason for that is they often have a very high cost of absence – given the high salaries – plus they have a high risk of burnout.

What’s your USP?

A lot of our competitors such as Employee Assistance Programs are just a tix box exercise for companies to say they are looking after their staff, yet they use an unfair delivery and pricing model.  They recruit mental health providers increasing their costs and price for access to support based on an assumed usage model to cover salaries. For example, providers often assume usage of around 30% of all employees at a given company will access support, when in reality utilisation for these services is around 5%. This means companies are often paying for more than they actually use! Our competitors also do not match people to the right support but rather based on availability.

We have Business Model innovation, which is a huge advantage for us and touches all our solutions.  We have a marketplace of support providers so we have a huge volume capacity but also the ability to match effectively. We match based on relevance to need and personality fit – because the better the therapeutic relationship, the better the mental health outcome. And availability, so you get seen quickly which is important. That alone gives as pricing and access to the right support advantages over our competitors.

What’s been your biggest challenge running the business so far?

I touched on it before but transitioning from the minimum viable product to a scalable solution. It was a big challenge, very stressful and at times it really felt make or break. Dan and I were trying to decide when to take on investment (and sometimes disagreeing) as I’d seen startups raise too early during my time working in incubators.

Grants are such an amazing option when you are early stage and you’re trying to get some money but aren’t ready for investment and don’t want to take a loan, but a lot of businesses don’t necessarily know about them, and they’re not the easiest thing to find. I just remember working basically three weeks solid every single day on our grant application, but it paid off.

You’ve recently raised funding, what’s the plan now?

We are looking to raise beyond our £150,000 round to £238,122 (to be exact!) after raising £146,996 so far. The plan here is to extend our originally planned 12-month runway to 18 months. We then want to hire key sales, technology team members and outsource a creative content writer to drive sales of solutions targeting 81 new businesses in 18 months’ time. We also have some cool new features we want to add to our Personal Wellbeing solution, enhance our matching intelligence and improve data security.

Finally, what would be your best advice for other entrepreneurs?

• Things will take longer than you think.
• Developing resilience and getting knocked back is part of the process, it doesn’t mean you failed.
• Be open to asking for help and accept you don’t know everything. Putting your ego to one side is a good thing, it’s not bad being a bit vulnerable.
• Remember, you don’t always have to be going 100 miles an hour all the time to make progress. I try and look at the average of my progress over time rather than day by day.
• And look after yourself. It’s not sustainable to work all day, every day, in a productive and continuous manner.

Matthew Vamplew is the co-founder of Paranimo. You can email him on matthew.vamplew@paranimo.co.uk or connect with the business on LinkedIn to find out more.

The post Meet the startup: Matthew Vamplew, Paranimo appeared first on Small Business UK.

When it comes to building and construction, safety is paramount. The slightest misstep or lapse of concentration can cause injury or even death. Just imagine the damage a crane operator can cause if they have a momentary lapse or close their eyes for just one second.

That’s the problem that Mathew Norbury and his team at FC Laboratories have been working on. FC Labs has been developing wearable brain imaging technology which can be worn on its own, with other headgear or implanted in a hardhat. This wearable technology tells the user if their attention is dropping or if they need to take a break.

And this kind of wearable brain imaging technology has lots of other applications as well, from NHS hospital staff being told that it’s time for them to rest through to currency traders in the City being alerted that their split-second judgement is below par.

FC Labs founder and CEO Mathew Norbury talks about why he felt it worthwhile entering the Start-Up Series competition even though his wearable technology was only at an early proof of concept stage, key milestones over the coming year, and why having mentorship is so important.

Tell us about your background as a tech entrepreneur

My original background was in marketing, which I pretty much fell into coming out of university, going on to develop a 20 odd year career and eventually running my own agency.

About five years ago, I decided I wanted to stretch my legs beyond the agency world and I got into various consultancy roles, some pro bono with charities and not-for-profits, others mentoring with start-ups in a number of sectors, including tech. That’s really where my exposure to the tech start-up world began. One of those start-ups was looking at EEG technology (measuring electrical activity in the brain), exposing me to the broad world of wearable brain imaging which FC Labs now specialises in (though using very different technology, which we believe is more appropriate for reliable, practical, cost-effective real-world applications than EEG).

‘Tech founders have become the new rock stars’

What is wearable brain imaging?

Wearable brain imaging is a broad term for a number of different technologies. There are various ways to essentially look at what’s going on inside your head. You’re really looking at a brain activity or activation of certain areas of the brain in different ways. You can measure certain waves and frequencies of electrical activity in the brain and infer things like levels of focus or mental fatigue.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which is what FC Labs works with, looks at blood flow and blood oxygenation and deoxygenation levels. Essentially what we measure is how hard an area of the brain has been asked to work. So, if you are being asked to focus intently on something, for example, then lots of oxygenated blood will be sent to that particular brain area.

There are not many devices measuring brain activity that are genuinely wearable. Those that do exist are bulky, with separate battery packs for example and could be described as portable rather than wearable. What we’re working on is a wear-and-forget solution. A lot of what we’re doing to achieve that is around miniaturising the hardware and minimising the number of sensors, focusing in on just the specific areas of the brain relevant to what we want to measure. Something approaching the quantity and quality of data that an MRI scan would give you, for example, is not really that practical to walk around with. By reducing the number of sensors, miniaturising them, as we are with our first device, Float, by just focusing on mental attention with a single sensor, we can achieve a genuinely ‘wear and forget’ solution.

What’s the first sector that you’re concentrating on with the Float technology?

The first sector we’re addressing is what we’ve defined as the hardhat market, including industries such as construction, engineering, oil & gas, infrastructure, forestry and mining. The hard hat is an indicator of a high degree of risk, obviously, but also allows us to embed our technology in something workers are already putting on their heads. If you’re asking somebody to wear something that they’re not already wearing, that’s a barrier to adoption. You just put your hard hat on as you normally would, make sure our device is switched on, and beyond that, it’s wear and forget. We’re trying to remove all of the traditional barriers to adoption of new technology in sectors such as construction and engineering, which have traditionally been quite resistant to new tech, particularly technology like this. But that’s changing, at quite a pace, particularly because we’ve all become so used wearable technology in our personal lives.

We’re all far more interested than we were five or 10 years ago as to what’s going on in our own bodies. We have devices that you wear on your wrist like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, which claim to have some insight into what’s going on inside our heads, which to a degree they can, making inferences from temperature, movement, blood flow, pulse, heart rate, those sorts of things. But ultimately, if it’s a function of the brain, like sleep or mental attention, unless you’re measuring what’s going on inside the brain, you’re really just guessing.

What does the Float hardhat tell me if I’m wearing the technology?

Think of it like a canary down a coal mine. We’re aiming to give an early warning of when mental attention levels are either declining or lapsing to a degree which could be of concern. We’re not trying to diagnose what’s causing loss of attention. We’re just trying to identify when mental attention might be declining or lapsing to a point that it may cause an accident or an error.

The data could be tracked long term to identify optimum shift patterns, for example. Everybody has different circadian rhythms. Some people work better in the morning, some people work better in the afternoon. We can help to identify the working patterns which produce the optimum productivity and mental wellness ultimately for workers.

What other areas could you see Float being used in?

We’ve had discussions with healthcare where we were initially thinking of those high-risk roles such as surgeons or anaesthetists where, if they if they make a mistake, then the results could be catastrophic.

Interestingly the healthcare sector was far more interested in how our tech could give people insights into how their mental attention levels are changing over time, driving behavioural change, encouraging them to just be more aware, to self-manage potential fatigue issues by taking rest periods for example, as well as providing management with data to optimise shift patterns and productivity.

Other people have approached us and said this could be really good for something like banking or financial services.

Call centres are another interesting one where it can be a pretty stressful environment. You have to deal with complaints and callers aren’t going to be particularly happy if you’re getting tired and not paying them enough attention. The level of service customer service then drops. Being able to identify when certain people might need to take a break and prompting them to do so is something call centres have expressed an interest in.

At what stage is FC Labs now?

Right now, we’re finalising what we’re calling our research unit. We’ve designed and manufactured our own sensors, which can be connected together in any quantity or configuration and positioned in specific locations on the head using a neoprene cap. This allows us to carry out experiments to identify the best position for collecting the data we need for FLOAT. This work should be completed by the end of August, after which we move into a 12-month project with the University of Stirling to develop our first fully functional prototype. We aim to go out start pilot projects with industry partners by the end of 2022 and then fully launch in early 2023.

What was it that appealed to you about the Start-up Series competition? Why did you decide to enter?

The simplicity of the process was incredibly attractive. I had been aware of the Start-up Series for a number of years. I’ve known people who’ve applied, some who were successful, some not. I’d heard very good things. When it came to looking for our first external funding, the Start-Up Series was right up there for me.

For a start, the process was so simple and approachable compared to many others. I approached taking on external investors for the first time with an amount of trepidationSo much VC investment seems deliberately intimidating. Partly it’s because of the cult of personality that has grown up around some tech founders, who have become the new rock stars in recent years. The performance element of pitching for investment in some of these competitions, the flamboyance of many of those succeeding was somewhat off-putting. My attitude is if you’ve got the idea and the team and the talent, a lack of experience behind a mic on a big stage shouldn’t be something which holds you back.

Apart from investment, the Start-up Series also offers mentorship and a peer network. How important was that for you?

Having that support is fantastic. Paul and Matthew’s backgrounds and experience were really appealing in terms of entering the Start-Up Series. Being a founder and entrepreneur can be quite a lonely existence at times, even when you have a fantastic team as we do at FC Labs. This tech start-up world is still relatively new to me, so having a team like Worth Capital to steer me in the right direction is great. If you’ve got any questions, any concerns, it’s a real comfort to have them close on hand and that really gives me confidence in the future of FC Labs.

What advice would you have for anybody thinking of entering the Start-Up Series?

Just go for it, don’t think twice. The I know that the Worth Capital team – Hayley, Paul and Matthew – will be more than happy to chat if you’re unsure whether you’re ready or not. Just speak to them. If you’ve got an idea, if they like the sound of it, then there’s that support, even at the early stage. And I’d be delighted to chat to anybody who’s thinking about it, as well.

Now that you’re a Start-Up Series winner, what milestones would you like FC Labs to hit over the coming year?

The two key milestones we’re focused on just now are completing the testing and validation of our research unit by the end of August. We then commence the 12 month project to develop our fully functional, looks-like works-like prototype, the delivery of which will be a huge milestone for us.

The Start-Up Series competition

The Series opens for applications every month, with the aim to select one or two winners to receive:

• Up to £250,000 of SEIS/EIS equity funding (subject to due-diligence, terms & conditions).

• A minimum of 2 years invaluable hands-on help from experienced & battle-scarred entrepreneurs

• Media coverage on smallbusiness.co.uk & other channels to promote your business & follow your journey.

We are on the hunt for B2B or B2C business across all sectors. As long as your business is eligible for SEIS or EIS HMRC advance assurance, then we’ll consider your application.

We’ll be impressed by innovative products or services, in high growth or underserved markets, with the potential to build a loved brand. If you can demonstrate these, you’re in with a fighting chance.

Because the investment will come from an EIS & SEIS FCA regulated fund, businesses who are considering entering need to satisfy the following criteria set by HMRC:

• You must be a UK resident and run a UK-based business

• You must be over 18 years old at the time of entry

• Certain financial services and property businesses are unlikely to qualify.

Find out how to enter The Start-Up Series here

Further reading

What winning the Start-Up Series meant for me – Carrie Davies, ONE Essentials

The post Winning the Start-Up Series – Mathew Norbury, FC Labs appeared first on Small Business UK.

One of the pain points with Brexit was always going to be the shortage of migrant EU workers coming to Britain for the summer fruit picking season. The government is trialling a scheme that would only allow a maximum of 30,000 migrant EU workers into Britain this summer to pick soft fruits and vegetables. It is estimated that 70,000 fruit and veg pickers are needed in Britain each season.

Henry Acevedo, a computer scientist from Colombia, has developed a robot transport system which is about to start trials at a fruit farm. Given that nearly a quarter of any fruit picker’s time is spent carrying produce to collection points, Acevedo and his Fox Robotics team believe they can boost productivity by letting pickers concentrate on just picking fruit.

Being a winner at this year’s Start-Up Series will help turn his childhood passion for robotics into a business that can help farmers avoid fruit and vegetables rotting unpicked in the fields.

What’s your background as a tech entrepreneur?

I’m a Colombian computer scientist with almost 30 years’ experience in industry across many areas, such as telecommunications, working systems engineering, software development, information security, automation and, of course, robotics. I’ve worked with blue-chip organisations throughout my career. This has allowed me to gain experience and insight into the key aspects of how a successful company should be developed, managed and all the end-to-end ides from conceptualisation, R&D and product development through to sales and marketing.

Where did you get the idea for Fox robotics? It seems a big step to set up on your own.

I’ve always been interested in robotics since a very young age. However in around the early 2000s I started to imagine what a robotics companies might do to improve our lives and have an impact on industries. In 2016, I started to take more determined steps into ideas for a robotics company. At the end of 2017, I started to develop a robot prototype specifically for logistics in my free time, using my own resources, and that basically triggered me to start Fox Robotics. And after some meetings with angel investors, farmers and software companies, I decided to found Fox Robotics.

What’s the problem that Fox Robotics is trying to solve?

In agriculture, the margins are very low. And the work is very strenuous. So most of the logistics when it comes to fruit picking is divided into very clear tasks: from picking, transporting, queuing through to waiting, paperwork and other activities. Just the task of transporting produce from fruit trees to collection takes on average between 21 per cent to 25 per cent of the time. That’s time wasted, which could be carried out by a robot assisting the pickers and runners to move all the produce back and forth. In fact, those runners who currently do the transporting could become pickers, naturally increasing farm productivity exponentially. A robot will help to gain the efficiencies on the picking activity. A picker would also spend less time walking to collection points and spend more time picking, therefore the productivity of the farm will increase.

Why did you decide to use a robot for collecting as opposed to actually picking fruit?

With present technology the clear option is to assist the pickers because humans are 100 times more efficient and quicker at making decisions when it comes to fruit picking. A robot arm by comparison is very slow, lacks dexterity and quick decision making compared to a human. A fruit picking robot requires many attempts and errors just to pick one piece of soft fruit. So for us, the idea was to support human pickers with the current technology that’s available.

We’re about to start a pilot with a fruit farm and we’re looking to demonstrate what automation can do and how our robots can improve productivity. Our robotics reduce the inefficient task of moving collected produce from pickers to collection points by using autonomous robots.

One of the anxieties about Brexit was it would create worker shortages, especially in the agricultural sector, and specifically in fruit and flower picking. Has Brexit actually helped farmers understand what Fox Robotics is doing, made its concept more attractive?

Absolutely. Brexit has been a problem for the UK farming industry. Current government immigration policies have reduced the potential number of annual migrant EU workers to just 30,000. What the farming industry needs is double this capacity. So there’s a clear need and the stress felt by farmers losing this productivity is significant. In this case, robotics can come and help use human resources more efficiently. We take away the unproductive tasks from a human and give them to the robot. So a farm can optimise the number of human pickers to a level close to what they would have been if Britain had stayed with EU migrant worker levels of 2016.

Farming, especially soft fruit farming and even flower picking, is always looking for technological improvements. And since Brexit and now the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s more interest in what and how robotics and automation can do to help this industry.

What has been the biggest challenge for you getting Fox robotics to where it is now?

When I started the company, the biggest problem has been always funding and, of course, finding the right people for the job. But also selecting a leadership team that compensates for my own lack of skills in some areas, closing those gaps which I have, to ensure this can be a successful company.

You’ve just been named as one of this year’s winners of the Start-up Series competition. What made you decide to enter the Start-Up Series?

Well, one of the things I was looking for was to connect with the experience of other founder-managers, as well as both capital and the support that might give us. Most important was the business mentoring side, the experience and knowledge we as a company could receive, because that will allow me to grow Fox Robotics, to mature it. Worth Capital’s support will help us get on a successful path within this industry, as well as all the connections and benefits you have with other founders.

So for you, it wasn’t just the equity investment but more the mentoring, the networking with peers which appealed to you?

Well, the investment is handy, of course! That will allow me to carry on and hit our own milestones. But the mentoring will help us get onto the right path, enabling us to be successful.

I’m sure some readers will be thinking they’d like to enter this year’s competition. What advice would you have for other entrepreneurs thinking about entering the Start-Up Series?

If I had any advice, it would be to be bold. If you have the right idea, the right concept which has been tested, has been checked with experts within your own industry, if you can show the need for it, then you can be a winner.

The Start-Up Series competition

The Series opens for applications every month, with the aim to select one or two winners to receive:

• Up to £250,000 of SEIS/EIS equity funding (subject to due-diligence, terms & conditions).

• A minimum of 2 years invaluable hands-on help from experienced & battle-scarred entrepreneurs

• Media coverage on smallbusiness.co.uk & other channels to promote your business & follow your journey.

We are on the hunt for B2B or B2C business across all sectors. As long as your business is eligible for SEIS or EIS HMRC advance assurance, then we’ll consider your application.

We’ll be impressed by innovative products or services, in high growth or underserved markets, with the potential to build a loved brand. If you can demonstrate these, you’re in with a fighting chance.

Because the investment will come from an EIS & SEIS FCA regulated fund, businesses who are considering entering need to satisfy the following criteria set by HMRC:

• You must be a UK resident and run a UK-based business

• You must be over 18 years old at the time of entry

• Certain financial services and property businesses are unlikely to qualify.

Find out how to enter The Start-Up Series here

Further reading

Winning The Start-Up Series – Adrian Lawson, The Preference Hub

The post Winning the Start-Up Series – Henry Acevedo, Fox Robotics appeared first on Small Business UK.

Zaffrin O’Sullivan, 41, first had the idea for Five Dot Botanics back in 2017. She wondered why the packaging for skincare products listed impenetrable ingredients at a time when consumers were demanding ingredient transparency in food and cleaning products.

It was not as if O’Sullivan did not have enough to do in her day job as a senior lawyer at the BBC.

Plus O’Sullivan had no beauty industry background, so she partnered with a cosmetic scientist and spent two years designing the brand and a website.

The idea was to create a range of skincare products with only five easily understandable ingredients each. Five Dot Botanics had its first manufacturing run in the spring of 2019 and launched direct to consumer last July. The brand is already stocked in health food chain Holland & Barrett.

O’Sullivan says: “We created it in response to the growing complexity and lack of transparency when it came to skincare. We could see a market opportunity for us to offer a British skincare line that used only minimal plant-based ingredients, tying in with the growing vegan movement. We also knew that beauty was not super inclusive, so wanted the brand to be non-binary … it’s consciously gender neutral.”

O’Sullivan and her husband Brian used up their savings and then took out a sizeable personal loan to launch the brand, putting every penny they had into the business. They were putting in 50-hour weeks on top of her day job working in television.

O’Sullivan says: “If you don’t have that passion for it, you might as well give up because it means not seeing friends, turning down invitations, not watching that boxset. It’s talking about it 24/7. You can’t do it unless you’re focused that your business exists for a reason.”

>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Les Dawson, Uniblock

In many ways, Five Dot Botanics could be not more on trend, chiming with the whole eco movement, veganism, being a gender-neutral beauty range suitable for men and women, and also sourcing cartons and labels from within the UK, as opposed to China, which would have been the cheapest option.

O’Sullivan says: “It sits as a beauty outsider. We’re always challenging the industry about why there are so many ingredients in products. We think fewer ingredients are better for your skin and better for the environment and we need to be more mindful about the products we consume.We only have one mission, “do more with less””

Like several other The Start-up Series winners, Worth Capital initially turned them down when Five Dot Botanics was at the concept as opposed to product stage.

O’Sullivan says: “We approached Worth Capital in February 2019, but they rejected us. What they did which was helpful was share their feedback. At the time it smarted, but we absorbed that feedback and eight months later we applied again, this time we were successful.”

Five Dot Botanics reapplied to The Start-Up Series last October and the £150,000 investment came through in January this year.

How important was winning The Start-Up Series funding and what has Worth Capital done for your business?

The investment has done three things. First, it’s given us confidence that somebody has invested and we have capital to scale. Second, the level of accountability when you take on outside money is huge. We’re accountable for growth in a way that would have been harder on your own. You have an investor-director asking difficult questions, holding our feet to the fire. Third, the money enables you to think bigger, to scale a brand and not limp along as a lifestyle business. Now we can hire in expertise as opposed to doing everything ourselves.

Apart from the equity investment, how has winning the competition affected Five Dot Botanics?

I went into to pitch to Worth Capital as a pregnant ethnic Bangladeshi woman, days away from having my baby. The statistics for investment in businesses run by female founders of colour are dire, I was prepared to face unconscious bias. However I am so proud of Worth Capital didn’t pigeon hole me. Other female beauty founders see Worth Capital as the glimmering diamond in the rubble. It’s not old-fashioned stuffy money, they are normal people searching for talent.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business?

The pandemic forced people to think about everything quite philosophically. Skincare was one of the beneficiaries of the pandemic. Between April, May and June we turned over month-on-month growth. People are wearing less make-up and focusing on their skincare.

In terms of our social media during the peak of the crisis, we moved away from selling to talking about our brand values, inclusivity, diversity, kindness and gratitude. Small business can speak like humans and be kind in a way that large brands find it difficult to do. We stand for something much bigger than the products we make.

We also launched a hand sanitiser, distributed for free around worthwhile social projects throughout South London, manufactured in a gin factory in Kent.

What is the outlook for Five Dot Botanics now?

In March, Five Dot Botanics was taken up by the Sephora Accelerate 2020 programme. The US makeup giant picks a dozen female-lend businesses from around the world.,Our mission to reduce the number of ingredients in skincare and to do more with less is quite radical. We want to contribute to a new conversation around what skincare means and contribute to a more positive beauty industry. Sephora are spending a lot of time with us on how to make the brand bigger and better, so it can scale globally. Minimalist skincare is going to go mainstream and we want to the leaders in this space. We have the ambition.

This October I will be virtually pitching to 120 investors interested in ‘clean beauty’ at a Sephora pitch event online. We want to take the business up to the next level, to distribute globally you need access to working capital.

Of course, we still have to weather this terrible macroeconomic storm that we are all in. It’s still a long journey for us.

What would you say to somebody thinking about entering The Start-Up Series competition?

People should apply, even if they don’t believe themselves, they are ready. This process is one of the most accessible, fair things you can go through. Even if we hadn’t won the Worth Capital investment, the fact of applying changed how rigorously we planned our business and our ambitions got a lot bigger.

Further reading

Small Business and Worth Capital partner to relaunch The Start-Up Series — with £250,000 equity funding up for grabs each month!

The post What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Zaffrin O’Sullivan, Five Dot Botanics appeared first on Small Business UK.

On the face of it, there is not much to connect the villainous Snoke, Supreme Leader of the First Order, in the Star Wars movie The Last Jedi and a Premier League footballer with a nagging hamstring injury.

However, the same motion-capture technology used to create villains in the Star Wars movies is being used to help elite athletes recover from sports injuries.

Vitrue Health, a healthtec start-up, uses sophisticated computer vision software to assess how sportsmen and others are moving. In many ways, it’s a more advanced version of the running gait technology which some sports shops use to help you buy the right pair of running shoes.

>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Ed Bird, Bird Eyewear

However, it’s a long way from Snoke’s home planet of Exegol to a Starbucks in Camden, where Vitrue Health founder Dr Shane Lowe and his partner Alex Haslehurst spent six months eking out cups of tea while they developed Vitrue Health.

Dr Lowe finished his PhD in biomechanics at NUI Galway in 2012, creating an algorithm predicting a person’s future ability to move based on how they are moving today.

He then worked for Oxford-based Vicon motion systems, whose credits include The Last Jedi and Kingsman 2, as a motion-capture camera developer.

The idea for Vitrue Health came after he and co-founder Haslehurst were chatting to an occupational therapist and were surprised to discover that the most technical piece of equipment at her disposal was a stopwatch. Both being engineers, they wanted to help.

Dr Lowe says: “Most assessment consists of a physiotherapist or an orthopaedic surgeon assessing a patient based on watching them perform simple tasks. Even for the best clinician it’s difficult to collate accurate data based on your sight. Vitrue uses computer vision software to track the movement and provide better quality information.”

>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Les Dawson, Uniblock

Given the thousands of man hours lost because of back problems, let alone the cost of elite sports stars being out of action because of musculoskeletal difficulties, the pair came up with Vitrue Health.

However, unlike many start-ups, you cannot just bootstrap a healthtec company.

“You can’t just build a medical device prototype out of a garage,” he says. “That romantic idea where you can just do something like this in your spare time and bring it to market doesn’t work.”

The pair first approached The Start-up Series in spring 2018 but the response they got was that more proof points were needed to validate the idea.

Later that year, they won a £50,000 feasibility grant from Innovate UK and each ploughed in £12,500 each of their own money into their nascent company.

However, they kept in touch with Paul Soanes of Worth Capital and in March 2019 Vitrue Health won £100,000 of Start-Up Series investment, while an angel investor came in with an additional £20,000.

How important was winning The Start-Up Series funding and what has Worth Capital done for your business?

The investment from winning The Start-Up Series enabled us to really kick things off as a high-growth company. It was completely pivotal for us. We had proven the feasibility of the idea. Now it was time to start scaling the team and building a product we could get out there. Worth Capital’s money meant we could hire a physiotherapist to push the clinical validity of what we were doing and some engineers to speed up development.

‘It’s important for founders to get validation for what you’re doing’

Apart from the equity investment, how has winning the competition affected Vitrue Health?

As a digital health company, it’s much harder to hit the standard metrics for a pre-seed round than for other companies. To some extent, you’re looking for investors who believe in the mission and the vision of it. The fact that Paul Soanes and Matthew Cushen from Worth Capital met us, saw what we were doing – even though we didn’t have those big metrics and revenue numbers – that gave us the belief and credibility. That makes a big difference for any young company. It’s important for founders to get that validation for what you’re doing.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business?

It’s affected quite a lot of things. Our technology is one that you have to try in person to really believe. Customers for our core product are institutions or businesses that rely on seeing patients in person, such as elite sports clubs. Coronavirus has put a stop to that. The world of physiotherapy has been completely disrupted. It’s quite hard to roll out to patients because patients just aren’t coming in, which meant our customers were suffering. And getting in front of physiotherapists to show them our product was a huge part of our sales cycle, which we just couldn’t do anymore.

What changes have you had to make because of coronavirus?

COVID-19 has forced us to be more innovative and bring forward our product roadmap from next year. We were due to launch some of our products towards the end of 2021 but we turned our plans around, got our heads down and have launched them already.

We’re delighted to have released a remote workplace assessment tool that uses computer vision to help you get set up right. The number one cause of absence in the workplace is musculoskeletal problems. Industry spends billions every year making sure employees have good setups in their offices yet ignore what they do at home. Today, a huge number of employees are perched on kitchen tables or hunched over laptops in a corner of the living room, especially for office workers working from home. The explosion in musculoskeletal issues is going to be huge. Until now it’s been very difficult to improve setups without sending someone over to each employee’s house.

We’ve released software called Vitrue VIDA that lets employees quickly and easily assess themselves from home. We’ve taken the core algorithms of our clinic-based software and put them into an internet-based subscription service, where each person can log in and then the webcam will assess their posture, how well their PC is set up, and then give a personalised recommendation to the employer and the staff member about how to set up better.

What is the outlook for Vitrue Health now?

The mission for our company is to be the gold standard for muscular-skeletal diagnostics. To do that, it’s not going to be a small lifestyle business. The next steps are expanding our clinical partnerships and rolling out to international health systems. We’ll go out into the funding marketplace in the near-to-medium future to raise more VC investment and accelerate our growth.

Further reading

Small Business and Worth Capital partner to relaunch The Start-Up Series — with £250,000 equity funding up for grabs each month!

The post What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Shane Lowe, Vitrue appeared first on Small Business UK.

The idea of launching fashionable, eco-conscious eyewear came to drummer Ed Bird in 2015 after developing a product idea for drummers using sustainable materials. Fast forward to April 2020, Bird Eyewear became the first UK eyewear company to become a certified B Corp in recognition of its outstanding commitment to sustainable and ethical business.

There weren’t many brands out there making well-made sustainable eyewear says Bird. So, Ed and his younger brothers Lawrence and Paul decided to launch their Bird Sunglasses brand with a triple mission statement: people, profit and planet.

Bird says: “We wanted to fill the gap in the eyewear industry with affordable frames that made a real difference in the world. We wanted to demonstrate that we were a more-than-profit company and a force for good.”

>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Les Dawson, Uniblock

Each pair of Bird Sunglasses helps distribute solar lights across Africa through their Share Your Sun partnership with charity SolarAid. They help create micro businesses in communities, weaning people off toxic and polluting kerosene and paraffin burners.

Bird spent the whole of 2016 researching the sustainable eyewear market and creating prototypes. He settled on working with four different manufacturers in China where the majority of eyewear manufacturing takes place.

The brothers initially launched Bird Sunglasses at the end of 2017, raising £12,000 through crowdfunding site Crowdfunder UK and won the site’s best new idea in fashion award, which led to it being featured in Forbes, the Independent and the Mirror.

>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Andy Roberts, Weekly10

That same year, Bird Sunglasses was a winner in the National Santander Entrepreneurship Awards.

Bird Sunglasses won The Start-Up Series in November last year, closing the deal with a £300,000 investment on Christmas Eve. “It was a nice Christmas present,” Bird laughs.

Bird himself only went full-time in January, working alongside two other staff members, as well as three freelancers handling marketing. The brand is now in the process of hiring a full-time marketing person.

How important was winning The Start-Up Series funding and what has Worth Capital done for your business?

Having that capital behind us has been such a huge boost. It meant we could all go full-time, which is a huge help on productivity and helps us iterate faster and move quickly with wholesale distribution, as well as pushing a lot more on marketing.

Apart from the equity investment, how has winning the competition affected Bird Sunglasses?

On top of marketing and being able to buy more stock, there’s all the huge experience that Worth Capital’s directors bring to the table. Having Matthew Cushen sit on our board has been very helpful and he’s now an integral part of our business. Matthew and his partner Paul Soanes brought a lot of experience. There’s a lot of cross-information and sharing with other The Start-Up Series retail business winners too.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business?

Well, our model was not online only. We were selling into independent opticians and the pandemic closed down all our retail sales outlets. We have had to stand down various reps and freelancers we would have been working with.

Which means we’ve had to pivot quickly focusing on our online sales. Our business used to be 50:50 split between consumer and wholesale, so we’ve pushed through a lot of website changes to optimise our online channels.

In some ways, it’s forced us to come back to our core proposition and how we tell our story online, making best use of all the digital channels over the last six months. It’s very easy to do online marketing badly. That’s been a very big learning curve.

In terms of stock, luckily, we had done enough forward planning in 2019 and we had enough frames in stock to see through the online demand.

What changes have you had to make because of coronavirus?

It’s made us improve our customer experience on the website, installing an augmented reality feature where customers can try glasses on virtually and swivel their heads round to see what they look like. It means the customer can quickly decide what suits them and which frames they like. The virtual try-on has been so helpful because it breaks down barriers with people ordering from home, and our return rates are now so much smaller, saving on packaging and postage.

What is the outlook for Bird Sunglasses now?

Having the backing of Worth Capital puts us on a strong foundation. Moving forward, we see a really big opportunity for growth. We’ll soon be launching our online prescription glasses, offering virtual try-on along with some new frames by the end of August.

Our main goal is to establish ourselves as one of the best-known eyewear brands, first in the UK and then further afield. And we eventually want to give a million solar lights to Africa. And as things begin to open up, we will also see our independent optician business start up again.

What would you say to somebody thinking about entering The Start-Up Series competition?

It’s definitely worth applying and sticking at it. When we met Worth Capital it meant doing a deep dive into our products and our model and our vision. That was all really helpful. We took away pages and pages of ideas from our first meeting, and that was before we even knew if we were progressing any further. Having that first face-to-face session alone was a great help. For us, the rigor of entering The Start-Up Series competition was the challenge and what made it worthwhile. People shouldn’t be afraid of not winning but embrace the learnings.

Further reading

Small Business and Worth Capital partner to relaunch The Start-Up Series — with £250,000 equity funding up for grabs each month!

The post What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Ed Bird, Bird Eyewear appeared first on Small Business UK.

Most of us think of homes being built with bricks or, at a push, timber, but Les Dawson of Uniblock doesn’t so much want to blow your house down as revolutionise the way you build it.

In many ways, Uniblock is a perfect good news story that chimes with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to get more social housing built across the North of England and opening a factory in Scunthorpe, still reeling from the closure of British Steel.

Dawson, 56, also shows that you don’t have to be a bearded hipster living in Shoreditch to have a cutting-edge start-up idea. His Uniblock system slashes the amount of time it takes to put up the walls of a new home from six weeks to under a fortnight. Rather than painstakingly laying brick by brick, Uniblock uses concrete-filled sandwiches of high-density polystyrene, which is quicker and easier to build with and offering greater heat insulation.

>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Andy Roberts, Weekly10

Dawson spent 14 years in the Army having taken part in the Falklands War and then ran several businesses in Asia for 15 years before returning to England. “When I came back to the UK seven years ago, I was a bit of a loss as to what to do,” he admits.

He saw an opportunity in 2016 to license Uniblock for 25 years from its Canadian developer, Polycrete. Uniblock’s Inserted Concrete Form (ICF) technology has already been licenced for the French market and licensor Saint-Gobain owns a factory in Norway producing blocks.

ICF has been around since the early 1960s, predominantly being used in North America and on the Continent, and Dawson saw an opportunity to launch the block in the UK market.

The UK housing construction market is 70 per cent brick and block, 20 per cent timber frame, and just 10 per cent other, of which ICF represents 2 per cent. However, in the USA, ICF is 10 per cent of the house build market, “so the size of the UK market should be huge,” says Dawson.

“I thought with a pedigree like that, launching in the UK market would be extremely easy,” he says.

>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Nick James, Bedfolk

What Dawson underestimated was the conservatism of the UK construction industry. He spent a couple of years toiling away as a one-man-band, trying to convert minds but found it extremely hard going. Until he won The Start-Up Series, that is.

Dawson became a Start-Up Series winner in November 2018 and has received £250,000 of investment so far through a mixture of Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) and Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) money from The Start-Up Series Fund, along with expert mentoring from Worth Capital.

Apart from the validation that came after having slogged away on his own for so long, the Start-Up Series investment has enabled Dawson to open his own factory in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire and to dramatically ramp up the amount of production he can do.

Uniblock is on track to be used in five planned housing estate developments over the coming year, bringing affordable, state-of-the-art and eco-friendly housing to some of England’s most deprived areas.

How important was winning The Start-Up Series funding and what has Worth Capital done for your business?

Initially, the investment allowed me to create a much-needed website and underlined that I wasn’t actually going mental! Somebody else out there thought this was a business idea that had potential. It wasn’t just the money; it was the moral support from Worth Capital, which I still appreciate today. It’s that validation, the recognition of the six years of hard work which had gone into it and got us to where we are today.

Further along, the investment from The Start-Up Series Fund has enabled Uniblock to establish its own manufacturing plant in Scunthorpe, producing the blocks rather than importing them. We currently have eight full-time staff, but we plan to expand that to 40 across two shifts.

Apart from the equity investment, how has winning the competition affected Uniblock?

Having Worth Capital co-founder Matthew Cushen on the board, with his in-depth knowledge of marketing, meant he could help advise and steer me when we had another investment offer. He helped me with selling equity in the business to property developer Paul Rothwell, who had the foresight to see the benefits of building with Uniblock.

‘If you truly believe in what you’re doing and work hard at it, you can make it happen’

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business?

When the pandemic hit, I was quite concerned that our factory had to be following correct social distancing procedures. However, since lockdown, we have been working in a totally secure controlled environment. To be honest, the impact of COVID-19 has been minimal. If anything, it’s been a positive.

What changes have you had to make because of coronavirus?

When the Government announced that flammable building materials could not be used in buildings over 11 metres tall, our project portfolio needed to mirror the current changes. The pandemic has given our business the breathing space to optimise processes and get stock in place ready for the release of lockdown. COVID-19 has enabled us to optimise those factory processes and catch up on production so that we’ve got stock. It’s been extremely fortunate timing for us. We would not have been able to do that without Covid, changing over from high-rise to housing projects.

What is the outlook for Uniblock now?

At the moment we’re negotiating contracts on delivering numerous contracts nationwide all using Uniblock. Empire currently has a pipeline of 3,702 new build units across 18 developments in Yorkshire, the North West and Northumberland.

Plus we’re starting work with the Government’s housing accelerator Homes England to build houses in our home town of Scunthorpe, where we’re working with North Lincolnshire County Council. They’re very excited because it’s a large-scale home building manufactured locally.

It’s hard for everybody at the moment. But there’s worse things that have happened to us all and we’ve all just got to get on with it and drive forward. If you’re a start-up, nothing is ever easy but if you truly believe in what you’re doing and work hard at it, you can make it happen.

Further reading

Small Business and Worth Capital partner to relaunch The Start-Up Series — with £250,000 equity funding up for grabs each month!

The post What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Les Dawson, Uniblock appeared first on Small Business UK.

Andy Roberts started out as a developer, working with artificial intelligence and machine learning technology throughout his career. Several years later, while managing a team of 50 people, he came up with the idea for his business.

Frustrated by ineffectual annual reviews and anonymous surveys, he put his knowhow into creating Weekly10, an employee engagement and performance software platform measured in weekly sessions.

Companies, particularly those in the legal and accountancy sectors, really took to the software. And in recent months, the accelerated move towards remote working has seen a transformation in clientele for the business.

In February 2019, Andy entered The Start-Up Series competition and he bagged the funding for Weekly10. We caught up with him to learn more about the business and how The Start-Up Series has been invaluable to him.

Tell us about yourself and how you launched Weekly10.

Before Weekly10, I worked across different industries in the software sector.

We were always told by HR and senior management to run performance reviews every year and encourage people to do engagement surveys, but the most frustrating thing as a senior manager was the fact that performance reviews were once a year. There was no other framework during the year to provide feedback and manage performance. And although I was relatively proactive, a lot of my peers just saw it as a tick box exercise to go through.

What I started to do in the last company I worked in was send out a weekly meeting invite. People would just check in and provide responses to some simple questions. My team really engaged with it.

Off the back of that I started to develop a platform and then tested it out to the MVP (minimum viable product). At that stage, I brought in my co-founder, Alistair. I wanted to get another angle on it and see how he would develop the sales side.

As the interest started increasing, I needed to make a decision about leaving my career and going full-time with Weekly10. So, in November 2018, I gave up my job and just committed to not paying myself for the next year and giving it a really good go. It was during that period that we entered The Start-Up Series.

What kind of opportunities did winning The Start-Up Series competition create?

I guess there are a few things in there. Winning a competition provides good exposure, there’s no doubt about that. We have been able to utilise Worth Capital’s network. It’s useful from a collaboration perspective with other start-ups, and we often talk to some of the other portfolio companies as well, asking advice on stuff they’ve done. From a peer perspective, that’s been great.

That opens up quite a lot of opportunities aside from the support that we get, particularly from Matt [from Worth Capital] because he’s on our board, around the ongoing progress of the business and supporting that moving forward.

How has COVID-19 affected your business?

COVID-19 has been a double-edged sword for us. With the clients that we had lined up, there was obviously some impact in that people were furloughed and doing various other things. The legal sector, for example, is a strong sector for us. It pretty much stopped overnight: there were no completions going in for houses, not many contracts being exchanged, so we had some challenges there.

However, the trend has been moving towards more remote working anyway, people being more dispersed within their work. COVID-19 has accelerated that. Weekly10 can work brilliantly within a remote network. In a way, it’s been an opportunity for the business because it provides us with more clients who are really in need of a solution in the short-term.

We’ve not furloughed anybody – we’ve hired staff. We’ve actually seen sales growth over this period and some of it’s been quite significant.

How about how about post pandemic? What are your goals and your priorities?

The first thing is increasing the amount of coaching and support that we provide through the platform. This is very much around advising and coaching managers within the platform about how to give effective feedback.

We also have a people scientist that works with us. He engages with our clients on an ongoing basis, but we’re trying to make more of that into the core platform. We’re looking at using machine learning for doing a lot of that.

The second element is integration. We’re continuing to develop our integrations, especially Microsoft Teams, and we aim to have pretty much all the functionality from the core platform within Teams by the end of the year.

We are currently going through another round of hiring, so we’d expect to maybe have a two to three new staff members by the end of calendar year.

And then finally, I’d say around the analytics, we’ve got some exciting projects that are ongoing. We have one European-funded project at the moment with the Welsh Government.

One of the biggest things to come out of this project, which we’ll be pushing to production soon as well is around attrition prediction. What we’re able to do is using machine learning and using the data in Weekly10, purely the data and nothing else, we’re able to predict the risk of something leaving an organisation six months before they leave, to an accuracy of 70 per cent.

Coming out of post COVID, we don’t see the work environment changing massively. With a lot of the clients we speak to, if they are moving back to the office, it’s going to be on a hybrid approach, at least until probably the middle of next year.

And beyond that, we think the culture has changed within organisations. Within our own, we don’t expect people in. Even if we all went away tomorrow, we’d still expect that people want to work from home two or three days a week.

Anything else you’d like to say about The Start-Up Series?

What I would say about The Start-Up Series generally is that there’s value in the whole process – even the people that don’t win will get a lot out of it.

Worth Capital gave us a lot of ideas in the deep-dive meeting. It’s not a typical pitch – it’s more of a chat, but deeper. You’re not just going in there for a coffee. I mean, it is really going into your business in detail, but it’s in an informal way. I think it’s a safe environment for you to go through the warts and all and see what they think about it.

Secondly, they continue to support us. We had a board meeting yesterday and Matt had been knocking together some spreadsheets around the KPIs that we wanted to track, and it would have taken me days to come up with what he did, but he was able to get his hands dirty and get something together for us.

The whole process has been very positive.

Read more

Small Business and Worth Capital partner to relaunch The Start-Up Series — with £250,000 equity funding up for grabs each month!

The post What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Andy Roberts, Weekly10 appeared first on Small Business UK.

Engaged couple Nick and Jo James were finding the experience of shopping for bedlinen extremely frustrating when they hit on the idea for Bedfolk.

Traditionally dominated by one or two department stores, Nick and Jo decided to set up an online business exclusively selling the finest cotton sheets, duvet covers and pillowcases. They are inspired by other online vendors who specialise in one bespoke product, such as Harry’s razors.

James says: “For a product you spend a third of your life in, it seemed ripe for disruption, getting better quality at better prices.”

The couple spent a year researching the bedlinen market, trying to source the best suppliers. The couple spent their honeymoon romantically or not, depending on how you see it, visiting textile factories in Portugal before settling on one in particular.

James says: “We go and do the hard work to find the best materials and the best makers and because we’re online we can do it at a fraction of the traditional luxury retail price.”

The couple, who like many entrepreneurs were working full time while pursuing their start-up dream, sold their London flat to raise working capital and persuaded a Portuguese bedlinen factory to let them place a minimum order. Having moved to a rented cottage in the Cotswolds, their sitting room became a bedding warehouse when the pantechnicon arrived with their first order.

“Building a start-up is a bit like jumping out of a plane and sewing the parachute on your way down,” James jokes.

Bedfolk launched in 2018 selling three types of cotton bedding styles, adding a new linen range only four months ago.

The couple were funding themselves until they won the Worth Capital Start-Up Series funding competition in March 2019. A month later, the Fund invested an initial £90,000 in the online bedding site, before coming back with subsequent investments.

Here Nick James talks about what difference having Worth Capital on board has made to Bedfolk, what effect COVID-19 has had on the business, and their plans for the future.

How important was winning The Start-Up Series funding and what has Worth Capital done for your business?

Well, the first thing having Worth Capital’s investment meant was that we could go full time and pay ourselves a small salary. It gave us certainty and meant we could put 100 per cent into the business and give it the love it needed to accelerate it. Launching Bedfolk as a side hustle was hard work, plus we had put all our money into developing it. (We got some raised eyebrows from our parents when we did that.) The other thing I quickly realised is that it doesn’t matter if you have the most amazing product, if you don’t have marketing budget and brand building. Marketing is the lifeblood for a new brand and the Worth investment allowed us to invest more heavily in this area.

Apart from the equity investment, how has winning the competition affected Bedfolk?

We have had a lot of support outside of just investment. Being a founder can be lonely. The cash is great but also the non-financial support Worth Capital gives you. Typically venture capital funds have lots of ex bankers or management consultants and the support they offer often feels more arm’s length, whereas Matthew Cushen and Paul Soanes, the co-founders of Worth Capital, have both been in business. Matthew worked at Woolworths, John Lewis and IKEA and, as a pair, they are not afraid to roll up their sleeves.

What advice would you have for anyone who wants to enter The Start-Up Series?

Even if they don’t invest, Worth is really good at giving feedback, which you can use to grow your business or become more investment ready. That said, investment isn’t for everyone. It comes with stress and pressure, and an expectation of rapid growth. There are other ways of funding your business and equity investment is not a silver bullet.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business?

We have been lucky despite the coronavirus. We operate in a market that has probably benefited because of lockdown. You read about people spending less money going out and instead upgrading their immediate surroundings. We’ve seen an increase in demand because of that. The pandemic has accelerated the shift from physical retail to e-commerce. From a blunt growth and sales perspective, COVID-19 has been a positive for us as a business.

What changes have you had to make because of coronavirus?

Well, we took on our first full-time staff apart from Jo and myself in February and, all of a sudden, we’re all working from home because of the pandemic. On the other hand, we have not furloughed anyone. In fact, we’ve just hired someone else and are just finalising our fourth new member of staff.

What is the outlook for Bedfolk now?

Our plan over the next 12-18 months is to continue growing our customer base here in the UK. There’s a huge market and so many people don’t yet know the joys of Bedfolk bedding. We’re also planning to launch more products to complement our bedding range, including quilts and throws in the autumn, and, beyond that, ancillary products such as towels, pyjamas and dressing gowns.

Further reading

Small Business and Worth Capital partner to relaunch The Start-Up Series — with £250,000 equity funding up for grabs each month!

The post What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Nick James, Bedfolk appeared first on Small Business UK.

Sara Davies, 35, is the latest – and youngest – dragon to join hit BBC show Dragons’ Den.

Davies began her entrepreneur journey while still at the University of York, where she graduated with a First in business management. She founded Crafter’s Companion, a crafter’s supply company, as a student. During a placement at a tiny craft company, she spotted a gap in the market for a tool which could create bespoke envelopes for handmade cards. With help from her retired engineer father, she designed a product called The Enveloper, going to a TV shopping channel to sell it. She sold 30,000 units within six months. By the time she graduated, her business was turning over £500,000.

 Today, Crafter’s Companion turns over £35m and exports to more than 40 countries globally, employing over 200 people worldwide.

 In addition to appearing as a dragon, Sara Davies continues to run her business with her husband Simon and has two small children.

>See also: Piers Linney: ‘I was one of the first to do real tech on Dragon’s Den’

#1 – Don’t let emotion drive your business

One of my biggest learnings was when we were turning over £2m a year and stationery giant Helix copied my product. I immediately reached for my solicitor and what I then realised with law was that once you’re in, you’re in. Our legal costs rose to £250,000 giving me sleepless nights and, in hindsight, we could have lost the entire business because of an emotive decision I made. Eventually Helix settled out of court and withdrew its product. But the thing it made me realise was not to be so emotional about things.

#2 – Realise your limitations

My husband Simon quit his job as an accountant to help me run our business, and the first thing he said was, ‘You’re not to look over my shoulder. As an entrepreneur, you need to realise you’re not good at everything. Realise your limitations and delegate to people who are better at specific parts of your business.

#3 – Offer a taste for free but don’t cut prices

If you’re a freelancer offering a service, give your prospective client a taste for free and then charge them the full price if they want. Don’t offer yourself on the cheap from the start. You need to give them a sample of what they’re going to get.

#4 – Don’t be shy to ask for advice

Every business has the same problems and people love to talk about their experiences. Don’t be unconfident in asking for advice.

#5 – Champion your positives

As a working mum, I do get overstretched sometimes when it comes to, say, attending the kids’ school events. Rather than beat myself up about it, I compartmentalise my life so that when I am with my children, I’m 100-per-cent with them. The email gets switched off. And if you do miss something, rather than focus on the negatives, you need to champion your positives. Don’t chastise yourself. What I don’t do is smush work and family together – otherwise you won’t do anything very well.

#6 – Don’t let being a woman define you

Something my fellow dragon Deborah Meaden on Dragons’ Den told me was, ‘If anybody talks to me about being a woman in business, I tell them, no, I’m in business.’ Don’t let yourself be defined by your gender.

#7 – Try and grow your company using your own money

Where possible, always try to grow your company using your own money as this way you are guaranteed to stay in control. By taking on equity investors you lose this control and will inevitably end up making compromises.

Sara Davies was being interviewed by fellow Dragons’ Den panelist Theo Paphitis as part of his annual #SBS Small Business Sunday event in Birmingham, which celebrates its 10^th anniversary this year.

To take part in #SBS follow Theo Paphitis on Twitter and tweet him about your business every Sunday between 5-7:30pm. Theo retweets six businesses each week on Mondays at 6pm, giving them a free marketing boost.

Further reading

Entrepreneur Q&A: ‘Going on Dragons’ Den fast-tracked business growth’

The post Sara Davies of Dragons’ Den 7 tips for small business appeared first on Small Business UK.

The 3D creation market is growing fast and businesses are eager to get involved.

We chat with Daniela Paredes Fuentes, co-founder of Gravity Sketch, to find out more about her business.

How did Gravity Sketch come about and what is its USP?

Gravity Sketch came about off the back of a university project.

During my studies at The Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, I met Oluwaseyi Sosanya, my Gravity Sketch co-founder. We discovered a shared interest in how spatial intelligence can enable designers to quickly and easily visualise and conceptualise their designs.

With this focus, we developed a 3D creation tool which evolved into Gravity Sketch. Recognising that it had the potential to become a viable commercial solution for designers, we started the business and ran it in parallel with our last year at university.

Gravity Sketch is now one of the fastest-growing 3D creation start-ups, providing designers with a tool to quickly and easily create in 3D.

Who is your target audience?

We operate a B2B model targeting multiple sectors including automotive, concept arts and education. However, the reality is that anyone who is interested in design would be able to use Gravity Sketch as a 3D creation tool.

How did you secure funding for the business?

Since starting the business, we have raised a total of $1.7m over four rounds, with the last one being a seed round. The investment has come from a combination of grants (both government and non-government) and venture capital funding.

Learn how entrepreneur, Michael Rossman, secured seed funding

What challenges do you face in running your business?

There are many challenges that we face in running the business – both product/technology and business-wise. For instance, we are operating in an era where technology is changing on a daily basis. We need to be constantly evolving our software to keep up with how technology is advancing while simultaneously delivering the right experience to our users.

“We need to be constantly evolving our software to keep up with how technology is advancing”

Running a business is also a challenge, although we have a team of experienced advisors who ensure that we are following the right path and challenging ourselves and our ambitions. Adoption is another challenge. We know that our tool enables designers to create in a much more immersive way than traditional tools. However, there is a whole education piece involved in getting designers to switch from what they have used for years to some entirely different technologies.

The biggest challenge is that we are competing with industry giants. We usually find ourselves in conversations where we are the only start-up.

This is one of the things that motivates us the most – a David vs Goliath sort of thing.

Gravity Sketch has community-based sketches on Instagram. How do they help your business?

Instagram has such a massive audience, reaching people from all walks of life.

Having community-based sketches on Instagram not only opens us up to new customers using the tool but it also shows just how easy it is to design using Gravity Sketch and the truly professional work that can come from using the tool.

 

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Concept Vehicle by @causelovesky . Here are some #screenshots directly from the #application. . . #gravitysketch #gravitysketchvr #VR #artist #art #3d #vehicledesign #virtualreality #sketch #sketching #3dsketch #vrdesign #design #concept #conceptdesign #scifi #productdesign #oculus #oculusrift #design #cardesigndaily #cardesign #ConceptCar #concept #sketchbook #cardesignworld #transportationdesign #electric

A post shared by Gravity Sketch (@gravitysketch) on Jun 7, 2018 at 4:44am PDT

Instagram helps us communicate with our users and interact with the ever-growing Gravity Sketch community of over 8000 prosumer (someone who consumes and produces a product) users out there. For our company, user feedback is one of the most important things in our day-to-day business. We make decisions based on feedback and Instagram helps us communicate with our community.

What are your business goals over the next five years?

Over the next five years we have many things that we want to achieve.

I’ll give you a few examples: expanding our product range to target new sectors; growing both our business and our team; building brand awareness in priority and emerging markets; and ultimately creating the most flexible product for delivering more creative workflows.

The good news is that things are looking very positive. We are already increasing headcount, we have some strong deals in the pipeline and the user feedback is consistently good. We hope and believe that with the right determination and focus that Gravity Sketch will continue to go from strength to strength.

The post Entrepreneur Q&A: Daniela Paredes Fuentes, co-founder of Gravity Sketch appeared first on Small Business UK.

PRESS is proving to be successful in a market that is increasingly health-conscious, but how has it beat the burgeoning competition?

We ask the company’s co-founder, Ed Foy, about trying to be more active on social media and the logistics of running a pop-up with a cast-iron bathtub.

How did company come about and what is USP?

Georgie and I were living in New York and LA respectively for around five years and we’d both seen the rise of cold-pressed juice. Companies were adding convenience to high-quality products where customers are not necessarily having to blend at home using a blender that ends up in the back of the cupboard after three weeks.

PRESS started by looking at the success of cold-pressed juices in America and Australia, saying, ‘Look, we think the British public should have that’.

I think the USP, though it sounds corny, is that nutrition really can change lives. Obviously, it is an elevated product – the price point is £2.99-£3.99.

We’re always trying to bring the price down because it creates a bigger market for us. I did an MBA at Harvard and always thought about business culture and what we could do with it and I always wondered how you construct the culture.

The people running the company set the precedent by the way they behave. That is absolutely in-line with the way you eat and exercise – but we avoid preaching; we’d rather be teaching.

It’s about living a balanced life – of course you’re going to want to go out for drinks on a Friday night and there’s nothing wrong with that. Be good when you’re being good and avoid being too bad when you’re being bad.

I have a normal life and, like a lot of people that start businesses, you need to have a lot of energy. I’ve always said yes to everything and that includes going to a friend’s birthday and having too much to drink on occasion. But I’m back in the gym in the morning, I’m eating the right things on the day-to-day and a lot of people understand this.

The conversation we’re having is for people who want to make generally healthy lifestyle changes or for more moral reasons. It’s just being more real about the whole thing. I think accessibility when you’re making change is key.

Do you reflect the brand lifestyle in your personal social media accounts?

Being frank – I’m very bad. You look at the frequency of my posts over the last four or five years and you can see that I’m not good at posting on a regular basis. I’ve tried to post more over the last month because my team said that they wanted to see me post more content about myself. It’s more fun for the brand and people like to engage with you as a business owner.

As easy as it is to hate on influencers, I have so much respect for the good ones. It’s tiring to constantly be documenting stuff while you’re running your own business. For me, I try to live an honest Instagram feed for things that are relevant to PRESS when I’m doing them. I don’t live my life through social media and Instagram in terms of personal relationships. I’ve just tried to start being more active and doing more video content which is fun – it’s just a case of remembering to do it.

 

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Me at @press_london Piccadilly Circus #makingmuppetlookeasy

A post shared by edwardfoy (@edwardfoy) on Oct 26, 2018 at 12:11am PDT

Why did you decide to open a pop-up with a bathtub?

Opening a pop-up is effectively testing the market. We want to know where we could sell the bottles. The thing about cold-pressed juice is that the process and ingredients are costly. Will a customer perceive the value of all that juice when arguably you could go and buy a Tropicana?

The bathtub itself was £65 and we bought it off Gumtree. It was cast-iron and so heavy. We put it on wheels and that was helpful, but I did almost lose a finger a few times.

We needed to make this fun and – having worked in the States on consumer goods and retail – you need to make it a fun experience that’s not focused around the transaction, particularly with customers in England.

I think we’re a harder customer in terms of engaging with strangers but we’re getting better; we’re quite reluctant to walk up to something with sales.

“This was the worst month of my entire life. I had no sleep and it was horrifyingly tiring”

If I was in a gas station in America, they would always have drinks on ice. It was interesting. Even when you’re not in for a can of Coke, you see it glistening on the bathtub of ice and you’re probably going to grab one.

We thought about how we were going to communicate the freshness of the product, so we got the ice delivered every day with disastrous consequences. It involved having to drain the bath and loads of nightmare things that you don’t even think about at the beginning.

This was the worst month of my entire life. I had no sleep and it was horrifyingly tiring.

What did you do about funding?

Both Georgie and I had savings and we had a little help from family for our first shop in Soho. We were both working full-time right up to the first pop-up due to the nature of our jobs. She had her own business and I was doing consulting at the time. I just wish I’d done it when I was 22 rather than when I was 32.

To anyone going into any retail space, the problem is that you’re an unknown tenant. Some landlords are kind and want you to thrive, so they’ll give you a small deposit. But if they want six months’ deposit and then you’ve got to factor in a fit-out of the shop and everything else, it limits what you can afford.

If you’re in a retail business – and you can’t afford the right location – you’ll never have a chance, purely because you couldn’t economically open in the right spot. Loads of businesses open and close because they don’t open in the right place.

We opened our first store and it was successful, albeit stressful. We were making products on-site.

The head of food at Selfridges just randomly walked past the shop one day and asked for our email address. They were reviewing what they had in the food hall.

We got an email back saying that they really want a juice concept. They said they had a meeting the next day at 12 and if we could get something across so Georgie and I sat up and pulled together an 85-page slideshow overnight. They said they’d never seen anything like this sent to us for a concession opportunity and asked us to come in. I managed to blag my way through the meeting with all these people.

You cannot underplay how important being attached to a brand like Selfridges is. I’m still surprised – when you speak to a buyer at, say, Waitrose, and tell them we have a store at Selfridges. It gives us a leading-retailer edge.

“Dreaming big, because what’s the point otherwise?”

You can always look back and say you made your luck, but I suppose it’s putting the effort in too. When you get the opportunity, then you take advantage of it.

You have The Squeeze magazine as a side publication – what does it add to the business?

We did end up getting an angel investor after a year and a half and one of the things that their job is to question resources – what are you doing and why are you doing it? The magazine is something they questioned before, particularly in terms of resource and effort. What we’ve shown is the amount of online revenue we’ve driven by people clicking through.

Everyone’s got a blog, so we refuse to call The Squeeze a blog because it undersells the quality of the production that we put in. We just thought that we’ve got all these cool stories from these cool people, so could we share it on an email?

Then I said that we should actually be a media source and our goal – dreaming big, because what’s the point otherwise? – that we have a whole floor of a press tower.

I’d love to have that as a legitimate magazine that ended up being printed.

How do you set yourself apart from the competition?

In terms of competing, you have to build a brand and content that people can relate to. Our social media guy says that people follow people, not brands. Whether that’s me or our retail team, we need to show our drive and passion behind businesses.

Shooting behind the scenes at Paris Fashion Week would’ve been crazy – everything was kept mystique. Today people love that stuff. They’re interested. You’ve also got to realise that attention spans are short, so you’ve got to make it fun and entertaining. Weirdly, you’ve got to be an entertainer in a product business. That’s certainly new for small brands like us.

 

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Pretending to help whilst posing with team @lunch with @press_london bathtub #bathtub #greenjuice #lunch

A post shared by edwardfoy (@edwardfoy) on Sep 21, 2018 at 6:55am PDT

What are you doing to prepare for Brexit?

We talk about Brexit extensively. In a purely apolitical business sense, the frustration is that you just don’t know – not only what the outcome will be and whatever side of the coin things land on, what will that imply.

The only thing we have done is built a monthly look at pound strength against the euro into our year’s forecasting. We’ve accepted that there’s going to be a margin erosion month-by-month as we go through the year. That’s the reality of the circumstances regardless if it’s in or out.

We are launching in Europe at the moment – and we’re going in with a bit more vigour.

The reality that’s bigger than that is that there could be a recession on the way, whether we’re in or out. I think that’s more likely and it’ll have an effect.

Do you have any advice for entrepreneurs in a similar position?

If you’re not a finance person, make sure your first employee is someone who knows the numbers. The numbers seem like the boring bit while the sales are everything, but that’s not true.

“If you don’t give up, the others will”

What’s interesting about the two-year survival rule is that just by surviving longer than other people – sometimes they have nightmare moments that they weren’t expecting to happen – sometimes they get luck that they don’t attribute to luck.

There were five or six credible businesses at the beginning of our business and slowly they went under – it could be because there wasn’t enough appetite to keep going or they weren’t financially managed the right way. As they fell over, it just created opportunity and space in which we can grow.

So, the key is not to give up – if you don’t give up, the others will. You’ll thrive because you’re the last man standing.

The first two years were the worst in my life because of stress. My quality of life has never been worse; I went through my own mental health issues. Two years on, I have the best job in the world.

The post Entrepreneur Q&A: Ed Foy, co-founder of PRESS appeared first on Small Business UK.