Investor, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, Film Producer. He knows his stuff.
On the 2nd October 2019, it dawned on me that my acceptance on to the Kings 20 accelerator was really not to be sniffed at.
On this day, Professor Stefan Allesch-Taylor CBE, King’s College London’s first Professor of the Practice of Entrepreneurship, took his seat in front of King’s20 cohort of 20 (incredibly lucky) entrepreneurs with the aim to initiate us into the exciting journey that lies ahead.
Stefan has been described by the London Evening Standard as ‘one of the Square Mile’s foremost financiers’ and is internationally recognised as a leading advocate of using entrepreneurship as a force for positive social change and social mobility in the UK and Africa. Over the past 32 years, he has co-founded or invested in more than 100 new companies in 15 countries and served on boards as Chief Executive, Chairman or non-executive director in sectors including property, banking, financial services, retail, asset management, hospitality and health. But his commitment to philanthropy is most inspiring.
As co-founder and Chairman of the Afri-CAN Children’s Charity, Chairman of the award-winning British based charity Pump Aid and as Deputy Chairman of the Central London Rough Sleepers Committee, his hands are full.
It was immediately evident to me by his demeanour and towering confidence, that this man was wise. His likeness to the Headmaster (Greg Davies) in the Inbetweeners also made me chuckle, and this was only exacerbated by his sarcasm, bluntness and sometimes seat-shifting, dry humour; all my favourite traits in someone who is about to shatter any rose tinted illusions you might have about your journey as an Entrepreneur.
His no-bullshit advice aimed at making us think about how not to screw up the opportunity we are being given at the Kings College Entrepreneurial Institute struck a chord with me. Below are some of my favourite quotes and tips from that session, with some personal insights and interpretations.
“The rules are, there are no rules”.
If there was a prescribed checklist on what steps we should to take to launch and exit a successful, billion-pound business, then we would all be gazillionaires.
Oh wait.
There are.
Thousands.
Books, podcasts, online content. If you try to consume them all, it will blow your mind. Trust me, I know.
My creaking bookshelf, endless audible list and saturated notes will attest to the amount of information I have tried to absorb, digest and put into practice since the start of my enlightening adventure in becoming an entrepreneur.
The thing is, 20 months into my journey and having spoken to numerous other founders, it’s becoming apparent that there really are, no rules. The avalanche of cliched advice that has been regurgitated so many times has lost much of its impact.
As Ben Horowitz says in his book – The hard things about hard things:
It’s not enough to know the path. You must walk it.
“You’re the star of your own movie.”
How you direct your journey and the choices you make are in no one’s hands but your own. No matter what support ecosystem you have around you, you see the world through the eyes of a single character; yourself.
Your journey is watched through the lens of your individual past, your fears and your desires.
Only you know your intent and your drivers to achieve your start-up mission.
You might have a producer, or director helping to shape your scenes, but how you act, the decisions you make on how to interpret various positive and negative experiences, setbacks and the nuances of people’s reactions to you, your ideas and your vision – are completely under your control.
Whether you get punched in the face and fall gracefully, only to get up and keep swinging or decide to stay down and let the underdog win – it’s up to you.
“The skills to build your company are not the skills to run it.”
FACT: Ideas themselves don’t make money; products and services do.
Imagine. You’re a passionate, ball of energy just desperate to save the world with your vision.
You:
Step 1: Come up with an idea
Step 2: Pitch it and get funding
Step 3: Hire a team
Step 4: Come up with mantra/ vision statement and do lots of team building stuff
Step 5: Build an awesome product
Now your product is live in the big bad world. You have a handful of users. What now?
Operations…
Often seen as the less exciting part of building a business for those who are Wartime CEOs;
what does Ops entail?
Product improvements:
Continuously seek feedback.
Fix bugs, Iterate your product, Fix bugs, iterate, etc.
Continuously market your product. Work with agencies, vendors, manufacturers. Manage and maintain all those relationships.
Team management:
Manage your team. Deal with conflicts and weak links. Fall out with your co-founder. Lose sleep. Keep people motivated.
Go from main decision maker to potentially losing authority.
You now have investors, so you lose some of your oligarchic power; you hire executives and directors to oversee various functions, and now you won’t be the only voice deciding the direction of your business.
Compromise, communication and accepting guidance will be required here.
Manage finances:
Spend money, make money. Manage your cash flow. Make sure some of your cash is reinvested in the business. Don’t lose all your money. Make a profit.
Steps 1-5 are often what Entrepreneurs live for. This is the exciting part. It’s our life blood.
The operational part of running a business requires a set of skills that not every Founder CEO has.
But they can be learned (and honed, through experience). Find a Business course, online class and get yourself a mentor.
Start-up CEOs are more often than not, Wartime CEOs, not Peacetime CEOs.
“Know whether you are a wartime CEO or a peacetime CEO”
Businesses will ebb and flow during their lifecycle. If you find that you thrive during the ‘Wartime’ phase because you are problem solving, managing an immediate threat from a competitor, fighting fires, negotiating deals and are continuously under pressure then you probably aren’t the kind of person who flourishes during ‘Peacetime’.
Assume Peacetime is when you have a strong competitive edge and your Business is steadily growing.
Bliss, right?
Not always.
If you find yourself getting twitchy when you don’t have any immediate threats to your Business and you feel like you’re dying because you are not growing by being challenged, and as a result your business is not being optimised, then you might need to hand over the baton.
However, if you have the traits of both leadership styles, then ideally you will adopt the same strategy of Wartime during Peacetime and continuously disrupt your own business. Shake shit up and continuously, improve your product or services.
Be on the offensive.
Don’t plod.
Know which way you lean and if required, make the decision to fire yourself as CEO as soon as possible.
“Empower people in their roles”
The first reason why start-ups fail is due to having a crappy product no one wants (42%). The second is poor money management (running out of cash 29%). The third reason why start-ups fail is due to having a non-existent, poor performing or non-functioning team (23%). Stefan’s advises that “the thing that will decide your fate is not lack of money, its people. The sooner and the more you understand what motivates your core team the better”.
I agree.
In my 18 years of managing people, it’s always been clear that the only way to get the best out of your team is to understand the individual characteristics and motives of your key players and influencers. Putting aside the fact that your team, as a whole need to buy into your vision and mission, you must also tap into the needs and wants of the people who are spinning the plates. Understand them, trust them and then empower them to execute.
“The ability to empower people in your team means they will have respect for themselves and their achievements”. He reminds us that as Founder CEOs, “we might be great at conducting but we can’t play all the instruments.”
Stefan has had the same core team for twenty years. This is no easy feat.
He says “”Every leadership role is meritocracy” and that the secret to his success is due to him being a “master delegator”.
Trust people until you can’t.
“Don’t solve problems in a vacuum”
Even if your individual critical thinking skills rival Einstein’s, one of the key steps in problem solving is Brainstorming.
Unless you have a split personality, this is rarely a solo activity.
There are benefits to sharing the load with your team or mentors. Talking and sharing ideas and encouraging people to speak freely leads to transparent communication, it breaks down silos, it’s more likely to throw up innovative ideas and allow for a more rounded solution as the process draws on people’s part experiences.
Problem solving are one of life’s greatest gifts. You will experience personal growth and may end up in a better place than if you hadn’t been faced with the problem. Choose to make it a positive experience.
Sharpen your problem solving skills here and follow these quick steps to being problem free.
Step 1: Define the Problem (what?)
Step 2: Identify the causes or root of the problem (why?)
Step 3: Brainstorm possible solutions
Step 4: Choose the Solution
Step 5: Select a back up solution
Step 6: Create a plan to implement the primary solution
Step 7: Execute against that plan
Step 8: Follow up, evaluate and monitor your progress
Step 9: If it fails, go to your back up plan
“I’ll tell you what’s hard to get money for – a shit idea.”
Go figure.
But what’s a shit idea?
One that won’t generate take-home profits (unless you’re a social enterprise*).
What do investors look for?
Opportunities in a domain they understand
Passionate Founders with Skin in the Game
Product Differentiation/Competitive Advantage
Traction
An experienced, solid management team (with a clear edge above competition for successful execution of the idea)
Significant Market Size and opportunity for growth
Clear monetisation strategy (shareholder value)
A business that provides social impact
A business that’s morally acceptable
A clear Exit Strategy
Frankly speaking…
Most investors don’t give a shit about you. They are playing the odds.
But as the key component to holding it all together, they are definitely looking for the X Factor in any Founder CEO.
*Stefan’s advice is to think very carefully before claiming social enterprise status. There is are some real legal and moral implications with not understanding what this means, particularly in regard to the flow of monies in and out of your company. You need to be operating within the frames of the law.
You’ve been advised.
So that brings us on to your Elevator Pitch.
“Your elevator pitch is everything. Don’t be a jibber jabbering looney toon.”
“No Shakespearean acts please”, Say’s Stefan. And remember, “Investors won’t tell you if your pitch is crap or if you’re crap.”
His advice is clear.
So, drop the jargon.
If the following sounds anything like something you would say, then prepare to make some skin crawl.
“Hi, I’m Jo, CEO and Founder or Amazeballs. We make Everything amazing which is set to “disrupt” the Blah Industry.
We’ve “hacked” together our “MVP” using agile development, leveraging our “Rockstar” team who are “visionary evangelists” and we have several exciting features “on our roadmap” that are sure to scale us to be the next big “unicorn”.
We’ve “bootstrapped” until now and no longer have “bandwidth” to scale so we need the funds to ramp-up our team.
We hope you enjoyed the pitch and would love if we could “circle back” or “touch base” for a follow up.”
For your sake, and everyone else’s sanity, leave all the technical mumbo-jumbo that was once confined to hackathons and back offices, where it belongs. In the history books.
If you don’t, you will likely lose your audience in conversation.
Don’t act your role, or they will act theirs.
Be natural. Disarm them with just being yourself. Speak in the same tone and voice you would do if you were having a conversation with your mate.
What you think you know is worthless. No one cares what you think you know.
Use what you know to be true, based on real data, to disarm whoever you are talking to and if you can convince them it’s based on data that draws the same conclusion that you also came to, then you have a chance of winning.
“A lot of people you meet are going to think they know more than you because they’ve got the money” says Stefan. “They’ve already seen 100 start-ups like you in your sector”.
Your role is to nurture and educate people who are investing in you.
Basically, know your shit.
To be successful you need a high EQ.
Emotional intelligence is crucial to the success of any Founder, CEO or leader.
It’s benefits manifest in many ways but at its core it all about being able to balance the emotional and rational parts of your brain.
Having the ability to recognize and influence the emotions of others needs self-awareness, awareness of others, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills.
Putting this into practice, think about when you are pitching to an investor.
If you don’t know anything about your investor, their experiences and if you didn’t learn about what they are interested in then you’re not using your EQ.
Find out what’s important to them, find the data that aligns with what they want and who they are.
Two great books to start out with to hone your empathy and communication skills are Emotional Intelligence and Never Split the Difference.
There are ethical rules of fundraising. Do not be a conman.
Listen up. If you know you’re going to take someone’s money when you don’t believe in, or have fudged the financial forecast you’ve pitched, then you’re a conman. Simples.
People don’t mind if you screw up but they do mind if you lie or bullshit them.
Don’t get caught with egg on your face.
“Facetime is everything.”
Cold calling is for losers.
Don’t hide behind emails or calls.
There’s no excuse in 2019 to not be prepared to talk to a prospective stakeholder, advisor or investor. With the abundance of data and social media platforms out there, you can probably find out what your prospect ate for breakfast.
Prospects expect you to have done your research.
Engage them with a story, your story. Dazzle them with your personality. If you are part of an Accelerator, mention it.
Offer to go and meet them.
If they live on the other side of the world, and they are that important then tell them you will be in their City and ask them for a coffee. Once its confirmed, get on a flight.
“Success is your ability to move with Shifting tides”
It goes without saying that to be successful with anything in life you must accept change. You must be able to flow with the tides and be opportunistic when chance presents itself to you.
Be stubborn about your goals and be flexible about your methods.
Sink or swim, my friend.
On a final note, whilst not words that came directly out of Stefan’s mouth, I’d like to assume that he would agree with my suggestion that:
Nobody cares. Just fucking do it.
Be Brilliant.
Danielle
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