Start. Scale. Sell.: 75 lessons for business success
By Nick Suckley
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About this ebook
· A practical, accessible guide to the three main life stages of a business that most entrepreneurs will experience
· Learn from 75 bite-sized lessons the author learned the hard way
· Offers targeted advice for building business value and sustainability
· Pulls no punches: tells it like it is – the good and the bad.
Nick Suckley
Nick Suckley is widely regarded as one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs in digital media. Over a 20-year period, Nick has launched four digital specialist businesses and sold three of them, most recently his multi-award-winning digital media consultancy, Agenda21, to Be Heard Group Plc for £12m. Early on, he launched Media21 as one of the UK’s first digital media agencies and sold it to Grey London at the height of the dot-com boom just 18 months after its formation. He was a founding investor in digital creative hot shop Glue London (which sold to Aegis Group in 2005 for £14m) and he launched and incubated DataShaka, an analytics software business where he was instrumental in securing several rounds of VC funding from Seedcloud Ventures. Nowadays, Nick is a much sought-after consultant for media and technology entrepreneurs and C-level executives, advising them on opportunistic corporate build strategies and how to avoid the costly mistakes frequently associated with rapid growth and a changing marketplace.
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Start. Scale. Sell. - Nick Suckley
START
Chapter 1
Lessons for how to get started
Lots of people think about starting a business or company. Some do it – but, in the UK, 20% of new businesses fail in their first year and only around half will survive until their third year. I see a lot of common factors that cause young businesses to fail and I see a lot of common factors that hold rapidly growing businesses back from achieving their fullest potential. So how do you ensure success? In this section I explore the kinds of issues that founders are likely to encounter in the early days: why getting into your Founder’s Mindset is so important; why you need to understand how much demand there is for your product or service; why a well-thought-out business plan is not just a piece of boring admin standing between your idea and endless riches; how to plan; how hard to work; and how to raise external finance.
The lessons in this chapter give your business a fighting chance of success and I mean this in the wider context – there is no point having business success if you hate your life. It is also crucial to look after yourself and ensure the business works for you and not the other way around.
Lesson 1: The Founder’s Mindset. Treat yourself as self-employed even if you have a job
I have often asked myself the question of how I got started. Funnily enough, I developed a start-up mindset long before I actually started my first business. My father ran his own painting and decorating company and his advice is what really got me going: even if you have a job, think of yourself as being self-employed – you will be in a better position than most by thinking about running a business and starting to gather the funds to start up while you’re still employed.
First, what I earn and what I pay myself are different amounts. Why is this important? It separates your earnings from your income – an important distinction when running a company. Getting this mindset right is crucial, as it means the surplus can be used to do other things – even if it is just saved to be spent later. I call this is The Founder’s Mindset.
Second, if you spend less than you earn, you are building up a financial war chest. As with any company, a war chest will help you weather an unexpected storm. From my point of view, it gave me the knowledge that I could walk away from my job if I needed to. That feeling of independence is critical; often the biggest thing holding people back from starting a business is the fear of losing out on a regular income. Remove that fear and you’re far more likely to do what others only talk about. Break the cycle of being stuck as an employee by paying yourself less than you earn.
Lesson 2: It’s all about spotting the opportunity. Is there a market for what you are doing?
New opportunities will come from the unlikeliest of places. It took three eureka moments to get me to my first idea. The trick isn’t necessarily in taking advantage of them; it’s actually spotting them in the first place. How do you attune your senses to spot them? Or is it more a question of pursuing a number of interesting opportunities in the knowledge that some will work and some will fail? And of course, the most obvious failure is the company that stays on the drawing board and never gets going.
My first eureka moment came a few years after graduating. I was working in an advertising agency media department, the part that decides where ads run (eg on TV or in newspapers).
One afternoon is etched in my mind. I saw two colleagues looking intently at a PC screen and went over and asked what was going on. Right there and then, I got my first glimpse of the thing called the internet. What I saw (and can still remember) was a very beige computer and some very pixelated text and a low-resolution logo for a US bank. As eureka moments go it was not that earth-shattering, but I did walk away knowing that I had just seen something really important. I might not have realized precisely why, but there was definitely something