Thinking Business > Video Interview: Ross Wilson on the secrets of success for startups
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Video Interview: Ross Wilson on the secrets of success for startups

Ross Wilson is a director of Wilson Partners, former chairman of the IOD Berkshire and former Regional Chairman of Tenon Thames Valley. Ross has a reputation for his entrepreneurial style and love of start up businesses, and has helped countless businesses to grow and fulfil their potential. We met with Ross to learn about:

  • The most common mistakes he sees new businesses make
  • His top networking tips
  • The key metrics he believes all entrepreneurs should obsess over
  • Wilson Partners’s new online business tool, ON.TRAC

 

1. What’s the most common mistake you see new businesses making?

Well I think life is all about the people and one of the commonest mistakes I believe is not choosing the right people to be around you. And often, it’s not asking the question, and seeing whether somebody might be prepared to assist you. We introduced something, some years ago, where we may take a small interest in the business which cannot afford to pay the fees. Well, quite often what happens is the entrepreneur starts the business, they realise they’ve got to count the numbers, so they find someone that can count the numbers.

But to honest with you, I think ultimately at the end of the day, you are looking for somebody that can provide more than just the number crunching; you need advice, you need to go to people who have been there and seen it, they’re willing to give you their advice and support. In my experiences, it’s a bit like mentoring. I mean, I love mentoring, I’ve mentored three people with another organisation. It is confidential, I’m not allowed to talk to the rest of my directors about it, but I’d like to think that the results will manifest themselves in everything they do within the business and people will suddenly recognise, “Well that person did something I didn’t really expect them to do.” I think as a smaller start-up entrepreneur, just ask for help, just ask and be prepared to take in bucket loads until the person that’s offering suddenly goes, “You know what, I think I’ve helped you enough, perhaps I need to get paid for this”, and that’s what my advice would be.

 

2. What advice would you offer someone seeking to become a great networker?

 

Well I think first of all, you’ve got to enjoy networking. You’ve got to enjoy meeting people. But, a lot of people say to me, “I’m a great networker, a prolific networker.” I learned how to network because I realised it was good for business. So, I would say go on some training courses. Go and find out how best to present yourself in a group, in a room. Go and find out how to walk into a room, walk into an open three or a closed two. You probably wouldn’t touch or pick off the singleton – the danger, of course, picking off a singleton is that they may be on the road for a reason- So it comes through experience and practice and just keep practicing. Take every opportunity you can to practice pubic speaking. Do it to the mirror. I used to do lots of speeches and I stand on a Saturday morning in the office, and I present to a mirror, I presented myself because it’s so important that I know the message I’m giving is key, but the way I give it is also key.

So for for me, networking is absolutely integral, it starts with family, these are the easiest people to talk to and then it goes into the wider community and people will remember you for what you are.
I was at a function only recently with the High Sheriff of Berkshire at the Monkey Island Hotel in Bray and I walked into the room and I knew about 25% of the people who were there, which is quite amazing. I mean they were all business people and trustees of charities from the Royal Borough, but of course, I knew them because I had been out networking for many many years. There is that great phrasing about, you know, kissing frogs and I have kissed a lot of frogs. If I had the chance again, it would have been great to talk to some people early on in my career that might have helped me to avoid networking in areas that were just never ever going to bring me the kind of satisfaction, enjoyment and rewards that I was hopefully expecting.

 

3. What key metrics would you encourage a new business owner to obsess over?

 

I guess it probably depends on the kind of business it is, but, to be honest with you, you have to get very involved in certain key numbers. Profit is absolutely fundamental, cash is as important, if not more important. So I really encourage anyone in business to actually, perhaps, even do a short couple of day courses on something, learn about the basic fundamentals of what the numbers mean. It’s all very well to talk about sales and the sales have gone up last month and we’ve increased sales by three you know, times three, four the last six months. That does not necessarily give you a business which is going to be profitable, so you need to understand. You also, I think, need to understand your pricing, so it’s really important to understand “Why am I charging for this product, or this service?”, the amount I’m charging, and what’s the correlation between what I’m charging and what it’s costing me to create that offering, whether it be a product or a service? Now these are pretty straightforward things that most people, the vast majority of people will understand, if you teach them right at the outset, but you need to basically have that knowledge right through the outset.

Most businesses that I come across are started by great people, good ideas, good products, good service; but they lack something, which is why they come to us. They lack the knowledge on the numbers side, and it’s for us to make the numbers. We’ve trained for five, ten years or whatever to do numbers. What we need to do is to allow ourselves to articulate to them the key metrics that you comment. Profit, what does it mean? Cash, what does it mean? What does it mean when I look at my bank statement? I compare it with my books and records. How often do I look at my numbers? Every single day, every single week, every single month, that’s a fundamental part of the discipline, I think, of running any small business. Find someone that’s good at it, that can teach you and help you to keep it simple because we want to keep it simple, because I really want the small business to go and do what they’re best at, which is to sell, market themselves and their products and their services, but also have one eye on the numbers. Without that, then there are pretty serious chances that the company will fail, and a very high percentage of companies fail for the wrong reason, in my opinion, often to do with not understanding the key metrics that they should be measuring on a regular basis.

 

4. What is ON.TRAC and do you see it impacting your clients?

 

ON.TRAC, it is quite interesting, there’s an interesting way it came about because I was challenged by one of my directors in terms of how do I actually do what I do? I’m a business advisor. I am an accountant, pretty proud of it, but I actually like the people, the processes, much better than I perhaps I like the numbers, the pure numbers because there’s a life to them. So I was challenged with “How do I do what I do as a business advisor?” it became very obvious to me that what I was doing regularly was asking a whole series of questions.

We started off with Strategy and Management and Structure. It then moved through to Sales and Marketing. It went into HR and IT, managing Risk, funding, all of the aspects that are really important to business. If you get all of those right, the outcome, of course, is finance, you do well. So I sat down and I started off with our Excel spreadsheet because the real challenge for me here, for the firm was “What am I leaving behind when I leave this business? What is any partner of any business leaving behind in terms of real value?” So, for me, this is my opportunity to leave something behind which would be helpful in terms of training our people, helpful in terms of securing new work, thoughtful in terms of retaining existing clients, helping the corporate finance teams with their due diligence exercises, finding out more about clients before they help to go and sell those businesses.
So it started off with a spreadsheet, Excel, Word spreadsheet and I produced a questionnaire and everybody got quite excited about the questions and the responses. So, then we developed an app; we had an app developed, which again we had launched about three or four weeks ago. It’s in the validation process, but I have absolutely no doubt it’s working. we’ve already used it twice on real-life cases to help us to secure new clients. And the outputs are principally, ask a series of questions and, you know, at the end of the day, the entrepreneur has to complete the questionnaire. It will probably take them about about an hour, and if you don’t want to spend a hour of your time on, you know, your business strategy, then perhaps you’re not the firm for us. But, in every case we’ve gone to the hour spent, the results come to us, and we then create the summary of the results.
Basically, if you like, it’s gold, silver, bronze or tin and you don’t want to be tin, nobody really wants to be tin and invariably what happens is it comes up with a response and if I said to you, you’ve come up as a higher level of bronze. Your next question always is “How do I get to the next level?” Fantastic. Come into my office and I will introduce you to a whole bunch of people who are ready and willing and waiting to help you to go to the next level. And also there are certain areas of expertise. We’re not experts, you know, we’re not experts in Digital Marketing or these other things that may be required, but we have surrounded ourselves with some fantastic businesses which we would then introduce to our clients, through effectively the networking we’ve done. There are two reasons for that: one is, because of course, it helps our risk, it helps us to show up as a fantastic business which has got an ability to pull in expertise that we don’t have in-house, and the other thing, of course, is it forms fantastic relationships with those businesses that we’re collaborating with because they suddenly realise that we’re actually part of their channel to market.

I don’t know, in the last ten years we have sent around about three million pounds worth of business to our client base. Outstanding, and that may be identifying a client that needs a new office, or an office fit-out or, somebody that needed their financial services, or needed their IT looked after, all of those kind of things. So, this app suddenly has been – is a real differentiator. I am very excited about it. We are very excited about it and the senior leadership team within our business- and we aim to drive it down deeper into our business- are also very excited about it. We can’t wait to get it running and get it up and running, to a greater extent that it is, and I think within a year, we could well have actually stumbled upon an added business to our business, the opportunity because only recently we were asked by a very large group of accountants of SME accounts, of smaller practice like ourselves, between 2 and 20 partners, whether we were prepared to share our app with them, and have it white labeled. Now that just takes us into a completely different league, in terms of what the application for this could be beyond just our own business. It’s all very exciting.

 

[Transcript]

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