It’s easy to spot business success — the brand is everywhere, the founder has sold up and bought themselves a jet. But few entrepreneurs shout about their professional screw-ups — despite most admitting mistakes are where they’ve learnt to grow their companies.
Louise Hill, co-founder of children’s money app GoHenry, goes against the grain, happy to share with other founders that she found scaling-up one of the toughest parts of growing the fintech.
“There was definitely a ‘near-miss’ moment six years ago when growth at GoHenry really accelerated,” Hill, pictured, explains. “We were hiring more people and I was working flat out. But I realised I had become a roadblock. So much of what we did was either in my head, or on my laptop.
“It was creating a risk for the business and potentially stopping us from growing as quickly. So, I started a campaign across the business to identify ‘single points of failure’ — embarrassingly, I appeared in it rather a lot.”
Hill spent six months delegating to GoHenry’s teams. Now the entrepreneur will share her advice with other founders at the Standard’s event for start-ups and scale-ups, SME XPO.
“Don’t let that moment of being a roadblock sneak up on you,” is one of her pieces of advice. “Plan ahead for it; make sure that you are sharing information and delegating responsibilities right from the start. Also, don’t be afraid of hiring people who are better than you. Let it be an opportunity to bring in complementary strengths, and new ways of working. It’s often the quickest road to growth.”
Charlie Mullins, who sold his Pimlico Plumbers business for £140âmillion just over a year ago, is an expert on growth — but says his lucrative exit from his one-time start-up was “the biggest business mistake I’ve ever made”. Mullins sold up to US giant Neighbourly. But he now believes he could have taken the firm global if he had stayed at its helm.
“I don’t believe the new owner is running Pimlico Plumbers in the same way that we did — it needed to continue as a family-run business,” he says. Mullins — who is hosting a bold “ask me anything” Q&A at SME XPO — advises other entrepreneurs to “not get overwhelmed if a sale opportunity comes up”.
He adds: “When you sell a business, you’re under so much pressure, eventually you think, ‘I’ve got to get this deal wrapped up.’ But my advice is, try and hand it down to the family rather than sell — you might not realise that your family can step up and forge ahead.”
Erik M Day, senior vice-president of global small business at tech giant Dell, says his work with SMEs has shown “behind every successful entrepreneur is someone who experienced a lot of failures along the way. Those who keep going, learning, evolving, and pushing forward reach their goals. Sharing our failures is just as important as sharing our successes. Perhaps even more so. We should celebrate failures because it leads to innovation. And it helps nurture the next generation of founders”.
