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Financing

All from my back pocket to be honest. I've had a successful career over the years. I've made sure I've been financially secure in terms of how I save. This new business has been financed by me. We're quite close to going towards seeking venture capital money. I'm trying to push that a little bit further down the timeline. I think it's a little early now, but I've got people encouraging me to do that.

To be honest, with these businesses, like an Ed-Tech startup, given the proliferation of technology and software as a service, the costs of building something isn't particularly expensive. It's not like I've got to go and spend hundreds of thousands of pounds. We've got a website, we've got an iOS app, an Android app and we've got a huge amount of digital content. The bulk of which has been built at home. We use artificial intelligence to help us construct the content and also record the content. We're using things like digital avatars - where I write a script and press a button and then the technology creates a video with somebody speaking it.

If you want you can call it deep fake technology, for want of a better word, which I think makes it sound a little bit riskier than it actually is. It's that level of technology that creates a huge amount of scale in your production process. So, someone like me can create a lot of content very quickly.

I guess what my skill is, I was a nine times number one ranked analyst in my world. That's the unique selling point. I have the ability to create the content intellectually, and then there's the technology that allows me to tangiblise it - if that's even a word! But create product off the back of it.

Growth Curve

What was the first six months of doing the business like? You know, it was okay. It was just a lot of hard work and this is the fourth business I've set up. I'm kind of used to the process of there being a lot of hard work for literally no reward. But what you have is your vision of what you want to achieve, and then you're trying to get to the point of having a critical, massive product that is obviously not complete, but is good enough to show people without having to embarrass yourself about the fact that it is incomplete.

Actually, this one is better than I expected it and quicker than I expected it. I think a lot of that was to do with the value of my network. I didn't realise how many people I knew and how if I dropped an email to somebody, quite often those doors would open for me. Which is very different to, let's say 10, 15 years ago when I was a younger guy. I would make a phone call or try and get in somewhere, and nobody paid me much attention. Whereas having had a pretty successful last 9 or 10 years in the corporate world, the value of that network has been fantastic. But it's really hard work.

People like me who set up these businesses tend to be quite obsessive. So, trying to draw that line on a work-life balance when the work is like a hobby and it's fun, and life's fun and it's a hobby and that it all becomes together.

There are many evenings where it's 1:00 AM and I need to go to bed because I'm up at seven. Some days, I'll work 15 hours a day, and then other days, like today, it's quite good fun. I'll probably do a couple hours of work, and I'll go out to lunch, then we'll do this interview.

That's where I think the balance is quite nice because there's a real danger of mental burnout with these types of things if you're not careful. I am constantly coaching myself to avoid overdoing it because it's so easy to get so self-absorbed in these things.

Challenges

I think it's the idea of getting balance in your life because I love what I do. I don't have to commute anywhere for what I do. I literally go downstairs, and I have a study at home. I am constantly coaching myself to take a break or two. To not work too hard or anything like that.

I think one of the best things I did was I joined a gym, and I haven't got a history of being a good gym kind of person, but the gym allows me to work really hard during the day and then kind of late afternoon just disappear down there for a couple hours and just decompress. I think that's the hardest thing, just trying to find that balance. I think a lot of people that set up their own businesses are quite obsessive and I'm definitely one of those.

Highlights

What do I enjoy most about owning my own business? It's the flexibility. It's the fact that most days I start work at say, 7 or 8:00am because that's when my son leaves for school. So, I want to see him before he goes to school. But it's the fact that there is flexibility. There's not a definite structure. I might work till midday, disappear for a few hours, work from 4:00pm till 7:00pm, disappear for a couple hours, maybe do an hour or two before bed. It's flexibility, it's agility.

So again, going back to the fact that being an Ed-Tech platform, we're constantly experimenting. I don't have to go through an approval process. I just get a credit card out, and then I have a go at something, and if it works, it works.

If it doesn't, we cancel it. We go and look at something else. So those two together just give me a lot of feeling of freedom and control over what I'm doing and making sure that I don't go OTT on the amount of effort that I put in. I just make sure that work-life balance is there.

Advice

You've got to find something that you're absolutely passionate about. You've got to have good ideas. I think you've got to surround yourself with good people. Even though our business is quite small, we have a board of senior advisors who advise me, and these are people I've worked with over the years. So I think you’ve got to have a good product and good people around you, but the underlying aspect of it is you've got to have something that you're passionate about because of the emotional ups and downs you'll go through where, one day I'm thinking we're going to take over the world and the next day it's like, oh my goodness, where's the next penny going to come from? So, the emotional swings can be quite dramatic, but if you've got that underlying passion and belief in the product, that's what sees you through that process.

Using 1st Formations

I think this time around, I knew 1st Formations because I set up a company through them, probably around 2014 or 2015. I knew them already and it was just easy. The website is very easy to operate. It's very cost-effective as well. You get quite a lot of service for the subscription that you pay. But it was just easy, that was it; easy, clean, did the job, and communication's been very good. It's great to have the registered office in Covent Garden. It just did everything it says on the tin without any complication or slip-ups.

Company Formation Process

The process of setting up the business online through the website was incredibly straightforward. It was a couple of clicks. It was click this, click this. What additional services do you acquire? When I acquire a registered office, I want the post to be forwarded to my operational address. It must have taken me less than 10 minutes, I reckon, to get the whole thing set up and incorporate the business. Then the documentation just comes through in the post and online. It was just simple.

One service I use at 1st Formations is the Registered Office. It’s pretty good for us because it's nice to have that WC2 Covent Garden address. I use the Full Company Secretary Service - they look after all the admin to do with running the business. This means I can do share transfers, I can change the capital structure of the business, etc. They forward all business post to my operational address, which is my home address. And also things like confirmation statements with the tax authorities and the filing authorities, they deal with that as well. So, I've gone for a reasonably full package just because it takes that administration away from me, and admin's not my strong point. To have somebody else look after that and have those processes in place has been very useful for us.