Entrepreneurs

Your NOT-To-Do List

Posted on by edreidyork


The children have gone back to school, the nights are drawing in, there’s only a month until the clocks go back. Christmas has appeared on the horizon, you’ve spotted a 2020 diary in the shops…

Which means that for many of us thoughts are already turning towards plans for next year. For what you want to achieve in the year – and, by implication, what you need to do in the first quarter and first month of 2020. 

No question about it, you’ll march confidently into your office on Thursday 2nd January, pull that brand new pad towards you and – knowing exactly what you’re going to achieve – confidently write ‘To Do’ at the top.

But there’s another list you need to write. Not just for 2020, but starting now. And in my view, it’s even more important than your ‘to do’ list. 

Your ‘Not To Do’ list. 

I can still remember the shock I got the first few weeks I used Toggl and realised how much of my time wasn’t being used effectively – and how many things I was doing very definitely belonged on a not to do list. 

Despite the technological advances of modern life virtually all of us are leading busier and busier lives: perhaps because of those advances. How many of us check our e-mails just before we fall asleep? 

Add in family commitments – and for many people reading this blog, taking care of ageing parents is now starting to become a major commitment – and all of us have a seemingly endless to-do list. 

At work you need to delegate: at home you need to decide what’s really important. 

Let’s start in the office. Delegation is one of the hardest skills to learn. It is all too easy to sigh and think, ‘It’s quicker to do it myself.’ But you cannot build a business without delegation. Sometimes ‘done’ is more important than ‘perfect.’ 

And as I have written many times, it is not your job to be the best engineer, coder or salesman. It is your job to lead a team of outstanding engineers, coders and salesmen – and to help them go on improving. 

So as you contemplate your plans and targets for 2020 ask yourself – or get someone else to ask – why should YOU be doing that? And delegate what you can delegate, whether it’s to your own team, or to an outsourced specialist. Even starting a ‘not to do’ list will be a valuable exercise: it will unquestionably challenge some of your long-held assumptions about what your job really is. 

Time to come home – where exactly the same principle applies. Let me give you just one example. One of the best decisions Dav and I ever made was to hire a gardener. Andy comes for three hours a week, he cuts the grass and generally keeps the garden under control. We pay him £60 and it is a superb investment. It gives me three hours – longer, really, as I’m not as good a gardener as Andy – which I can spend with my family or simply de-stressing myself. Or yes, as has recently been pointed out to me, hacking out of the rough…

There is one final, and very important, point about your ‘not to do’ list. It doesn’t just apply to you. 

Take a look around you. Is everyone in your team seriously making the very best use of their time? Or are they doing jobs that really could be delegated, allowing them to do much more important work? 

We were guilty of this at TAB head office. Members of the team were doing admin tasks that they really shouldn’t have been doing. That wasn’t a failing: we’d simply reached one of those moments every business reaches from time to time. We’d expanded, there were new challenges, the team needed to focus their attentions elsewhere. 

So Tracey has joined us, she’s immediately picked up a whole range of admin for us and that has helped the existing members of the team to focus on what’s really important. It’s also given them some time to think – to stand back and look at the business. 

I’ve often talked on the blog about working on your business not in your business. A ‘not to do’ list helps you do that. Equally importantly, making sure all the members of your team have a ‘not to do’ list means they can sometimes work on their part of the business not – as Stephen Covey put it – constantly be ‘in the thick of thin things.’ 

And now, with exactly 13 weeks to go until we all abandon the office for Christmas, time for me to make a list…

It’s Fine to Fail

Posted on by edreidyork


Every board in TAB UK has a proud record of failure. 

What do I mean by that? Simply that the vast majority of TAB members have – at some point in their business careers – failed. It may have been a new idea, a new direction for the company, an acquisition, a new market… 

It may even have been the whole company. 

Whatever it was, it failed. It hurt – and it probably cost a lot of money. 

But the authors of those ‘failures’ now sit around the TAB UK tables, successful by any conventional definition of the word. Why? Because they realised that it was fine to fail. They realised that failure was simply a learning experience – as Churchill famously said, ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.’ 

But we all know that lesson. Failure isn’t failure, it’s just a learning experience: we’ve all heard it before. 

So let’s try and widen the debate a little. Last week I read an article in City AM about young entrepreneurs – or, more correctly, potential entrepreneurs. 

It’s not just the proverbial policeman: there’s no question that entrepreneurs in the UK are getting younger. The traditional path that most of us followed – graduate, work your way up the corporate ladder and then have your light bulb moment – is becoming less relevant. 

Today it’s graduate, start a business (or don’t-even-bother-graduating, start a business). That ‘career path’ is becoming more and more common. And unsurprisingly, the UK is attracting record amounts of tech investment, especially from the US and Asia. 

But it could be even better.

The article in City AM quotes the Entrepreneurs Network, and the attitude of British 14 to 25 year olds to starting their own business. 

85% said they had thought about starting a business, had started one already or would be open to the idea. But more than two-thirds cited fear of failure as a barrier that would stop them moving forward with their entrepreneurial ambitions. 

Two-thirds? That is a depressingly high number by any measure. 

Now we all know that being an entrepreneur is hard. There are plenty of long hours, plenty of worries and – above all – the loneliness that comes with knowing that it’s you that makes the final decision. 

But would a single member of TAB UK change that? Would a single member of TAB anywhere in the world say, ‘I’ve had enough’ and go back to the corporate world? I very much doubt it. 

Because hard as being an entrepreneur is, it is also exhilarating, exciting, challenging and immensely rewarding. 

And that’s a message we need to spread. Maybe it’s because my two sons are now both within the age-range of that survey, but I increasingly find myself thinking that older entrepreneurs need to get out there and tell their story. As it says in the article: 

If more young people were aware of business owners in their own neighbourhoods, or if more entrepreneurs visited schools and colleges, the next generation could find themselves being inspired by examples that are closer to home. 

…And a key part of telling those stories will be saying, ‘This didn’t work. We tried it, we thought it would work, but we were wrong. But we learned from our mistakes and the second time we got it right.’ 

The problem is, our education system doesn’t encourage making mistakes. I see Dan and Rory approaching important exams – followed by very important exams – and the whole focus is ‘whatever you do, get the grades.’ Now of course I want my children to do well. All parents do. But I do worry that we have a 20th Century education system preparing our kids for a 21st Century business world. 

After all, the model for many start-ups is now not ‘ready, aim, fire’ but ‘ready, fire, aim.’ The vast majority of start-ups do not need a factory, plant and investment in machinery. Laptops, a collaborative working app and regular supplies of coffee will do just fine. 

The financial cost of getting it wrong is much less than it was – but it seems that the psychological cost is still the same. 

That, I think, is where companies like TAB UK – and our members – can make a real contribution. 

Let’s get out into the world and tell our stories of failure – especially to young people. Let’s make them aware that failure is very definitely not fatal. That it’s fine to fail – and that very often, failure is just a stepping stone on the road to success. Let’s make sure we give young entrepreneurs the ‘courage to continue…’ 

A Fortnite is a Long Time in Politics

Posted on by edreidyork


I seem to do it every year. Write half the blog before I go on holiday and half as soon as I come back. This year it seemed to make extra sense to do that, given that our politicians could very easily have rendered anything I’d written at the end of July wholly irrelevant by the middle of August…

As you know I have two boys, Dan and Rory. They’re both teenagers now but we’ve never had any problems with them. They’re hard-working, dedicated and committed. Yep, even in the summer holidays. They broke up from school and immediately went straight to their bedrooms, completely focused on their future careers. 

What was that? Doctor? Solicitor? Accountant? 

Have a word with yourself. This is 2019 – and there’s only one possible career for a self-respecting teenager. 

Professional Fortnite player. Call of Duty at a pinch…

I remember reading an article maybe ten years ago. ‘Video games will take the place of traditional sport’ it boldly prophesied. Right, I thought, as if anything could replace the experience of live sport. An afternoon at St James’s Park: England vs. Scotland at Murrayfield…

And at the end of July the future arrived, as US teenager Kyle Geirsdorf won $3m (£2.49m €2.68m) as he became world champion of the computer game Fortnite. And no, I’m not insulting your intelligence. I converted it to pounds and euros simply to help me get my head round the figures. 

The total prize pool for the event was $30m – easily putting the Fortnite World Championship on a par with some of the biggest ‘traditional’ sports events. 

If you want absolute proof that the world is changing – and changing in ways we barely contemplated a few years ago – look no further than your teenager’s bedroom. 

Of course, you might well argue that the future arrived in more ways than one in that week as – to no-one’s surprise – Boris Johnson easily beat Jeremy Hunt and became our new Prime Minister. 

Johnson undoubtedly epitomises something that has been a running theme of this blog from Day 1: the job of a leader is to lead. He’s unquestionably saying, ‘That’s the direction we’re going in. Follow me.’ 

As the Spectator put it, ‘His mission, as leader, is to project confidence and optimism from the top. After three years of Mrs Dithers we need a bit of courage and guts in Number 10, a sense of purpose and a relish for attack.’ 

But – and this is a very big ‘but’ – Johnson used to be the editor of the Spectator. The magazine has not changed its political stance since and broadly reflects his views. 

I am rather less optimistic. 

Both the UK and Europe now seem to accept that leaving the EU with ‘no deal’ is the most likely outcome. Everyone who knows me is aware that I think that would be a disaster. 

So while Boris Johnson may be demonstrating leadership, it is surely factional leadership. He may be consistent in his message, but that message has no hope of uniting the country. 

Neither am I an expert on parliamentary law and precedent: but again, it seems that even democracy is going to play second fiddle to delivering an outcome whose sole concern is how it plays in a General Election.

Boris Johnson may well find himself spending Christmas in Downing Street with an increased majority, but the way that majority is achieved will, I think, do lasting damage to the political and social fabric of our country. 

Some of you, I’m sure, will disagree with me. But a blog like this has to be a reflection of the writer’s personal views. And I think there are real business lessons to be drawn from these two seemingly unrelated stories. 

What does the success of Fortnite tell us? That things are changing: they’re changing quickly and they’re changing in ways we never imagined even a few years ago. And because of that leadership is going to be more important than ever. But leadership is about more than gestures and personal popularity. It is about taking people with you and keeping the country – or your company – united in a common purpose. 

So here I am back at my desk after a week in Portugal. We’re now less than 11 weeks away from October 31stand there’ll be 4½ months left of the year. We know only two things for certain: all of us running businesses are going to face unprecedented challenges – and you’re much better equipped to meet those challenges as a member of TAB UK.

[One note of housekeeping: this post is late because of being in Portugal. I’ll be publishing the next one on August 30th, as I’m shortly off to the TAB conference in Denver. The normal fortnightly cycle will resume from September 6th.] 

Want to Grow your Business? Do Less

Posted on by edreidyork


The blog speaks, Wall Street trembles! And maybe profit does matter after all…

Two weeks ago I discussed Uber’s forthcoming IPO: 

Early estimates of $120bn have been scaled back to $90bn. But that’s £70bn – or more than 15 times the value of Marks and Spencer’s which, despite its recent problems, still made a significant profit in its last six months’ trading. 

But now Uber says it ‘may not achieve profitability.’ The company says that annual sales rose to $11.2bn and losses narrowed to $3bn. But, it warned, it expects operating expenses to “increase significantly.” 

In the event, even that lower estimate was reduced. With Uber drivers going on strike a few days before the IPO the company was initially valued at $82bn – only for the shares to fall 7% on the opening day. They have subsequently fallen even further – although that might have rather more to do with the sudden re-escalation of the US/China trade dispute than a blog written in Harrogate…

These are turbulent times, both in the UK and the wider world. Yet these are the times in which we have to build our businesses – but at the same time, keep our work/life balance well and truly balanced. 

One man who has unquestionably built a successful business is Jack Ma, the co-founder of China’s Alibaba group and estimated to be worth $40bn. 

Like many successful entrepreneurs, Jack Ma seems to have been unemployable: he was rejected by the police and was the only one of 24 applicants to be turned down by KFC. So he started his own business…

That’s great – but recently Jack Ma has been espousing the benefits of what’s termed ‘996.’ If you haven’t heard of it, 996 is simple – it’s China’s culture of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. 

“If you want to build a great company,” he says, “You have to work very hard. You have to suffer terrible things before you become a hero.” It is, apparently, a ‘blessing’ for his staff to work 72 hours a week. And he’s not alone: excessive working hours are also championed by Elon Musk of Tesla. 

You won’t be surprised to hear that they’re not championed by Ed Reid of TAB UK. Working 72 hours a week can never be a ‘blessing’ for you, your family or your staff. Throwing hours at a problem is almost never the way to solve it. Thinking ‘if I just spend more time…’ is nearly always one of the biggest mistakes an entrepreneur can make. 

Rather than Jack Ma, I prefer to look at a different example. Oscar Pierre set up a small shopping service in Barcelona in 2015. Now the company, Glovo, operates in 124 cities, employs 1,000 staff and has 1.5m shoppers. A shopping service was hardly a ground-breaking idea, even in 2015 – but by anyone’s standards that is a highly impressive growth rate. How has Oscar done it? Simple: as you’ll see in this short clip, he’s a firm believer in delegating. 

In fact, Oscar believes in delegating everything. As he says right at the start of the clip, “Make sure you walk out of all the meetings without anything assigned to you.” 

He makes a great point. If you don’t delegate you end up with such a long list of tasks and to-do’s that you become what he describes as ‘the bottleneck of your company.’ Rather than speeding things up, by taking on too much you slow things down. 

Now he says, he does the things which only a CEO can do. Everything else is done more effectively and more efficiently, while he has time to think about medium and long term strategies. The absolute opposite of ‘throwing hours at the problem.’ 

As you’ll all know, that exactly mirrors the TAB philosophy – and it’s put Oscar Pierre on Forbes’ list of 30 under 30 for Europe. 

So how do I measure up? Apart from being just a tad over 30…

With a team of six at head office it would be impossible for me to delegate everything except the ‘only I can do that’ stuff. Clearly, the boss has to be seen to be working – but I do make sure that the ‘only Ed’ stuff is right at the top of my list. And as the team grows, so I will steadily delegate more and more. 

Speaking of which, the team is growing. We’re increasing our numbers from six to eight, with one of the new people handling our every-increasing admin. Part of defining the role was to say to everyone ‘what things are you doing that aren’t core to your role, and can you delegate them?’ That effectively wrote the job description: he or she can look forward to an interesting and varied workload…

When you’re starting out, delegation is hard. You can almost certainly do whatever-it-is-you’re-delegating better and quicker yourself. But you have to let go: you have to give your team the chance to grow and – as Oscar Pierre says – ultimately your job is to do the things that only the CEO can do. 

In the long term you’ll do more by doing less. Delegation is an absolutely essential part of building your business… 

Does Profit Matter Any More?

Posted on by edreidyork


That seems a ridiculous headline. Of course profit matters. Of course profit will always matter. Without your business making a profit, how are you going to pay the mortgage? Not to mention all the other mortgages that now depend on you.

But bear with me. I think there are some worrying straws in the wind… 

Flipping briefly through the news headlines on Wednesday lunchtime two stories struck me. 

This month will see the Wall Street debut of Uber, which is generally expected to be valued at $90bn – that’s around £70bn. But Uber – as the eager shareholders queue up – now says it ‘may never make a profit.’

Meanwhile here in the UK, hapless Transport Minister Chris Grayling has cancelled the contracts with the ferry companies that he’d put in place in case of a No Deal Brexit. The cost to the taxpayer? Just £50m…

Uber, Slack and Pinterest 

Uber was founded in March 2009. We’ve all taken an Uber, we all jealously guard our 5* – or close to 5* – passenger rating. To say that the company has ‘disrupted’ the taxi and private hire industry is one of the world’s greatest understatements and its IPO has been long awaited. Early estimates of $120bn have been scaled back to $90bn. But as above, that’s £70bn – or more than 15 times the value of Marks and Spencer’s which, despite its recent problems, still made a significant profit in its last six months’ trading. 

But now Uber says it ‘may not achieve profitability.’ The company says that annual sales rose to $11.2bn and losses narrowed to $3bn. But, it warned, it expects operating expenses to “increase significantly.” 

Meanwhile, shares in Pinterest – best described as a ‘social scrapbook’ – soared 28% on its first day of trading, valuing the company at $16bn. The good news is that last year losses at Pinterest fell to $62m, down from $181m two years previously. But the company is heavily dependent on advertising and warned that a downturn in the economy could harm it. In fact, Pinterest warned that it would “incur operating losses in the future and may never achieve or maintain profitability.” 

And then we come to Slack. Most of us have used – or seen someone use – Slack, which does a handy job of replacing intra-office e-mail. What do you know? Slack is filing for an IPO and expects to be valued at $7bn. The good news is that revenue is growing rapidly – up 82% to $400m in its latest financial year. But is it making a profit? What do you think? Losses for the last year were $139m. Like so many tech firms, Slack is spending money to make money. Or to drive revenue growth…

No wonder they’re called unicorns 

As many of you know, a ‘unicorn’ is the term applied to a tech start-up that’s valued at a billion dollars. A unicorn is also a mythical animal and you just have to wonder if some of these valuations have far more to do with myth than reality. 

Call me old-fashioned but I thought the purpose of a business was to make profits? To do it ethically, to give back to the local community, to grow the people within your company: but at the end of the day have the bottom line in black, not red. Damn it, in the olden days you bought shares – invested in companies – because they made a profit and paid a dividend to their shareholders. 

But increasingly the businesses that make the news seem to be valued on fashion and potential. On market share or revenue growth or potential earnings in 2023. And I think that’s a worrying trend…

A short detour into the public sector

At the beginning of last year, Carillion collapsed. Despite the warning signs, Government ministers continued to ply it with contracts. The inevitable eventually happened – and when Carillion went bust it owed money to 30,000 small businesses. 

Now we have Crossrail delayed until 2020 at the earliest and a massive overspend is looking far more likely. I doubt there is a person reading this blog who expects HS2 to be delivered on time and within budget. Maybe there was a reason HS2 hired 17 PR agencies…

And as I mentioned above, Chris Grayling has just cancelled the No Deal contracts with the ferry companies, landing the taxpayer – you and me – with a £50m bill for which we have received nothing at all. 

Why all this matters

As every single member of TAB UK knows, Tesco do not accept market share or your projected 2023 earnings in exchange for bread and cheese. Neither do projected earnings pay wages. 

Why does profit matter – apart from the fact that it buys bread and cheese and pays wages? It matters because profit is how you keep score. It’s how you say, ‘we’re doing this right: ‘we’re doing it better than last year’ and ‘we’re competent to run the business.’  

When Mags and I were buying TAB UK the organisations who supplied the funds were rightly concerned with two things. Could we service the borrowing – that is, could we generate the necessary cash – and would we make a profit? 

That is something that certainly feeds through to the TAB boards. Profit, cash flow and margins are the key metrics. And if yours are moving in the wrong direction then your colleagues around the table will be very quick to ask what you’re doing about it. 

But once we get away from the idea that profit matters then things start to slip – and slip quickly. Profit goes hand in hand with fiscal responsibility. Does Wall Street care that Uber, Slack and Pinterest are losing hundreds of millions of dollars and may never make a profit? Apparently not. 

And more and more we see the same attitude in the public sector. Chris Grayling has just tossed away £50m of our money. Well, let’s keep the maths simple: assuming a nurse is paid £25,000 a year that £50m would have paid for 2,000 nurses. 

But here we are, increasingly slipping into a parallel universe where profit and fiscal responsibility seem unimportant. Someone needs to stand up and say that profit will alwaysmatter – before another 30,000 small businesses pay the price. 

Welcome to the Fifth Generation

Posted on by edreidyork


As most of you know, I’ve played the occasional round of golf over the years. So it is impossible for me to start anywhere other than the 18thgreen at Augusta as Tiger Woods rolled in the putt which gave him his 15thmajor, after a gap of 11 years. 

Tiger’s had his problems. We all know that. We all know that his behaviour has sometimes fallen short of certain standards. But leaving that aside, to come back from all the operations, the injuries and the headlines to win another major is an astonishing achievement. And he’s 43 – as many of us who are a similar age will testify, that’s the age at which your body doesn’t always want to co-operate…

So let me add my congratulations. What an example of dedication and a sheer, bloody-minded refusal to be beaten. 

On to business, and the blog on a Wednesday morning – on the simple grounds that Friday may find you with better things to do than read my thoughts on 5G, the ‘fifth generation’ of mobiles. 

Two weeks ago both South Korea and the US launched commercial 5G services. This should bring a ‘new wave’ of capability and connectivity for smartphone users, with Samsung claiming that its Galaxy S10 5Gwill offer speeds that are up to 20x faster than current phones. 

What will 5G do? 

What will it do? 5G will simply be faster. Users should get more data, get it faster and enjoy better and more stable connections. 

Quoted in a BBC article, Ed Barton, chief entertainment analyst at Ovum, said the shift from 4G to 5G would be significant. 1G brought voice, 2G gave us text, 3G images and photos and 4G enabled video. “We’re expecting the leap from 4G to 5G to be a much greater leap than ever before,” said Barton. 

The current 4G offers download speeds of around 20Mbps. That is enough to download a movie in HD in 30 minutes. 5G will offer download speeds of 500 to 1,500Mbps – so you will be downloading your Saturday night movie in around 25-30 seconds. 

That’s incredibly quick – clearly you cannot make a cup of tea in 30 seconds or nip to the kitchen for another can of beer – so providing you have a good connection, 5G will see everything becoming more or less instant. Which is fine in theory: there is just the thorny question of coverage. Or the lack of it…  

Will 5G really improve coverage? 

Possibly… Which areas do and do not get coverage is still very much a business decision made by the phone companies. You may feel – as I do – that a good broadband signal is now an integral part of life. If, for example, I stay in a hotel I am far more concerned about the broadband signal than how many channels the TV has. 

You may therefore feel that our Government shouldn’t stand any nonsense from the phone companies. But they do – and the phone companies will continue to weigh the cost of new towers against the potential revenue from users in that area. 

Businesses continue to suffer

There is no question that UK businesses – especially in rural areas – are being held back by poor 4G connectivity. While 83% of urban homes and offices have complete 4G coverage, rural premises get less than half that, with no coverage at all in some remote parts of the country. As every member of TAB York knows as they drive around North Yorkshire…

For me, the roll-out of 5G across the wholecountry is essential. Nearly everyone I speak to sees it as far more important than HS2. It would be wonderful to see one of the phone companies really champion rural areas – and seaside towns, which are now also suffering because of poor connectivity. 

Sadly, if past performance is any guide that’s not going to happen. And that’s a real shame – the PR benefits for any company that made a genuine commitment to genuinely giving the UK 100% coverage would be enormous. 

But let’s at least try and have the glass half full for the Easter weekend…

What will 5G  bring us? 

The most exciting answer to that question is, ‘we don’t know.’ For example, once your smartphone could process payments and was aware of your location, it gave rise to companies like Uber and Lyft. 

But you are not reading this for a pathetic answer like ‘I don’t know’ so let’s look into the crystal ball and come up with some 5G predictions. Although if you are in the UK, it may be a good idea to move to London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Birmingham or Manchester. These are the citiesthat are supposed to have 5G capability by the middle of this year…

Mapping and shopping 

5G is going to allow your phone to know even more about you – and as the AI algorithms become ever-more powerful, expect your shopping to become more and more personalised. Just walking past Next? There’s a notification on your phone, with a special offer, just for you. And the female side of TAB will be pleased to know that stick-thin models could become a thing of the past. 5G and augmented reality could allow the catwalk models to look exactly like you…

Driverless cars and smart cities

5G will undoubtedly speed up the arrival of driverless cars – and with every other lamppost acting as a base station those driverless cars are going to take in all the information they need from the smart cities they are driving through. Quite how those driverless cars will fare when the passenger wants to go into the desolate British countryside is another matter…

The cloud and security

Very clearly, 5G will see everything heading up to the ‘cloud.’ And that’s fine – being able to access everything you need wherever you are – apart from the countryside and the seaside, of course – is vital for business. But so is security, and 5G has understandably given rise to plenty of security fears, especially where the Chinese company Huaweiis concerned.

Like 3G and 4G before it, 5G is unquestionably going to change lives, businesses and industries. Five or six years from now I will be writing about a $100bn company that hasn’t been founded yet. Like Uber, it will no doubt cause a ‘crisis’ in one sector of the economy. But we all know the old saying: the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is made up of two characters – danger and opportunity. 

Have a wonderful Easter. The blog will now revert to its traditional Friday, and will be back on May 3rd. 

The Importance of Cyber-Security for Your Business

Posted on by edreidyork


The strength of TAB UK: Defence and Attack

Good morning – and welcome to 2019. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, that you have returned to work refreshed, re-focused and reinvigorated and, if it is not too late, a very Happy New Year to anyone I’ve not yet spoken to.

I’m writing this on Thursday, or – as it almost certainly should be labelled – Black Thursday. Ford are planning to slash thousands of jobs, Jaguar Land-Rover are going to make 5,000 people redundant and – in the least surprising headline of the year – Debenhams and M&S have reported poor trading figures for Christmas. The high street, apparently, had its ‘worst Christmas for a decade.’

In search of a rather more uplifting message to start the year, let’s leave the UK and head off to sunnier climes. Specifically, to Las Vegas which this week is hosting CES2019. CES stands for Consumer Electronics Show and this year (as it always does) it features some astonishing products: the Breadbot (a fresh loaf of bread every six minutes), the Foldimate (anyone with teenage children should simply watch the video and place an order) and a ‘smart toilet’ that talks to you.

Given that the smart toilet talks to you via the Alexa app and Alexa does have a previous reputation for broadcasting your conversations to your friends, I think we might pass on that one…

But much as I love fresh bread and the idea of my boys’ clothes being folded automatically, it is a rather more serious tech development that I’d like to talk about this morning.

The importance of a cyber-defence

A perennial theme of this blog has been the pace of technological developments. In 2019 they look set to go at an even faster pace – and while freshly baked bread and freshly pressed clothes might be something to look forward to, there are some rather more serious developments on the horizon…

One of the things writing and researching the blog has increasingly given me is an interest in tech and trends – and I’m delighted that former LastMinute CEO Helen Webb will be talking about ‘megatrends’ at our TAB Conference in May. So over Christmas – at least when Maison Reid was finally cleaned up after our ever-expanding Christmas Eve party – I read a lot of articles more or less entitled ‘Predictions for 2019.’

There was one prediction that struck me very forcibly – that 2019 could be the year when a piece of malware or ransomware takes down a FT-SE100 company.

Two years ago we were all worrying about the NotPetya ransomware attack, which caused millions of pounds worth of damage to countries and companies around the world. Two years on and you can be sure that the viruses, ransomware and the AI behind them are more sophisticated and more dangerous. So much so that security firm Gemalto made this prediction: that ‘an AI orchestrated attack will take down a FT-SE 100 company.’ This will apparently see a new generation of malware infect an organisation’s systems, gather information (presumably on customers, bank accounts and products) and then let loose a series of attacks that will ‘take down the company from the inside out.’

How will companies counter these AI attacks? With AI of their own. We are heading towards a world where it will not be man vs. machine, but machine vs. machine.

…Which, of course, is fine if you are a FT-SE100 companies with a ‘defence’ budget of millions. But no-one sitting around a TAB boardroom table is the boss of a FT-SE100 company. We are owners and directors of SMEs acutely conscious that if it can happen to the big boys, it can happen to us.

“Come with me if you want to live!”

That’s one of the reasons I see 2019 as a year when TAB UK will be more important than ever. Increasingly the problems brought to the TAB table will be about technology and the threats we might face: that they’ll be about defending your business as much as they’ll be about developing your business.

Fortunately TAB gives you the chance to learn from not only the six or seven other people around your table, it also gives you the chance to learn from every member in the UK. Rest assured that any advice and guidance on protecting our businesses will be swiftly and widely disseminated.

Right now it is difficult not to read the news and be depressed: the Brexit shambles, the continuing US/China trade war and – most crucially – no transfer budget at St James’ Park…

And yet I have never been more optimistic about a coming year. As I wrote in December, I am privileged to work with some hugely talented, hard-working and dedicated people. Working together through TAB, I am certain that we’ll all have a year to remember…

By Ed Reid, TAB UK Managing Director

Read more of Ed’s Blogs here:

Your Goals for 2019

How to Manage a Millennial

The Importance of Brand Perception

It’s Time to take Two Steps Back…

Posted on by edreidyork


This is the last blog post I’ll write before the Chancellor of the Exchequer – Spreadsheet Phil – stands up to deliver his Budget speech on Monday October 29th. 

As always there will be plenty of warm words: ‘fairness,’ ‘opportunity,’ ‘safety net’ and – if the Prime Minister’s speech at the Conservative Conference was any indication – the beginning of the ‘end of austerity.’ No matter that the Institute for Fiscal Studies says it will cost £19bn– inevitably meaning higher taxes and higher spending.

I am a little frustrated (my entry for the Understatement of the Year Award) when it comes to the incompetence and lack of business acumen of our elected politicians. Virgin were allowed to walk away from the East Coast franchise but have just shared a £52m dividend from the West Coast franchise. Tell me, please, which ‘high flyer’ negotiated that particular arrangement. 

As the saying goes, ‘give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.’ But goodness me, it is difficult at the moment. 

Back to the Budget, and another word you will need on your Philip Hammond bingo card is ‘productivity.’ It was a favourite of George Osborne’s as he regularly bemoaned the UK’s poor productivity and his successor will no doubt make the same point. UK productivity – essentially, a country’s GDP divided by the total productive hours – has not improved for ten years. It is still at the levels it was before the financial crisis. 

How can that be? Compared to other countries in the G7, the UK’s productivity is poor. The ‘productivity gap’ – the amount we lag behind the other major industrialised countries – is consistently around 16% in ‘output per hour worked.’ If you measure productivity in ‘output per worker’ terms then the gap is even higher – rising to 16.6%. And where the productivity on other G7 countries has improved since the economic downturn, the UK’s has not.

That is hard to understand. The UK is home to some of the most innovative companies not just in Europe, but in the world. And virtually every business in the TAB UK family – even if they are not at the leading edge of innovation – is simply too busy to worry about any productivity gap. 

So why the problem? 

Writing in City AM, Tej Parikh, senior economist at the Institute of Directors, suggests that we should all ‘think like a small businessto solve the productivity puzzle.’ That rather than looking to do ‘the same with less’ businesses should instead look to do ‘more with the same.’ 

In many ways that goes right to the heart of what we’re trying to do with TAB UK. I have been writing this blog for a long time but one of the earliest – and now one of the most perennial – themes has been the need for business owners to work ‘on’ their business as much as they work ‘in’ their business. 

It is by no means a new idea – Michael Gerber first wrote about the e-myth in the mid-80s and my battered copy of The E-Myth Revisitedwas published in 1995 – but the principle of working on your business is as important today as it has ever been. Perhaps more important. 

Despite the fact that the world is demonstrably changing at an ever-faster pace, people remain resistant to change. It’s human nature (especially as you get older, according to my sons…) 

Right now people are also taking the labour market into account. UK unemployment has just come down by another 47,000 in the three months to August and there is a real shortage of talented people. So if a small business has some of those talented people, it is understandable that business owners are reluctant to disturb the status quo. 

But as the last post on Uber showed, sooner or later all our status quos will be disturbed. We either manage change ourselves or some outside agent takes it out of our control. 

There is, of course, a second part to the quote I used above. ‘Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change – and the courage to change the things I can.’

Change takes time and it takes work. Initially it will almost certainly feel like two steps back – and the three steps forward may seem a long way off. But now, more than ever, we need the courage to change those things we can change. Let’s see if the Chancellor has that courage a week on Monday…

Uber and Out?

Posted on by edreidyork


The time: the future 

The scene: the Wastelands.

Two vagrants huddle round a slowly dying fire. There’s a super-highway in the far distance, sleek cars heading to an even-sleeker city. 

Tom: Is that all we’ve got? 

Dave: (holding up a rat) All we caught in the trap

Tom: Guess that’s it then

(Tom drives a skewer through the rat. He holds it over the fire. But the fire will go out long before the rat cooks properly…)

Dave: My anniversary today. Three years. 

Tom: Yeah? Must be closer to four for me

Dave: What did you do? 

Tom: Sent some food back in a restaurant. Chicken wasn’t cooked. But they still gave me one star. Took my rating down below four. You? 

Dave: TAB Conference. Too many beers. Threw up in an Uber. Letter arrived two days later. Can still see the words…

Tom: Me too. ‘Your behaviour has fallen below the rating required to continue in society. You have a week to put your affairs in order…

Tom and Dave together:   …You will be escorted to the city gates.’

If you have never used Uber, it’s simple. You download the app, and use it to call a cab (more correctly, a private hire vehicle). The app tells you the name of your driver, the type of car he is driving, the registration number and when it will arrive. A map shows you exactly where your cab is. 

As many of you know, we had a family holiday in California this summer – a state that is about as far from the Wastelands as it is possible to get. But it is the state where Uber was founded less than ten years ago – and where Uber leads, society may one day follow…

You don’t pay the driver – Uber drivers do not accept cash – and the money is taken direct from your bank account. And then, when the ride is finished, you rate the driver and – crucially – the driver rates you as a passenger. 

Phew. I’m rated at 5 stars by Uber and yes, I do what I can to protect that rating. As more than one driver said to us in California, “If someone’s rated below 4.5 most of the guys I know won’t pick them up.”

It used to be said that ‘the customer is always right.’ Well, as businesses start to rate their customers that old maxim is disappearing out of the window. 

I am giving no secrets away when I say we do that at TAB. We want the product we deliver to be the best it possibly can be – and it is a product that depends on mutual trust and co-operation. It also depends on a mutual contribution: if someone consistently fails to prepare for meetings, then they lessen the value and experience of the meetings for the other participants. If the 7thmember of a TAB board is not preparing properly, we owe it to the other six members of that board to take some action – and we do. 

What we don’t have, of course, is an app that rates TAB members. I can just hear our Uber driver, ‘If a couple of Board members are rated below 4.5 most of the guys I know won’t join that Board…’ 

But I believe that where Uber leads other businesses willfollow: that the idea of businesses rating customers will become commonplace. 

As my boys get older, I become increasingly fascinated by the developments that will shape their future. They will shop almost exclusively online: they will use Uber – and I think they will be entirely comfortable with the idea of rating a service and being rated as a consumer. 

At this stage in a post I usually have a sentence along the lines of ‘so what lessons can we draw for our businesses?’ For once, I’m not sure: maybe it’s a topic for a few boards to consider…

But I am absolutely certain that ‘ratings’ will play an ever increasing role in all our futures. We may be a few years away from Tom and Dave being consigned to the Wastelands, but the penalties of a ‘low social rating’ may be closer than you think. 

And before you say it is a big leap from getting a low rating on Uber to being thrown out of society: that I’m painting a dystopian vision of the future that is never going to happen – or that I’ve written this on a Friday night after one Shiraz too many – consider this. 

China has already introduced a social rating system, and people are already being penalised. People’s routine behaviour is being rated and scored and the data is being accumulated and used.

A high score can lead to perks – lower energy bills, a better rate of interest on your savings – while a low score can see penalties imposed. Your children might not qualify for certain schools, or you might be denied rail or air travel within the country. 

That, I think, is sinister and Orwellian in equal measure: but once the tech exists, it is almost always used. So you, and your business, need to be aware of the developments. 

Uber came along and ‘disrupted’ the taxi business – and I, for one, am delighted that it did. Similarly Amazon has ‘disrupted’ our high streets. But link Amazon’s tracking with Uber’s popularisation of ratings and there are implications for all our futures. 

A Brave New World indeed…

The Seven Ages of the Entrepreneur

Posted on by edreidyork


I like a nice drop o’ Shakespeare…

Macbeth’s my favourite, but as far as speeches go, I’m drawn to As You Like It, and Jaques’ speech to Duke Senior, which many of you will know…

All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players/They have their exits and their entrances/And one man in his time plays many parts/His acts being seven ages. 

This idea of the world as a stage wasn’t new, even in the 16thCentury. Shakespeare borrowed it from the Greek dramatists, who no doubt borrowed it from someone even earlier. 

Neither was the idea of ‘seven ages’ new: in Shakespeare’s case, infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, the justice, the lean and slippered pantaloon and – finally – sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. 

Which, of course, raises a simple question for me, and for any man:which age am I at? 

Am I a soldier, still ‘seeking my reputation, even in the canon’s mouth?’ Or am I now the justice? In fair round belly with good capon lined/With eyes severe and beard of formal cut/Full of wise saws and modern instances. 

Perhaps more to the point, what age am I as an entrepreneur?

There are, I think, seven ages of the entrepreneur, just as Shakespeare had seven ages of man. Let’s see if we can define them – although, sorry, I won’t be doing it in iambic pentameters…

Pushing your breakfast round the plate 

My story of the first age of the entrepreneur is well-known now. If it’s characterised by one word, that word was ‘frustration.’ 

‘There has to be a better way.’ ‘What am I doing in Milton Keynes when my son is in the nativity play?’ 

The first age of the entrepreneur is the age when you decideto be an entrepreneur: when you make the decision that – for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer – you are going to be in charge of your own destiny.

“Doesn’t Daddy have a job any more?” 

And running through all those seven ages is a common thread: your family, the people you love, the people you are doing it for. Ultimately – as I intimated last week – ‘family’ comes to mean a lot more than immediate family. I’m very, very conscious now that my family – the people for whom I feel a responsibility – is far wider than the three people in South Milford, but when you start your journey, you musttake your immediate family with you. 

Your partner will need to come to terms with the fact that – for now at least – her security has gone. She may suddenly be the main breadwinner. And you’ll need to explain to your children that yes, Daddy doeshave a job – ‘and the reason I’m working in the spare room, sweetheart, is that nothing is more important than collecting you from school.’ 

A man and a lad 

I remember this from years ago – before I became a ‘coach’ and I was just giving advice to a friend. “There was me an’ a lad,” he said. “And I was doing alright. Now there’s me an’ seven lads and an office manager and I’m not making any more money.”

This is a key age for the entrepreneur. It’s the age where you learn two valuable lessons: businesses progress in steps, not straight lines and – much more importantly – you can’t go back. If the first age is characterised by ‘frustration’ the third age of the entrepreneur is characterised by ‘unemployable.’ You wake up one morning and realise that you’ve changed too much. You cannot go back to your old, corporate world. As you turn round, the bridge is burning brightly. 

The man who couldn’t play frisbee any more 

The title of this age is taken from one of my favourite blog posts. Just as you wake up one morning and realise that you can’t go back, so you wake up and realise that you’re no longer ‘one of the lads.’ You’re the leader, your job is to lead and – sooner or later – that means difficult decisions, quite possibly affecting someone’s career, family and mortgage. That’s when the loneliness of the entrepreneur hits home – and it’s when The Alternative Board appears on your radar. When you realise that the only person who truly understands is another successful entrepreneur. 

Make Good Art 

If ‘The Man who Couldn’t Play Frisbee’ was one of my favourite blogs this one – blog post no. 99 – possibly still ranks as my absolute favourite. The title came from a commencement address which writer Neil Gaimangave to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts in 2012. 

His message was simple: ‘make good art.’ Whatever you do, that is your art – and you should do it to the very best of your ability. And that’s where you are as an entrepreneur. Your business is established, you’ve accepted that you can’t play frisbee any more – your children even believe you have a proper job again! And every day, you are striving for excellence. Whatever your business does – from web to widgets – you ‘make good art’ and you do it consistently and remorselessly. 

Building something serious 

Remember those steps? Businesses progress not in a straight line but in a series of steps? ‘Good art’ may now consist of a lot of time with solicitors, bankers and accountants. 

But one morning you wake up and realise that you havetaken another step. Maybe your profits or your turnover have hit a level you once considered impossible: maybe your staff levels have done the same. Either way, you’re no longer just a business, you’re part of the community – maybe part of the regional or national business community. Which means that suddenly there are demands on your time which start to take you away from the business, and – although you don’t realise it immediately – prepare you for the final age of the entrepreneur. 

Giving Back

That little girl who wondered if ‘Daddy still had a proper job?’ Well, she’s all grown up now and – despite your best efforts – you can no longer convince yourself you’re 39…

It’s time to sell the business, pass it on to the team you’ve built or maybe even stand aside for your son or daughter. But that doesn’t mean your time as an entrepreneur is at an end. Far from it: and this is one of the key lessons I learned from Paul. 

When an entrepreneur sells his business, very often he gets a new lease of life. Because there’s a new generation of entrepreneurs who need coaching, guiding and mentoring. There are challenges and opportunities in your local community. The entrepreneur’s age of giving back can be the best age of them all…

So where am I? Unquestionably I’m ‘building something serious.’ If TAB York took me through the first five ages of the entrepreneur, TAB UK is the sixth (and yes, complete with bankers, solicitors and accountants…)

And – together with the extended ‘family’ I talked about earlier – we are unquestionably building something very serious. 

So let me end exactly where I began, with Shakespeare. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ said Macbeth, again using the stage as a metaphor for life.

Macbeth ends the speech with ‘signifying nothing.’ But for TAB UK, ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ signifies a verybright future. I couldn’t be more excited about our plans for the years ahead and I couldn’t be more excited about the people I’m privileged to work with every day.