Paul Nelson, managing director of Allied Vehicles, clearly remembers the day
the winner was revealed for the 2007 Entrepreneur Challenge and with a wry
smile remarks: "I think the biggest emotion we felt was that we were
gutted we didn’t win.”
“We felt we did a very good presentation,” he recalls. “I remember the day of
the announcement and I remember how gutted I felt because that’s what you
enter the competition for.” But Nelson adds: “We’ll be entering again. We’ve
got new products. We’ve got new developments. And we believe we can win it.”
As Nelson says, all competitions are there to be won. But the experiences of
many of the companies that entered the Challenge last year suggest there are
benefits simply from the preparations necessary to take part in such a
competition.
In a Sunday Times/Bank of Scotland Corporate survey of 250 companies that
participated last year, 22 per cent declared that the Challenge process
helped them understand what their business needed to do to grow.
One respondent, who declined to be named, says: “I actually found it more
beneficial than a five-year plan, in that it made me evaluate my business
and where it was going and it made me think about the progressive aspects.
It re-injected some entrepreneur spirit that you can lose in day-to-day
matters.”
Guy Nicholson, chief executive of Hexham-based Econnect Group, agrees:
“Whenever you do something like this, it forces you [to] step back and look
at things from a slightly different perspective. I found everything fine and
straightforward. I know people don’t like filling in forms but if you’re in
business, you’ve got to expect to do it.”
Nicholson says: “We tend to be concerned with the short term – today’s orders.
But considering what things could look like is always a good thing to do and
that’s what comes out of this sort of exercise.”
He says: “We were already putting forward proposals to bring other investors
into the company so we were starting this process anyway. But it’s not often
people ask you to look three years out. We’re normally thinking in terms of
a year’s horizon. So it was very helpful.”
At Glasgow-based Allied Vehicles, Nelson presented to the judges alongside
Gerry Facenna, the founder of the £44m a-year-turnover manufacturing
business. “We spent some time before we went there, preparing for our
presentation, which helped us in many ways to focus on what our issues were."
“As it happens I’ve been to the Bank of Scotland Corporate’s offices many
times before but it was quite daunting this time. We are pretty assured of
the direction we’re going. What we had to do was consider what we were going
to leave out [of the presentation] because there is so much going on in this
company,” he says.
Biggar-based wine merchant, Inverarity Vaults, can point to an equally busy
spell on the corporate front, including the opening of a retail business,
the takeover of another wine wholesaler and significantly higher turnover to
more than £6m. All of which, managing director, Hamish Martin flagged up to
the judges in 2007 and all of which has come to pass in the year since he
made his presentation.
“You talk about doing acquisitions and sometimes they fall away,” Martin says.
“It’s one thing to say to somebody, this is what I want to do and this is
what I’m going to achieve. It’s much better to say, actually, I’ve done it.”
And with that in mind, Martin says he is going to enter the 2008
competition.
Another entrant in Scotland was Barrhead Travel Services. Director Mark Brock
describes the business as a hybrid travel agent and tour operator, and by
his account the travel industry is fiercely competitive and changing
rapidly. What is more, at the time of last year’s Challenge, the company was
preparing for a management buy-out, which has since successfully completed.
But Brock still made the time to enter not just the Entrepreneur Challenge
but other awards demanding the same evidence of innovation in business. In
short, Barrhead Travel is a serial competition entrant.
With a 400-strong workforce and £100m turnover, Barrhead is a fair-sized
business but Brock regards the preparatory work for such competitions as a
valuable extension of the company’s extensive marketing and market research.
“The motivation is very much can we win that award and we balance various
things like have we won it before, how many times have we entered it before
and not won it – sometimes that’s a good sign,” he says. “If we’ve never won
an award before we always think we’ve got a better chance of winning it.”
For the 2007 Entrepreneur Challenge, Brock did all the initial preparation
before bringing in senior colleagues to work on the presentation. “It was
very much a joint effort,” he says. “It does focus the mind on where we’re
going with the business – the strategy, the short term, the medium term and
long term objectives, what’s happening in the market place, the changes in
the industry at the moment. It helped us to formulate where we were going to
be – not just to react but to do the opposite and be pro-active and have our
solutions in place before the market completely changes.”
Another respondent to the Sunday Times/BoS survey says: “I think that it was a
good discipline. It made me sit and take stock of the business and what we
would do with the money if we won.”
The money, of course, is impossible to ignore, and in a tough economic climate
the possibility of an interest-free loan is more appealing than ever. Nearly
two thirds of the respondents to the survey said that the funding was the
main reason for entering the challenge.
But as Brock says: “The loan would have been nice to have but we realised
there were other carrots there as well.”
