It’s been a while since I’ve written but then again it’s been a busy start to the year. I have a lot to tell you. 

2012 has gotten off to an incredible start. I stuck to my New Year’s resolution to quit being a “wantrepreneur” and actually start a business whatever the consequence. I thought I had figured out what skill sets I had and what I needed so I asked Katherine Ferdinand, a friend that I had gotten to know casually over the last few months to be my business partner.

What motivated me to pick her and ask her to be a Co-Founder? Well, I knew that I didn’t have all the strengths to do it alone. I felt I could be open with her and that she possessed the strengths of creativity, focus, patience and experience in start ups that I lacked. To be honest pure gut instinct. Thankfully for me she agreed.

I’ve been advocating recently that knowing yourself and your strengths and weaknesses is incredibly important.  I am starting to realise that is much easier said than done. It can be a very testing and painful process but being open to criticism and listening should help.  

Everyone says that running a start-up means you’ll face a lot of business related challenges. Actually the real challenge is the business relationship. 

Katherine, I am learning is a truly unique individual/mature business partner and it is because I respect her that I take on board her criticisms. She recently told me in exasperation that she feels like she’s my “guinea pig” business partner. I felt a little taken aback but she had a point. As the weeks go on I’m realising that she has had a very powerful and profound influence on me in a business/non-business context.

I’m starting to understand why that choice of business partner is so crucial. She’s made me realise a lot about my personality/approach when working with her that so many people before her would not have the patience to put up with or the ability to confess without offending me.  I have made a conscious effort to learn quickly. In order to be a better person in business and to be honest with myself I’ll openly share them here…  

1. Learn to commit everything to paper:

The Business Plan

I had the musings of an idea and had done a considerable amount of research. I had gone over a twelve month period through the following industries: travel, finance, fashion and finally travel. I knew the travel industry best and had found a pain point. I thought more about my solution and had a semblance of something. As I wrote the business plan it never quite seemed right. I will always advocate that doing a lot of research is key when you are starting any business but it left me with a problem. 

The problem: I had done so much research I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. 

I had a problem committing or structuring all my research/thoughts to paper.

This is where Katherine has been key in getting rid of the “fluff” around the initial idea. She’s telling me to always keep it simple. I verbalised my research, the findings, complicated methodologies and personal actions to her.  She was then able to pick them apart, structure them into a customer proposition that made sense to someone else and help me really shape what we were building here. Without her I would probably still have been on my millionth iteration and never really have committed to starting. 

Having Katherine around also means I am forced to commit everything to paper so that she rightly so can buy into what we are building here.

We have very different working styles. I like to bombard her with everything I find. Lots of interesting market related stuff and she only sends me what she thinks is relevant after prior assessment. Hence, I also like to know everything that is going on and she is happy just letting me get on with it and see the final product… We need to come to a compromise. 

With our continued discussions TravelClouds has gone from being something small to something that could potentially disrupt a whole market.  All because one day in Nando’s I was talking about some things I do when travelling and she said one thing to me “that’s not normal” - that was our eureka moment for TravelClouds. She told me I hadn’t realised it but I was “unconsciously competent”. Would I have been able to get there without her? The honest answer is NO even though I like to think otherwise. Just took me a while to realise it.  

2. Do not act rashly:

When I asked Katherine to be in a partnership with me I wanted it to be on an equal footing because I genuinely believe that the branding/customer engagement is equally as important as how the product makes money. So we had a 50%/50% partnership. We didn’t sign a partnership agreement. We incorporated the company and it was all go. My tip to anyone is signing a partnership agreement makes it so much more real so make sure you sign that legal documentation first and that you discuss how you will give up equity as you raise capital/what the equity split will be and who is accountable for what in the process. Think about all this stuff long and hard. Be aware that it is not something that you will necessarily be able to go back on afterwards. 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. To be honest it was all too fast. Katherine hadn’t even found her feet in the travel industry and wasn’t fully aware of what we were trying to achieve before we were all over the press. Her experience was telling her that things were moving way too fast. Unfortunately, due to point one I went to her with not a lot of written down stuff. I had lots of research and the basis of the problem and then my solution. I went to her with features but the core of the proposition I kept to myself. In hindsight it was a very odd move. Since I hadn’t committed all my thoughts to paper I had my vision of what the product could be and what I felt the customer proposition was but Katherine wasn’t buying it. She wanted to really delve deeper. Here I have to add I was unfortunately trying to do her job for her. By not sharing the core functionality with her I wasn’t fully allowing her to do her job.  This frustrated her no end and I can understand why.

After that eureka moment in Nandos of which there are probably several in business I came to an awful realisation that in fact Katherine was trying to build me into a product. Which wasn’t a nice feeling. We were automating something that I naturally do. I didn’t speak to her for two days in anger that she had challenged me so much and knowing that I had just given away 50% of a company where the goal posts had suddenly changed. It was not what I had gone to her with. Realising that I had given away 50% of a company so easily I panicked. I started to doubt all the decisions I had made and even what value she was adding. 

Katherine is potentially the most honest and honourable person I know. She allowed me to renegotiate my business agreement to a 60% stake to me and 40% to her on that basis. Did she feel I had belittled her in the negotiation process. Of course. Was she doubting whether she wanted to be in the business with me anyway. Yes. Note to myself I can be very harsh in negotiation and she felt like I had questioned her worth. I realised after reflection that is how it had come across.  Not a pleasant ordeal for anyone.  

3. Know your business partner is irreplaceable:

A potential investor asked me an interesting question:

“If I gave you £50k right now for 10% of your company then would your business partner who is responsible for branding, customer engagement and product development be worth the £250k?”

I had a product that was basically based on my actions so no one could copy it… This would mean that if I had £250k I would then be able to outsource and buy in experience to an entire team: a design house, get a web developer on board (something we would need to do anyway), media agency, UX professional to build the product.  It was an interesting way of looking at things. Instead of telling them that Katherine was irreplaceable I asked Katherine to prove herself. I wanted her to show me that she truly was worth that much equity. This kicked off our equity renegotiation discussion. It wasn’t pretty. Which she was very insulted by because I didn’t stand by my original business decision. She told me that it would have been a non-question for her if someone had asked her if they could outsource my input. I felt guilty and bewildered that I didn’t have the strength to stand up to my original decision. 

Sometimes, I had the urge and did tell Katherine I could do some of the tasks that she did i.e. writing a creative brief to be given to a designer. She rightly questioned whether I truly understood what she did or her worth. I realised I had hired a designer before. A cheap one that didn’t understand what a truly “multi-channel” logo was. Probably because neither did I. When you understand that someone else has skills you don’t possess it doesn’t always mean that you understand how difficult it is for them to do what they do.  I kept stepping on her toes. I wreaked havoc with the launch page of TravelClouds. She had carefully selected the copy and the photo (a man overlooking the sea). I replaced it with a photo of Rio… She wasn’t impressed. I can now see why.  I was messing with her branding strategy because I didn’t understand it.  

I was micromanaging her. For someone who hates to be micromanaged myself I was doing it to someone else because I felt like I was losing control. Something that is inevitable in business. Adam Smith advocated the Division of Labour for a reason.   

4. Sometimes the only person to listen to is yourself & your business partner

I go to a lot of talks and I speak to a lot of people about entrepreneurship or the problems that I have been facing with Katherine as a business partner. It’s upsetting for Katherine because she feels like I am questioning her worth and maybe with the way I phrase it it comes out like that. Talking to other people is almost like talking about the problems in your marriage to someone outside of it. Rarely is that going to help the situation. Also, people have different motivations (something else that Katherine has highlighted to me to take into consideration) so each person challenges or tries to give me advice that in the end I need to have the conviction to refute or not.

Instead of having an internal debate about this or thinking it through I directly go to Katherine and try and tell her what people have been telling me or suggestions they have had. This is because I want us to have that open dialogue. One thing about Katherine is that she couldn’t care less about book based “theories” or what other people think. Katherine is a grafter, she’s strong minded on this and she tells me I have a vision and should learn to stick to it. In essence, I should care less about what other people think and be confident in the decisions I make.  Running a business will test you to your core. There’s a difference between being agile in product development and being all over the place because someone tells you you should be doing something.  

Overall, is this business relationship broken or irreparable. Honestly, I hope not but it has been a huge learning process. Acknowledging all these issues early on I hope will only make the relationship stronger.  I would rather have them all now instead of way down the line. Most businesses fail because that relationship wasn’t tested or strong enough in the first place. 

The one thing I’ve learnt most is remember really it’s about you and your business partner against the rest of the world. Being in that relationship is like being in a marriage: choose very carefully and treat it as sacred. When the going gets tough it’s about openly talking about it and choosing whether you both want to fight for it enough. 

I spent part of this morning updating Dido Harding (CEO of TalkTalk Plc) on the progress I’d made since last meeting with her a few weeks ago. 

Like Charles she’s extremely approachable, humble and likeable. Besides being incredibly sharp as you’d expect from a CEO she manages to infuse this serious side with a great sense of humour. I’m often laughing when spending time with her. Although, Dido will admit she’s not an entrepreneur she can definitely teach you a thing or more about running a business. 

She asked me how things had been. With my cup of tea in hand I started by telling her that this last week was the first time I realised I knew more than I did three months ago. She laughed and said that was a good sign. I was being very serious. Last week was quite a revelation.  I visited a third party provider and they starting taking notes when I was speaking on a topic I was there to get their expert opinion on. 

I admit the last three months seemed like a complete waste of time because there appeared to be no tangible benefit to the 1000 plus hours (ten plus hours a day) I had spent talking to people in the business/learning definitions/reading old internal reports/reading articles/listening to podcasts/viewing videos and note taking on everything and anything technology related.

I am inquisitive by nature so I wanted to build a knowledge base of internal business knowledge, useful websites, new start-ups, entrepreneurship, frameworks and trends whether it was directly or indirectly related to what I had been asked to do. As time passed I realised I was able to spot start-ups early on before they were in the press, connect ideas and come to my own conclusions supporting them with a myriad of sources. I finally plucked up the courage to present my personal opinions on different technology trends confidently to senior management and was thrilled they wanted to hear my views.  

As I explained or discussed concepts Dido never once interrupted listening patiently. My favourite Dido trait is that when she does challenge ideas it’s with encouragement providing constructive viewpoints or names of people that might be able to assist and without making me feel inadequate which I admire her greatly for. She respected that I was able to counter argue some of her challenges with supporting evidence and innovative ideas. When I’d finished she looked at me and smiled. 

She said the first day I entered her office and actually when any individual enters a new job or role (especially graduates) they are unwittingly in a state of “unconscious incompetence” basically “not knowing what they don’t know”. Eventually, they move at varying speeds through the four stages of learning illustrated below(from Maslow who gave us his famous hierarchy of needs). She said she was delighted that I had come such a long way since that first day. 

I truly believe with hard work, perseverance and the faith of the business you work in self development is inevitable. I realise I only want to achieve one thing by the end of my NEF placement here at TalkTalk Plc in September 2012.

Unconscious Competence. 

Today I had the pleasure of spending time with Charles (Dunstone) best known for being the founder of the Carphone Warehouse and the majority shareholder in TalkTalk Plc.  If you’d asked me this time last year whether I would be sitting in the office of one of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs (recently he became a billionaire topping the Sunday Times digital and online retail millionaires rich list) having an informal chat about myself, life and business I would have thought it very unlikely. I have to admit I still can’t quite believe it. 

Charles’ office is on the sixth floor of the White Building (TalkTalk HQ). It is modest with the most prominent feature being a large framed photograph of a view from the Mandarin Hotel overlooking central park in New York behind his desk. I was meeting Charles with Louis who is also on the NEF programme with me. He warmly ushered us in and asked us to make ourselves comfortable on the black couches. First impressions were that Charles is the type of person that you immediately warm to. He makes you feel at ease and despite his vast success does an incredible job of staying humble.  There was no inkling of ego and he was extremely charming (even when I had my fan moment and asked for a photo with him!).

He kicked off by asking how he could help myself or Louis. We replied that we were really there to get to know him as a person as well as a business man. So below is what we learnt… 

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF CHARLES:

Louis and I wanted to know what a typical day for him was like. He replied that it would be very difficult for him to say what a typical day looks like as he does very different things daily. There are lots of things that he is involved with.  For instance today he had a friendly doubles tennis match with friends in the morning, a couple of meetings at the White Building of which we were one and then he was heading for a meeting at the Prince’s Trust. On hearing about the tennis we asked who his favourite tennis player was. Charles replied Federer because he has a gentlemanly attitude and behaviour despite his success. Although, Charles said he is not the biggest of Tennis fans. 

Of course he is interested in business which takes up a lot of his time. He is the chairman of the Prince’s Trust and is supporting the NEF programme.  Currently Charles is involved with ten different businesses but with experience he told us it gets easier to manage.  

ON BUSINESS: 

One thing that Charles has been known to say is that in business “you need to zig whilst everyone else is zagging.”

He’s fascinated about how things work and with any business he has come across he is fundamentally interested in the proposition and how it makes money. Charles affectionately mentioned his wife at this point and said that she was less bothered about the “how” of something working but more concerned that it did. He knows random facts like how a washing machine works or why we have tides and it’s this inquisitive nature that allows him to look at any industry and want to “rewire” it to work differently or better.  He doesn’t look at creating a new market but just creating a different way of operating in that market. 

Charles feels that you put as much effort in starting a business in a small market as you do in starting a business in a large market which is why he has never entered the market of pet insurance. He said having a very small piece of a large market is much better than having a small piece of a small market. Today he felt that the industries ripe for disruption were Finance (high barriers to entry) and Energy. 

It can be difficult to land demand. Charles likes to throw as much as possible into a proposition to make it compelling for the customer. If he could have done the free broadband with TalkTalk Plc differently he probably would have limited the number of free sign ups to 10,000 a week and kept that momentum over a period of time like the Hard Rock Cafe business model. 

Using Alex Ferguson vs. Arsene Wenger as an example we discussed how different character traits will lead to different management styles but that unlike the business books would like to have you believe there is no one right answer. It is more important to have capable people that you can teach to do things that work well together than an all star team that doesn’t.

For any budding entrepreneurs reading this Charles is involved in www.fundingcircle.com and lends to new start-ups through this.  He thinks that this is a great business model for financing. It was interesting to learn that Charles has never taken any VC money which is why he retains high equity stakes in any of his businesses. It’s important with regards financing to start with minimum investment so that you know your business works efficiently and can make money.  

AT A DINNER PARTY: I then asked him “If you could have any people living or dead come to a dinner party who would you want to come and why?”

Charles clarified if the individuals needed to get along or could just be individuals he was interested in. I replied they could just be people that he was interested in but didn’t necessarily have to get along.

Thinking it over Charles replied with the following:

NELSON: Because he was a kind of maverick/rebel figure. 

CLINTON (Bill): Charles at this point clarified that he meant Bill not Hillary or even the more unlikely Chelsea. Because he was a compassionate capitalist and had the ability to get people to follow him which is an extremely difficult thing to do.

ELIZABETH I: She inherited a difficult situation and being a woman in those times was still able with steely calm and logic with a successful reign navigated the country to a strong place.

WARREN BUFFETT: Because yes, he’s a financial genius but he also has an interesting take on the world. A lot of common sense.

Charles added that Steve Jobs would probably not have made the list. Charles had met him several times and despite Jobs being a visionary and debatably the greatest business person of our generation he would only eat at one restaurant in London. The infamous NOBU in Mayfair; probably couldn’t imagine Nelson or Elizabeth I eating there. 

FAVOURITE QUOTE: Louis then asked Charles what his favourite quote/mantra was. It is The Man in the Arena - Excerpt from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt (1910). 

Charles proceeded to read it to us:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

On finishing reading it he said that when he thinks about being on his deathbed and looking back he wants to feel like he had at least tried and accomplished something. He emphasised that it’s important to not always sit on the sidelines. I don’t think anyone could ever accuse him of that. 

The half an hour we had with Charles turned into an hour. Much to our delight these meetings are going to be a frequent occurrence.

So what was the best thing I learnt from Charles today? It’s ok if you don’t read the FT. He doesn’t read the FT :) “Why?” - I asked aghast (having religiously read it for years). Because he finds it dry and you can learn more from people around you. Judging by today I think I would have to agree.    

I’m three weeks in. I’ve spent most of my time relearning the English language.  Thank you Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger… 

Sticky: “A term used to describe a web site on which visitors stay at for longer than normal.”

Cookie: “Used for an origin website to send information to a user’s browser and for the browser to return the information to the origin site.”

STD: ”Standard Telephone Dialling.”

VIP: “Vertical Information Portal.” 

Impressions: “The number of times a banner ad was requested and seen by users.”

Inventory: “The number of ad spaces available for sale on a web site during a certain time frame.”

Three months ago I made a decision. I then shared it with my friends, colleagues and family. The responses varied. Some friends stared at me in disbelief. Colleagues patted me on the shoulder and repeatedly told me what a great opportunity it was or how courageous I was being. My parents were more than anything bewildered and anxious.

I was thrilled. I took great delight in what this decision would mean. Mainly that I would get to wear jeans to work.

I had spent the last three years beavering away in Finance, wearing a suit to work, waiting to get promoted and religiously reading the FT. I grew dreary at the thought that this would be my life but it was comfortable. Being a small wheel in a big cog is enough for some people but not for me. I was escaping to become a New Entrepreneur.  

Entrepreneurship is something I had been talking about for years at: university, dinner parties, with friends and to anyone that would listen. I devoured business books, magazines and blogs reading about new start-ups and corporate strategies.  I always wanted to start my own business but there was no predefined career path or “how to” guide like in Finance which made it daunting. 

I feel like being on the programme is getting me one step closer. It’s kind of like having the security of training wheels on a bike, at least for the next twelve months before I ride off unaided into the sunset.  

Since I started the programme it’s been a tough adjustment. I’m not going to lie to you. There have been a lot of cut backs and it’s been harder than I imagined.

Gone at least for the foreseeable future are:

1. Fancy dinners in exclusive London restaurants.

2. Luxurious holidays in far flung destinations.

3. Flat renting in a sought after part of London.

4. Having a fully invested ISA.

5. Frequent VIP theatre/concert tickets.

6. Dare I say it a pension plan.

7. I could go on but you get the picture…

They’ve been replaced by:

1. Home cooking.

2. Travel to industrial estates on the outskirts of Manchester.

3. Living in a single bedroom in zone 3.

4. Dipping into my overdraft limit.

5. Daily hunting of Groupon/Living Social deals.

6. You guessed it, no pension plan.

7. How life has changed….

Was it worth it and should I have done an MBA instead? Ask me in twelve months. It’s early days.   

During this time I will be working for TalkTalk Plc focusing on entrepreneurial business development. You might recognise the company as the official sponsors of the X-Factor but they really do offer the cheapest and safest broadband in the UK too. Special offer of £3.25 per month if you sign up before September 27th!

I’ve already been told about a few employee perks: free broadband and tickets to the X-Factor Final. I’ll keep you posted.