We asked Margaret Lang and Iain MacRitchie to share their experiences and pearls of wisdom at this Focus Dinner. If you read these brief biogs, you’ll see why;

Margaret launched Intelligent Office in January 2001, since when the company has experienced sustained growth, in spite of the economic downturn. Under Margaret’s leadership, Intelligent Office’s turnover has grown to in excess of £13m, whilst staff numbers have grown by 73% in the past five years and currently provides business process outsourcing services at 40 locations across the UK with more than 500 staff supporting their clients.
Serial entrepreneur Iain is focused on investing and leading situations which require rapid change, growth or development. His marketing and brand development expertise, first gained from a Strathclyde University education has led him into multiple corporate leadership roles, mostly within Private Equity backed businesses. Iain has completed 12 major engagements in the last 8 years, returning just over £500m with an average 6-fold increase in company profits. His latest was after leading the £75m buy in of Maxinutrition (Maximuscle), he helped double sales and profits in 3 years, resulting in the sale of the company to Glaxo for £162m in 2011.

What was interesting in their experience is the fact that the principles employed in “turnaround” are exactly the same as those required when transforming a business from good to great. Turnaround is simply the same as transformation, a desire to make your business better.

Imagination is essential. You need to be able to think about what a business, or your business, could be and identify small steps to start to take it there from where it is currently. It’s about thinking practically, and making sure these small steps are done quickly; walk to jog to run to sprint.

Their advice was to create a business plan with practical milestones – not financial budgets, which should be separate – and to focus on what makes an impact. Seek short cuts to speed up the changes.

Three key tips;

• Believe you can – have courage in your beliefs and goals
• Think … PEOPLE
• You can change anything, given enough time

David Frame was at the Focus Dinner. He said it’s important to understand that transformation doesn’t need to take place as a result of heading for a cliff – it can be employed to a good business to try to make it great.

Good businesses easily suffer from becoming comfortable and start to lose the drive that got them to become good in the first place, and so to become great they need the same sort of approach as would be employed if it was heading for a cliff – a review of where it is and a clear plan to become better.

“People are so important to growth and transforming a business but I still struggle to make changes in this area,” said David, MD of Barum and Dewar. “I took away the importance of believing in yourself 100% – you won’t always be right but you will learn and make the next decision.

“And don’t be embarrassed to show passion…in business at least!”

From basic brochure-ware websites to multi-lingual e-commerce websites, and LinkedIn to Twitter, how you use the Internet is as important to your business as cash flow. Get it right and it can make your business a huge success; get it wrong and you could be throwing money down the drain.

Tamlin Roberts has spent the past 12 years growing Mercurytide, an online application and web development company. Working with companies such as GSPC, Montpeliers Edinburgh, Flow Hospitality Training, Faithful + Gould, Edinburgh Council, Redeem, O2, Prudential, Scottish Widows and Grant Management, and of course, the Entrepreneurial Exchange, his experience of how to make the web work for business is unrivalled.

He believes there are four key elements, and businesses should ideally use all four to maximise visibility of of a website.

• Technical connections – Tamlin says there are as many as 250 issues relating to a site’s architecture and construction that determine how successful it will be in meeting the search engines’ increasingly sophisticated criteria
• Great content – original material that is regularly updated. Blogs are good, as long as they are hosted on your domain and shared with lots of people
• Social media links – get those connections working with people and get them to ‘like’ your site
• Linked network – it’s vital to build ‘virtuous circle’ links with high-volume sites accessed routinely by the greatest number of people. For example, the BBC is the UK’s No1 site but to maintain a link with its site would require refreshing the link every day.

Chair for the evening, Alistair Balfour of The Company Creators, said:”Tamlin also included great tips, such as using a service called PR Web to push out press releases for £80 a time, and various techniques to gather information about visitors to your site.

“For example, try writing a short e-book about your business, products, technology or markets, then offer a free summary on your site but require visitors to register to access the other chapters.

“Tamlin’s talk provoked a flood of questions from members about their own website issues, and he was kept busy answering them well beyond the event’s official finishing time.”

Feedback
“Key tip for me – the quality of web copy is very important – we’ll look into getting a copywriter/journalist to work on our content as this is a weak point.”
“Key tip for me – amplify use of LinkedIn in my personal case.”
“Tip for me was to use Web and social media to better market our products and services.”

He spoke of his passion and enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and shared his journey from beginning – as a child – until now.

A fascinating tale, but it was Hermann’s focus on how to fix the UK’s “broken economy” that proved the talking point.

The government and banks are looking to “us” to get the country out of recession, he said. “They need us to have the vision and to take the risks, to create the jobs and opportunities. “

But if they want us to do that, said Hermann, then they need to do something about payment terms. He called for the government to make it a legal requirement that companies pay suppliers in a timely manner.

“If the government really wants to improve business conditions they need to address payment terms, make it normal for businesses to pay each other in 30 or 45 days. Even make it illegal to ask for longer payment terms.

“I would go so far as to say the British economy will thrive on this, or stagnate if we don’t do anything about it.”

And Hermann knows it will work – because he has done it himself.

In 2010 Hermann’s company was struggling. Money had dried up because of 90 day payment terms, and in some cases, longer.

So Hermann closed all the accounts that weren’t willing to pay in 30 days. He explained how important it was to pay him on time, how important it was that they have a strong supply chain to work with and how important it was that they have a supplier with a stable business.

Within a few months Pressurefab recovered well. Long-standing debt had been settled and he was being paid on time. So he started to pay his own suppliers in 28 days.

The result is that Pressurefab is now saving 15% on its purchasing strategy.

“I believe it was my breakthrough as an entrepreneur,” explained Hermann. “I had hit rock bottom, I couldn’t pay anyone, I couldn’t draw or transfer funds, my hands were tied behind my back by someone else blocking my business.

“This is real entrepreneurship by my standards, it’s not just about throwing capital at a business, it’s about finding a solution from within.

“Since then my business has grown to more than 100 employees and £10m turnover this year.”

Originally a chef by training – and passionate about food – Kevin thought it was a brilliant idea and decided to create a diet chef that would be affordable for everyone.

Diet Chef was launched in 2008 and grew to £20m, profitable, this year without any help or funding. The company now has 100,000 customers in the UK and is No3 in the FastTrack 100 with CAGR of 229% over 3 yrs.

“We launched with £100 seed capital and no support from the bank, because there wasn’t any,” laughed Kevin.

From the get go, Kevin immersed himself in research so they could understand the consumer. Perception of diet food is that it tastes bad, so they employed a former Gleneagles Hotel chef as development chef. Customer service is really important. He spoke personally to customers to understand what the problems were.

And the team has become obsessive about sales and data. For example, Kevin knows that 50% of his website traffic comes form a mobile device, so he plans accordingly. He also planned the business so they don’t need to be in the office, they can even make sales in the pub. That’s the beauty of online and mobile.

“The devil is in the data” says Kevin.

“Understand what the customer needs and improve it all the time. We are never finished. We fixate about our product, I would say to any entrepreneur you should really love and understand your product

”And we are always looking at our competitors and working out ways to kill them.”

Kevin’s plan to expand into Europe wasn’t without its challenges. “I thought all you had to do was translate website, launch and off you go. Wrong!” he laughed.

“We were lucky, our timing was great, we were able to sell and scale business – then tv was our next big break. TV is a very trusted media, people understand it, it’s a great way to profile your business.”

Much of Kevin’s entrepreneurial learning was done in America with his first business, Orbital Software.

“Orbital was great fun, and really easy to raise money, it was my education in business,” he said. “I lived in the States for 3 years and was really immersed in the whole dot com model and understanding the can do attitude. Google’s Eric Schmidt invested in Orbital, which gave us great exposure and learning.

“But you still need failure, difficult times to help you build something of scale, something of substance.

“We had 3 founding rules at Diet Chef, and we’ve broken all of them. The first was not to raise money – but we had no choice.”

Kevin rounded off his talk with his favourite quote: “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”.

Tom Cross, Annual Conference 2013

Tom spoke passionately and honestly about growing a business in Scotland with an international perspective. He shared lessons learned the hard way from Dana Petroleum and before. Tom believes absolutely that businesses of all sizes experience the same challenges, and offered advice from his own experiences.

For example, Tom still believes he listed Dana too early, a mistake he learned from quickly.

“There’s a great mix of people in this room, some small businesses, some startups, just like mine – I’m involved in startup businesses right now,” said Tom. “I would advise you to think very carefully about going public. Advisors often push you in that direction but it’s not a panacea. I still regard going public so early with Dana as a mistake, I should have worked harder to find alternative funding.”

Dana was listed in 1996 because the banks, said Tom, were a “non-starter”. He grew the business over 14 years from just £200k seed capital. By the end of 2010 the company was worth $3.1bn, it sat just outside of the FTSE100 with $600m t/o.

An incredible performance, especially considering the very small team, which was making $5m profit per employee.

Tom’s access to boards of directors and government officials across the world enabled him to see a bigger picture, he says it helped crystallise his determination to form a new type of oil company, one that was free from nonsense, one where he could just get on with it, simply find a lot of energy and supply it to people who need it.

The philosophy worked. Within 12 months of starting up Parkmead, they had their first production. It’s the thing he is most proud of with Parkmead and not surprisingly, when you consider the average in the industry is probably 5,6,7,8 even 9 years.

“All this makes the difference, you get cash coming in and you have choices,” explained Tom.

“We all share the same challenges, looking after customers and partners,” said Tom. “Another thing I have learned the hard way is to temper your enthusiasm. All of us are completely enthusiastic, we see an opportunity and want to push, push, push, grow, grow, grow and sometimes you have to reign back a bit.

“For every 20 opportunities we explore, we probably do one, it’s a very high filter rate. We are ruthless in terms of taking opportunities forward. But when we take on that one, we are ruthless again.

“You are never going to get everything right. If we get 7/10 or even 8/10 we will do well.

“I have an open door policy and have stuck by it in the 20 years I’ve been in business. I encourage people to come to me with their ideas, it doesn’t matter if it sounds crazy, drop me an email, tell me you’ve got an idea, I’ll always look at it and if I can’t do it, I’ll point you in the direction of someone who can help.”

“Entrepreneurs do this naturally guys. We’ve been building Parkmead over the last 18 months and it already has a value of £200m, but what has made that possible is all the goodwill coming back. Our very first deal was with Exxon Mobil, the biggest company in the world – not the biggest oil company – the biggest company.

“If you can do well with Exxon Mobil, as a tiddly little company in a 2up 2down in Aberdeen, that’s serious credentials. So try to make sure you help others.”

Tom is passionate about the future of Scotland. He speaks regularly to groups of young people and encourages them to think big, and give entrepreneurship a try.

“I absolutely believe Scotland has a unique formula, an ability for growing businesses. We are surrounded by excellence, we have great schools and universities, targeted at business. We have a very intelligent, experienced workforce, it’s not huge but quality makes up for quantity. People deal with people who are trustworthy.

“We have shown the way with fantastic world beating public companies, large and respected private companies, and great smaller companies working to become world leaders in their area in Scotland.

“I see Scottish companies operating all over the place, it fills me with pride and makes you want to do more.

“There is no doubt in my mind, and I say this to many young people, we have the potential and framework and mind set to build many more world class companies right here.”

Martin Gilbert is a founder shareholder and Chief Executive of Aberdeen Asset Management PLC, the holding company of the fund management group that was established in 1983.

Martin is a director of a number of investment trusts, Chairman of FirstGroup PLC and a non-executive director of British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC. He is Adjunct Professor of Finance at Imperial College Business School and a member of the Scottish Government’s Financial Services Advisory Board, the EFAMA President’s Advisory Council and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland.

In December 2008, Martin was named European Personality of the Year at the Funds Europe Awards. In 2009, he was named Ernst & Young Overall Scotland Entrepreneur Of The Year. In 2011, he was named Scotland PLC CEO of the Year at the Business Insider/PWC Scotland PLC Awards.

Martin was educated in Aberdeen and has an MA in Accountancy and an LLB. He divides his time between Aberdeen, where the business has always been headquartered, and London, as well as overseeing the international operations of the Group.

Martin was inducted into the Entrepreneurial Exchange Hall of Fame in 2006.

Mike is a passionate and serial entrepreneur, probably best known as the founder of Dreams which he launched – at the age of 30 – with one store in 1987 growing to more than 200 superstores before he eventually sold most of his shares in 2008 and stepped down as Chairman and CEO.

Mike is currently in the early stages of a dynamic new bed retailing venture….called ‘Buzz Beds’…..watch this space!

Mike realised he wasn’t quite ready for retirement in 2008 so he decided to pursue his love of unusual and iconic properties by turning a hobby into a business. Mike formed Clarenco LLP in 2009 and has now built up a considerable property portfolio including towers, castles,forts and monasteries (throughout Britain) under the ‘Amazing Retreats’ division. These properties are let out for exclusive use, weddings, corporate hospitality and themed events.

Clarenco has also invested in many pre-let commercial properties in Buckinghamshire as well as larger residential homes through Beaconsfield Executive Homes. Another division of Clarenco is Country Manor Estates, which as the name suggests specialises in the development of substantial country houses for short and long term lets.

By far the largest part of Clarenco is the Amazing Retreats portfolio which boasts three incredible properties in Scotland – Ackergill Tower in the Highlands, Kinnettles Castle just outside of Dundee and Carberry Tower just South of Edinburgh. There is also Plas Rhianfaa French Gothic chateau in Wales, Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire and Solent Forts, a trio of incredible sea forts in the Solent.

The Clare Foundation was created by Mike and his wife Carol in 2009l; the charity aims to support and improve the efficiency of other charities throughout the UK and help them become more commercial and entrepreneurial. Based near High Wycombe, The Clare Foundation also acts as a hub for local charities by offering subsidised accommodation and shared resources.

Mike also supports many other philanthropical organisations including The Princes Trust, the Retail Trust, Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers, Bucks 4C, Bucks Community Foundation and Skidz.

More recently, through a joint collaboration with Bucks New University, Mike helped launch the Clare Business School. This is an exciting new initiative enabling the Education and Business sectors to work together by bringing ‘real live business’ experience to students in Buckinghamshire.

Among all of this, Mike still finds time to help and mentor many local businesses and entrepreneurs and is often heard on the speaker circuit, lecturing and advising students and business men alike to help make their ‘Dreams’ come true.

Mike is a Freeman of the City of London, a Fellow of the Institute of Directors and a winner of numerous entrepreneurial awards. In 2009 Mike was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Bucks New University in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of commerce and entrepreneurship.

Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year 2012, Hermann Twickler of Pressurefab Group.

A master engineer and ship builder by trade, Hermann worked in the shipyards of Northern Germany and North America before taking an internship with Boeing. Hermann moved to the UK in 2000 to take up the role of operations director of the VT Group in Portsmouth where he was responsible for 2,000 employees. In 2008, as the VT Group merged with Babcock and despite being offered employment with a number of FTSE 100 companies, Hermann decided to leave and start his own business.

Hermann saw an opportunity to establish an offshore transport and development equipment business manufacturing products in the UK. However, as a newcomer to the market with no proven track record, Hermann encountered challenges in securing credit from both suppliers and lenders. As a result Hermann invested his life savings, including the sale of his house and car, into creating PressureFab Group.

Hermann placed his focus on building a world class workshop using the best equipment he could source and brought prospective clients to the facility to demonstrate its engineering capabilities. Herman has focused on implementing ‘big company’ procedures and philosophies from the outset – always using the best equipment and only settling for the highest quality workmanship.

Despite setting up in 2009 with no customers, no products and no staff the Group now counts some of the largest operators in the oil and gas sector among its customers and employs 85 staff.

One of Hermann’s key challenges is sourcing and engaging a workforce committed to the same high standards. PressureFab operates a peer to peer training programme to encourage employees to share best practice. Hermann has also aligned himself with one of Dundee’s universities to provide work placements for graduates.

PressureFab Group is entirely self funded and, despite being in its infancy, has been profitable since inception. Hermann believes in “not buying business” but instead offers quality design and engineering with his products priced accordingly. Hermann has no desire to grow the company for exit, but instead has set his sights on wealth creation and achieving long term growth with plans to expand into new facilities, scheduled to complete in 2013.