16 entrepreneurs My formula for business success
What makes a potent entrepreneur? Kate Craig-Wood, one of the few female technology entrepreneurs in the UK, and recently ranked the 20th most influential person in British IT in Computer Weekly’s UKtech50 list, has a theory. Ten years ago, with just £3,000 in a room above her mum’s garage, she and her brother set up Memset, which has grown to become one of the UK’s leading managed hosting and cloud computing companies. As she tells Eleanor Harris, her success in business is in part thanks to a unique experience
Kate Craig-Wood is co-founder and managing director of Memset, based in Guildford. She was born in Surrey in 1977 and has a Masters degree in biomedical science. After graduating, she worked as a web programmer at MBA Systems, then as a management consultant at Arthur Andersen, and then rose from e-commerce developer to head of business development at Easyspace, before founding Memset in 2002. Today, Memset employs 24 staff and achieved revenue of £2.88 million in 2011, and clients include Debenhams and Hilton Hotels. Memset was named the UK’s best web host by PCPro Magazine for the sixth consecutive year in 2011, and Craig-Wood won the IoD Young Director of the Year South East award in 2008. Craig-Wood sits on the main board of Intellect UK, which represents the UK technology industry, and chairs its climate change group. She is in the final year of a collaborative PhD in energy-efficient cloud computing at Surrey University, and her hobbies include motorcycling, surfing and science.
Can you tell me about the growth and success of the company?
Why did you set up Memset? What was the inspiration?
I was brought up in quite an entrepreneurial household – my dad was a technology entrepreneur, and the dinner table conversation revolved around business and information technology, so I had it in my blood to an extent. I’ve always loved technology and I started programming computers when I was nine – back then there weren’t many games so you wrote your own. And I always knew I wanted to run my own company, so when I’d had a bit of real-world experience and the right opportunity came up, I jumped at it. I’d got bored of having a boss, and I’d spotted a gap in the market: there was either traditional shared web hosting or dedicated servers, and nothing in between, but virtualisation technology was just starting to emerge and I decided to start my own virtual dedicated server company. I had a very supportive partner so I was able to go for about two years without paying myself. I hear a lot about barriers to entrepreneurship and I perhaps take a bit of a hard line, but I started a business with £3,000, bought a laptop and some Google AdWords and bootstrapped business that way, got customers to pay in advance, and it snowballed from there.
www.businessmag.co.uk
In the first few years we grew very aggressively. Since then our growth rate has slowed, but we’re still doing 30% compound annual growth, so this year we’re on target to do about £3.8 million, with the best part of £500,000 profit, which is a nice place to be. One of the recent milestones we passed is getting just over £1m in the bank. It is quite a capital-hungry business so we do tend to hoard it a bit, partly because we’ve got some quite big investment plans in the future, but it’s been a real success and we’ve done that without selling any equity – my brother and I are still 45% shareholders each. Getting involved in technology at a young age really gave me an advantage and I became quite scientific too, and I brought that systematic and scientific approach to business, which stood me in really good stead. A real advantage to me is that I’ve never had any business training, just anecdotal stuff from my dad, a scientific approach and a good understanding of the product. Certainly, early on, we did a lot of things that a lot of people would think were not particularly sensible, but it’s worked out really well. We recently won a framework agreement to deliver cloud services to government, and I did a lot of work on the technical side of the GCloud programme, which aims to open the field a bit more for SMEs, and for us that’s been really successful. Through that we’ve just won a contract with Estyn, the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted, for its cloud infrastructure, and we’ve got a lot of opportunities in the pipeline, and these too have the potential to be quite transformative.
You promote the UK’s high-tech sector – why are you passionate about this?
I’m a patriot – I love Britain, and I think we’ve lost our way. We’re a nation of great innovators but there’s a poor culture in the UK where you have a great new little business and almost always the IT ends up going over the Atlantic. We’re really good at science and technology, particularly IT and advanced communications, and as long as we’ve
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – DECEMBER 12/JANUARY 13
got little companies like us and we’re going up against behemoths like Amazon and we’re out- innovating them in some areas and undercutting them in most areas, it shows you don’t need to be massive to do it. In these difficult times where we’re seeing a seismic shift in the way the economy functions, we need a new engine of growth for Britain and I passionately believe that information and communications technology has the potential to be that. We account already for 10% of GDP, as a sector we’re still in double- digit growth, and the beauty of IT is that it’s so exportable – you create a software product here and can sell it to the entire world. Our nation could be the next Silicon Valley; there’s a real opportunity here, but in order to grasp it we need to attract more kids into IT. And instead of this culture of well, we can invent it here but we have to sell it to the Americans to monetise it, we need a cultural shift to well, why can’t we have the next Facebook or Google right here in the UK?
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60