Martin Leuw, Father to Charlotte and Former CEO of IRIS
“From a very young age, I always wanted to run a business and my early career steps of a marketing based business degree, followed by an accountancy qualification and then strategy consulting were all intended by me to position myself with the necessary skills to do my own thing. At school my strengths were in languages rather than maths, so accountancy training at Arthur Andersen was pretty gruelling but I quickly learned that numbers tell a story and if Andersen’s were prepared to hire me, then it must be possible for somebody like me to master it. I also got the impression at that time that most marketers didn’t understand numbers and most accountants didn’t understand marketing, so if I could do both, that would be of real value.
Hard work, lots of learning experiences and “knocks” during a number of boom and bust periods in the 1980s and 1990s were key, because you learn much more from the things that go wrong than those that go right. Being in a situation where you might not be able to pay the wages (including your own) at the end of the month really focuses the mind.
Other people also like to label you, so I realised that the sooner I became an MD the better, however small the company, because once you’ve done it once you can hopefully progress upwards. Also, people telling me that I can’t do something is usually a red rag for me to give it a try.
I’ve now grown a number of businesses in sectors ranging 28 entrepreneurcountry
from cartoon animation to healthcare and technology and my skill set is sector agnostic and more about the levers required to achieve growth, although growing IRIS from a £9m revenue business to £120m and from a value of £30m to £500m over a 10 year period has meant that subscription based software businesses are something I understand particularly well. Not having any of my own capital initially, VC and Private Equity funding was essential to enable me to get started.
I am also a great believer in following your dreams and the things you most enjoy doing, so I didn’t actively encourage either of my daughters to follow in my footsteps, although I did teach them to negotiate in the souks and markets in North Africa and Asia, which they insisted on trying in Macy’s New York and taught me that you can negotiate anywhere.
Charlotte’s early dream was to be a teacher but when the reality didn’t live up to the expectation, I was pleasantly surprised when she turned her attention to business. She is a natural entrepreneur, full of passion, ideas, persistence, is a great networker as well as focused, very hard working and has taken an idea which was originally a text message to me and turned it into a start-up business,
www.mycargossip. com. In the last six months her learning curve has been steep, but the practical experience has swiftly taught her about many of the building blocks of business. This is very much Charlotte’s business and my role as a mentor and a father is to challenge, support and introduce her to people who might help, plus a little bit of angel funding, although as she has found out, we keep overheads very low until
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