DEBATE SCALEUP
PRESENT: Richard Slater
Lancashire Business View (chair)
Nathaniel Butters Industrial Systems UK
Nick Dykins Slingco
Richard Few Sales Geek
Coun Michael Green Lancashire County Council
Stephen Pritchard Matrix Platinum
Susan Scurlock Primary Engineer
Lynn Sedgwick Clayton Legal
Amin Vepari Two Zero
John Woodruffe Cube Thinking
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
HEADING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
Lancashire’s scaleup businesses will play a massive part in the post-Covid recovery. We joined with Two Zero, the county’s scaleup programme, to look at how these growing businesses met the challenges of the pandemic and what help they will need going forward
What are ambitious scaleup businesses getting right?
AV: What we have found during the pandemic is that scaleup businesses, while obviously affected by the challenging obstacles it has created, have generally shown more resilience. They’ve had more robust infrastructure and systems, plus other elements, such has having a cash reserve in the bank. They were building that resilience pre-Covid and it has been highlighted during the pandemic.
NB: The ambition for growth has always been there. The events at the beginning of last year were very unpredictable, so like a lot of business we took stock of what we were doing and reviewed processes.
If anything, the pandemic probably accelerated the idea of growth and how we can go about
it. So once things started bouncing back for us, which was quite quickly in our industry, we decided to go on an aggressive recruitment drive. We could see a lot of people coming onto the market.
We’ve recruited 12 new members of staff over the last three to six months and we’ve got a robust programme to recruit another 20 to 30 over the next 12 months. We just ran at it. Once we knew there was some stability back in the market and we were bouncing back, we just decided, let’s go for it, let’s take this bull by the horns.
RF: The big shift for us started pre-Covid and in many respects Covid supported what we had ambitions to do.
One of the biggest gripes in the sales training market is the cost, because it is all delivered
live to people in rooms. There are expensive day rates. We launched an app the week before Boris put us into lockdown, which was a great product for what went on. It’s full of short-form content and super accessible.
We’ve also moved our traditional, day-long type courses into a digital on-demand format.
ND: I’m extremely fortunate and lucky to be in a business that isn’t impacted in the same way as other people’s and that’s just good fortune. Managing the cash is something we do and are diligent about. The furlough scheme, the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme, all that was fantastic.
We have a risk register and probably like most people in the country, we didn’t have ‘pandemic’ on it last year, so we immediately sat down and tried to assess, ‘What is going to be impacted?’
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