What’s good for Business is not necessarily good for business

Many of the professional organisations that speak on behalf of business are the preserve not of the small startups that the government wishes to encourage but the large or mature businesses who are fighting for their own interests. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the views of the CBI or Richard Branson do not particularly reflect what’s in the best interests of promoting startups. These representatives should be treated with no more or less scepticism than the TUC or the AA.

Often the best business people will have half an eye on what’s bad for the competition when they call for changes to government policy. I was also told by a special adviser that the tax that business people complained about most to Cabinet ministers was the top rate of income tax. If only startups had such things to worry about!

Business doesn’t vote – startups won’t donate

Building a coherent story to support enterprise won’t be easy for the Labour Party. Businesses don’t vote and most startups won’t donate money to the party. I was once fortunate to be invited to Labour’s Thousand Club annual summer party. A Peer and former senior party staffer looked at me with the disdain most reserve for bedroom-based eBay traders when she heard I set up a company. Her mood only shifted when she heard I employed people – as if that was the only measure of success she could understand.

This isn’t natural territory for Labour. That means finding unfamiliar ways to engage with business people – for whom much of politics is equally alien. Entreprenuers don’t like meetings that start late, lack focus and don’t have a clear benefit.  Finding activities that can be useful for both parties will not be easy.

So what can Labour do for startups? Here are five modest ideas, intended to help Labour’s Business.

No one got sacked for hiring MIB

‘No one ever got sacked for hiring IBM’: an old adage but absolutely true in my experience. I met many organisations who were very attracted in our ideas but without 2/3 clients and case studies behind us, we were untouchable. Once we had that, we accelerated at great speed. One way of helping organisations reduce the risk aversion to something new would be to provide a ‘Made In Britain’ tax break for any company using services / products from a startup (perhaps within the first 12 months). A 25% tax break would be a significant incentive.

Secondly, stealing an idea from the West Wing, civil servants could be encouraged to spend a day meeting relevant startups with a service to offer. Once we had meetings with the public sector, many civil servants were very amenable. But identifying the right ones required a particular set of skills. And a case study from a government department can be hugely beneficial to get a business moving. Whilst in opposition, why doesn’t Labour publish tenders on its website? Or run a scheme for MPs to volunteer to serve as advisors to startup businesses?VAT free purchases

In the first year (or 2 if you’re unlucky) you will spend more than you earn. And cashflow will be a waking nightmare. Being able to reclaim VAT costs every quarter is painful. Not having to pay them at the start would be a major boost. Giving startups a VAT-free card to reduce B2B costs (web build, computer hardware etc) would free up cash to run the business.

The Child Trust Fund

Financing a business has never been easy but, right now, has rarely been harder. The Child Trust Fund meant that school leavers would have a put of money to invest – ether in HE or, possibly, in starting a business. That would mean fewer bank loans and less reliance on a small pool of hard to reach angel investors. That has to be a good thing.

Good skills

This is a long hard slog; more so than starting a business – probably. Mature businesses may suffer because of small increase to national insurance. For startups, the 12% cost is marginal once we’ve persuaded ourselves that a) we can afford someone else and b) that person isn’t going to absorb so much management time that it holds back the business. That’s about having people who turn up on time. Don’t spend an hour on the phone to friends or checking Facebook. Who do what they’re told and don’t call clients ‘bruv’. It really is that simple, although I have little doubt how difficult it is for government to help achieve this. A small start might be encouraging universities place students in roles with businesses during their degree.

Celebrating failure

Most small businesses fail. Government doesn’t like failure. Better visit ‘success stories’ like Innocent Smoothies or be associated with a Richard Branson than a miserable failure of a business. But most businesses are small nad unglamorous, even if they succeed. But failing can teach you a great deal. And if those lessons can be captured, society is better off. Fewer people make similar mistakes. Government ministers aren’t going to embrace failure in a photo opp. But at the very least remember that a photo opp at the corner shop will likely mean more to more voters in a constituency than a visit to a remote industrial park.

Related posts:

1. A Progressive Entrepreneurs association

Listening to some of the organisations that had been awarded catalyst funding it was clear how the RSA had helped. The programme enabled people without any organisational form or legal status the money to take the idea beyond conception. From memory, there aren’t many grants available to organisations that don’t yet exist! For Plan Zhero, for example, it provided a great deal of what they needed to get off the ground. But refreshingly its founders also told me that the process of applying for the grant was challenging yet engaging and actually helped improve the idea.

The RSA helped further by bringing together the award winners and organising a roundtable workshop style event which ensured that it was more collaborative and engaging than the typical platform-style event. In fact, by the end of the event the jaded energy of the room suggested that the fund winners would benefit from meeting more frequently – perhaps working in partnership with the social entreprenuers’ spotlight scheme. It’s when the RSA is able to effect introductions to like-minded people with a common interest that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Following the event, there was a lecture and the award of the Albert Medal to Alberta Ruiz, a social entreprenuer who helped organise waste pickers. What was particularly powerful about her moving story was that it combined community activity, awareness raising and policy impact. So often organisations achieve one of these three things and so rarely are all three combined. With its growing interest in social enterprise, the RSA too has the potential to do this through matching its project research, public events and fellowship networks.

One of the challenges for the RSA in this space is how it consolidates the learning from this activity. The Albert Medal lecture will doubtless be available in multiple digital formats, reaching a global audience. And that’s a massive achievement. But the lessons from an event like the catalyst worksop, or the social entreprenuers programme are currently held in the brains of each who attended. Writing these down in a report may feel very 20th century (and is also time-consuming) but each group funded by catalyst needs to be able to learn the lessons from previous startups.

When I was first labouring with setting up Newscounter, my experience would have been radically different if I’d had the RSA networks to draw on. Yesterday the RSA made a significant contribution towards its mission and it was great to witness.

No related posts.

I expect there will now be an election which will conclude at the end of January. Inevitably for many – if not the majority of fellows – the importance of the ballot will get lost in Christmas cards. In contrast, I will be doing everything I can to convince people that humble little me, with 30 years experience, can make a valuable contribution to an organisation that boasts Benjamin Franklin as a former fellow. I’ve written a statement in support which will be accompanied with my CV.

I’d like to use social media in three respects:

• talking about my experiences of the RSA and with its fellows – events I’ve attended, projects that I’ve been involved with and fellows who are making a difference
• making transparent the role of a trustee
• relating the role of trustees to the roles of fellows, particularly outside London

I’m assuming that in an election of this sort, there’s no need to set out a campaign approach / principles per se.

However, in each of the three areas I’m sure I’ll learn more by doing it than by thinking about it. And in each there will be tensions: how do I do the first to best complement and support the RSA’s excellent existing channels; how do I make the role of a trustee transparent without breaking confidential conversations or undermining collective decisions? To what extent do fellows want to deal with trustees and how is that bests done within the constraints and formal processes of the RSA?

I’ve written previously about why membership organisations are so compelling. I’ve given a lot of thought to how to use social media to promote campaigns and organisations. Now is the chance to do some of it myself. Hopefully, without sounding pompous.

Related posts:

1. Statement for RSA trustee election

As with any new project, we learnt a considerable amount about what the RSA can do best and I’d like to make the most of this experience  in my work as a trustee.

2. My career history

I founded Trufflenet five years ago and the company now provides business insights from digital media to some of Britain’s largest and most high profile private and public sector organisations. Building the company in the current economic climate has been an extraordinary experience. It has taught me the importance of collaboration and learning from investors, colleagues and clients; the creativity and flexibility needed to fashion an attractive offer and the need for focus and energy to make the most of opportunities. I believe this experience –both the successes and failures that I’ve had along the way – will be of considerable benefit to the RSA as it seeks to become a
more entrepreneurial organisation.

I have experience of leading influential research projects, most recently devising the Media Standards Trust’s recommendations for reform of press self-regulation, many of which have won considerable support in politics and the media post phone-hacking. At IPPR I led the research on the state funding of political parties. The high profile
recommendations, which had a broad constituency of support, have been echoed in subsequent public inquiries.

3. An effective trustee

As vice chair of a primary school governing body in Southwark and a non executive director of a community development organisation in Hackney I have experience of working with a range of different organisations. Within
the necessary constraints, I will use digital media to make my experience of the RSA as a trustee visible to the fellowship, helping ensure that the regular work of the trustees is open and accountable.

Given the power of the regional networks within the RSA, I will also be available for visits around the nations and regions of the UK to attend meetings with fellows to ensure that the RSA provides a rewarding experience to its fellows.

If you’d like to talk to me further, please get in touch. Just get in touch with me.

Related posts:

1. RSA trustee blogging

In fact, the real activity – and the point of greater interest to intelligent marketers was away from the obvious social media networks like Twitter. And therein, lies the more interesting story.

The promise of social media was that it would bring people closer together, creating a more democratic world. Its role in the London riots is a reminder of how utopian that promise turned out.

Social media – or more accurately those who use it – have recreated the divides that already existed in society. The well-educated US graduates who flocked to Facebook were rejecting Myspace – not just its design and features but also its community. The shift was described by a leading researcher as ‘white flight’, echoing the exodus of middle class people from cities to suburbs.

There are echoes of the social divide in the growth of Twitter. Casual observer could be lead to believe that Twitter is of a similar size to Facebook. It certainly eats up column inches in the mainstream media. According to Journalisted there were more mentions of Twitter in the national press than Facebook in the last week. For the avoidance of doubt, there are 24m UK Facebook users and less than half the number of Twitter users. Hits to Twitter account for just 1 in every 184 UK internet visits. To put it another way, Trufflenet’s clients see hits to their website from Facebook on their analytics. Twitter is too small to notice.

So why has Twitter got such a large profile? Because it’s used by older, more affluent user, mostly living in London. Research from the Oxford Internet Institute has shown that adoption of Twitter loosely tracks adoption of the iPhone. Trufflenet has even found in its work in the political sphere that it is disproportionately left wing, findings underscored by Hitwise.

It is plausible that young rioters chose to use BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) because they prefer the privacy of the closed network. Indeed, Trufflenet has previously found young people much less likely to boast about poor behaviour on Facebook than Twitter. But anyone who had actually considered the privacy angle would have been likely to find the controversy about RIM handing over data to dodgy regimes in the Middle East. It is much more likely, however, that the greater penetration of BlackBerry’s amongst poorer teenagers meant that more of their friends used it.

Twitter played a vital broadcast role in amplifying news of the riots, spreading rumours and localising the news; and now in promoting the cleanup. BBM played an organising role. Many are using Facebook as a support mechanism for close friends and families.

Understanding what’s being said on social media is no small task. But anyone seeking to utilise that to plan activity needs to go beyond that to understand who is using which channel, how and why people it is being used.

Related posts:

1. Does Twitter encourage intimacy?
2. Why Rafa Benitez will never be a media darling