Speech at the inaugural Heropreneurs Dinner

Last night, I attended the inaugural dinner for Heropreneurs, a  new charity established to help service leavers start up their own businesses. It was attended by the Minister for Veterans Affairs and a range of ex-military people who are all very successful business people in their own right. The following is the text of the speech I delivered - I did not completely stick to script, but it is broadly the same in content and theme:

The Right Honourable Under Secretary of State, ladies and gentlemen, my name is James Swanston and I run Carbon Voyage, a start up and an investment for Heropreneurs.

I thought it would be useful to set the scene by providing some background to my business and then discussing those areas in which Heropreneurs and indeed government can add value.

Transport is responsible for almost a quarter of all carbon emissions. Most commercial road transport is empty 30% of the time and 84% of all commuter journeys in cars only have single occupants.

My business was set up to address this by making transport more efficient, cutting cost, carbon and congestion.

To do this, we built a software application that tries to make best use of transport – sharing vehicles, filling empty return journeys and finding the right mode of travel; we initially developed this around passenger travel and are now working on a freight version of our software which is already attracting significant interest in the UK and elsewhere.

We compliment this with an advisory service to help major organizations in developing and implementing strategies to manage transport needs.

I negotiated our first deal, a research collaboration with Tesco and the University of Manchester almost a year ago whilst on leave from Afghanistan, and key customers now include Aegis Group plc and more recently, a major public sector organisation; pending successful funding from the Technology Strategy Board later this month, the organisations we anticipate we will be working with will include a range of very large public and private sector organisations. Our research work with the University of Manchester continues and we are regularly approached to assist research efforts at other universities.

We are very positive about opportunities in the current economic climate as our service can help the government deliver services whilst meeting significant cost and carbon reduction targets with minimal upfront investment. However, this will require some new thinking in the government and a willingness for innovation – some of our models point to wastage of 20% and higher in the way transport is used across all levels of government and the MoD is certainly not exempt from this. In the experience of many innovative companies, government is poorly set up to support fresh thinking when it comes to new ways of doing business.

While this all paints a rather impressive picture, or at least we feel rather positive, it is not all plain sailing and this is where an organisation such as Heropreneurs can provide a great deal of value. Most of us have served in highly demanding war zones where our decisions, often made in a split second, are about life or death, so in some respects, the pressures of a start up do not quite compare. Our ‘do more with less’ lifestyle certainly translates very nicely into bootstrapping a start up, but help is still needed.

Mentoring is perhaps the most important thing – having links into experience can help entrepreneurs open doors and negotiate the obstacles and pitfalls of running a business. Links with big business are also key – via Heropreneurs, one FTSE 100 company is now investing money and time in supporting some of our efforts, and our link with them will only serve to add to our credibility as a new enterprise.

Support with business services – PR, legal, accounting – can take a massive amount of pressure off a start up and remove major costs from the early stages of the life of a business.

Access to funding for start ups, rather dear to my heart at the moment, is fundamentally broken at the moment, although I would be keen to note that funding should not be seen as an automatic right for anyone with a cunning plan. Tech businesses in particular do not require amounts that sit within the normal model of angel and venture investing; banks do not lend money and do their best to ignore enterprise finance initiatives. Ten or twenty thousand pounds can go an amazing distance in start ups these days, and in some respects, that is the kind of funding levels that are important – if I look at our business, the help that an amount such as that would provide to us would be amazing, particularly to help ease pressure on our working capital needs, but it is hardly a funding level that would excite most angel investors or VCs.

Trying to break into public sector procurement is somewhat akin to a sisyphean task; at minimum, it would be great for Heropreneurs to help start ups build partnerships with the right organisations to be competitive for bids – a need that we have right now as we look to compete for a major public sector organisation to manage their transport better – which we know we can do if we can jump through the procurement hurdles. Perhaps a more exciting idea though would be for Heropreneurs to work with the MoD to establish a suitable test bed or incubator for public sector opportunities – smart, entrepreneurial service leavers know exactly where the opportunities are to do things better, far more than defence civilians or the standard set of major consulting firms that cost a lot of money, and it would also enable some retention of the corporate knowledge that is exiting the uniformed services at alarming rates.

In closing, I would like to add my thanks to those of Peter’s for coming tonight. The space in which Heropreneurs exists links very well with the Government’s aspirations for big society as well as the continuing need to foster enterprise and innovation in the United Kingdom. It can also reinforce the very positive light in which those who serve in uniform are seen.

Effective mentoring, funding, business support, and assisting with public sector procurement opportunities are all fantastic ways for Heropreneurs to enable service leavers to excel in building new businesses.

I hope I have been able to plant some ideas about where you can support Heropreneurs; most service leavers are without the right networks and opportunities to achieve their potential, so having this mechanism to assist entrepreneurial service leavers is an aspiration worth of support.