Transcript

What piece of advice would you give to MBA students at Cranfield?

"I think doing an MBA is a very, very privileged, wonderfully self indulgent thing to do. Use it. Get as many contacts as you possibly can. If you want to become an entrepreneur after after you've left your Cranfield MBA, you've got to make sure that during this year, you are starting to sow as many seeds as is humanly possible. Don't wait until the end of the year because it takes ages. Just get on with it during your year and make it practical."
Sarah Willingham, Founder of Letssavesomemomeny Limited

How do you keep motivated in business?

"My motto is if it isn't broken, break it. I think that's a great motto to adopt in a business because basically, if you just have to keep challenging everything, if you have to keep doing things that are innovative, they may not be ground breaking, but they need to be innovative."
Guy Rigby, Head of Entrepreneurs at Smith and Williamson

How do you keep yourself up to date with technologies?

I think it's engaging with people, reading, being at Cranfield is an ideal way of keeping abreast of what's happening in society and technology. I'm a great reader of Wired magazine, for instance, and attend their conferences, so mixing with people. And it's picking and choosing what are the right innovations for the future that you can adapt for the business that you're running."
Debra Charles, Managing Director at Novacroft

How would you create a brand?

"I think you have to have a theme to your business. You always have to have a very good quality product. In our case, we're very keen on innovation, authenticity and ethics. An those are the corner stones to our brand. So everything we build have those things in mind."
Peter Harris, Co-Founder of Hotel Chocolat

How do you make the transition from vision to reality?

"Well, we have nearly two and half thousand people and each one of them is exposed to confidential information. My office door is open physically as well as metaphorically. People can ask questions and we encourage that sort of thing. All the executive team at ARM go about in amongst the business, we're physically located right in the middle of people rather than down some corridor at the end of a building somewhere so that that communication can happen readily."
Warren East, CEO of ARM

How important is it to have confidence in your idea?

"Doing nothing is the worse thing that can happen. Getting up and talking to people as much as possible, coming to events like Cranfield Venture day that gives you exposure to a whole range of different skills and different people. It's really important that some kind of implementation takes places, otherwise nothing ever happens."
Richard Salvage, Managing Director at Medsa Group