Transcript

How would you define an entrepreneur?
How do I define an entrepreneur? It's somebody who wants to exploit an idea for advantage. Somebody who wants to improve the world. Somebody who wants to make money. Somebody who knows they can do something better than someone else and then goes out and does something about that.

What do you look for in a successful entrepreneur?
What I want is somebody who can define the proposition clearly and simply.
I know that sounds very simple but you'd be amazed at how few people can say to me this is what I intend to do. This is the benefit I intend to provide.
And I emphasize benefit as I'm not interested in products or services or technologies, I'm interested in what the customer thinks about what this person is doing and if you're an entrepreneur you want to exploit, you want to take advantage of something to make a profit you need to know what benefit you're providing.

Does Dragons' Den accurately portray what it is like for entrepreneurs seeking investment?
I think that Dragons' Den does actually, though perhaps a bit playing to TV, does capture one moment in the life of the business that's very important to understand and that is how do you get money and what 's it like to ask for money. And I think it does a reasonably fair representation. Dragons' Den takes some very bad businesses and occasionally a good business and it presents them to a group of people who have no reason and no need to spend their money. And if you persuade them to do so then the chances are you've done something right so I think that in that sense Dragons' Den is very accurate.

How can the government foster the spirit of entrepreneurism?
In fact I would absolutely not encourage the government to try to foster spirit at all. I think that the best thing that the government can do is do its best to get out of the way of businesses starting.

Governments sometimes legitimately, but frequently not, create obstacles to business and the regulatory burdens small businesses face, the transport issues, the infrastructure issues, these are the issues that make it hard to start a business in this country and its not a matter of fostering spirit. I think spirit is fostered by parents looking to their children and saying you don't have to be a doctor, you don't have to be a lawyer, you can start your own business and for us to accept the fact that success is fine all by itself and doesn't have to be chastised for being successful.

Do you need to understand failure to become really successful?
You don't have to fail to be successful but most people that are successful have failed. Any entrepreneur who tells you that they have been like a gazelle and just jumped from one mountaintop to another and never failed is probably not telling the truth. On the way to success you'll need to fail.

Is success about good ideas or effective implementation?
It's solely implementation. It's not about ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. You don't have to even have a great idea. If you actually look at how the most successful entrepreneurs built the largest most important companies in the 20th century almost all of them started with ill formed ideas, usually that made sense of their advantage and frequently very uninteresting businesses and they grew those businesses by being very tightly involved in the implementation in delivering something slighter better. And they were very adaptable, they were very comfortable with ambiguity, not knowing exactly where things were going to end up and they were able to move their businesses forward one step at a time and figure out what that business was going to be when it grew up as they did it. And this is completely contrary to the myth that you have to have a great idea and then go out and raise a lot of money and then start off with a bang. It's not how real businesses start it's not how real entrepreneurs succeed.

What are the key qualities an entrepreneur needs to be successful?
I think many entrepreneurs, myself included at various points of my life don't get beyond a certain ceiling, we are good at starting businesses but in order to grow that business successfully to be something substantial you do have to have a sort of changing of skin at some point, and the most successful entrepreneurs have that change moment. They go from being impulsive to strategic, they go from being ad hoc to being planned and it's without a doubt that this has to happen, and some people cross that chasm and others don't. I think to be a successful entrepreneur is to be different things at different stages of a business and just remember that you're going to have to learn as you go and grow and therefore you have to continue to be adaptable, adaptability meaning learning how to buckle down and be methodical at a later stage of the business.

How do you see the business arena changing in the next 20 years?
I think it's very likely that successful businesses are going to be what I would call very thin. There will be very few people leveraging a lot of other people in organisations to be successful. It's not something as trivial as outsourcing it's much more fundamental than that. Businesses will grow by focusing solely on the unique thing they can deliver and they will leave to others almost every other element of the activity.
This is a never- ending proposition and as more businesses get better at helping other businesses the notion of becoming part of a larger eco system is going to become more prominent.

Should you surround yourself with people like you or people to compliment your skills?
I don't have to love them and I don't even have to like them. But more importantly I want them to challenge me and be better at what they do than I would be at their job. I will never grow a business if we're constrained by my limits as like everybody I have limits.