E2E Partner, Lioncroft Wholesale reveals the tools that create successful entrepreneurs

(Lioncroft/The Times)

It will not come as a surprise that entrepreneurism has a vital contribution on economic development. A new business entering the market stimulates competition and innovation and creates job opportunities where none previously existed.

The UK can be a welcoming home for entrepreneurs. Over 750,000 new startups launched between March 2021 and March 2022. But the real success isn’t in starting, but in how well that company grows, measurable by the number of jobs they can create over time. The question is, what is a key ingredient that makes one business a success, while others fail?

If we list the most obvious characteristics of an entrepreneur, I believe we would all include the ability to explore and embrace new ideas, to adapt and embrace challenge and to innovate.

As a business grows, it must surely take on the characteristics of those in charge. It can either create a rigid set of rules along which it operates and eventually stagnate, or it can remain open minded, curious and embrace challenge. This is the very essence of a business culture, but to do this, it must welcome a diversity in leadership.

A diversity of thought and culture

Just as entrepreneurs stimulate an economy by bringing variety into the marketplace, diversity in a leadership team stimulates a business.

For example, Lioncroft Wholesale has generated a number of jobs over the past two years as we launched and created our new brand. We have about 200 employees. We have built a new board and new leadership team from scratch. Within that leadership team, we have a varied diversity in ethnicity, gender and background. And that, I believe, is a significant contributing factor to our growth and success.

How does this help? The diversity our leadership team offers is clearly beneficial. When we consider a problem, we have a range of thoughts and approaches from those different backgrounds that enable a richer decision making process. This can only generate a better outcome overall.

Similarly, we recognise the value in the diversity of experience, backgrounds and thoughts that we have across the whole business. Our culture is one of openness. We firmly believe that a strong culture develops a strong business and have deliberately created a very friendly, informal open-door policy, which in turn has helped to develop a stronger connection with each other and a stronger output.

Can I say for sure this is successful? Well, we have grown at a significant pace in the last few years and boosted our turnover by up to 30%. I believe this is a result of the fluidity in our decision making.

And I am not alone. As we celebrate the E2E Job Creation 100, I am sure that many among that list will be of a similar ilk where they see the advantages of having that diverse background across the floor and that diversity of leadership in their business.

Embracing diversity through training

The challenge that a business faces is how to continually introduce fresh ideas, to maintain the spirit of entrepreneurism even as it grows. At any point there is the danger that the day-to-day policy and procedure have become rigid and inflexible; a point where we no longer embrace innovation and have become stagnant.

Our approach to creating that inclusive culture and introducing an appreciation of new ideas is through training. Gone is the old mindset that if you train them, they go elsewhere. Instead, successful business owners embrace training that upskills employees and encourages them to be more curious, more open minded – more entrepreneurial. Training shows your employees that you value them and their contribution and encourages them to use their new experience for your business.

An athlete might spend 90% of their time training and 10% of their time ‘on the job’ in order to reach the pinnacle of success. However, in business we spend less than 10% of our time on training, and 90% on the job, and yet we still want our employees to continually strive for achieve more. We really need to give them the tools to succeed.

That doesn’t mean we should or could take employees off the shop floor for the majority of the time. But there needs to be a balance between the investment in training and also the physical implementation of that new understanding.

Diversity in policy

Small to medium businesses are the lifeblood of the economy. There’s no two ways about it. Britain is a country filled with entrepreneurs and they have the drive and determination.

What they need are the same open minded flexible approach to policy that allow them the room to put that drive into action. If policy is rigid and restrictive, we stagnate as a country. But if we create a landscape where policies support and encourage, where we embrace diversity in thought, and encourage diversity in our leadership team, then we can give the small businesses and the entrepreneurs the tools they need to get on with growing their businesses and creating jobs.

You can view the complete E2E International 100 track here