My blog

Tag: entrepreneurship

  • Class Dismissed: Richard Desmond

    Richard Desmond, the successful publisher and founder of the Health Lottery on the next generation, the success of OK! magazine – and not switching off

     

    Tell us a little about your upbringing. What do you think parents would say if they could see your success today?

    Look, I think they’d be incredibly proud. My father was the managing director of a cinema advertising chain Pearl & Dean and he used to take me to meetings. I have been in a lot of interesting meetings since; I can tell you that.

     

    You left school at 15 and have fought your way to the top. Do you think the university system has become less successful at preparing young people for the workplace?

     

    Universities are good for some students – but I reckon they’re not always right if you want to start a business. Parents are better off carefully thinking about what kind of offspring they have: don’t just send them to university if they have entrepreneurial flair.

     

    Did you have a mentor in your early days of business?

     

    Yes, but I always made my own decisions. I have tried to inspire the next generation and tell them when they are wrong. The main reason people fail in business is just that – lack of clarity of purpose.

     

    What advice would you give to young people today looking to start their own businesses? 

     

    It is tough out there and the sooner you realise that the better. You need resilience, the ability to sell and to champion your purpose – I can tell you that business is also a hell of a lot of fun when you win.

     

    Why do you think OK! ended up surpassing Hello! in the market?

     

    We were in tune with the markets: people wanted out product and we knew it. That meant that we were able to live and breathe it, knowing that with the right we would be successful. I also think we invested in the right features: never underestimate the value of good editorial – and when you see a good story, put your money behind it.

     

    How do you feel about Sir Keir Starmer’s administration? 

     

    He claims to be the party of wealth creation. It is probably better for me not to say anything just yet, although I am known for my expletives. Sometimes the wisest course of action is for me to try and remain silent.

     

    What did the writing of The Real Deal teach you about yourself and your past career?

     

    No doubt about it – most absorbing experience of my life. I remember being very busy writing it. It’s a fascinating experience to draw it all together – the threads of your life. Some of my best friends and worst adversaries told me that they couldn’t put it down.

     

    The Health Lottery is a passion of yours. What community projects are you most proud of having supported because of this initiative?

     

    I’ve a very simple philosophy on this. Don’t do anything you’re not proud of. I don’t believe in going into any project without believing absolutely in its importance.

     

    How do you switch off from work? 

     

    I never switch off – the lights never go out here!

     

    What is your legacy and how would you like to be remembered? 

     

    It is far too soon to be thinking about that. However, allow me look back with great pride for my own part in ensuring the Battle of Britain Monument which I helped get built against all the odds!

     

     

     

  • Adam Page: ‘It’s indefensible to be involved in business and not understand finance’

    Adam Page

     

    This is the story of a fantastic journey.

     

    But first, I have to explain something. I’ve been in far more pitching sessions – either raising money myself or as a potential investor – than I can remember. I’ve met, worked with or employed innumerable consultants. I’ve watched hundreds of senior directors as they’ve sat in countless board meetings. I’ve written and read acres of financial reporting. I’ve worked with a few hundred wealth and asset management professionals. I’ve led a good few investment research teams.

     

    And the one question that has hung – unanswered – in the air over and over again has been this: “Why on earth is it that the majority of these people have clearly never bothered to educate themselves about the one matter that lies at the heart of all business: finance?” Why are they sitting here, so evidently naive and so clearly bewildered about even the most basic concepts that make finance tick? Are they really that unaware of how unprofessional, how much less relevant to the conversation, they appear compared to those folk in the room who have got their heads around finance?

     

    I’ve always believed that it’s not only indefensible to get involved with business without a sound understanding of how finance works, but that it bestows such a huge (and easy) career advantage. Moreover, it’s just not that hard to learn.

     

    And those are three dirty little secrets about finance. First, you’re handicapping yourself badly if you run away from it; secondly, it really quickly sets you apart from everyone else if you do understand it; and thirdly, it’s much easier to learn than most people think.

     

    But there’s a fourth. It’s subtler but probably even more powerful: to think of finance as simply being about accounting is to make a huge error. Accounting is one small part of finance. I’m not an accountant. I don’t have the disposition for it. But I do know finance, and to me and others like me, finance is up there with great marketing, or engineering or product design. It’s inventive. Creative. It’s future-oriented, and is all about building value, serious value, for yourself, and for the business (and about avoiding destroying value – something the financially illiterate are all too prone to do).

     

    So in this short series of articles, I’m going to argue that one of the most powerful things you can do – in terms of your own career development – is to take some time to learn about finance, to understand the principles and the language that preoccupy the great entrepreneurs, the great business leaders, the great consultants, in a million conversations a day, in every business environment around the world, and that by doing so you will present yourself in a whole different class from everyone else chasing the same roles, the same opportunities, and the same careers.

     

    Let me start off by painting a picture of my own career so far.

     

    How did I first get involved in finance? Pretty easy really. I was in my early-20s, drifting around a little, unsure of what to do with my life, when I had a life-changing conversation with my father. I’ll tell you his exact words at the end of this article but, broadly, he pointed out that in every domain of human endeavour, finance was involved. Made sense. So I enlisted on an evening program, two nights a week for a year in a post-graduate diploma in finance.

     

    At the time, I had just started working as a computer industry journalist – despite knowing nothing about the computer industry (in my first week my editor bought me the Ladybird Book Of Computing to help things along).  But just by virtue of choosing to study finance, by committing to it, my editor made me the finance editor of that publication.

    Fast forward about nine months, and I was recruited by another publishing company to be the editor of a publication that wrote about investment in technology companies. My salary doubled. Fast-forward a year from that, and I was recruited by Union Bank of Switzerland to be one of their securities analysts specializing in UK and European technology, telecoms, software, that sort of thing. My salary quadrupled.

     

    But then a year later I was then made head of Small Caps research which meant I could poke my nose into any industry I was curious about. And, boy, I did. I dived right in and spent time looking into a huge range of businesses and questioning the Chairmen, the CEOs, the COOs, and the CFOs about how those different industries and their companies worked. (And my salary went up about 50%.)

     

    I looked at computing, software, telecommunications, electronics, biotechnology, power and optical cabling, defence electronics, estate agency, open clay mining, furniture manufacture, lace manufacture, lingerie manufacture, the music industry, the funeral industry, health & medical businesses, publishing companies, and many more.

     

    Endlessly curious, after seven years I left the investment banking world – having also worked with UBS and Natwest Securities) and then spent a decade flying between London, Hollywood and the Cannes Film Festival, financing the film industry. That in turn led me again into the music industry, animation, digital content, television and from there into live entertainment.

     

    By this time I was operating in more entrepreneurial environments, too, better described as venture capital and private equity, more complex financial engineering. I got involved in financing food businesses, more in health and medical technology, restaurants, bars and clubs, into fintech, insurance, sports, and time in renewables (wind energy, solar energy, anaerobic digestion etc.), countless start-ups in countless fields, then most recently in life sciences, artificial intelligence and educational technology.

     

    It’s been an extraordinary journey and an incredible education. And throughout all of that, I’ve seen and been involved in some spectacular moments of artful, clever, inventive financing that have elevated ordinary businesses, that have made the difference between founders abandoning their own business or becoming spectacularly wealthy.

     

    And, remember, I’m not an accountant. But certainly I studied, although it was only after leaving investment banking that I studied an MSc in Finance at the London Business School.

     

    The point is finance has opened countless doors, created countless opportunities, shown me countless fascinating situations, and it’s been vibrant and creative and endlessly refreshing.

     

    So in the next few articles I’m going to show you how easy finance actually is. How it breaks down into 12 basic – and entirely common sensical concepts – that individually or in combination lie behind every aspect of finance. They just require familiarity and a confidence with the language. (Oh and some very simple arithmetic.)

     

    So, to come back to what my father said to me all those years ago, “Get your head around finance, son. It’s everywhere, not enough people understand it, it will open endless doors, and I guarantee that no matter where you are or who you’re with, you’ll never, ever be the dumbest guy in the room”.

     

    Adam Page is CEO of Adam Page Training. Go to adampagetraining.com.  

  • Those Are My Principles: Michael Moszynski on Government’s Powerful Role in Fostering Innovation

    Michael Moszynski

    I am not a fan of Government trying to ‘pick winners’ in the economy (remember DeLorean?) but it does seem to me that some help to encourage people to start-up new enterprises is a good thing, especially when our economy was flat-lining in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

    Launching a new global ad agency, LONDON Advertising, two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, my partner and I received no financial assistance from the then Labour Government, so we had to risk our post-tax savings to fund our new enterprise.

    So, along with a number of other business people, I lobbied the Government for this to change and in 2012 was delighted to see George Osborne introduce the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme to encourage investment in start-ups (the most risky stage of any business).  This was the most rewarding incentive for investors to put money into new companies anywhere on the planet.

    Unfortunately, Osbourne’s 2012 budget was overshadowed by the ‘Pasty Tax’ row and the SEIS announcement was not featured in the news.  I rang the Business Editor of the Times to complain and was astonished to find out that even he was not aware of it.  So, on the spot I made a proposal that my start-up firm would put up £100,000 to fund another start-up if the Times would cover the story.

    He got his Editor to agree, who then invited me to speak at The Times CEO Conference. This enabled me to persuade the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to announce it at a business event at No.10. The next day, the front page story of the Times Business Section led with “Clarion call for the next big thing comes all the way from Downing Street” with details of our a prize of £100,000 to fund a new digital agency and how people could apply for our Dragon’s Den-style competition.

    In fact over 1,400 people answered the call from over 60 countries, including Iraq, Moldovia and Vietnam.  The winners were two young UK graduates who had the idea of automatically turning tweets into video messaging, using tags linking specific words to relevant Getty stock footage.  To cut a long story short, our £100,000 SEIS investment helped the company secure £4m of investment to build and launch the product, making it the most funded tech start-up in Europe.

    We named it “Wordeo” and in its first week it secured more users than Snapchat did in its first six months.  Unfortunately, whilst hundreds of thousands of people tried Wordeo, it did not achieve ‘product market fit’ so we did not get the repeat business to fuel our ‘rocket’.

    But our initiative did help promote SEIS and the early stage investors in Wordeo benefited from up to 78% tax rebates on their losses.  Since 2012 over 53,000 new businesses have used the SEIS scheme, generating over £50b of new investment in the UK, many of which have found long-term success.

    So, whilst any dream of becoming a tech billionaire was put on ice, it was fortunate to still have the day job of running the ad agency, which we had built to become a robust business.

    The challenge running a small to medium sized business is how can the Founders be rewarded for all their investment, risk and hard work and reward their staff without selling out to a bigger company?

    Well, in 2014 the Conservative Government introduced Employment Ownership Trusts (EOT), with the objective of helping to create more employee-owned businesses.

    For the owners, it means they can take any unpaid dividends and future profits (to the value of the business) without paying any income or capital gains tax.  Plus they can continue to run the business without working for a new boss.  For the employees, there is absolutely no downside – and they even can access a tax-free bonus whilst the Founders are being paid out of the profits.

    Once the Founders have been paid, the Trust can issue the profits as dividends to the staff. Or, if the company is sold in the future, then the value is shared out between the employees. And for the business, it has a brilliant mechanism to attract and retain great staff, retain its independence and create a true legacy for its founders.

    My partner and I sold 100% of our shares to our own EOT (you can choose the amount with a minimum of 51 per cent) in 2018 and last year completed our five-year earnout period.

    We survived a terrible time under Covid when we lost 80 per cent of our revenue in one month and in our recovery plan set out financial targets which we have met and allowed us to pay all our staff a one month bonus at year end.  As I explained to our team at our end of party, if we achieve the same result over the next three years my partner and I will have had the value of our shares paid off and the value of their bonus in year three will be worth a year’s salary each.  You could describe it as the ultimate win-win.

    The third area which I believe this Government has helped successfully grow is our tech sector, which is now the third largest in the world, with our tech startups valued at £996 billion.  This is the result of the quality of our educational institutions, the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs and underpinned by the SEIS scheme. As we have seen with the recent Microsoft announcement of its £2.5 billion European AI hub in the UK, we are well placed to embrace the benefits of AI.

    I believe Rishi Sunak is correct to identify that the UK can take a leadership role in the technology which will help us grow our productivity.  Only by growing our economy will we be able to fund services to help the less fortunate in society. I am witnessing AI’s impact through my advisory role with one of the world’s most successful AI companies. This business is dramatically changing the financial performance – and significantly reducing the carbon footprint – of many of the world’s most energy-intensive businesses.

    Of note this is a US company that decided to co-locate in London. This is another win-win outcome that can in time be extended to all sorts of business activity and help not just make more profits, allowing for more investment and jobs, but also make the world a greener place.

    So in conclusion, whilst I believe Government should not be a crutch that businesses rely on to support them, I do believe Government can help create a positive environment to help unleash the country’s entrepreneurial potential.

     

     

     

  • Harvey Soning on the importance of not going to university and learning on the job

    Harvey Soning

    My education wasn’t what you’d expect. My grandparents on my mother’s side came from Russia and Poland – that was in 1912. Within two years my grandfather was conscripted into the First World War. He spoke very little English but learnt very quickly in the trenches – mostly swear words.

    On the other hand, my father’s parents were here a generation before and were quite anglicised. My father’s father – a second generation immigrant – was an entrepreneur who built one of the first cinemas in the country in Staines. One month he had money – the next he didn’t: in that sense, he was a typical entrepreneur. In 1945, my Dad came out of the Air Force Bomber Command with £300 and went into the retail business. He became a successful businessman with a property portfolio.

    At the age of 14¾, I had the most diabolical school report: I was drawing aeroplanes and battleships when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork. We lived in Willesden at the time and my father said enough was enough. The headmaster said the best thing my father could do, was to send me to an aircraft factory in Cricklewood and see if they would give me a job and draw aeroplanes for the rest of my life.  Fortunately, my father phoned George Farrow, of Peachey Property, his friend in Kent, and said: “I’ve got this boy Harvey, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with him”.  George said: “Send him to me and we will make a man of him.” Peachey Property was based in Petts Wood, Kent, and so it was quite a commute: Willesden Green to Charing Cross, then Charing Cross to Petts Wood. I was paid £24 a week, of which £15 went on the fares even in those days. That’s how I got into the real estate industry.

    My education was, as they say, on the job. It was January 1st, 1960, when I started.  There were no bank holidays not the three-days-a-week in the office like there is now; it was full-on office work. The Corps of Commissionaires Sergeant used to clip me round the ear quite hard to make sure I had a clean desk –it’s how I was brought up and trained. You had to be the first in and last out: eight in the morning to eight o’clock at night.

    You could almost say that the old work ethic has now been all but destroyed and in the same way the mobile phone is destroying the art of communication, but this is the world we’re living in. In the 1960’s, London was being rebuilt. The smart money was buying the plentiful bomb sites, especially in the City and the East End.

    Despite the long hours, I got the property bug. Shelter is fundamental to human beings, whether that be a cave or modern home. We all must buy food and clothes – so retail is inevitable – and the retail has a supply chain, so you need warehousing and factories and so on. All of which makes real estate one of the most important factors of human life on earth, after food and water.

    It was on my 15th birthday that I started working in real estate. I have always admired the architecture and the sheer guts of these people to put these buildings up, From the early entrepreneurs such as Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855) and John Nash (1752-1835) who built this country, and then latterly for Irvine Sellar and Renzo Piano who built the Shard in the midst of a recession.

    Of course, you mainly read of the successes, but there have been lots of disasters as well.   More people have lost fortunes than the few who have succeeded. There are tens of thousands of people in this country involved in real estate as agents, architects, builders, and developers. I go to cocktail parties at Christmas, and look around me and think: “Wow, how do all these people earn a living in the Real Estate Industry”.

    I started life at Peachey Property Corporation who seconded me to estate agents for experience. I stayed there until the late 60s – a good 10 years – then I joined a company called Guardian Properties in which my father was a shareholder. Unfortunately, that went the way of many other real estate companies in 1974, which was the first crash after the Second World War. It was a secondary banking crash that brought down public-private real estate companies. At that point I thought: “Sod this business of working for other people” and I formed James Andrew as a commercial estate agency. I certainly didn’t think it was going to last for 50 years!

    I had £5,000 and named the company after my two eldest sons. I immediately received a desist letter to stop using the name because there was already a company with the same name in existence. I couldn’t afford new notepaper – you had to write letters to each other in those days, so I reversed the names. One of my first clients was Gerald Ronson who is still a client after 50 years, Sir Martin Sorrell followed a few years later. We have some very loyal clients including Sir Lloyd Dorfman, a Sovereign Wealth Fund, and a major Japanese Institution, who have been with us for 35 years.

    I don’t think setting up a business has changed all that much since we came out of the dark ages. Human beings are great at invention – whether that invention takes the form of technology, medicine, electronics, or some other commercial enterprise, and look at the tech businesses that have grown in the last 20 years. It’s the human drive. You have got to prove in a very small way that what you are trying to do actually works – and I would advise doing that with as little money as possible.

    The 1980s was amazing to witness. You have to hand it to Margaret Thatcher and her advisers as well: she had a great vision. When you met Thatcher, she was always straight to the point: no pleasantries about family life or anything like that. Right away the facts came out: she had a great brain.

    After what her successors have done to the economy, we’re now in a different world. We are still suffering from austerity and Covid 14 years after the last financial meltdown. There has always been tax, the only consolation being if you are paying tax, you are making a profit; tax runs the country. Has tax been a disaster for the real estate industry? Not really.  Corporation tax hasn’t moved too much either way with the changing of the governments. For private individual rates have not been the problem it’s the removal of allowable expenditure. Local taxation whether it be residential or commercial property is starting to hurt more and more, especially if you have a vacant property where there is no income. I am pleased Entrepreneurs’ Relief is still 10%-20%, depending on the circumstances, and CGT on most transactions.

    I would prefer to see entrepreneurial relief, at even lower levels to encourage new start-up businesses, as we talked about before. I think there should be at least a 5-year period before any tax on start-up businesses is charged. The government should also be providing more money for young entrepreneurs; we certainly need to encourage young people in this country to create the growth the economy requires.

    We need more bursary schemes for students and apprenticeships.  I am involved in a bursary for the Worshipful Company of Chartered Surveyors.   We have been very successful and have got 30 youngsters going through university that would have had no chance of being involved in higher education or know about the real estate and construction industry. It’s a great country of opportunity.   We need governments to encourage people to try and progress themselves out of the mire.

    Harvey Soning FRICS, is the founder, Chairman and CEO of James Andrew International

    Ambassador to the Royal Air Force Museum

    Founding Member of the Natural History Museum Foundation

     

  • Hamish Jenkinson on the Hard Truth About Entrepreneurialism

    Life as an entrepreneur isn’t always straightforward, writes Hamish Jenkinson, the CEO of leading immersive agency The Department

     

    What does it really mean to be an entrepreneur?

    A question I often ask myself, as I sit in my home office while simultaneously answering calls and tending to my two young kids.

    Maybe it’s being able to wear multiple hats at once? Maybe it’s dealing with chaos on a day-to-day basis? Or maybe it’s what we tend to see on social media: the ultimate escape from a ‘mundane’ lifestyle…

    Every day I meet and connect with fellow entrepreneurs across various platforms, and I see a variety of success stories. But online, you only see 3 narratives: The “nothing to something”, the “how I became rich”, and the “become your own boss”.

    What I see far less of is the story of how they got there – the real truth behind entrepreneurship.

    At just the click of a button we can search, chat, stream, and publish until our fingers turn blue. But are we only sharing the things that we think others want to see?

    I’d like to share my journey in the hope that it will shed some light on what it’s really like to be an entrepreneur.

    They say never go into business with family or friends. Naturally, I didn’t listen to that piece of advice…

    I co-founded my first company, Golden Monkey Productions (GMP) in 2003 with my school friend, Jonny Grant. The same Jonny Grant who co-founded The Department and is now ECD of our latest venture, Dept. Studios. A business partner for over 20 years, it’s safe to say we’re still friends.  (Shout out to Jonny, you’re great).

    Though GMP didn’t turn over any revenue, we did get chased by HMRC for failing to file dormant accounts (more on HMRC later). Those fines were small – but symbolic.

    Lesson 1: There’s a hell of a lot more to starting a business than just winning work and clients, you need to be on top of everything behind the scenes to retain customers and drive quality.

    Luckily, England is one of the easiest places in the world to start a company – pay £200 to Companies House and you’re away…

    And that’s how my career as a Director began. No shareholder’s agreement, no articles of association. The classic case of running before I could walk.

    On the 8th of December 2006, I found myself as the director of MINI Partners ltd. Fast forward 7 years, the directors and I had appointed a voluntary liquidator. Not an easy decision, but the right one. It was profitable and I learned a hell of a lot, but it wasn’t scalable. So, we took the profits and ran.

    Next up: The Old Vic Tunnels. We had 6-figure revenue and it became a cult immersive sensation, just below London Waterloo. The space was just shy of 90,000,000 sq ft of dormant tunnels and we hosted events such as Banksy’s UK Premiere of Exit through the Gift Shop and Bill Clinton’s fundraiser with the Reuben Foundation in May 2012. The next thing we knew, the venue “was not a core focus for the Old Vic Theatre Trust” and that door closed in March 2013.

                                                                  Hamish Jenkins at the Old Vic Tunnels

    It broke my heart, as I quickly realised I’d have to make 18 incredible people redundant in one day. I felt for all of them and watched helplessly as they looked at me in utter disarray. This was the first gut-wrenching process I had to go through as director.  Sadly, it wasn’t the last.

    Lesson 2: Being an entrepreneur means making difficult decisions.

    My next venture Lights of Soho followed a similar trajectory, but not before becoming the most Instagrammable venue in London and even making it onto the front cover of GQ magazine soon after we opened. That grand space was a different kind of cultural highlight for London.

    Like many entrepreneurs, I never received a salary at that time. While we paid the wages of the bar staff and security; our exchange was to come when the venture would expand and, of course, be (successfully) acquired. Our payoff came in the form of unbelievable nights at the venue that made it entirely worth it. But it didn’t last forever, and when the landlords hiked the rent, staying at the Soho venue was impossible. And so again, I had to make some great team members redundant. Followed by an unpaid bill to HMRC and a rap on the knuckles.

    Still reading? Great.

    On 17th May 2013, Jonny and I established our next venture: The Department. We made a strategic hire, Jessica, who quickly proved her worth and became a co-founder and an equal shareholder. For years, The Department grew and grew. Our team of 30 staff gained some amazing opportunities with incredible clients such as FIFA, Toyota, Adidas, Lexus, Asics, and Facebook to name a few.

    Once again, the founders were not the highest-paid – far from it. But we were prepared to pay ourselves in dividends when we would (eventually) gain profit. It was all moving in that direction, but this time it was the pandemic that meant I had to make more tough decisions.

    March 16th, 2020. Ten members of staff were called into the board room together to be told their services could no longer be needed. If the company was going to have any chance of survival, this was an extremely painful, but necessary, step. Furlough was announced about two weeks later and the remaining staff were furloughed while we crunched numbers and counted the days of cash left.

    But it’s not just the hiring and firing decisions that take their toll. Each of these endeavours took years of my life to build. I poured my sweat, blood, and tears into every business, sacrificing time and money as time went on. I’ve lost friends and business partners, but I’ve always tried to focus on the highest quality experience to ensure that what we do inspires people. Yet I’ve still not reached the point of living on ‘passive income’, sipping margaritas all day long – far from it… (if you have any tips let me know).

    Lesson 3: The truth is being an entrepreneur is full of challenges, and more downs than ups.

    It’s so much more than the glimpses we’re shown on the internet. It’s not the easy life people portray it to be and many of us do not accomplish success overnight; I know people who’ve spent over a decade on a business that turns over no more than £50K a year.

    So, if you are to be an entrepreneur, you need to stick it through the good AND the bad. Believe me, without the lows, I would never be where I am today. I’ve learnt (the hard way) that nothing is certain – and you can’t be successful without failure.

    As Arianna Huffington says: “Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of it.”

    If you’re going to do it – buckle up, hold on tight but don’t close your eyes – you’re in for a tough ride.

    Go to: https://www.the-department.co.uk/ 

  • Diary: Toby Young on journalism, diversity-crats and not oversleeping

    Toby Young

     

    Journalism is a great career for someone in their twenties and thirties, but it’s a very people are given proper employment contracts by newspapers with pension benefits and healthcare. So once you’re in your forties and you’re married and have a family, and mortgage contributions to make it’s a less attractive profession. Some people combine it with doing other things. Others use it as a springboard into marketing and PR.

     

    Something I found unsatisfying about being a journalist is that there’s not much sense of progression. If you’re a reporter or a columnist, you’re doing the same thing day in day out for decades at a time. Unlike an architect where you can look back and say: “I built that” with journalism there’s sometimes a lack of a cumulative sense of achievement. If you’re on the editorial track, and you shin up the greasy pole and become editor-in-chief, that can be a different thing though.

     

    One time I had to interview the film director James Ivory. I overslept and I got woken by the publicist about half an hour after it was meant to have started. The publicist said: “That’s not a good enough excuse to keep him there!” “Well what should I say?” “Car crash!” When I got there he quizzed me in great forensic detail about my car crash. He obviously knew it was a lie. I thought at the end of it he might hire me as a screenwriter so great was my imaginative capacity.

     

    I’ve always had an entrepreneurial streak. I set up my first magazine in primary school, so when I set up The Modern Review when I was 27 in 1991, I was able to say I’d been in the publishing business for 20 years. I eventually got involved in education and set up four schools, and then more recently The Free Speech Union. Setting up schools and institutions gives you a sense of leaving something behind. You have to think much more commercially if you start things, and if there’s a market for it, and if so, how to reach that market.

     

    As British universities have admitted more and more students and grown in size, they’ve attracted left-wing academics with a sense of social mission who want to change the world by evangelising and converting them to the cause of social justice. It’s a generational shift. Most academics were radicalised in the 1960s, or those who weren’t have hand-picked their successors. As these resources have grown, more has been spent on diversity-crats. As tuition fees have gone up, students have become more and more demanding that they be looked after by university administrators.

     

    The Free Speech Union is often contacted by students and academics who have got into trouble for exercising their lawful right to free speech – sometimes quite bad trouble. So a good example is Timothy Luckhurst, who’s the head of South College at Durham, which is the equivalent of an Oxbridge college, for inviting Rod Liddle to speak. He was placed under investigation, and the Free Speech Union had to look after him. Durham is one of the worst offenders, and we’re often contacted from people like Oxford and Cambridge. On the other hand, we don’t get too many inquiries from Birmingham, and only a few from Exeter.

    One of the reasons to be cautious about how quickly the spirit of liberty can be restored is it was revealed to be in a very decrepit state during the last two years. It was surprisingly easy for the government and various public health agencies, civil servants and the BBC to persuade people to exchange their liberty for safety, much more so than it had been in the Asian flu in the 1950s. That was true not just of Britain but of most liberal democracies. Today, when we look at the Draconian lockdowns in China, and people streaming from their windows for help, we think that’s what tyranny like, but two years ago people did the same. That was a sobering moment.

     

    Toby Young founded the Free Speech Union

  • Book review: Ronel Lehmann on Lord Cruddas’s Passport to Success: From Milkman to Mayfair

    Ronel Lehmann

     

    I could not put the book down from the moment that I began reading, despite its author for a time crossing the road when he saw me approach. As an Honorary Trustee, I was fundraising for Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice capital appeal and Peter was inundated with similar requests. He did contribute for which we will always be incredibly grateful. It set the scene for what was a remarkable journey From Milkman to Mayfair.

    Unlike many business leader autobiographies, this was not ghost written but penned by the great man himself. Whilst reading you can hear his tone of voice during an extraordinary voyage right to the top.

    The son of a meat market porter and an office cleaner, Peter left Shoreditch Comprehensive School at the age of fifteen with no qualifications and a part time job as a milkman. Today he’s Lord Cruddas of Shoreditch, the founder of a £1.5 billion financial trading company and a distinguished philanthropist, giving to over two hundred charities through his foundation which helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

    Fed up with Labours economic management, Peter began his foray into politics, becoming a key Conservative Party donor. But after being elevated to Treasurer in 2011, he fell victim to a Sunday Times sting which he was falsely accused of breaking the law on party donations. With unflinching honesty, he reveals the full story of his successful libel battle and opens of Pandora’s box of profound wider questions about newspaper dark arts and the power of the British press over the judicial system.

    Refusing to be scared off from the political world, Peter co-founded the winning Vote Leave campaign. Here, he gives a detailed insider view of the real reasons behind the victory and contemplates how Britain can now thrive outside the EU.

    Filled with heartbreak and elations, this is the extraordinary story of Peter’s epic rise from an east London council estate to a Mayfair mansion – and includes plenty of tips for budding billionaires, not to mention the importance of giving back.

    Honestly, I cannot wait for his sequel, and so will you.


    Passport to Success is published by Biteback Publishing at £20

  • An Inside Look at the Changing Chess Industry

    In this special report, Finito World’s Patrick Crowder examines the post-pandemic chess world, from local clubs to the world’s largest chess website.

    Like many, I started playing chess during the lockdowns to break the monotony of endless media consumption and to give my brain something to do other than worry and slowly rot away. Here at Finito World, we believe that important lessons can often come from unlikely sources. Chess isn’t only something to learn, it is something to learn from. Chess teaches to deal with and learn from failure, to teach compassionately, and trains concentration. It is also a rapidly expanding industry which is brimming with possibility for those who decide to take the plunge.

    Lately, chess has gone out of the chess pages into the entertainment and even the front pages. Of course, there was the Queen’s Gambit which brought the sport – if in fact it could be called a sport – onto people’s radar, and then there was the cheating scandal which led to the lawsuit between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann. This is all very interesting, but the bigger question is “Can chess be a career?” World famous chess player Hikaru Nakamura would certainly say yes, as he makes a very good living not only by playing in tournaments but also by streaming chess-related content on Twitch. For truly great players, there is quite a bit of money to be made from tournaments alone. Chess.com awards $20,000 in prizes every weekend, $1M in the global championship, and every Tuesday sees $5,000 in total prizes as part of the Titled Tuesdays event. In-person events such as the Sinquefield Cup also have prizes in the high six-digit range. Chess is often seen as one of those routes in life which you find yourself in because the game came unusually naturally from a young age. However, there are now more jobs out there than you might think, and you don’t need to be a grandmaster to get in on the action.

    Battersea Chess Club
    chess

    Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, Maria Emelianova/Chess.com

    Other than a few games with friends I had never played over the board, so I was eager to see what attending an actual chess club was all about. I am not a very good player (about 900 ELO if anyone’s curious) and I feared that the environment may be unwelcoming, but after a Tuesday evening at Battersea Chess Club, I realised my worries were misplaced.

    Leon Watson is fully immersed in both the online and in person, or over-the-board (OTB) chess worlds. He serves both as Secretary of the Battersea Chess Club and as Head of PR for world champion Magnus Carlsen’s online chess teaching venture Play Magnus Group.

    “We are one of the biggest chess clubs in London, and one of the oldest chess clubs in London. We formed in 1885, and we’ve been a fixture in the community for all that time. We’ve survived two World Wars, a World Cup, and we continue going to this day. Even through the World Wars we carried on playing,” Watson says, “We cater to everyone from casual players to very serious players, from beginners to grandmasters. We’ve got members ranging from age seven to 92, and these people are all from different backgrounds. Some members are really struggling in life, and others are high-flying city bankers. That’s what’s great about chess; It doesn’t matter what age you are, your background or your gender, it’s a game where you can come in, sit down, have a pint or an orange juice, and just have some fun or take it seriously. It’s up to you,” Watson says.

    Both myself and my opponents that evening took the “just have some fun” approach, and there was never a hint of pretension or ego. I relate this experience not for the purposes of self-insertion, but to describe the great benefits of trying new things which require concentration in unfamiliar environments. The confidence required to walk in cold to a chess club surely exercises the same parts of the brain as a job interview, and the carefully considered strategy required to play the game itself represents a meditative disconnection from the outside world that is becoming ever harder to find in our busy lives. Watson too has seen the benefits that chess can bring, both to himself and his family.

    “There are lots of benefits to chess. Of course there is the social aspect, but there are also claims that chess is very good for educational reasons. I’m not an educational specialist, but I personally find it very helpful for learning to focus and concentrate on things, and that helps me in life. I also have a seven-year-old son who’s learning chess, and I feel like it is helping him focus… hopefully on his schoolwork! A grandmaster has lost more games of chess than I’ll ever play in my life, but the thing about chess is that you can take a game that you’ve lost, analyse it, look at your mistakes and make sure you don’t make them again. I think that’s a great lesson for life, and as a dad I hope that I can impress that upon my kids,” Watson says.

    Helping people make the transition from playing online to over-the-board is something that the kind folks at Battersea Chess Club excel at. Though new OTB players must learn how a chess clock works and remember not to touch a piece unless they plan to move it, the game itself is of course unchanged. The experience, however, changes greatly. You can play slow, contemplative chess online, but it is much easier to do so if your opponent is in front of you and your environment is free from distraction. Online games are excellent for practicing faster time controls, and online game analysis is an indispensable tool for improvement, but the social and mental benefits of OTB chess are far more applicable to daily life, from the experience of this author.

    The Online Effect

    Chess, Hikaru Nakamura

    Hikaru Nakamura, Maria Emelianova/Chess.com

    Since the dawn of the internet, people have wanted to play chess online. There have been many interesting offerings which provide this service, including caissa.com, chess24, the fully free site Lichess, and play-by-email options dating back to the 1970s. Now, Chess.com is the most popular chess website in the world.

    Chess.com has been instrumental in the growth of chess. The website, which first started in 2005, is now a massive business which holds the title of the largest chess website. International Master Danny Rensch helped found Chess.com. As someone with experience both playing and teaching chess, he realised the potential for a website which combined chess training, casual play, and tournaments which would attract the strongest players from around the world.

    “I learned to play when I was 10 and I was quickly made aware that I had a knack for the game, and I got good very quickly. Knowing what I know now about the levels of chess, it’s not necessarily fair to say I was some sort of child prodigy, but I was definitely one of the best players in the US at one point,” Rensch says, “At around the age of 19 I had some health problems and was kind of forced to stop playing and travelling, which turned out to be a really important, pivotal crossroads in my life. I jumped all-in to running a chess teaching business in Arizona where I’m from, which was an after school scholastic enrichment programme. It was sort of the traditional professional chess player’s gambit at the time.”

    Teaching chess is an extremely common way for professional chess players to monetise their talents, and now online teaching has become the norm. With the Queen’s Gambit came millions of people new to the game who were eager to improve. Rensch has found that the best teachers seek to understand how their students think rather than focusing solely on accuracy and rote memorisation.

    “I think honesty without tact can at times be cruel or disingenuous, and then at the same time explanation without understanding of whether someone can digest the information is also not useful. You have to have an appreciation for what the next steps are for someone’s learning process rather than just saying the answer, because anyone can understand the answer to an algebraic or calculus equation in the back of the book, but your ability to solve it is a muscle that you build along the way. I think you have to focus on it more as a language than simply a problem that you expect someone to solve. You don’t expect someone to read before they understand how to sound out letters and syllables and vowels and put them together, right? People always approach chess as a thing for people with brilliant IQs as if it’s an unsolvable problem, which it is, in many ways, but the core of being a good chess player is about pattern recognition. You can’t expect people to see patterns that are complex before they see basic patterns. I think a good teacher appreciates the need to reach someone at their level of understanding and cares more about them taking the next step in their learning process than they do about whether they’re ultimately right,” Rensch says.

    This understanding of what it takes to teach effectively can be translated to life outside of chess, of course. Compassion and understanding are hallmark traits of a good educator in any field, and Rensch realised in the relatively early days of the internet that this teaching style could be delivered to a far wider audience online than in person. Rensch’s vision led him to look into online options, and through a chance encounter, to the very start of Chess.com.

    “I was running this chess teaching business and putting most of my energy into that rather than travelling due to my health problems, but then the internet happened. The world was changing rapidly before our eyes, and I think I quickly saw the internet in terms of what it could be for chess in a non-traditional sense. I was immediately looking to build an online chess business, so having learned about SEO and keyword optimisation I went to get the domain name ‘Chess.com’. And there, like ships in the night, I found that my eventual business partners and co-founders Erik and Jay had just acquired the domain name out of bankruptcy in the Bay Area,” Rensch says, “Their vision for chess.com was to be the MySpace of chess, and my vision was for it to be a place for professionals to coach and to teach, as well as a place for tournaments. When I came on board, within about a year after launching I was always pushing things in this direction, and that’s why when Erik, Jay and I talk about it I’m considered an honorary co-founder.”

    Now, Chess.com is a platform which allows people to play, teach, communicate, and entertain. Before platforms like it existed, the only way to enter the chess world was to attend a chess club or read chess publications to improve your game. Without a large emphasis on chess in the US, Bobby Fischer’s rise to fame and eventually the World Champion title was unprecedented. It also came at a time when chess was highly politicised. The 1972 World Chess Championship wasn’t merely a game between two men, Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, it was a battle between the US and the Soviet Union. Fischer’s success was attributed to the mind of a prodigy, a rare chess genius who was born in America, but intelligence and prodigy are spread across all nations. Now, the accessibility of the chess world is beginning to allow these prodigies who would otherwise be unknown to reach their full potential.

    “Traditionally, before online chess existed, if you didn’t have a very rich chess culture in your backyard, you had no chance of developing into a world’s top player. Even Bobby Fischer was in New York – Greenwich Village and the Marshall Chess Club were a block away from where he lived – and so he grew up around the best of chess in the US at the time. There’s a reason that all of history has seen dominance by Soviet chess players. And I say Soviet because it’s not just Russia, it’s all former Soviet states. At the peak of the regime chess was a state sponsored sport throughout all of these countries, which is why until Bobby Fischer you saw only Soviet world champions. Since Bobby Fischer we had Kasparov and Karpov, and they were great players, but since then we’ve had Viswanathan Anandfrom India, we’ve had Magnus Carlsen from Norway, and I would say that we are on the verge of potentially having a Chinese World Champion in Ding Liren. But regardless of the label of world champion, what we have are prodigies rising from all over the world because of their access to the best chess players. What’s happening online is actually changing the game,” Rensch says.

    Chess coaching was, and still is, a major way for players to earn enough money to compete, but now online tournaments also offer that chance. As we will explore later, this has led to some significant challenges in terms of ensuring fairness. Rensch is confident in Chess.com’s robust anti-cheat methods and explains how the good that these tournaments bring outweighs the risk of misconduct.

    “Just to talk directly about the elephant in the room in terms of anti-cheating and the scandals that currently face the chess world, people don’t know that we’ve been dealing with scandals effectively and appropriately,” Rensch says, “It has allowed us to continue to invest and increase the money that’s in the game, and therefore the opportunities for professionals and therefore the livelihood of coaches, and who knows what trickle effect that’s having downstream on the next generation.”

    The Rise of Chess Entertainment
    Chess, Danny Rensch

    Daniel Rensch, Daniel Rensch’s personal collection

    The sudden, massive interest in chess following the Queen’s Gambit formed an unlikely link between the worlds of chess and e-sports, and the pandemic ensured a captive audience. Now, chess streaming is a multi-million-pound industry which is only growing. Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who is one of the best players in the world, streams on Twitch, interacting with fans and providing funny, insightful commentary. International Master Levy Rozman, who goes by GothamChess online, has provided countless free lessons on YouTube and frequently streams games, and reviews the games of his followers. The Botez sisters, IM Eric Rosen, and many more have become stars of the chess world, both for their skill on the chessboard and through their engaging personalities. Not only is online streaming a way for people to interact with top chess players like never before, it is also yet another way to make money in a field where it was once so difficult. Danny Rensch believes chess streaming’s influence goes beyond mere entertainment.

    “I think chess players are approaching the game in a much more social way, not just online but because the community has grown,” Rensch says, “I would say that’s another reason why technology has been so good for chess, because it’s brought these communities together. Chess has merged communities that existed locally in pockets all around the world. You had the Detroit chess community and the Moscow chess community. Well, guess what? Now you can actually see them online together at the same time, sometimes on camera with a grandmaster from Michigan playing against a grandmaster from Russia. And there’s something really cool and unique and challenging about that, and it’s pushing people’s stereotypes of chess players.”

    At first glance, there is something slightly surreal about seeing the Twitch stream format applied to chess. Watching streamers yell into their microphones, fully hyped up about what many consider to be a quiet, dignified game has an element of the absurd to it, but on closer examination, it’s really not that strange. Twitch streaming is one of the main forms of next-generation content taking hold today, and many young people are interested in chess, so the marriage of the two is simply a natural progression. What is unique about streaming chess is that you don’t have to be a master at the game. It certainly helps, but there are plenty of streamers who have a relatively low rating – it’s their personality and ability to entertain which keeps people watching, not their skill. For the first time ever there is a way to make money and gain popularity from chess without teaching lessons or playing major tournaments, and it is a new industry begging for further exploration.

    The Prodigy’s Gambit

    If you’ve seen chess in the headlines recently, that’s probably the doing of Grandmaster Hans Niemann. In what has become the biggest story to hit the chess world in many years, the major cheating scandal involving a $100m lawsuit against top players and Chess.com has taken many turns and is at the time of writing unresolved.

    Hans Niemann is a 19-year-old chess player who has shown unrivalled skill and progression. He achieved the title of Grandmaster at only 17, and he has since gone on to perform well in top-level competitions against other extremely highly rated players. The scandal began when Niemann beat current World Champion Magnus Carlsen in the prestigious Sinquefield Cup tournament, breaking Carlsen’s 53-game winning streak. Even more remarkably, Niemann beat Carlsen while playing with the black pieces, putting him at a disadvantage as the player with the white pieces makes the first move. During Niemann and Carlsen’s matchup the next day, Carlsen made one move against Niemann then resigned and withdrew from the tournament. This led to wild speculation online and prompted Carlsen to author a Tweet which implied he was in “big trouble” if he spoke out.

    Niemann admitted to cheating in his chess career while playing online, once when he was 12 and multiple times when he was 16 to grow his online streaming career, but he insists that he has never cheated in an OTB game, and that he does not cheat now. This was already known at the time of the Niemann-Magnus scandal, but it prompted a further review by Chess.com, analysing Niemann’s games on the website for signs of irregularity. Niemann’s Chess.com account was closed, and he was banned from competing in the upcoming Chess.com Global Championship before the release of a damning report which asserted that he had cheated over 100 times on the website. The alleged online cheating occurred in games against other top players, while Niemann was streaming his games, and in events with large prizes attached to them. The report was careful to point out that Chess.com had no concrete evidence of any cheating OTB at the Sinquefield Cup, and stressed that Carlsen’s team had not pressured them to take action against Niemann.

    On October 20th, 2022, Niemann filed a $100m defamation lawsuit against Magnus Carlsen, Chess.com, and Magnus Carlsen. Describing “devastating damages that Defendants have inflicted upon his reputation, career, and life by egregiously defaming him and unlawfully colluding to blacklist him from the profession to which he has dedicated his life,” Niemann seeks damages and vindication for what he sees as a massive attack on his livelihood. It is unclear what will be proven should the case go to court, but top players have predicted that finding evidence of cheating will be extremely difficult.
    Many media outlets have reported that cheating represents an existential threat to chess, but chess experts insist that cheating is not as prevalent as reported. Large-scale cheating would threaten the sport, however online cheating is already fairly easy to detect, so it is far more likely that we will see higher security measures and new methods of cheat detection at OTB tournaments. These could include a time-delay between live play and broadcast, which would make it difficult to run chess positions through an engine in real time, and it is also possible that players could compete in a Faraday cage which eliminates cellular and radio frequencies.

    Despite the drama, it is clear that chess is here to stay. The game which has fascinated mankind for over 1500 years continues to do so today, and there is clearly a reason why people keep playing. The mental and social benefits of chess cannot be ignored, and as an industry it shows massive room for growth. The new horizons of online streaming, teaching, and playing allows the game to be accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and chess entertainment has proved to be an excellent way to monetise a love of chess and the talent of charismatic presentation. The world of chess is very much worth diving into, and the breadth of opportunities available is surprising, so if you think chess could be for you or you think you might want to return to the game after many years away, there’s only one thing to say: your move.

  • Arts universities produce the most start-ups, study shows

    New research from the financial tech company Tide shows that art universities produce more start-up businesses than other institutions.

    By using data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), they were able to see that the top start-up producing university in the UK is the Royal College of Art. 1,665 graduates have started their own businesses since the 2014/2015 academic year.

    While having a high number of start-ups tends to be associated with the tech industry, arts-focused universities actually produce more start-ups, due to artists frequently being self-employed. The trend towards the creative industries continues, with Kingston University coming in second on the list. Their focus on business, engineering, and many types of art including fashion and design makes graduates from Kingston more likely to start their own businesses than those from other institutions.

    Third on the list, Falmouth University has fostered creativity and helped their students translate their ideas to the real world of business through their Launchpad programme, which focuses on giving entrepreneurial students access to the market through mentorship and networking opportunities.

    Having a high number of start-ups coming out of a university is a good sign, and due to the freelance nature of many creative careers, this seemingly unlikely pattern is actually not that unusual. However, although arts-focused universities produce the most start-ups, these are not always the most financially successful.

    Aside from the number of start-ups a university produces, Tide also looked at the value of a university’s intellectual property. They found that Oxford University tops that list, having produced intellectual property valued at £213 million since 2015. Oxford also has the highest number of patents, with 3,086 granted over the five-year period. Most of these innovations came from the prestigious university’s tech and healthcare developments.

    The Institute of Cancer Research has seen graduates produce £208 million in intellectual property over the last five years. This remarkable number can be explained by the high value of developments in the fight against cancer.

    At £64 million, the University of Sheffield has proved that accelerator programmes can directly lead to increased student success. Their Pre-accelerator programme helps students generate, develop, and sell their start-up ideas with a focus on getting products through to the investment stage.

    Tide’s research shows not only that the creative industries are large producers of start-ups, but also the value that can be created when creative instruction is coupled with mentorship and networking programmes which allow students to get their ideas onto the market. While the highest-value start-ups are still based in tech and healthcare, design, fashion, and other creative courses can create lucrative start-ups when students are given the opportunity to take their ideas to the next level.

    Credit: https://www.tide.co

  • 2022 Highlight: Arts universities produce the most start-ups, study shows

    Patrick Crowder

    New research from the financial tech company Tide shows that art universities produce more start-up businesses than other institutions.

    By using data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), they were able to see that the top start-up producing university in the UK is the Royal College of Art. 1,665 graduates have started their own businesses since the 2014/2015 academic year. 

    While having a high number of start-ups tends to be associated with the tech industry, arts-focused universities actually produce more start-ups, due to artists frequently being self-employed. The trend towards the creative industries continues, with Kingston University coming in second on the list. Their focus on business, engineering, and many types of art including fashion and design makes graduates from Kingston more likely to start their own businesses than those from other institutions.

    Third on the list, Falmouth University has fostered creativity and helped their students translate their ideas to the real world of business through their Launchpad programme, which focuses on giving entrepreneurial students access to the market through mentorship and networking opportunities.

    Having a high number of start-ups coming out of a university is a good sign, and due to the freelance nature of many creative careers, this seemingly unlikely pattern is actually not that unusual. However, although arts-focused universities produce the most start-ups, these are not always the most financially successful.

    Aside from the number of start-ups a university produces, Tide also looked at the value of a university’s intellectual property. They found that Oxford University tops that list, having produced intellectual property valued at £213 million since 2015. Oxford also has the highest number of patents, with 3,086 granted over the five-year period. Most of these innovations came from the prestigious university’s tech and healthcare developments.

    The Institute of Cancer Research has seen graduates produce £208 million in intellectual property over the last five years. This remarkable number can be explained by the high value of developments in the fight against cancer.

    At £64 million, the University of Sheffield has proved that accelerator programmes can directly lead to increased student success. Their Pre-accelerator programme helps students generate, develop, and sell their start-up ideas with a focus on getting products through to the investment stage.

    Tide’s research shows not only that the creative industries are large producers of start-ups, but also the value that can be created when creative instruction is coupled with mentorship and networking programmes which allow students to get their ideas onto the market. While the highest-value start-ups are still based in tech and healthcare, design, fashion, and other creative courses can create lucrative start-ups when students are given the opportunity to take their ideas to the next level.

    Credit: https://www.tide.co