Not all businesses aspire to hyper-growth. But too many of those that do fail well before they achieve their potential. What might tip the scales in founders’ favour? Sam Knowles, Founder & Chief Data Storyteller at The Insight Agents, explores.
A dozen years ago, I’d had it with agency life. Through a combination of a boss and team based in California – challenging in the extreme for meaningful management, and very rarely in real time – and the reality of a new job being almost precisely at 180 degrees from what was promised, I struck out on my own to become self-determining for the first time in my career.
In creating Insight Agents – a data storytelling consultancy helping those in data-heavy sectors to make smarter use of data in their communication – I had ambitions to create a sustainable business. One that would grow for sure, beyond our foundational seedling clients – both former employers, as so often – but I didn’t want to scale it into an enterprise that Martin Sorrell would be interested in buying years down the track. I’d had enough of letting down line reports whose names and roles I couldn’t remember until 30 minutes before their annual review.
There’s nothing in the entrepreneur’s playbook that demands scale and exponential growth, although there are plenty of deluded owner-founders – those with hope as the growth strategy – who believe they can do what their former employers did at a fraction of the cost and outflank them. In the Hollywood ending, they’d come back and buy their former bosses. Then fire them.
There were vibes in the air. You see, I set up shop in Lewes in good old Sussex by the sea, a few miles down the road from the start-up capital of Europe. Brighton. Counter-intuitively, Brighton is also the start-up failure capital of the world, where too often ill-considered trifles get either their comeuppance or their just desserts. My friend and long-term collaborator, Richard Freeman, detailed this dubious joint honour in his excellent podcast, the Brighton Paradox.
Now Brighton isn’t alone, it’s just that the data suggest that it’s the worst of a bad lot. Fewer than one in ten start-ups anywhere in the UK ever really scale, and seven-in-ten founder entirely in years 2-5, the so-called Valley of Death. Meantime those that do succeed – including the shining light of Brandwatch, a Brighton success story that led to world domination in social media analytics – often do so thanks to careful planning and proper market scoping. But many more of the success stories stumble into the big league thanks to hazard alone.
I get a sense that this may soon change, thanks to advances in AI – both the frontier and agentic varieties – helping both those founding new enterprises and those funding them to make the right decisions and the right time, based on a forensic understanding of what turns start-ups into scale-ups.
Start-ups that plan to stay modest – like we Agents of Insight – can thrive, grow modestly, and be sustainable by design. But start-ups that really could change the world are failing at an alarming rate – 90%, don’t forget. That’s thousands of companies, hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and tens of billions in enterprise value unrealised each year. Not to mention billions of tax revenue never collected.
If governments are serious about growth, they’ll harness the power of AI – on which they are so keen – to take the many, brilliant ideas from the incubator lab to the FTSE 100. It can and will be done, but far too often, it isn’t. As the nine in ten failed enterprises will readily attest. Midst all this gloom, AI may soon shine light on this land of darkness where the blind often lead the blind.
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