Small received his MBA in 2010 and now currently serves as director of two (very different!) companies: Agile Solutions, a marketing consultancy for the construction sector, and PowerCases, a supplier of protective cases that also charge mobile phones.
PowerCases is a supplier of lightweight protective cases for smartphones and tablets. The cases also contain batteries that recharge the devices. In 10 months, they have established distribution agreements covering the UK, Europe, the US, Canada, South Africa and Australia.
Small is the first to say that his successes in entrepreneurship did not come easily (he once started a business that eventually failed!). But Small turned these mistakes into quite the career as an entrepreneur – and now wants to share his lessons with you:
How did you start your work as an entrepreneur?
I’ve always worked for large companies in the construction sector doing engineering and marketing. I was working in Spain as head of marketing for a quite large company.
I came back to the UK in 2010 and I actually started a company that didn’t work. And that was quite an interesting start to working for yourself!
Failure actually that teaches you more about how businesses work than anything else. There’s nothing that focuses the mind more than a failed business.
What is the story behind Agile Solutions?
When it started to look like the failed company wasn’t going to work, we started up Agile Solutions because it was a marketing consultancy offering marketing solutions to the construction sector, which was back in the comfort zone for me and my business partner. It was a quick way for us to start earning money and building a company.
I never set out wanting to start my own marketing consultancy in the construction sector, that was set up as a business to really pay the wages whilst we tried to make the other company work and we found other jobs to do instead. Agile Solutions was formed out of necessity more than anything.
Tell us more about PowerCases and your role there.
My role in PowerCases is that I co-founded it with my business partner and brought my business partner from Agile Solutions into the company. PowerCases is product-based. We make protective cases for mobile phones with batteries in the back. They protect the phones and they recharge the phones as well. It’s a very practical product.
I have no experience in mobile accessories, I have no experience in consumer products, it’s just that this product jumped out at me. We’ve learned how to do it as we’ve gone along. The role I play now is a very operational role and that’s not something that I’ve done before and if I didn’t have the experience from the MBA, I don’t think I would’ve felt comfortable.
Why did you choose to get MBA?
There’s one thing that the MBA gives you that you would never really get from any other course and that’s the confidence to take on certain roles that you would never have dreamed of performing before. You learn the rules properly, you get yourself into the habit of doing things in the right way. The Bath EMBA is modular, with one week per subject. So it’s very intensive on one particular subject and that was absolutely perfect for me because I always avoided things like finance. But spending a week immersed in it, I actually learned a lot of fundamental things that are very important in running a business. It’s those sorts of things you draw on when you’re running your own company.
A lot of it is about confidence and taking that leap of faith. The really good thing for me with the EMBA is meeting people who started their own businesses that you can draw from and get advice. Starting a business is about learning. A lot of people have good business ideas, but they never do them because they never take that leap. I wanted to do an MBA because I wanted to learn more before I tried to jump and run my own company.
What about Bath stood out to you when you were choosing an MBA programme?
An MBA is a lot about where you do it. For me, the most appealing thing about Bath is that they run the Executive MBA as a modular MBA. It’s not evenings, it’s not weekends. For me that would have been much harder because I was in a role that required me to travel to Spain and Scandinavia. I would not have been able to manage something that was a regular meeting.
At Bath, you can call off a holiday for the week and immerse yourself. You learn one thing at a time and you learn it properly.
What advice do you have for current MBA students looking to start their own businesses?
- Talk to people. Talk to everybody that will listen. It isn’t you that decides if your business is going to succeed, it’s everybody else. If you’re going to do something that touches onto your existing experience, have a word with future clients. Don’t set up your own company until you know you’ve got a client base. You’ve got friends and say “Look, I’ll buy you a pint and let me talk to you about what I want to do and I want you to tell me if you’d buy it.” And listen. I didn’t listen. That’s why my first business didn’t work. I still know it’s a good idea, but I made a couple of fundamental errors. The common thread with people who have businesses that fail is that you think it’s a brilliant idea and it can’t fail because it’s so clear to you what the benefits are, but if you can’t explain the concept to someone simply in a few minutes, then think long and hard about changing it. I got some advice that I didn’t take.
- Successful entrepreneurs learn very quickly when it’s okay to save cost and do it yourself and when to spend a bit of money on someone who is professional. We had a legal issue at PowerCases with someone threatening to seize our product. But we paid a lot to bring a lawyer in and with one letter, we were able to stop the case. It’s about knowing when to spend the money.
- The thing we’ve learned with PowerCases is that you’ve got to get the fundamentals right first. There’s no point rushing out to manufacturers unless the product is ready. Get all your ducks in a row and everything as you want it before you have your big meetings. Have your key targets, but don’t go into meetings yet. It’s so important not to rush. It flies against everything you want to do because you’re so excited, but you have a huge amount of work to do.
Student Reviews
University of Bath School of Management (MBA)
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