After the idea

Keeping up with production nearly broke us.

The off-grid sanitation business I had founded was growing faster than the factory could keep up with. Everyone was working hard, but nobody could see the whole picture: how much had been ordered, what came first and what was in stock.

The fix was not more people or more machines. I introduced a computerised Kanban-type system that ran from a new order through to packing for dispatch, with touchscreens on the shop floor. Updates made at each workstation were reflected in the office, so volumes, priorities and stock were visible to everyone, wherever they worked. That let the whole team contribute fully. The shop floor managed its own production priorities, with the production manager's help, instead of waiting to be told. Flow through the factory became much smoother, and output rose by 30% with broadly the same staff, hours and equipment.

I start there because it is the part of innovation people rarely talk about. The idea had worked. Customers wanted it. The business still nearly failed on something that had nothing to do with the idea and everything to do with making, moving and supporting it.

The businesses I started

Each began with a need that was close to hand.

A component for computer boards. It was expensive to obtain from overseas at the time. I designed it, built the manufacturing and test jigs, and sold it through distributors. Even then, the product was only half the work. It was not finished until it could be made, tested and sold repeatably by people other than me.

A consultancy chambers. Independent consultants are strong individually and small commercially. The chambers let them work together as a larger sales and delivery force. There was nothing physical to invent. The innovation was the structure.

A restaurant. I saw a gap around food intolerances that existing venues were not serving, and built the business from scratch. We used early social media platforms and local in-person groups to get the word out. We were profitable from day one, won Restaurant of the Year by public vote from more than 500 venues, and sold the business seven years later.

An off-grid sanitation manufacturer. I was living off-grid and needed a solution for my own family. When I talked about it online, it became clear that a lot of other people needed one too. The business grew to nearly £1m turnover and 20 staff across two sites, and was sold to a German company.

Its name became shorthand for the product. Competitors arrived with cheaper designs, and people would say they had bought one of ours when they had bought one of theirs. We did not mind. It was free promotion, and our products sold at a substantial premium on quality, design, performance, reviews and support. Around 30% of the team lived off-grid and used the products themselves. They knew the need from the inside, and customers trusted them for it.

A health technology venture. As founder and chief executive, I took a bio-sensing smart wearable from architecture to manufacturing readiness, alongside investment strategy and clinical partnerships in a regulated market. Then I sold the IP to a US company rather than build it in the UK. Founding a company to develop something does not oblige you to be the one who manufactures it.

Scaling something that already existed

Not all of it was starting from nothing. One of the most demanding roles I have held was in a business that was well past the startup stage.

It was an established IT services company: remote systems administration, and development work on enterprise knowledge management and workflow systems. One of its teams had built an integrated knowledge management system aimed at global businesses. The company decided to pivot its core towards the emerging enterprise knowledge management market, with a planned IPO as the focus.

I moved from director of systems integration to chief operating officer, and led the restructure that made the business capable of being a product company. The work won a Leeds business award created by a major corporate law firm, a university and the Yorkshire Post.

We kept the services business distinct, because it was healthy and a good cash earner. In hindsight it should have been sold or supported through a management buyout. A profitable part of a business can hold attention that the new direction needs.

I stayed on as COO after the IPO. Alongside operations, I supported the sales team in developing opportunities and handling objections, and dealt with everyday shareholder matters that did not need the CEO or chairman. A common objection was not about the software at all. Customers wanted to know how they would get it adopted across their organisation. We did not run those deployments, but we worked with their change management teams to set the projects up. As the product developed, we moved into acquiring semantic tools, an early forerunner of the language technology now built into modern AI.

What carries across

The sectors could hardly be more different. The lessons repeat.

• The need is usually closer than it looks. My own family's sanitation. A gap in local restaurants. A component that cost too much to import. The best opportunities I have found were ones I or the people around me were already living with.
• Operations decide whether growth is survivable. A product people want will find the weaknesses in how you make, stock and ship it. The sooner the people doing the work can see the whole flow, the sooner they can run it.
• Trust is built by people who know the need. A premium price held against cheaper copies because the people answering the phone used the product themselves.
• There is more than one way to carry an idea forward. Selling, licensing or partnering can be the right outcome. Not every invention needs you to build the factory.
• Customers buy adoption, not software. The hardest question in an enterprise sale is usually what happens after the contract.
• The comfortable part of the business can be the trap. A healthy cash earner is easy to keep and hard to justify when the company's future lies elsewhere.

Why this matters to the businesses I work with

When I help a startup or scaleup now, I am rarely the person with the original idea. I am the person who has seen what happens next: the production crunch, the hire made too early, the customer who loves the product but cannot adopt it, the exit that looks like failure and is not.

If you are at that point, the Technical Leadership Check is a quick way to see where your foundations stand. The C-suite a startup actually needs and The cost of endurance go further into two of the traps above.

Related: The older I get, the better I remember I was · From invention to Idea Mining · The C-suite a startup actually needs · The cost of endurance · Services · all writing