GUEST COLUMN:
Matthew Tossell
Co-founder and Chairman
Tailwind Group
There comes a point in the development of many businesses when the founder can reasonably look around and say: I have done well. The danger is when that becomes: I have gone far enough.
Wales has long debated the problem of the “missing middle”: indigenous businesses which reach a certain size but do not make the next leap. There will be many commercial reasons for that, but from my own experience I think we underestimate the psychological barrier.
I understand it because I have experienced it myself.
My parents were a painter and decorator and a dinner lady. I left school, started work in the steel industry and later returned to education before going on to study law. When I joined law firm Hugh James Jones & Jenkins, as it was then called, many of the people around me had come from very different professional and educational backgrounds.
Even after I became a partner, I would sometimes wonder whether I really belonged there. I used to have a recurring dream that the senior partner would discover I had somehow misrepresented my qualifications and demand that I prove I had the A-level results I said I had.
That sense stayed with me even as my responsibilities grew.
I eventually became managing partner, helped transform the way the business operated and was part of its development from a successful regional firm into one of the UK’s top 100 law firms. Yet I know what it feels like to question whether you have earned the right to be in the room.
That is why I recognise something similar when I meet founders who have built successful businesses and then begin imposing limits on themselves.
They may have reached £1 million or another milestone which once felt distant and understandably feel enormous pride in that achievement. But there can also be a tendency to think: perhaps this is enough. Perhaps somebody like me does not build a business twice this size.
That limiting belief has consequences beyond the individual owner.
When good businesses stop growing into the organisations they could become, Wales loses jobs, career opportunities and businesses of greater scale. We also lose some of the examples that encourage the next generation to believe that they too can build something substantial from here.
We need founders continually lifting that ceiling.
But confidence is only part of the issue. Businesses also need the right environment and the right support.
During my years at Hugh James, one of my recurring frustrations was seeing initiatives we wanted to pursue – expanding an IT project or recruiting into a new service line, for example – struggle to attract any meaningful assistance. We grew organically, without accessing any government support.
At the same time, I saw competitors from outside Wales being encouraged to establish operations here with support around areas such as premises and recruitment.
I found that difficult to reconcile. Supporting inward investment and job creation can clearly have an economic purpose, but indigenous businesses should not find themselves at a disadvantage when they are trying to invest, grow and employ more people themselves. This only compounds the issue of the missing middle. I hope, with a new Welsh Government now in place, this approach will change.
One thing Wales already does incredibly well, however, is the amount of support available at the start-up and early-growth stages. What I think is less well developed is highly-tailored help for established owner-managed businesses which have reached a point where the problems are more complicated. They may indeed be those business owners who are thinking: “I’ve achieved enough”.
Of course, not all business support needs to come from government. A healthy, robust economy needs the private sector to take the lead, and that was one of the reasons that last year I created Tailwind along with my co-founders Angharad Neagle and Nigel Griffiths. We could see founders who had already proven they could build successful businesses but were under enormous pressure and were not always sure how to move to the next stage.
We work alongside owners, leadership teams and investors to find where value is being lost, decide where to focus first and turn that into practical work the business can act on.
What we’re building is an environment which unleashes ambition; one in which more business leaders feel confident, able, equipped and supported to keep going beyond the point at which they could comfortably say they have already done enough.
No longer should business owners – or Wales itself – need to settle for “good enough”.
