What I've learned about building winning businesses

The journey from start-up to scale-up is an exhilarating but vulnerable experience. Every year, there are typically around 500,000 new trading companies born in the UK. Of those, only 40 percent will make it past their third year of trading.

Much of what sets apart the success stories inevitably involves factors that are hard to engineer—entrepreneurial intuition, availability of resources—but there’s also plenty of good practice from which almost all companies can benefit.

Few understand this better than Phillip Dominique, whose team at HSBC interacts with more than 75,000 entrepreneurs annually. Dominique is a Director within HSBC’s SME Business Banking team, and part of his role involves meeting founders all over the country, understanding their challenges, and helping them navigate everything from day-to-day cash flow to international scaling.

So, what are his top tips for start-up founders hoping to beat the odds?

Founders tend to be experts in their fields, rather than experts in raising capital. Dominique has met many who have secured funding, but didn’t do sufficiently deep analysis of trade-offs and implications, or consider alternative options.

If you’re raising equity finance, say, are you happy to relinquish total control of your company? Would a business loan be more appropriate, or might you struggle with the repayments? Is there a government grant you could be eligible for?

“There are lots of options available to entrepreneurs from bank debt to grants to equity,” says Dominique. “Each has its pros and cons; it’s about matching the right funding solution with the stage that the business is at and the founder’s ambitions. Speaking to a bank or other advisors can help entrepreneurs work out what funding option is right for them.”

When Dominique’s team assesses business proposals from across the country, the strength and depth of the management team is one of the key things that they look at. Dominique emphasises that a balanced team is essential for future success, and they particularly prioritise one specific attribute.

“The very best entrepreneurs are those who recognise early that they need to hire others to fill the gaps within their own skills, rather than hire people who have the same abilities and backgrounds as them,” says Dominique. “I take this advice in my own business as well. I don’t hire people in so that I can tell them what to do. I hire them so they can tell me what to do.”

When developing a new product, fortune favours the flexible. Don’t be too wedded to your initial idea, instead take feedback and refine your vision. A great way to do this is simply to launch it: get it out into the world and see what the market tells you. This can also confer the benefit of first-mover advantage.

The power of this business strategy was brought into focus for Dominique a few years ago by a British backpack maker based in the South of England. The founder was aware that his products were not yet the finished article, but knew he had to stress-test the concept and also beat the competition to the punch.

“He was talking about getting it to market quickly, testing and learning, then iterating and coming back with a version 1.2 which would be better than version 1.1,” he says. “They’re now one of the largest and best known brands on the market.” Naturally, as part of this process, you need a system to gather feedback. One way is a good customer service department that captures and conveys key insights.

There’s a common pitfall that can be the undoing of even the healthiest looking business. “A business can have a great idea; they can have fantastic market share; they can be growing. Sales are there. Profits are there. But they can still fail,” says Dominique. “And that reason, really, is cash flow.”

The problem comes when money on the books is confused with money in the bank. You might have chalked up a certain amount of sales, but until your customers pay their invoices, you can’t actually access that money.

“Cash locked up in working capital,” - the amount trapped in unsold stock or ongoing transactions - “can pose difficulties for business owners both when they are starting out and rapidly scaling,” says Dominique. What’s more, smaller businesses generally have less access to credit.

If it’s the end of the month and you can’t make payroll, it’s hard to come back from that. “As the saying goes: turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality.”

“Success means different things to different people,” says Dominique, “and ‘what it means to you’ is a question not enough business owners spend enough time thinking about.”

At one end of the spectrum are founders who want to conquer the world, expand internationally, and disrupt their sector like never before; at the other are those who might have inherited a family business, and simply want to pass it on to their own children in 15 or 20 years’ time.

Typically, a business owner will fall somewhere in between, and many can’t articulate their own goals when asked. Since all your decisions ought to flow from a clear sense of what you want to achieve, ask yourself: what do you want your business to look like in three to five years’ time? Then let that answer determine your business strategy.