Entrepreneurs are big on dreams but are falling short when it comes to turning their idea into a large business.
That is the view of Stuart Lynn, CTO of Newcastle-based accountancy software giant Sage.
Sage was founded in 1981 by David Goldman, Paul Muller and Graham Wylie and is now the world’s third-largest supplier of enterprise resource planning software behind Oracle and SAP.
It is the largest supplier to small businesses.
鈥淲hat you find with SMEs in general is they reach a tipping point,鈥� he told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to scale a business鈥� turn a small business into a medium-sized business, and beyond.
鈥淲e can offer advice to people on how to do that: how to put together a strategy, decide what their goals are.
鈥淎 lot of entrepreneurs are following a dream but don鈥檛 really know how to commercialise it.鈥�
Jodi Birkett, technology, media and telecommunications partner at Deloitte in the North West, told 老九品茶Cloud that the unicorns of the future will be those businesses that use a global presence to scale quickly.
鈥淭o become a unicorn you need to be able to globalise and expand quickly, so scalability in your offering is key,鈥� she told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淎 great North West example of this would be Missguided, a Manchester eCommerce company that sells to countries in mainland Europe, Australasia and North America.
鈥淚ts model works all over the world, which gives it immediate scalability.
鈥淎nother example would be Avecto, whose security software is used globally.
鈥淭his is technology developed in Manchester which can then be rolled out into companies all over the world.鈥�
Investor Richard Law told us recently that selling an idea can be particularly challenging within the tech industry.
Showing innovation within a rapidly changing industry is key to this scalability factor, Birkett added.
鈥淩eality Mine has secured significant investment and has offices in three continents due to its innovative insights technology, and carfinance247鈥檚 platform turned an industry on its head and streamlined an historically complex process.鈥�
Ensuring that these companies can also continue to flourish in the UK though, is a country-wide job.
鈥淭here must be focus on the infrastructure needed to support entrepreneurs and start-ups in these early stages,鈥� she said.
鈥淲e have identified a range of 鈥楾MT Hotspots鈥� in the region 鈥� such as MediaCityUK and the Sharp Project 鈥� which do a brilliant job of nurturing promising businesses.
鈥淚f these hubs are successful then it stands to reason that successful businesses will follow.鈥�