Title Image: What We Do
 
 

Interview with Iain Scott (Creator of Robert Owen Centre and Enterprise Island)

Q. Iain, I’ve been writing for Enterprise Island since you set it up two years ago but we first met in 1980 something, when you were making delicious chocolate cakes for a living. Have you always wanted to run your own business?
A. Absolutely not. Like most of my contemporaries, I went to university - in Glasgow where I was born and brought up - and did Mediaeval and Modern History. I remember I sat my first final on the day that Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. I was 22 and, at that point, I knew that when I graduated I was going to do one of two things: teach or go into some form of arts administration. Arts admin got ruled out because Scottish Opera were in the middle of their first financial crisis so I did a post grad and went into teaching.
Q. Which you hated?
A. No, I thoroughly enjoyed it but after a couple of years, I started to get itchy feet. I was married by then and my wife, Clair - who was also a teacher - and I had become really interested in cooking. Then, in 1984, we got the chance to go to Hong Kong and spend a month with friends who had moved out there. I just thought it was the most fantastic place! There was the kind of buzz out there that Scotland just didn’t have in the 1980s and I found it tremendously exciting. It seemed to be the norm out there for people to set up all kinds of businesses without asking anyone’s permission and have a lot of fun doing it. I had never, ever considered setting up my own business until then but seeing what was happening in Hong Kong let the genie out of the bottle for me.
Q. What did you do when you got back to Scotland?
A.

I decided to start making frozen gourmet meals for sale to people in the West End of Glasgow where we lived. I was confident there would be a market for them because friends who had been to dinner at our house had often said if we made the same kind of food on a commercial basis, they’d buy it. And remember, that was almost 20 years ago, when the only frozen foods you could get were peas and fish fingers. A friend of mine produced a logo, I drew up a list, based on British regional dishes such as Sussex Braised Steak and Rumbledethumps, and we leafleted houses in the area. Almost immediately, the phone began to ring and we were in business.
Q. Didn’t you have to get your kitchen inspected?
A. You didn’t have to do that in those days. It was fun; it was the: “Let’s put the show on right here!” attitude.
Q. Had you given up the day job?
A. I was still teaching - and then a colleague brought in a leaflet that she’d picked up on how to start a high growth business and she said: “You’re always bleating on about how you want to give up teaching and start your own business - why don’t you do it?” So I did! It was a scheme run by the old Manpower Services Commission which offered participants £40 a week and an intensive business start-up course at Glasgow University. The course was good up to a point but the best thing about it was meeting lots of other people who were going to start up their own businesses. As it happened, my grandmother had died recently and left me £5000 so I used that to set myself up. I had decided to concentrate on producing gourmet frozen meals for vegetarians - yes, I was there before Linda McCartney! - In fact, someone once described me as the ‘Clive Sinclair’ of the food industry because of my tendency to anticipate eating trends that other people went on to make millions out of - but due to an extended hold up with the packaging, I started making cakes and selling them to local delicatessens because I had the premises and other overheads but no money coming in. In fact, the cakes became quite a lucrative side line but one that I never would have become involved in if there hadn’t been that hold up with the packaging - or if I’d taken the advice of a so-called ‘business expert’ in the Scottish Development Agency who told me I couldn’t make speciality cakes because someone else in Glasgow was already doing it! Of course, that infuriated me and I can remember storming out of their office, cursing and swearing, determined I would make cakes and make a success of them. In fact, meeting that kind of opposition just made me more determined than ever, so it was quite a positive experience.
Q. And that’s when I first met you because I bought a fantastic orange flavoured cake with chocolate icing and decided I had to interview the person who had made it.
A. My memory is that I gave you a cake for free and THEN you decided to write about them!

Q. So then what happened?
A. The packaging finally arrived and within a few years I was selling the vegetarian meals to Harrods as well as many other shops. But then I was approached by venture capitalists who persuaded me that I should grow my business by allowing them to invest £250,000 in the company. It meant taking it in an entirely different direction, the plan being that we would gear ourselves up to sell to the supermarkets. What had been more of a cottage industry turned into factory production with more than 20 employees and that was completely wrong for me. I mean, there are people who love factories but I’m not one of them so I was quite miserable.
Q. Of course, there was nobody to advise you in those days.
A. Well, there were quite a lot of people. In fact, there were probably too many but their advice tended to be of the theoretical kind because they hadn’t actually set up or run a business themselves. That’s the real danger when looking for advice about business start up. People who have done it and learned from their mistakes are much more useful.

Q. And are venture capitalists to be avoided at all costs?
A. No. They have their place but you always have to bear in mind that what they think will be good for your business might not necessarily be good for you. In retrospect, I would have been better opening a deli than going into manufacturing. I remember a colleague asking me, when I gave up my job, if I wasn’t going to miss “the smell of the grease paint” because there is a big element of performance involved in teaching. And I did miss that engagement with the public. But I learned an awful lot and gained a huge amount of experience in that time, a lot of which has gone into the Find Your Flavour test I’ve devised for entrepreneurs to help them decide what kind of business might suit them best. Anyway, my misery with the direction the company had taken was compounded by the fact that, due to a nationwide food scare - the egg one, I think - supermarket buyers got cold feet about new products and we didn’t get the volume of orders from them that we needed. That period required a great deal of reassessment on my part so after 6 years of trading (some very successful) I opted to change direction and teach again.
Q. What, school teaching!
A. No. All the time I was making my gourmet meals, I had kept up my connection with Glasgow University and had been teaching on some courses they ran for other young people who were planning to set up a business because I had become really interested in that whole process. When I sold up, they offered me a full time job and I spent two very happy years at their Business School, looking at entrepreneurship and why people set up businesses. Then came the opportunity to help set up the Robert Owen Centre which I’m now managing director of and have been developing over the past 14 years.

Q. Tell us about that.
A. It was set up as a public/private partnership - although it is now completely privately funded - to foster entrepreneurship and find new ways of developing entrepreneurship. (A profile of the Robert Owen Centre is available on request.) We’ve done a huge amount of research into why people start businesses, how entrepreneurs are made and so on and have been involved in motivational projects all over the UK where we’ve worked with everyone from coal field communities and the Women’s Rural Institute to university students and 16-year-olds. More recently, we’ve started working in Australia.
I’m particularly excited now about how people learn to be entrepreneurs - and how it can be taught and that’s what I’ll be concentrating on for the foreseeable future. I spend a lot of my time on the road, travelling all over the country delivering my own brand of workshop.

Q. I’ve seen you in action, Iain and I have to say, the workshops are great fun; a bit like interactive cabaret. In fact, someone recently said that you added: “a stand-up flair to the sit-down world of business development.”

A. Thank you, and that brings me onto Enterprise Island which has been our most ambitious project to date. As I discovered myself on that first course at Glasgow University, meeting and exchanging experiences with other people who are starting up businesses is the best way to learn about entrepreneurship and with Enterprise Island, we’ve created a web site where people from all over the world can share in that kind of experience.

Q. Are you happy with what you’re doing now?

A. Yes. At the age of 45, I think I’m finally where I was supposed to be! Entrepreneurship is a big deal these days and there’s been a huge increase in demand for my experience, knowledge and expertise. Instead of being Clive Sinclair, the market has finally caught up with all the things I’ve been doing for years.
Q. I see you’ve got a diary there with a quote on the front from the late Sir Noel Coward: “Work is much more fun than fun.” Personally, I agree with that statement - but what if you’re involved in the kind of work that isn’t fun?
A. Well change!