PLATFORM - Newcastle - May 2025
Insights Briefing
Paul Lancaster - Platform, UK Startup & Scaleup Week, Stellar Business Events
Paul welcomed everyone to the event with many new attendees coming for the first time and have been running events for a few months including a couple in Edinburgh. There is a Platform event pretty much every week and has done sixty-eight events so far and lots coming up and are free to come, there is a Facebook group to share what you are doing and there are over five hundred members. Platform is supported by BluSky, Circle Cloud, HR2Day, Mira, NEL, Precursor, True Potential, Ward Hadaway and Wubbleyou.
UK Startup and Scaleup Week is next month, with events held in the past and is being held in Sunderland there are keynotes from Sara Davies, Daniel Priestly and Paul Mort and the event covers everything about starting or growing a business. Day one is the big main event and expecting over five hundred people there for inspiration day and second day is more practical with workshops including one from Cluarantonn on starting a podcast and many more including Howell Media on video. There is also a day on growing and scaling business nationally and internationally and ones on helping taking things to the next level. There are people from all over the UK and world coming along to the event and Xero is the headline s ponsor for UK Startup & Scaleup Week and if don't have a ticket yet visit ukstartupweek.com.
There is new funding available there is the North of Tyne Business Support Fund which offers 50% funding for projects between £3,000 and £8,000 and can get this from growwithnbsl.org and need to get agreement first but can get this quite quickly for Northumberland, Newcastle and North Tyneside.
Paul Wilson - Managing Director Catalyst Recruitment & Founder, Datalyst
Paul began in accountancy which led into recruitment and recruiting a lot of finance people and they then started their journey to start Catalyst Recruitment up and get involved in all sorts of different areas including technical recruitment along with sales, marketing, design, R&D. They also founded an event with the North East Accountancy Awards and was involved with it for the first ten years and recruitment business went well and diversified and let to recruiting to larger businesses including EY which the Newcastle office is the largest outside of London and have helped them through a period of growth from fifteen and today has over seventy people, this is one kind of work they do as a recruiter and the other type is candidate led with people with marketable and niche skills, they are a bit of a tech enthusiast and many people they spoke to were responsible for tech in the business and the work they did led to candidate led recruitment work with someone who took an interesting career path from accounting to reporting and then moved into robotics and automation and they have now moved into a senior data engineer role.
They were looking for employers for this person which led to an event at The Catalyst hosted by a group The Analyst Network North East they put on a great event and met employers were hoping to meet but they were looking for people to do what they do which is put on networking events and they said they would see what they could do but saw there were gaps with people from commercial and industrial side. There was common language about the tech they were using and wondered about bringing the communities together so went to director of the National Institute for Data and then went to previous community of North East Accountancy Awards and others and found they all came on onboard and Datalyst was formed. Datalyst covers data governance, visualisation and more where data and tech come into these subjects including robotics and automation, AI use cases along with audit and quality. There's very little cost in the event and is looking to be a promising day with a cross section of subjects that will be of interest to many people and is on the 12th of June.
Show & Tell
Alex Head - Financial Advisor, Bespoke Financial Wellbeing
Bespoke financial wellbeing for business protection. Alex has experience in corporate sector in employee car ownership, but they were brought over to the business protection side. They know what it is like when someone doesn't have this in place when dealing as an executor and how money and ownership can change people, so have protection in place for your business is important. Business challenges including attracting the best talent, increasing business costs, pressure for pay rises, business stability and cashflow, employee wellbeing is a big one at the moment as it is important to think about wellbeing impact on the wider community, corporate social responsibility along with being time poor for training, skills, time and investment.
Why consider business protection? Protect your people, investors and loans along with ownership and customers. Protecting employees and making sure business is performing the best it can, if anything unexpected happens to a key stakeholder this can have an impact on the business. There's a solution for everyone including owners and directors along with key non-execs and all employees and family members. Different areas of protection include relevant life cover and death in service and make sure there is money there if something should happen, protecting key people in the business and that business loans are protected and can have income protection on an executive basis.
Protect with key person insurance where business owns policy and supports business continuity should a key person no longer be around to make sure there is cash flow and can cover recruitment costs of someone of a senior position which can be a costly process to replace a key person. Protect with shareholder protection to make sure ownership is kept to those within the business, shareholder agreements and valuation are accurate, and shareholders remain in control and beneficiaries receive share value. Business loan insurance where business pays premiums, lump sum pays debt or investors and prevents defaults and protects assets thinking about the bigger picture and future proofing the business. Executive income protection is tax deductible, paid to the business and up to 80% of salary plus national insurance and pension. Protect with relevant life cover for death in service, there's no corporation / income tax / benefit in kind / national insurance and is written in trust and paid to family and is trying to create a value add for the individual in a company. Private medical insurance with health and wellbeing support which can help attract and retain top talent and offers faster diagnosis and treatment which can benefit the business.
Mitali Deypurkaystha - Founder, Impact Icon
Mitali helps to see AI that fits and ROI that proves it. The main areas in your business to be looking at when AI comes as AI will completely revolutionise business which will blow the internet out of the water. Why are most businesses falling behind are feeling overwhelmed with thousands of AI tools for thousands of tasks. Businesses have no idea what is possible, it is not just ChatGPT and Large Language Models, you don't know what you don't know. Scared of the systemic impact if you get it wrong and resistant to reducing human experiences and change can feel effortful and expensive.
They have spoken to many business owners who got it wrong, poor AI drained more than money, I lost their trust to lead, I had no proof - just excuses. They've been under pressure too which was they felt need to innovate but what if they do it wrong or breaks their processes and wrote a small AI programme a year ago and within two weeks fell in love with it and realised that SMEs will benefit from this and are now certified on how to implement AI into businesses that work that get a real return on investment.
They are industry rockstar qualified which was a twelve-month programme to have the best knowledge on how to implement AI for businesses which helped get them Virgin Startup funding. They do know what they are talking about and a there's a lot of people out there who just did a ten-hour course. They set up Impact Icon to make impactful AI easy and affordable since it is a necessary transformation. AI is transforming business in many areas including marketing, sales, admin, customer service, finance, IT and security along with leadership and culture building.
Two shifts for future readiness, ChatGPT is like is your GP it is your first port of call as a good general understanding but are not a specialist but as a business you need to differentiate yourself as everyone is doing the same thing. Three tools include other than ChatGPT which is a generalist but can work with a specific model for sales and marketing if wanting to do this for specialist knowledge. Turn conversations into intelligence which listens to your calls and give real time feedback and collates the information after the call trained on the best customer service calls which means have the foundation of the best customer service people in the world whereas ChatGPT has been trained on everything. Voice cloning is something else you can use which you could use to send out voice notes to everyone who came to an event and be personalised by dynamically changing out the name.
Second mindset shift is there is a whole world beyond ChatGPT, and data is the real next interesting thing with AI, if don't have real data form your business then AI is just a generalist. The reality of getting this wrong and why it is important to get it right, they felt when waking up they felt something had changed and were perimenopausal and sought medical practitioners and met a lovely doctor a few weeks ago who told them they were as they had the right data and shared the same south Asian background. AI can't be biased but the wrong data fed in will make them that way which included Amazon who trained an AI to go through CVs, and it has stopped accepting applicants from women because most successful CVs had been from men. As business owners we have a bigger mission to get this right as can have a really negative impact if the data is not clean or correct so need to ensure that no one is being left behind. They want to create a positive impact with AI in communities and beyond.
Three-steps for AI in your business meetup and discuss current AI opportunities and do a future-ready assessment then team up and implement a simplified customised AI and then see long-term results and guaranteed return on investment and help create AI that supports a vision, stay calm and clear an in control, AI that works and feels right, make sure you collect and store data in the right way before you adopt AI.
Aidan Dunphy - Product Transformation Consultant, Samepage
Bridging the strategy Faultline. Aiden has been working in tech industry for many years and specialise in product strategy for product businesses including larger businesses but are mainly interested in SMEs who have got stuck and don't know what to do next they help there. The missing middle of strategy is you have people at the top of the business, middle managers and then people doing the real work and people at the top get consultants in and they cascade this down the business to implement a strategy but the people at the top can't translate this down-level so they make their own strategies but all these involve that department getting more resources and when tension builds and each department interacts so get silos happening in businesses.
Why does this happen? How many people have actually been trained in doing strategies. People are different so salespeople are different from engineers, but customers want what they need and there's ideas radiating from all of these. There are four fundamental motives which is to save money, innovate, out-compete and be a great place to work but it is difficult to do these things at the same time as they can conflict with each other so there needs to be a compromise to balance this out. Silos form around competency domains, strategy is about different parts of a business towards shared goals.
You need negotiators that are specialists and generalists who have a deep expertise in one area, but you can decide to be a specialist and generalist. Identifying the target which is difference between building the right thing and building the thing right but there is also pressured to build it fast if build too slowly. Sales generally needs to happen quickly and engineering aims to build to high quality and product management aims to deliver it right and need to balance urgency with sustainability. Owning tough lifecycle choices with introduction, growth, maturity and decline so know when to give up or to pivot. Product people are better connected within the business as they have to be in order to do their job so are the glue within the business, but it isn't a new idea to have a role about someone responsible for a product as it dates back to 1931 for a brand manager.
Product management's image problem is that they don't have a real job or don't do anything, but it seemed designers really hate them. But what are they supposed to be like you need to focus on creating customer value by leveraging competitive advantage and decisions are made on the basis of objective evidence not opinion or authority. Strategy is easy to describe and hard to do, it is a set of choices and choosing not to do good ideas as you can't do them all you need to focus on something you can actually execute. There's a lot of bad strategy about such as saying to grow by a certain date and not saying how. Strategy is about painful choices and prioritising as you can't do everything, data doesn't lead anywhere as it knows nothing it just is, what you do with it is what counts, data informed decisions are still better than hunches and make sure to look out for cognitive bias and data can fool sometimes. Set out direction and things you are going to be doing at different levels in the company.
How AI might help? Their first foray into AI where in 1984 heard about AI and tried to build a large language model on a Commodore 64! The two inevitable consequences of AI is AI slop content or humanity will be subjugated or destroyed. In the meantime, it can be incredibly disruptive, although it is still not entirely living up the hype. Vibe coding is building software conversationally and if do it long enough it becomes stupid and reintroduces issues resolved previously for example. If your job can be automated then your job as at risk by AI, AI is causing CEOs wonder if they need project managers at all, there are fewer entry-level product manager roles and fewer new product initiatives. Can AI create novel business ideas, can I produce research ideas that can convince humans or AI that it is more creative, and it seems it can. The human race isn't set to be idle just yet as AI has created new roles and AI is not just up to customer service of human contact people still want. AI is getting rid of the busy work and using it for the things it should do, and humans do what we should do. Humans are good at creativity and empathy and being unique, but AI is good at analysing huge amounts of data. Would you entrust an AI to make important business decisions on your behalf?
In Conversation With...
Jim Scott - Managing Director, Rightmove
Jim had a really successful career at Sage for twenty years and Paul has also worked for Sage although they didn't work together but came back later to be their inbound social media specialist. Jim started in telesales at Sage selling their software to small businesses and the first half of being there was operational side and the second part of their time was more strategic in nature and they had a change of CEO who left and a new CEO wanted to regionalise the business so could solve things once for the benefit of everyone and asked him to setup the small business strategy across the world and the last job he did was to setup their first global partner programme as every country had different partner agreements but did this within a year. They then setup their own consulting firm for a few years for leadership and coaching for different businesses including recruitment and tech then one of Sage's competitors wanted to migrate a legacy application into the cloud and then joined Rightmove.
During his career at Sage, Jim did most of the senior roles which is quite a unique experience to do that and then leave, at the time there was a specific direction of travel in the company and a friend of theirs had set up a company and asked them to run it but they didn't want to do that but came on as a non-exec but someone was selling a business and they wanted to buy this and ran this well until Covid but it was a really different environment. Until you wake up with the real worries of a small business as you can't appreciate it and wished they had the knowledge then they have now. When Paul went back to the business the same people were there or have been there their whole career as it is such a unique company but can get institutionalised, Paul wanted to be a disrupter which the top and bottom levels wanted but the middle management pushed back on this. The last six or seven years at Sage for Jim were quite interesting with the new CEO with many keen or not so keen what he was doing to move perpetual licences to subscriptions, but the business went through necessary and disruptive change and culturally today they are in a more stable place. Sage was the first billion-pound company in the North East but Jim has nothing but happy memories at Sage and wouldn't have got the opportunities they got there in other organisations.
Common themes with consultancy with different companies and different people was the problems are the same, the circumstances are different, but the remedies are similar or the same. The common thread there are no new problems as they have all be solved before, corporates will say they don't want to bring someone in to tell you what the problems are and make you face up to them but you can hang around and help implement the changes and work through the solutions and when you get past starting the execution process is when you can hand it back over to them.
Jim is really enjoying Rightmove but it is not as big as you think it is and has a turnover of £460,000,000 but manage a 73% margin which is impressive and difficult to maintain but culturally it is like Sage in the good old days. Rightmove is 900 staff across three sites in Newcastle, London and Milton Keynes and a lot of home working, it is big, but it is not big for the kind of revenue and business they have. Jim was interested in Rightmove as they have been in software for thirty years but Rightmove is an advertising business as agents pay Rightmove to advertise their stock, they're not a tech business but an advertising business but Rightmove bought a business in Newcastle which was a referencing business to check your employer, how much you earn and did you trash your last place. They didn't know how to get to enquiry to referencing and wanted someone to help with this to build products, Enquiry Manager to improve listing to get more information, there is a huge imbalance in rental properties with thirty five people on average per property and the software would filter this down to those most likely and other software would deal with tenancy agreement and deposit with Tenancy Manager which was gaps between listing and referencing.
Jim is MD for rental services at Rightmove and were conscious before coming in did a lot of research on the business and had a game plan and the founder of the part of the business who sold it is still around in the business. They keep themselves honest and try really hard and have a plan no matter what business they go in on how to get a team on board etc and executed the plan in the same way as if they were coaching someone to do it but are more sensitive on the impact some of the decisions on the finances of people in the business.
Newcastle business was acquired for part of the rental business and are still based here but with a newer office, which is the base of the rental business and Jim runs the business as a consultant and have annual meetings, monthly meetings and operational meetings per week at the start where talk about running the business and lead indicators and one at the end to talk about the numbers and not about operational topics. There's a good mix of doing things face-to-face and doing things remotely.
Jim did a lot of due diligence on Rightmove and got details of two people who worked there and talked about them in relation to the culture and also quizzed the CEO on this and really pushed hard on this as if they'd done that before things would have been much happier and smoother. Jim doesn't need an awful lot, so the security of a good salary and a good culture is a good option for them.
Net Zero is a huge thing as part of Rightmove and is one of their strategic pillars and growth for rent is a fast-growing industry and are helping those building this to see how things can be marketed well and are engaged with energy companies as sell to tenants to make sure that this is done as environmentally conscious as possible. Bills included is one of the biggest search terms so Rightmove are using AI to dynamically pull through data from most energy providers to see what it will cost as close as possible for a property. Rental market does require putting money into properties and many will find there will be a lot of consolidation and individual landlords will sell and those will go into bigger portfolios and larger rental businesses but there needs to be amendments to new legislation to avoid any unintended consequences.
Rightmove has a lot of eyeballs on site, every person eligible to buy a property in the UK they are presenting eight properties per day to that group, the entertainment value of Rightmove is right up there so what can you do there and the question can you put products and services you can't get anywhere else or be cheaper than anywhere else but there are a lot of conversations going on about that.