Professor Peter Denyer

We ask Professor Peter Denyer to reveal what he wished he'd known when starting up his business.

Like a host of things - great food, for example - reading about it is no substitute for doing it! Besides, writing about something so intimate as the company I grew, and lived and breathed, is going to be hard, isn't it? It turns out not to be - I must have learned a thousand lessons in growing and managing my business. Below are simply the first few that spring to mind.

Problems

Without wishing to make it sound like a game show, life as an entrepreneur is a continuous series of challenges. Lots of them. All the time. That word - challenges - wasn't chosen for its linguistic programming effect; it is actually how I came to see things. The mental process is fascinating - some people believe it can be taught, but I think it has to be learned.

It goes something like this: today a key supplier has warned you that a component will be four weeks late. One reaction is that the sky is falling, and this will be the event that is going to finish the company. An alternative is that you have faced problems on this scale every day for as far back as you can see, and guess what - you and your company survived them.

You may not be sure how, but you seem to have the knack of doing so. I have no idea, writing this, how you will solve today's problem, but if you've survived this far, then it's habitual. Therefore, there is no need to worry about survival - you don't have to waste any brain time on it.

Now, apply said brain to the problem in hand, and tomorrow you'll be looking back on this, another problem overcome. It's like a boat hitting a wave - the situation looks dreadful, but like five hundred waves beforehand, buoyancy wins again, the boat bobs up, the wave has passed.

What I'm trying, badly, to say is that you can and must naturally learn how to cope with continual stress, and to understand that there is a mental plane on which you can do this.

Communication

No matter how hard you try, you cannot communicate enough. Provided you're communicating things that matter, everyone appreciates it; suppliers, investors, staff, customers. In hearing you discuss the business some of your enthusiasm will rub off onto them each time.

If you're giving some insight into a problem a listener will naturally start to take some ownership of it; they may even suggest a solution. At the very least their new knowledge will affect anything they do that might be linked in any way.

I'm a naturally bad communicator, and it embarrasses me to admit that I have to force myself to do it. But almost every time I pushed myself to communicate I got a positive return on it. You should always take an opportunity to have a word with someone; even the simple fact that you've recognised someone, and taken an interest, can give a boost.

Once your business reaches a certain size, perhaps 50 or more staff, it's hard or impossible to maintain frequent personal contact with everyone. An alternative then is a regular update of some kind from you. A weekly state-of-the-nation email to everyone inside the company is one solution; monthly news gets a bit too stale.

There is no need to waste resources in making this glossy - but people really value being told about developments, and even about problems. This is also a great way to militate the rumour mill. If you've stated a position, or your view, there will still be rumours but they'll have much less currency.

There is another, deeply frustrating aspect of communication that I never managed quite to get the better of; getting your staff to communicate with each other. I can't offer a cut-and-dried solution here. I can only tell you that in a project requiring lots of communication between, say, two design engineers, they will probably not communicate even if you seat them within five feet of each other. The best you can do is to assume that communication, or at least the right degree of it, isn't happening. Try checking to see if it is.

Before long (hopefully) you'll have grown an executive team, and they must communicate also. Generally this isn't such a problem - people at this level understand the importance of communication. A weekly informal meeting is a good idea - a time in the week when the top team try to be in the same room to discuss anything and everything that is happening in the business. As far as I'm aware this works well for businesses as large as the largest FTSE 100 companies, and as small as yours.

Gratitude

An odd topic, I know, but an important one. Rather, it's important to know that you shouldn't expect any. In my own business during its nine-year lifetime (exactly the UK average time from start-up to exit, by the way), I can count on one hand the number of times I was thanked, ever, for anything.

This isn't sour grapes. I think none the worse of anybody for it; they simply don't see things that way. If anything they are doing you a favour, and your rewards will be great enough (they believe).

Perhaps I didn't do enough thanking myself, though I believe I tried and I encourage you to do so. So you've been warned, and that's all that is intended here.

Organisation (and change)

For a company to survive and grow, its shape must change quite often. You should think about reorganising about once every 12 months. People should get used to this, and see it as a healthy process, not as a personal threat. There is no point here in defining a perfect organisation - it doesn't exist. Though you can change the existing one for the better.

Inevitably changes will threaten some individuals (though this should be the exception rather than the rule). This can be tough, but you must learn to face up to it if changes are for the greater good of the business as a whole and, therefore, for the majority of its staff.

The only practical advice I can give is that no matter how bad the news, whether it be the removal of some cherished role, or even redundancy, people appreciate being spoken to face to face, and being told honestly why and what is happening. It seems almost absurd, but I have had subsequently friendly relationships with colleagues that I have had to ask to leave the business. It sounds like a platitude, but often such a move is in their interest as well as that of the company.

The most difficult day

Unsurprisingly there is a lot of competition for this one. A fairly clear winner however is the day, following nine years of exhortation from me that it was us-against-the-world, I gathered together my staff to announce that the business was being sold. I hope you have one of these days!