OCTOBER 1999 BROADSHEET - School of Entrepreneurship
As the new season starts we have some important changes on the committee. Our new Chairman is Roy Cuthbert, Managing Director of Webtec Products of St Ives, one of our sponsors. Linda Mahoney steps down as Secretary and her place is taken by Nigel Wallace who will continue to edit the Broadsheet. We also have a new Treasurer, Gary Compton who is with the East of England Investment Agency.
The season got off to an excellent start on Thursday, 23rd September with a full meeting at Cambridge Consultants on the Trinity Science Park. Walter Herriot, Managing Director of the St John's Innovation Centre, took the chair and introduced the first speaker, Alan Hughes, the newly created Margaret Thatcher Professor of Enterprise Studies. He outlined the characteristics of small and medium sized high tech companies taken from massive surveys and showed that small was beautiful. The smaller companies were employing an increasing number of people overall, doing more training and growing rapidly. The larger firms were better at exporting and were more innovative, but their further expansion was seriously affected by skill shortages.
He was followed by Keith Jackson, the Managing Director of Pi-Technology of Milton who had brought the company up from 3 to 300 strong with a turnover of £6M in seven years. It was remarkable how Professor Hughes' survey findings were reflected in the stages of growth of Pi-Technology. They were very successful and had grown rapidly but were now finding the shortage of software engineers a limiting factor. Several key factors came to light; the importance of people, high training profile and the importance of keeping customers - it cost six times as much to acquire a new customer.
Only a week before the meeting the Government had announced the setting up of the new Centre for Entrepreneurship which would be located in the Judge Institute of Management in Cambridge University. As Walter was one of the acting directors of this centre he was able to give some insight into its aims, which were basically to build up a body of knowledge to help entrepreneurs overcome common failures such as finding money and getting their marketing right.
We were more than honoured to have Jenny Chapman in the audience. She's the Business editor of the Cambridge Evening News and in her Diary for Tuesday 28th September she writes:-
- More cleverness declared itself at the Cambridge Europe and Technology Club on Thursday evening when Pi Technology boss, Keith Jackson, revealed that one in three heavy trucks in the US has got his electronics inside - quite an achievement, reflected in Pi's phenomenal growth in just seven years to a multi-million pounder.
- Yet Mr Jackson candidly told the club that what he really wanted to be was "a Cambridge PhD techno geek" but that he wasn't bright enough. Funny what people think is clever. A £7 million turnover sounds pretty good to me.
- He may, of course, just have been envious of his fellow speaker, Alan Hughes, the about-to-be first Margaret Thatcher Professor of Enterprise Studies due, in his own words, to be "handbagged" next month.
- Back to Mr Jackson, who has a Bill Gate-ish look about him. He said Pi, which is at Milton, still gets calls from people asking them to mend their televisions: "We always say 'yes', but warn them that it will be horrendously expensive."
ANNOUNCEMENTS
As previously announced our Publicity Officer Jim Cole has been elected Chairman of the East Anglian Branch of the Institute of Export. This is taking him all over the region and he is desperately trying to find someone to succeed him. Do you have any experience of advertising or dealing with the media and would like to try your hand, if so please contact either Jim (01223 870292, jamescole@city2000.net) or Nigel Wallace (01223 873014, nigel@nwallace.demon.co.uk).
Caroline Swift, the new chairman of CHASE, (Cambridge Hi-tech Association of Small Enterprises) sends frequent e-mails to their members telling them about the pub meetings they hold. Consequently they have consistently well attended meetings on all sorts of new technical developments popping up all over Cambridge. It's an exciting time to be alive! Find out more by asking her to put you on her e-mailing list; her address:- caroline.swift@dial.pipex.com
Another organisation using the internet in a similar way is The Cambridge Network. You can get similar News by registering with them through webmaster@CambridgeNetwork.co.uk. You can also register through their web site which is worth looking at: http://www.CambridgeNetwork.co.uk
This brings us to a point several members have suggested before - that is making all our announcements through the internet. We could send you all e-mails to give brief details of meetings etc. and you could then get the necessary details from our web pages, particularly the meeting notices. It would be nice of course if your acceptances and meeting payments could be transferred by credit card over the net, but at present this would be far too expensive. In the meantime we could use a downloadable form like CHASE do. Do e-mail me with your views on this to nigel@nwallace.demon.co.uk or use the form below.
The Club is very fortunate in benefiting from the sponsorship of the following organisations:-
There are also other companies who give us generous help with specific meetings and services.
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