Essex Startups team
In a nutshell, what is Essex Startups?
Established in 2019, Essex Startups is a free student service that we’ve put
together enabling support for students and graduates to help those who are looking to
start a business venture. We provide this support across the University and all years
of study – no matter what course, or what the idea is. We want to encourage the
entrepreneurial spirit and can-do attitude. Ultimately, our aim is for every student,
graduate, and researchers at Essex to have the opportunity to understand business.
The fundamentals of starting a business and understanding how businesses work can
also benefit those who want to go on to work in industry, so it’s about making
students ready to join the workforce too. Our support is everything from early-stage
idea, through to working with the team (attending our events, participating in workshops
and access to mentoring) and then, possibly in the future, some of those businesses will
get to the point where they move into support from our
Angels@Essex
investment platform and looking for funding. Hopefully it’s a bit of a lifecycle,
to get the best support from wherever we can get them, at every step of the way.
Tell us more about the entrepreneurial support you provide and how people can get involved.
We have a whole variety of support on offer now, which has grown and expanded over
the last four years. First and foremost, we provide one-to-one support sessions which
are a vital part of what we do, helping us to understand what it is that they need and
how we can get them to where they need to be. We run a wide range of workshops –
covering all sorts of topics from market research and understanding your customer, to
leadership skills and working with co-founders – which are a great source of
information if you haven’t started your own business before. We organise three
weekend events throughout the year, hold monthly networking events and then we have a
Summer Bootcamp, our main delivery programme of the academic year.
We offer more intensive courses as well, and this year we’ve started our Make
Me An Entrepreneur six-week programmes. We identified certain areas where perhaps we
had a gap or that were under-represented, so we’ve initiated ‘Empower’
for female founders, ‘Be Me’ for black and ethnic entrepreneurs, and
‘Digerati’ for AI tech-based start-ups. We have added on one for social enterprise
and one for freelancing too. Primarily everything is available for students and graduates
of up to five years to book via CareerHub. People can also email us at
startsups@essex.ac.uk, we produce a newsletter
(which goes out weekly in term time), and we have a few social media channels as well –
you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.
We also offer pitching opportunities, a combination of smaller amounts – what we
call ‘Dragon’s Den’ (up to £500) – and micro-grants of up
to £3,000 that can be won on a competitive basis. We look to progress a certain number
of more developed businesses onto our mini accelerator programme evolve, which takes place
over three months. At the end of that programme all these businesses then have the chance to
pitch for funding. This year, 13 businesses went through the programme, and we awarded four
of them £3,000 each; those four businesses will then come back to pitch to a panel for
up to £50,000 through the University’s Knowledge Gateway Seedcorn Fund.
We run a Angels@Essex
Investment Readiness webinar series too, which is free to attend and available to
everyone. It’s about the things you need to know when you’re looking for equity
investment, with expert guest speakers from outside of the University. They can be viewed
on our YouTube
channel, and there’s also a podcast (available via our blog).
These webinars are popular, and we’ve had over 3,000 people register and attend. We
compile a regular Angels@Essex newsletter offering business advice and information about
what’s going on externally – we encourage people to apply for grants and signpost
other support from organisations. Anyone can sign up, just email uez@essex.ac.uk
for more information.
Who makes up the team and what do your roles entail?
Andy Mew: The
Essex Startups team
has grown considerably since Lauren and I first joined back in 2019; it was just us as two
full-time members of staff alongside two Entrepreneurs in Residence then. Now we’re up
to nine full-time members of staff and four Entrepreneurs in Residence!
My role is Head of Start-up Support, which is looking at everything we do across
student and graduate engagement as well as externally. A large part of my role is how
we start to embed enterprise and entrepreneurship, from both a curricular and
co-curricular perspective. We’re trying to give those opportunities as part of
those studies, but also outside of them if students want to progress it further.
Lauren Gräeve is our Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Manager, and her role
entails looking after all our student-facing and graduate-facing activities. That’s
making sure that all the events are planned, workshops are organised, looking
at the content and supporting the delivery with some of the modules that we feed into
– so working with the course leaders to make sure those are all prepared in
advance. Lauren also oversees the use of our two Entrepreneurs in Residence on the
student side, as well as making sure data tracking is up to date to see how our
engagements are working out.
John Stenhouse is our Business Support Manager. He oversees our Angels@Essex
investment platform, engagement with start-ups looking to raise finance, managing our
investor network, and creating events that can pull those two different groups
together to identify opportunities. John works on national level supporting Innovate
UK on panels too and he works more locally with organisations who are looking to
allocate funding or doing pitching competitions. He’s also supported by another
two Entrepreneurs in Residence.
Across the team we then have three Enterprise Officers who are responsible for the
delivery of our workshops, content creation, doing the one-to-one support sessions and
any other projects that come up. We’ve got our Enterprise Assistant, who helps
us on the day-to-day management and logistics of everything, and an Inno4YUFE
Marketing and Engagement Officer who’s been helping us and is involved with the
Inno4YUFE project. We’ve also got a
Communications and Engagement Assistant placement year role; second year students at
Essex are eligible to apply for this post, which was introduced last year, and we’re
currently in the process of recruiting someone for the next academic year.
We take on Frontrunners too so there are lots of opportunities to experience working
in the team.
Tell us a bit more about yourselves, what’s your business background (any
side hustles) and what brought you to join our Enterprise team?
John: I’m a qualified accountant and my side-hustle is that
I’m also a qualified electrician. I appreciate both professional skills and trade
skills, they are both equally important in life. My background is very much in the
finance field, where I set up and ran my own accounting practice which I later sold as
a going concern. Having bought, managed and sold a number of businesses in many
sectors, I have also been engaged with business support organisations for a very long
time and have built a vast network of contacts across the UK and beyond of specialist
individuals and organisations. I came to the University in October 2019 as I felt that
Essex would benefit from these skill sets, and I like the fact that I’m working
with education – something which, having been a former Governor of sixth form
colleges and schools, I’ve always had an interest in. I was also a mentor for
The Princes’ Trust for 28 years.
Lauren: I’ve had various side hustles! I am a qualified
beauty therapist, that’s what my background was in originally, which I did for
over ten years working in lots of different spas. Then I decided that I wanted to be
self-employed and began working for myself in that field (as a mobile beauty therapist
and within spas), so that was my first branch out into self-employment. I then did a
bit more work in sports therapy and massage. I have a real interest in amateur
dramatics too. I’m part of a drama group and I also have a love of Disney, so I
combined these two passions and started my own children’s entertainment business
on the side – it’s doing impersonations of Disney princesses at children’s
birthday parties. That’s still something I do to this day which I find really enjoyable.
When I found out about this position at Essex, I wanted to take the knowledge
I’ve acquired from having my own small business and give something to students so
they could understand what it’s like to go through all that yourself. I’ve
always been interested in entrepreneurship, my whole family are entrepreneurs (in
hotels, B&Bs, clothing brands) so it’s kind of in my blood. I was really
interested in the role on offer here and joined as Enterprise Officer in March 2019. I
enjoyed delivering that support, working with students, and always found satisfaction
in that personable approach. I’ve since worked my up to this manager role and
have been in post just over a year.
Andy: I started working in businesses whilst I was at university.
I began in the Students Union as a bar server and then worked my way up to Deputy
Manager – finding myself dealing with all kinds of things across HR, operations,
logistics, dealing with sales reps – I really enjoyed it and ended up working at
the University of Portsmouth in a business development-type role. I then moved into
marketing and communications and was asked to develop their innovation centres; I
worked on business engagement strategy, there was one centre when I started which grew
to four centres when I left.
Next, I started my own copywriting business (which moved more into consulting for
small businesses in key areas) and went travelling for a couple of years. After the
travels came to an end, I came back to the UK and saw this role advertised at Essex. I
thought it was an interesting opportunity to take the experience I’ve had and
try to bring that in to give students the chance to explore whether it might be
suitable for them. Over the last four years student enterprise has become a real
passion of mine and all the opportunities it can create for students to think about
how they forge their own futures.
How does Essex Startups link to the University’s wider goals, and what are
your main priorities?
Our main priority is thinking about giving students a greater knowledge,
understanding and awareness of what their futures can look like after they graduate;
what the opportunities are. Self-employment is an emerging area which is becoming
popular, and it’s about how we can provide support to the students during their
time here as well as to our graduates afterwards.
There are real opportunities with Essex Startups and this has been a benefit in
terms of the University’s growth around using it as a mechanism for student
recruitment. We are now promoted in prospectuses and asked to get involved with Open
Days (with a new generation of university students also looking at what support is
offered outside of their course), so it’s become part of a recruitment tool.
Then, hopefully once the students join, it’s about how we can feed into the
academic side of things as well. Some of the co-curricular work we do in terms of
delivering certain modules is very much about the experience students have whilst at
university and making sure that a broad range of options are explored, not just from
an extra-curricular perspective but introduced within the curriculum. And more
recently, with the University’s enterprise and innovation sub-strategy
that’s been launched, it’s very much about how this needs to become embedded
behaviour in the coming years and what our role will look like in terms of how we do
that.
We’re also looking at our areas of work and, with the development of the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF)
for example, how it falls into various reporting mechanisms and recording what we do
as a team (such as number of businesses created). We feed directly into some of the
work around knowledge exchange at Essex as well, where we help support the delivery of
a programme called ACTUATE Accelerator; this internal programme has been running
annually for three years now, supporting our academics in understanding
commercialisation and interacting with businesses, plus the potential for forming
spinouts.
When we look at Angels@Essex it’s about the local economy too, supporting
local businesses that are seeking funding and finance to grow. It’s about how we
can either support them with that or point them in the right direction of what’s
available, to try and retain more of our graduates but also more of our businesses in
the region. It promotes Essex as a business-focussed university, so the business
community – local, regional, and national – are starting to recognise our
institution as somewhere they can go and talk to, get support, employ graduates, and
find academics.
Whilst on the surface it looks like it’s just for students and graduates,
Essex Startups is actually much wider than that and there’s a whole host of
different areas our work touches.
Tell us more about what Essex Startups has achieved so far. Also, what are the
benefits for businesses conceived and growing at Essex in particular?
One of our main achievements is that within the KEF, when you look at our role in
the area helping to support start-ups, we’ve jumped from sixteenth in KEF1 to
second place in KEF2. We think that’s a reflection of the way we’ve
developed our offer and programmes here. With the growth of the team, not just in
terms of how many staff we have and the multitude of skills they all bring but also
the content we deliver, we’ve progressed so much with our support and the
opportunities available. On the student and graduate side, we can see that’s led
to the creation of about 20 to 25 new businesses a year; we want to continue to build
this out and try to double that number! We were just extra-curricular when we started
too, whereas now we are co-curricular delivery – within SRES, EBS, Edge Hotel
School, and Essex Law School – and that’s a real achievement in the last
few years.
Alongside that, when you consider we’ve only been here since 2019 in the
current format with the team evolving, we’ve done about 1,300 hours of
one-to-ones and awarded over £300,000 of funding to help grow and support
student businesses. We’re over £32 million of equity investment through
the businesses that Angels@Essex have helped as well. With the kind of help that we
give and the benefits that we provide, a student, academic, or researcher, can have a
spark of an idea and we could take them all the way to full commercialisation; the
infrastructure is now there so we can support people right the way through the entire
process.
In terms of businesses growing at Essex in particular, the major added benefit is
that we have the Innovation Centre on campus. You don’t always get the community
on a campus like the one we have, with Studio X as a dedicated space students can use
and our team who’s there and available for any information, plus external
businesses within the building. That’s a real positive for coming to Essex
– that they’ll have this facility, all the knowledge and all the different
people that are here.
We’ve also participated in the Sustainable Essex
programme to help the University reduce its impact on the environment –
completing the Silver Award and achieving Gold this year!
What are you currently working on, and are there any specific ambitions for the
next 12 months?
John: We’ve just launched the Create South East programme about investment
readiness, which is focussed on creative industries and encouraging them to think in
bigger terms. Angels@Essex is the delivery partner for Essex, Kent, East and West
Sussex so we’re crossing into new counties where we haven’t gone before.
We’re going to be running four cohorts over the next two years, providing
mentoring and one-to-one advice as well; we’ve already got enough qualified
applications for the first two cohorts so we’re already steaming ahead with
that! This entering into new territories (as far as our work is concerned) can only
benefit the University and all the humanities and other creative work that we do,
generating more opportunities again.
Andy: On the student side of things, a key goal is continuing to
increase the number of academic departments that we support co-curricular delivery
with. We’re working with a handful at the moment but notice that when students
work with us in those departments, they naturally get more involved in our events
programme so it’s about how we can integrate what we do further across the
University and try to embed it. We’re currently developing our events programme
for the next year, with some expanding and introducing some new initiatives too. This
means that at any point during an academic year a student will be able drop in and, no
matter what stage they are at, there will always be something for them to get involved
in. The main point really is to start seeing how we can increase the number of
start-ups out of Essex. Plus, how we can bring back alumni who have launched their own
businesses and actually work with them, see if there’s an opportunity to bring
them in as guest presenters or mentors, and really start to build a link. That way
there’s constantly an opportunity for our students to learn from recent
graduates, but also so alumni who want to give something back know there’s a way
that can be done.
Lauren: I think another ambition for our team is to really be
recognised as a university which offers fully rounded entrepreneurial support, and
it’s known to incoming students that this is something they can get here. There
are still people that have never heard of us, didn’t know we were part of the
University or think we’re an external business. For us – perhaps longer
term – it’s working towards this recognition and continuing to build our
reputation.
What’s your key advice for building a successful start-up business?
John: My top tip for starting a budding business is to listen
– by listening you learn.
Lauren: You need to have resilience and be able to manage failure
too; it’s not a nice thing to say but it will happen, so just try to be
realistic and overcome any fears of failing.
Andy: Move fast and break stuff. Too much planning is
procrastination – get something out there and see if you can find people willing
to pay for what you do. Take on feedback, improve your product/service, and go out to
find more customers.
Finally, remember it’s about the journey and not the destination.
You’ve got to enjoy it and ride out the process on a day-to-day basis – balancing
both the highs and the lows.
