REO staff interview: Essex Startups
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.