Mental Health Awareness Month – a spotlight on YPMH
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The ideaSpace podcast with Alex Nicolaus
31st January 2025
Sherry Coutu CBE is a successful entrepreneur and investor with over 25 years of experience in the digital sector. She has established, floated, and sold several businesses in the financial services industry, including one valued at over $1 billion with 100M in profits.
She is an active early-stage investor, having invested in more than 70 businesses, such as LinkedIn, Zoopla, and Joby and serves on the boards of several companies, charities, and universities. Sherry also wrote the Scaleup Report & founded the Scaleup Institute, which supports entrepreneurs in scaling up their businesses.
At Cambridge Tech Week Sherry Coutu was a keynote speaker - she shared countless insights and hugely tips on scaling up. What follows is a write up of that talk. Our thanks to Sherry for sharing her notes with us.
The Art of Scaling Gracefully: What You Need to Make Come True to 10x Your Business (Several Times)
This content of this article chronicles conversations between hundreds of entrepreneurs from the four corners of the earth who have built businesses worth billions of dollars that operate in hundreds of countries and employ tens of thousands of people. Each one of these entrepreneurs not only had the original idea, they stuck with their idea, changed it to suit the needs of their customers over many years, while they built the business to employ thousands of people and serve hundreds of millions of customers. As they built these businesses, they became leading industrialists and leaders. There are common themes to how they did this. The below is an attempt at converting these common themes into ten recommendations for action.
1. As a leader your customer must be your north star
Focus relentlessly on the customer, not the technology and resist distractions. Everyone will seek to provide you with good ideas so listen, but filter. You can then add them to the ‘no’ or ‘maybe later’ list. Communicate internally your ‘why not’ so that your whole team is with you. Start-ups must be able to listen and be responsive to their customers as they scale - using techniques such as A/B testing and agile development allow this approach while scaling to millions of customers.
2. Test continuously to stay close to the customer
Be addicted to reporting and understand what drives your business. Make sure the environment you set up can facilitate teams competing against each other (within the business). Find out what your customers need, to be addicted to your product. You’ll surpass the incumbents.
3. Choose a big enough problem
If you want to build a business that is globally consequential, dominate a niche - it allows you to run circles around the ‘local players’.
4. Build systems that scale
Make sure your systems can absorb scale and use other people’s platforms for your day-to-day core use. And don’t hire humans to do what computers can do. At LinkedIn, when we launched our B2B solution in Europe, we got to £1bn in sales within 12 months… our systems did not fall over.
5. Talent acquisition - hire for tomorrow, not today
Recruit people who have done it before, hiring for experience of where you want to go. For example, at Raspberry Pi, we hired a Chair and CFO with the key criteria of having personally floated companies before. Embrace diversity - not just gender and ethnicity, but mind-set too. It’s critical to have people in the team who think differently to you. As a founder, make sure you can listen and take signals.
6. Development of talent - starting with yourself
Consider a good scale-up programme such as the London Stock Exchange Elite programme, or programmes at Judge Business School – they allow you to keep the same team as the company grows. Learn ‘leadership for scale’ and help everyone learn – while also learning yourself. Use reading lists and discuss with your team – what can be learnt from each book, what are the takeaways? And don’t forget to nurture the company culture and values as you grow.
7. Markets
Embed yourself in the right networks and understand what drives your business. That may mean going to conferences like Cambridge Tech Week - do it! Networking allows you to learn faster, and with more than 30 entrepreneurial networks in Cambridge, there’s every opportunity - use them all!
If you choose to not sell direct, understand who you are dependent on in your value chain and stay close to them.
8. Advisory boards are very helpful
They are not a time-waster and they are not governance. In fact, they are an amazing growth hack used by successful scale-ups as they help you solve your problems, and scale, at speed.
9. Finance
Take the right kind of money at the right time. It is hopelessly complex, so starting with angels who have been operators before, is a good option - Cambridge Angels is an excellent place to start. I would avoid angel groups that do not have people who have scaled a business before as a core component. If you’re considering a VC be sure to do your research - you’ll be around the table with them for a long time. Talk to others who have received funding and find out what their experience was like.
10. Infrastructure
Use platforms! Use AWS and other cloud infrastructure providers. Jira is excellent for project management, especially if you are remote. Xero saves you huge amounts of time on things that are not key to your delivery to the customer – and works well for up to 300M in revenue. Use HR management systems such as Bamboo and customer platforms such as Hubspot.
When it comes to AI use them all. Provide the tools and training and insist every employee is using them too. We should be using AI to be smarter, faster and better.
