Proposed solution 1: Enhance sign-posting and start marketing…

Having flagged our need to accelerate attracting scale-up talent to Scotland in this article, I’d like to start the debate as to how we might start doing that.

?

1. Let's start properly SIGNPOSTING.

On a fairly regular basis, I am contacted by highly experienced people wanting to move back to Scotland. They’re fairly expensive and highly experienced people. They’re ideal for scale-ups but probably not for start-ups. They ask me who they should speak to – a harder question than it sounds. After telling them who the main recruiters are. I then tell them to look at Deloitte Fast fifty, GP Bullhound northern tech awards (congrats to xDesign (inactive) ), EY Entrepreneur of the year, Scaleup awards, Fast Growth 50, the 18 or so angel syndicates and any recent exits on their websites, as well as whatever awards or companies I’ve seen on LinkedIn – with a mountain of recency bias.

The same is true for investors. They’ll message me and say “If I come over to Scotland, who should I come and see?”. My response “Erm….”.

There is a great opportunity to build a clear set of signposts to our best businesses.

Young Company Finance Scotland , MarktoMarket and others do a great job of trying to track transactions but how does someone search for:

Greentech >> more than XX employees >> profitable or recently funded >> more than ￡x cash on balance sheet… Or any other variant of that?

We don’t make it deliberately hard, but we certainly don’t make it easy.

?

We are not a big ecosystem and have very few players that hold most of the information.

Isn't it time we had a single cohesive plan to pull it all into one place?

?

Scottish Enterprise has a co-investment portfolio of c. 400 companies. Would that be a good place to start? Or, if we have data/legal issues, at least make transparency of KPIs, Employees numbers and?Revenue a pre-requisite of any future co-investment deals?

ScaleUp Institute reported on Scaling Up Scotland in 2023 and highlighted “there are 1,770 Scottish scaleups generating ￡36.12 billion of turnover – that’s a 31.1% share of the Scottish SME economy despite representing less than 1% of Scottish SMEs”. Brilliant – but does their site list the 1,770 Scottish Scaleups? No

Signposting is an EASY fix. Ask companies to opt in and even if we get 25% to do so, it’s a great start.

AND, I believe we can then so much further…

What about a basic AI engine to pull in awards, ONS data, press releases, company accounts, YCF data - pulling all of the publicly available information into an easily query-able form?

AND, we can go further still....

What about also having non-publicly available information through a national licence to a platform like Floww?

Techscaler has a national licence for Reforge (brilliant!) ScaleUp Institute claimed last week (via ONS data) that we now have 2,140 scale-ups in Scotland. How about we start by giving them free access to Floww (or something similar) and then bring all the start-ups in behind?

Imagine being able to click on a list like this:

And be given an overview that looks like this:

Or, imagine being able to click on any of the names in a list like this:

?And be able to drill in further like this:

?

The starting point is to move from invisible to visible.

If we can solve this reactive problem for inbound searching then we can start moving to a proactive solution – and start Marketing…

2. Let’s start PROPERLY marketing our ecosystem.

Does someone or some organisation definitively own Scotland’s marketing strategy to attract top scale-up talent?

This is hugely critical to the ecosystem. Potentially Talent Scotland (part of Scottish Development International ) but it seems to be for founders and investors – not talent, despite the name….

Or perhaps it’s Scotland.org? If so, their last “work feature” was in 2018 and now has broken links to the key areas.

I’m not trying to be facetious; there must be an organisation who has targets/KPIs/OKRs and a budget to attack this problem aggressively.

Let's help people overcome the challenges to moving to Scotland.

There are clear hurdles that we need to identify and then solve for. For example, one of the blockers to people moving to a new country/city is the fear of it not working out for them. If they also move a family this becomes even more extreme. A common question from people I tried to bring to Scotland was: What other companies can I move to if my role at Skyscanner doesn’t work out?

Trying to solve this, we contacted a number of the other scale-ups and suggested we all create a small marketing fund and a united strategy to attract people to Scotland. Unfortunately, we weren’t successful in getting it off the ground. Scale-ups are super busy and there may have also been some concerns that this was for Skyscanner’s benefit more than others. That wasn’t our intention and I wish we’d persevered. Not just for Skyscanner but for the benefit of the whole ecosystem.

Today, if I Google “Scotland’s fastest growing tech scale-ups” – the first page of results is nearly 100% start-up related responses, not scale-up. Who owns the multi-channel strategy for Scottish scale-ups? (and Kudos to Eden Scott for having a crack at this here).

Visas are another issue. We can't easily fix the underlying problem but what about a support team that helps our designated Scale-ups understand how to approach this as seamlessly as possible?

Scotland has so many brilliant things going for it – especially for family life. For example, once we were in discussions with potential new hires who had families we would invariably start talking to them about schooling options. The schooling system was a huge draw for people of a certain demographic. We would then start talking about beaches, Munroes, golf, gyms, societies, house prices. VisitScotland does an incredible job talking about the attributes of Scotland as a place to visit. Turing Fest does an outstanding job of bringing tech savvy people to Scotland to visit and meet. We need a considered, targeted and evergreen campaign to attract talent to LIVE here

I strongly believe that IF we can make our significant cohort of start-ups and scale-ups much more visible (signposting) AND couple this with a determined and well funded marketing operation, we are unbelievably well placed to attract some of the best talent in the world to come, live, work and help grow scale-ups in Scotland.

Thank you for reading. I'd love to hear your views in the comments below.

Next up: Zombies….

?

Guy Martin Jamie Livingston Duggie Carlyle FWB Kerry Sharp Stuart Hendry Ruth Chandler xDesign (inactive) Ciji Duncan Alex Lusty

• If you have views on these topics then please feel safe to add them in the comments below. I don't have all the answers at all but want to start the constructive debate to make things better. Good debates need good input.
• If you have anecdotes of start-ups that have struggled to scale-up, perhaps because of talent challenges, then please add them in the comments below.
• If you want to be notified of these articles as they drop then feel free to follow me.

This is one of a series of articles I’ll be releasing about Scale-up Ecosystems and how we now need to expand our thinking and challenge the status quo if we are to give them the support they need to thrive.

My experience is largely with scaling “tech” companies and so there will be a clear tech bias. However, I believe the principles stand for all businesses scaling up – regardless of sector.

Lastly, these articles are not politically orientated, but I can’t talk about both the positive and the negative forces on our ecosystem without referencing government policies and approach. Please try to keep any comments constructive despite your political views!