Tony Simmons is the Founder and Director of Mktplace Ventures, a start-up and scale-up business advisory and community of investors. With a background in law and a fascination for the seed-stage of business, Tony uses his business-based perspective on intellectual property and technology to help fledgling companies build the strong foundations needed to become players in their markets.
In this episode, Tony shares his views on three things he looks for in founders and their start-ups, and how that increases the chances of success or lowers the chance of failure. Breaking down what a start-up is versus scaling-up, and how that applies to innovating within the healthcare sector, Tony’s lived experience as a business builder and value creator shine through in this discussion!
Key takeaways:
- The number one indicator of success in a start-up is the art of storytelling — the art of the why. Those who have a why and can clearly articulate it will be able to bring people along on their journey.
- Being engaged with other contemporaries in your field gives you great exposure to the new things coming onto the market, what might represent best practice, what you’re doing right and what could be improved.
- Consumers want a good feeling about the choices they’ve made. People will generally opt for an outcome that’s more efficient and that makes them feel better along the way.
- Moving from start-up to scale-up is about learning business disciplines and organisational skills that enable you to put money in and multiply it out.
- Founders often become redundant very quickly. The more successful a business is, the quicker a founder can find themselves in a position where they don’t have the right skills. The skills that are needed to grow a company may not be the skills that are needed by a founder.
- 80% of every single business is the same, 20% is the technical magic that makes the business different. Mktplace Ventures is about making sure the fundamentals of a business are rock solid so that the business can focus on developing that 20%.
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