“Anyone can start a business – but not everybody should!” Steve Frost, Founder and CEO, WorkBuzz
This year’s Global Entrepreneurship Week’s motto is “thriving locally”. So the Bettany Centre was delighted to host Steve Frost, founder of WorkBuzz, based just down the road from Cranfield in Milton Keynes. On Thursday 16 November, Steve joined us for our third speaker event to share his experience of business start-ups and rapid growth.
WorkBuzz is just five years old but has raised £9M from investors and has over 400 clients. Steve describes it as an online SAAS platform that enables companies to gather real-time employee feedback and helps build great workplace cultures. This sector is a crowded one, but what differentiates WorkBuzz is its focus on its clients’ front-line staff, who don’t generally sit at a desk. How he arrived at founding the business, his second venture, is a fascinating story.
It starts with a modest upbringing in Northampton, from which Steve progressed to the University of Nottingham, where he studied Management. That is where he was first bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, creating a not-for-profit enterprise with a fellow group of like-minded students. Steve is just one of several members of that original band who have gone on to found successful businesses. On graduating, he secured a job with the Nationwide Building Society, which proved extremely useful in exposing Steve to a wide range of management roles. While working for his employers to build a plan for franchising the Building Society – which never materialised – he conceived the idea of creating a service for franchised businesses. Nationwide allowed him two days a week to pursue this, and Steve compiled a list of over 1,000 British franchising companies. He was inspired, he says, by the story of Colonel Sanders of KFC fame, who had to speak to many restauranteurs before one would go into business with him.
Luckily, the very first prospect he pitched to signed up, and Steve was away. The proposition was similar to Trust Pilot, allowing franchisees to score their franchisors and thus rank their attractiveness to would-be franchisees. Steve operated as Smith & Henderson, a brand he created to convey stability and authority. It succeeded, but only up to a point: he realised there were limits on how far he could scale the business model. In talking about his first venture, Steve stressed the importance for a founder of answering the question “Why?”: what is the purpose of the venture, and what is driving you? In his case, it was not simply about making money, which he thinks should never be the prime motive for starting up. Instead he was determined not to spend a career as a corporate executive only to regret that he had never tried to go his own way. By now, in his mid-thirties, he says he is unemployable anyway! Most importantly, knowing your “why” will sustain you through the tough times and setbacks that come with the territory as a business founder.
Technology has made the second venture, WorkBuzz, a viable vehicle for achieving Steve’s ambitions. Recognising that the biggest business risk at the outset was that he was not an IT specialist, he relied heavily on LinkedIn to recruit the necessary expertise. He has always believed that you can acquire the necessary skills as you go along. As owner of Smith & Henderson, he taught himself regression analysis and mastered advanced selling skills. As WorkBuzz has grown, Steve has learned the fundamentals of negotiating venture capital deals in line with the increasing size of funding rounds. He is a great believer in business books written by leaders in their field.
Steve describes his ambitions for WorkBuzz very much in terms of gaming: the aim is to get to the next level, and he spends a great deal of time visualising what that future business will look like in 18-24 months’ time. His senior team also understands that process and the skills and resources the future state will require. Many of the challenges are predictable, and he believes that the obstacles can be overcome if you surround yourself with enough smart people. There will be personal sacrifices along the way, however. Steve recalled the number of weekends when he declined social invitations in favour of working on the business – and he congratulated the audience on their coming along to hear him speak on a cold, wet November evening!
He is very clear that if you can create a great company you create great opportunities. WorkBuzz is in the corporate culture business, and he is single-minded about the ethos of the company he is leading. It’s a “Marmite” firm, he says, and it’s all about the people. Get that right, and everything else will follow. Now he is expanding into the US, he is keen to maintain the spirit of the organisation while recognising that the language might be common, but the business environment is very different.
During the evening, he was challenged about his ambitions: could WorkBuzz become a £50M or even a £500M business? Who knows what the future holds, but with clients like McDonald’s and O2, Steve is confident he still has plenty of fuel in the tank.
To learn more about WorkBuzz, visit www.workbuzz.com.
