Bonus episode: How to fix UK Plc?

0:00This is Britain's growth moment. Do you want to be part of it? On 26th of March, 750 of the UK's most ambitious founders, CEOs and investors will gather in London to shape the future of mid-sized business. The company's driving our nation's success. The Business Leader Summit 2026 isn't just another conference. It's a day built around the three forces that define growth, ambition, policy and capital. And as one of our valued podcast listeners, you can be there in person. To secure a discounted ticket, visit the events section of our Business Leader website and use this code. BLPODCAST, all one word, all uppercase.

0:41We look forward to seeing you there.

0:52Hello and welcome to the Business Leader Podcast. I'm Graeme Roddick. I'm Dougal Shaw. I'm Sarah Vizard. And I'm Josh Dombragg. In today's episode, we're going to be posing a question that has vexed economists, it's vexed politicians and it's vexed investors and many other people besides. That is, how do you fix UK PLC? We'll come on to what exactly that question means and why it needs asking in a moment. But first of all, I just wanted to say hello to everybody else and to say, let's try something different compared to what we did in the last episode. and very quickly I want to just pick everyone's brains in terms of what we've all learned since the last episode we did so Dougal to pick out for our audience pick out we're all interviewing all these great business leaders reading all this great content there's all sorts of insights that we're picking up every single day not an exaggeration to say probably more than anyone else in the business world so tell me you're out and about what is one bit of advice that's really stayed with you over the last month?

1:52Well, here's a really practical tip. I went to visit LinkedIn, the UK team at their offices in London. And while I was there, I got to pick their brains about, you know, how you can do well on LinkedIn and have impact. And they told me something I was surprised about, which is make sure you have a very high resolution picture of yourself and your profile, because that's actually one of the things the algorithm looks at when it decides whether it's going to share your thoughts or not. That's very practical, far more practical than I was expecting that's making me straight away think i need to go and change my linkedin profile picture which i don't think is at all high-res sarah that's you volunteering to go next as well i think okay well mine is um mine is based on the idea that actually i got very little of this last night and um sometimes i think that entrepreneurs and founders feel like they are they should also be like this and only get three or four hours of sleep in a night but i was actually reading a piece that fortune did they do quite a few sort of lots of places do it this sort of day in the life of someone and they did one with um uh chesky from airbnb and his basic was like his non-negotiable is he wants to try and get at least seven hours of sleep he says he knows that there are four or five people there are lots of people who get four or five or even six hours of sleep but the extra hour you save by not sleeping probably makes every hour the next day a little less productive and i think more people could listen to that advice and realize the importance of sleep jeff bezos says that as well he's i think he says eight hours because he's he said As a startup, the exception might get a bit less, but he said as a CEO of a big company, you have to make a limited number of key decisions every day and there's no way you can make the best decision in the best frame of mind unless you've had enough sleep.

3:21I would wholeheartedly agree. I think Margaret Thatcher only had five hours sleep a night or something though. She kind of thought sleep was for the week. So there's some other opinions on this as well. That might explain a lot though. Josh, what's your thought? See, I actually just had a quote that really stood out to me. I was reading Michael Lewis's book, Going Infinite, about Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced business leader, shall we say. And Sam was basically talking about the crypto space. And there was a little quote he just threw in there, which I absolutely loved. It was obviously still a very, shall we say, free market.

3:53There's not a lot of regulation going on. And his quote about it was, it's the blind leading the blind. The only way is to teach yourself how to see, which I really liked. Well, I like that. Mine's not too dissimilar in a way actually and it's not from a business leader either you know we we do we have lessons from another field as one of our features we do like looking from other fields and and how high performers have got to the top mine's actually from steve martin the comedian who has given some very insightful interviews in the past about how hard he works to to rise up to the top of comedy and how the comedy is a unique profession in that you do these warm-up shows and you test your act and you literally you're standing in front of an audience where you're testing your jokes and some with them fall flat and a disaster and you're literally bearing your soul in front of people and here's here's one bit of advice he says that the one bit of advice he thinks everyone forgets and it's all these playbooks and self-help guides is one key thing that he thinks is be so good they can't ignore you i just i really love that in terms of just trying to deliver high quality stuff as a person as a business i think there's lots of different things that that's applicable to.

4:59It sounds simple as well, but it's actually very difficult. It is. And it brings us actually neatly onto what we're going to talk about, UK PLC and how to fix it. And we're going to go around the room, as it were, and get everyone's thoughts on this. It's a question that we're posing on the front cover of our latest magazine. It's also a question we're posing at the Business Leader Summit, where we're looking at how the UK can get better at turning medium-sized companies into large companies. But why are we asking that question? It's a question that a lot of people are asking. I think very quickly we'll just go through first of all why we're asking the question.

5:33First of all it's obvious the economy is not growing as quickly as it could. So for the stats 2024 it grew by just 0.9%. That's growth obviously which is better than contraction but to put that into context the US grew by 2.8 % and on a per head basis so per capita the UK economy actually shrunk by 0.1 % in 2024. So in other words, everyone's share of the economy is getting smaller. Productivity is also an issue, as we know. Workers produced 0.7 % more output per hour quarter on quarter in the final three months of 2024. That's the good news. The bad news is that productivity was actually down 0.8 % year on year.

6:16You also see these challenges in the City of London and the stock market and the debate about where are the large companies listing. There's recently, there's been a lot of soul searching about Unilever's decision to list its ice cream business in the Netherlands rather than the UK. That is just one part of the problem. I mean, I would sort of say that that's only been raised as an issue because there's just not enough promising UK companies looking to list in the first place. So why is that? And how do we make it better? I think one thing that's really important to say in this debate that gets lost quite a lot, actually, is that the UK is a great place to start a business.

6:54It is. There is not a lack of ideas. There's not a lack of talent. And really, to be brutal about it as well, there's not necessarily a lack of finance. The UK businesses attracted more venture capital investment in 2024 than every other country apart from the US and China. By every sensible measure, the UK is a great place to start a business, but it is not a great place to turn a promising business into a large company. The data suggests that less than one in 20 medium sized businesses go on to become large companies. Businesses in the US and Europe are much more efficient at going from medium to large.

7:35And you can see that problem in that debate that I mentioned about the stock market and about the lack of companies listing on the stock market. Why this debate is so interesting is it brings us into short term, medium term and long term answers and solutions. And we're obviously out there talking to lots of different business leaders about what's going on. Lots of promising business as well. We know there's a lot of talent out there. We know there's a lot of promising businesses out there. and it's interesting we spoke to will shoe deliveroo in january and one thing he said really stuck with me and it was about this debate isn't about taxes it's not about government policy these are things that are not really going to move the needle it's it he was making the point it's all about culture it's all about seeing other people succeed it's all about seeing other people fail and being okay with it and then going on and building something really special and it's Interesting things like the facts that 50 people within Deliveroo have gone to found their own business after working in Deliveroo.

8:34And you get this virtuous circle of people who, having been within one successful business, go on and build another. And I also think it's interesting in this debate, the longer term things like energy, low carbon and the UK's future technology. AI obviously comes into this as well, as I'm sure we'll come to. But there's a Matthew Saeed column in The Times last year about how ultimately this is all about energy. And he's making the point that if you look back at every other time in history, when productivity has been held back, when economies have been held back, it's not to do with talent. It's not to do with ideas.

9:09It's about the fact there is literally not enough energy to power these ideas. and his point was at a time when fossil fuels are running out and costs are getting higher and higher it is a simple fact that energy is just not cheap enough to be able to power all the productivity gains that we need and one final point for me is that that brings us very neatly onto a podcast we did recently that's also stayed with me with James Basden and Zenobe who are building batteries and these new low carbon technologies I mean I would summarize Zenobe as being a company that is at the forefront of making zero carbon renewable energies usable for businesses that's basically what they're doing and James Basden the co-founder made the point that if the UK can get this right if the UK can be at the forefront of this technology it will provide an infrastructure an advantage it's very similar to what the Victorians handed over in terms of infrastructure and more power productivity economic growth and the future of uk plc so that's for me that's kind of a sort of brain dump in terms of where we are right now so i wanted to hand over to you guys now in terms of get some thoughts around the room about where we are and what the solutions could possibly be i feel like will shoe's point about sort of it doesn't matter how low your taxes are what government policy is is an interesting one because obviously the autumn budget put sort of 40 billion onto businesses and obviously sort of the wealthier people as well, 25 billion in national insurance contributions, which in the end, like, I don't know, it feels like it will have a bit of an impact on growth just because everything you hear from business is we can't invest so much in the businesses that we're running.

10:47We can't hire so many people. We can't pay them as much. We're going to have to raise prices. That's all stuff that's taking away from sort of innovation and productivity. So I both get his point about like sort of government policy and taxing and that it's a culture thing, but also think the government is there to stimulate growth as well or not stand in the way of it. And it feels like, yes, you can get good businesses if there's bad government policy, but you're more likely to get growing, successful businesses to turn into large ones if government policy kind of backs that up a bit. I don't know what anyone else thinks about the government policy point, but that was my thought.

11:22I mean, thinking about what Will Hsu said, there's kind of two things I think it's about role models and ambition. And I think he's definitely on to something there. And there's so many times, for example, where I've met entrepreneurs who said, oh, it was all about, you know, I saw Richard Branson, what he'd done, or I met Richard Branson in person, and that's spurred them on. And probably we don't have, you know, quite enough people like that in the UK. And possibly in the short term, making that a bit more complex is the whole effect of Brexit, that we had some people who were very successful entrepreneurs, people looked up to, that it became a bit of, you know, do you like them or don't you because of Brexit?

12:00And obviously I'm thinking of people like James Dyson, Tim Martin, people like that. But on both sides of the debate. So I think that complicated things a bit. But then the other thing I've noticed is that if you look at, I think if you speak to people of the baby boomer generation, what you'd find is that if you're an entrepreneur in that generation, it was seen that you were somebody who weren't intelligent enough to go to university, basically. and that's completely changed now to be an entrepreneur is kind of the ultimate accolade and everybody seems to want to do it and there's people of all ages who have that ambition which is definitely around here in the UK whether it's teenagers thinking of you know going into university starting a business instead or even actually lots of people in their 30s and 40s who maybe work for a big company they're an employee but they're ambitious to take an idea use their expertise and maybe spin it out but what I think often happens is that we have a kind of event horizon in the UK where you think my ultimate ambition is to maybe sell for about I don't know say 10 million pounds to do an exit pocket a life-changing amount of money and you know that's it I'm out at that point I'm very happy and you can understand why people think that way but what we don't really have in this country is the ambition to carry on growing and create those really large companies like they've done in America and again maybe that goes back to role models we need to see more people who've done it talking about it and sharing the knowledge so we've talked about entrepreneurs getting stuff done and role models there is obviously the question about whether they actually whether the resources exist in the uk to make these things a reality and i think there's various different strands to that one of them obviously is is skills and we have a lot of entrepreneurs and businesses who say they're on certain things certain critical fundamental things to building a business there is just a skills gap in the uk and no matter how good your idea no matter how good the founder is if you don't have people with skills to execute that plan you're going to get held back.

13:51Dougal what's your thought on that? I mean again anecdotally a lot of people have told me actually thinking about it even ones who sold at Rocklea you know who exited and didn't decide not to take their idea further even though they believed in the idea is that in the UK it was hard to find people who could take a successful company from kind of say 100 employees to a thousand to do that level of scaling you need different skill set to do that people who've had that experience before and I've been told several times they've struggled to find that in the UK and to entice someone over from say America who's done it before maybe you haven't got the money to do it or you can't persuade them to make the move so that's definitely a kind of pinch point but I did I did have a look at skills as a more general question before this chat because I knew we'd be looking at it and there's a couple of things I wanted to highlight.

14:40One is that if you're looking at the real big picture of our economy as a whole and not just businesses, it was interesting to see the Skills England report. Skills England is the task force, the quango set up by the government to look at this specific issue, obviously just in the case of England with them. But they talk about the critical demand occupations as the ones where we've really got the critical need. There's about two and a half million in this category, which is 8 % of our workforce. And you should remember that over 80%, just over 80 % of these require qualification lower than degree level.

15:12And around 40 % of them are in these critical demand ones are care workers. So that's a particular industry, but that's where we have actually the acute shortage that's worth remembering. And the other one in that category is construction. And, you know, we probably don't talk so often on Business Leader about care workers, although we do talk about construction and grim i know i remember you did a really good podcast episode we got four different people from housing associations to talk about um construction targets and things like that um but that's it's worth remembering that if in the big picture of our economy those are the really acute shortages but skills england also highlighted that this issue of elevated demand occupations and this is one that maybe we're a bit more concerned with a business leader there's 13 million in this category and these are the ones that most of them do require a degree and it includes programmers, software development professionals.

16:06And this is just over half a million people in this category. And again, week on week, speaking to different entrepreneurs, there's definitely a sense that we need more skilled digital workers in the UK. And to some extent, every company now needs those digital skills. We obviously need a business leader. Everyone needs it if you're going to build a company now. You need to think about how you organize your data, how you then integrate AI into that affects, you know, whether you're a food business or anything, it affects it. Can I just push back and ask a slight devil's advocate question here on the skills and something I've found fascinating about the debate.

16:43A business by its very nature is building something new and innovative, whether that's a product or a service, it may be completely disruptive, maybe completely sort of out of that machine, or maybe a twist on something else, but it's something different. By its very nature, therefore, is it not the case that there will not be a ready-made staff and skills for the business because it is doing something new therefore is there all no matter for particularly in new industries is there not always going to be a skills gap as skills and training catch up to the business and therefore is a lot of the skills gap issue not on the businesses themselves to make sure that they're getting the people into the business and then training them up and making them, getting them to the capabilities and aptitude they want?

17:30I mean, I think there's not many businesses where it's so specific what they're doing, the product, offer or service, that the skill set isn't outside the company. I still think there's general skills that we will need, digital skills that are kind of cross-company requirements like the AI skills, coding, various digital platform skills that are going to be needed across the board. But yeah, a certain amount of finessing can certainly take place within companies. And that's something else that we have to get better at as well, internal training. Can I just ask something on the thread of skills, especially as a parent to a teenager, this is very much at the front of my mind personally.

18:13But, you know, there's people like Duncan Wardle, who we've chatted to, the ex-chief of innovation at Disney. There's people like Scott Galloway, who's the author and entrepreneur and podcast host himself. They've both spoken about how more of the trades will become almost the gold dust jobs, because, you know, that's something where those two people have said that they're encouraging their kids to go into. Just because there's so much uncertainty with the AI threat that's coming to a lot of people's jobs. Some people may see it as threat, some see it as opportunity. But if you're a parent, you know, I guess, Graham, it would be interesting to see what you think about this.

18:48but where would you encourage your kids to go to? Would it be something like a plumber, a laborer, for example, a contractor where, yes, AI will help when it comes to those kind of roles, but it's not kind of front and center as much as something that's IT-based? I mean, there's a whole podcast series, books we could write about the education system and how it balances with the needs of businesses. I mean, we've had lots of people on the podcast, Mark Dixon of IWG talking about this, saying that there's all these basic skills that people are being taught that are irrelevant because AI calculators and other technology can already do them.

19:25Why, therefore, are people not being taught more things about risk-taking, for example, understanding how things are built, entrepreneurialism, decision-making skills, more practical things? I wouldn't dream of going headlong into that debate, but I do think there's very interesting questions that can be posed. It's also a question there as well, not just to sort of those hard skills, like do you understand AI? Do you understand data? But do you have those, I guess they call them softer skills, but, you know, like you're saying, like risk taking or resilience or the ability to make decisions, the ability to communicate well that you do hear people struggle with.

20:03And it's a bit like you were saying, Dougal, like it takes a certain type of person to get a company from startup to midsize to three million in revenue. takes a totally different type of person, totally different type of team, totally different kind of mindset to go from that to building something huge that you think can go to, you know, a billion pounds of value or whatever. So I think there's something in trying to train people not just in the hard skills, but in the softer skills and management and leadership as well that will enable these businesses to get to where they need to go. It's interesting because in those reports and surveys I mentioned, even though the acute need is more in AI tech skills, kind of underneath that, kind of fourth and fifth place, is just customer facing roles.

20:46And they also talk about needing the soft skills. And at this point, can I just give a little shout out to Beth and Vincent and David Scott, who I think are listeners, but I posted on LinkedIn saying that I was going to be speaking about this. And I thought people might chime in and talk about, you know, lack of digital skills, kind of tallying what the surveys were saying, but both of them leaped on the issue of soft skills and they're out interviewing people for their respective businesses and they were saying things like yeah they find the interpersonal skills aren't so good people apply at the moment people maybe lack curiosity or resilience and these are trying to think these are things they try to sort of detect at the interviews process with candidates and they're kind of finding that we're a little bit deficient in this area as well which I thought was interesting.

21:29Can I ask a question to everyone do we think that a good ceo or founder can overcome the other challenges that we spoke about when growing a business probably not on their own to be honest i think they have to collaborate with other ones and it's it's these are very big cultural issues i don't think really see how one person can solve it on on their own to be honest i think as well like you're saying there do go it if you're a good leader you should be able to lead all the other issues that your company might be facing like if you're a good leader you should be able to sell your company in such a way that it can raise good funding and financing.

22:02If you're a good leader, you should be able to spot the skills gaps in your business and hire the right people or train for the right people. If you're a good leader, you should spot when government policy might not go the way you want it to and have a realistic means of coming back at it and a sort of a strategy for dealing with that that isn't just burying your head in the sand. So I think both no, but also yes, which is a really unhelpful answer to give to that. I don't think you can surmount every single issue just by being a good leader but a good leader will find tackling some of these challenges easier i think one of the great unsets in this debate is that there are people out there who are extraordinary and can frankly achieve more than other people and tom blomfeld of the co-founder of monzo put out a post to that effect at the end of last year and i think those people those founders who can achieve more and more effective than others have an ability to just find a way and achieve great things and build a business despite the challenges and part of this debate is about empowering them and also encouraging them and finding them I guess frankly I think as well there's a debate here as well between like being a good leader and being able to build a good business right like there are lots of people who are maybe I shouldn't name them there are lots of people who are not very good leaders who are not interested in listening to other people in taking into consideration other people's thoughts or feelings, who will demand people back at work, who will renege on all their DEI deals and all the sustainability stuff, but in the end will change the world, will build businesses worth billions of pounds.

23:36And in some ways, it's the fact that they were so bloody-minded and didn't really give a crap about what anyone else thought about them that made them such good builders of a business that does not necessarily make them particularly good people leaders. I think those are two separate skill sets and two different ways of running a business. You can run a business in a way that very much thinks about people culture and builds it from that way. You can run one that goes like, I am right. And this is how we're going to build this. And off you run. And you can be successful both ways, probably. But maybe it won't have long term success if it's just antagonised everyone within the organisation because it hasn't listened to them.

24:13Possibly. But there's lots of examples of businesses that antagonise everyone and still seem to do well. not all of them obviously and it has to be a very specific type of business but there are I can think of a number of very influential business leaders who have antagonized almost everyone. One thing that is clear is that a great leader or manager can't build a business without money and access to finance and I said at the start that the UK is third in the world behind US and China in terms of venture capital money that's clearly more towards startups but what about going from medium to large going from good to great where how is the UK doing in terms of access to finance there I know you've looked into this Sarah I have had a bit of a look into it and you're all right there is an awful lot of VC money VC money sloshing around in the UK I think I can't remember the stat you gave at the beginning but yeah it's billions of pounds raised in the UK for businesses one of the issues that the UK has is a lot of that is aimed at seed rounds at very early stage businesses.

25:17Around 60 % or so of UK and European funds are really, really focused on seed or early stage funding. And only one in five sort of companies that raise money then go on to finance from the same investors. It's the opposite of that in the US. There's an awful lot of money in that sort of mid-stage, growth stage capital, I think eight times as much in the US as there is here available at a VC level in that kind of growth stage, which I think is one of the things that has been tried to be dealt with over the past few years. What you'll find in the UK is an awful lot of businesses raise money through bank loans, bank loans and grants, but lots of bank loans and debt.

25:54But again, that is on the decrease as well. So UK finance says that there was a drop in lending to small and medium sized businesses for the third straight year. So it's down from 14.3 billion to 18.4 billion. So what you see is there is a real sort of pinch point here where there's quite a lot of money sloshing around for startups in sort of the VC world. Again, with the big banks, there's quite a lot of money for the bigger companies that need to raise sort of debt or equity. But that sort of mid-market is struggling a little bit. What you do find, obviously, is where there's a gap, some people try to fall into it.

26:27So you've got places like Alica Bank and Oak North, which are trying to sort of fund like plug this gap but again it's it's through loans and debt rather than rather than investment um the government has tried to solve this as well there's a number of schemes around they're reasonably complicated and i've like having spoken to quite a lot of um medium sized business owners in part for for stuff we're doing at the summit around financing it's surprising how few know about things like the enterprise investment scheme about the british business bank about Innovate UK and kind of the grants and stuff you can get from those.

27:02There's an awful lot going on, but it's not the simplest way of, it's not the easiest to find out how to raise this money and what it can be used for. It's all sort of wrapped up in bits of tax relief here. And it's only applicable if you're a certain age. And I think especially for the enterprise investment scheme, you're only really allowed to use that if you're up to seven years old, which sounds good, but you might be a business that sort of started off smaller now is really going, if you're eight or nine years old, sorry, it doesn't apply to you just because of the age of the business. Also, from some of the business leaders we've been speaking to, raising VC funding is getting harder and harder.

27:39This might sound a little bit counterintuitive, but since the end of COVID, basically, investors want more businesses to be profitable before they invest. That might sound like it should be obvious that people want companies to be profitable. But actually before COVID, there was a lot more just willingness to take, not a punt, but a willingness to invest in what looked like a good idea with a good bunch of leaders that you thought would get to profitability in the end. Like businesses, investors are not interested in that anymore. They want to see that you have a CFO, that you're professional, that you understand your data, that you are a profitable business.

28:15That all makes raising funds much harder than it was for mid-sized businesses. How much of this is chicken and egg in terms of the finance and investor community would say, we'll invest at anything good that comes across our desk. The problem is there just isn't anything good. An almost impossible question to answer, but I think part of that and a part of it as well is it does come back a bit to that cultural point of one of the things that I spoke to a woman who she found a child's farm and now she's an angel investor. So she's obviously investing in slightly smaller companies than we tend to look up.

28:45She was like, UK businesses are not very good at selling their businesses, as in selling them to investors. You know, they don't they don't go in like the Americans or, you know, gung ho. But, you know, with the positive outlook, with the idea that like really it's you missing out on investing in us rather than us trying to get an investment from you. It's a little bit more, you know, British, a little bit more reserved. We're not so good at that kind of pitching businesses, pitching ourselves, tend to wade through 20 page decks and sort of talk through them. And really what the investors want is to chat and understand the person, the person and the passion.

29:23And once you get a reputation for that, the investor community in the UK is relatively small. So once you sort of not burnt bridges, but haven't have had a few sort of pitches not go very well, it will get around that you've gone to a few already. You haven't been able to raise the money. there must be something wrong and it sort of snowballs a little bit so I think there is a little bit of yeah like you say investors not wanting to invest but also investees not necessarily coming with quite the right sell to investors as well but one thing it just made me from what you were saying Sarah that made me think about something on the broader issue of culture and a bit with what Will Hsu was saying as well about and about the idea of collaboration as well is I always think about America.

30:05And I remember I had a very formative experience about 18 months ago on a holiday to California where I went shopping in Burlingame, which is a suburb of San Francisco. And I went along the street going into various shops to buy things. And in one clothes shop, they didn't have the thing I wanted. And the woman who ran the store sort of chatted to me and she said, well, you really must try the shop down the road because it sounds like they've got exactly the kind of things that you'd be after. You must go and check them out. Then I went to a restaurant and it got to the dessert. I couldn't see anything I wanted on the menu.

30:34And the guy, the waitress said, you know what? You've got to go to the ice cream shop down there. They've got the cookie cream flavor today as a special. You've got to try it. It's amazing. I remember thinking at the time, that would just never happen in Britain because people sort of thinking we're in this together. We're all businesses on this street and we're going to be a kind of ecosystem fighting for each other. And even though you think of capitalism sometimes as being quite cutthroat, in America, it can actually be quite collaborative and they kind of work together on the same side. and maybe in britain that's the kind of cultural thing we could be better at to be a bit proud of our businesses be ambitious for ourselves but also be looking out for each other and trying to help other businesses at the same time so we've touched on some of the key aspects and very quickly i just want to go around the room and and get your insight in terms of what is the most important thing that you think needs to be addressed not that we're going to give a definitive answer here about this debate which has got probably many more months and years to run but just quick thoughts mine very quickly would be culture whether it's among the entrepreneurs and the business leaders about encouraging them to have more confidence in their business to take the risks they need to grow and then among the investor community as well to back the businesses accept that there will be failures but knowing that for every nine failures that we want success that blows the failures out of the water so mine would be culture i think following on from that It's the culture, but I guess it's the ability to take risks or be okay with failing.

32:00Obviously, you don't want to run a business and it fail, and that can be damaging. But the ability to talk about things that have been difficult, the challenges that companies have faced, and to understand that not everything will just be a straight upward line to a billion-pound valuation and growth and listing on the stock market and being the next Amazon or Facebook or whatever it is you want to build. um this it's a culture point from a sort of a societal i guess can we innate can we allow people to take risks can we allow them to occasionally fail can we allow companies to take two steps forwards and three steps backwards sometimes and it not be the worst thing in the world i'm going to piggyback on that sarah because i think innovation for me is exactly that i mean you look at some of the incredible innovations that were born out of the 2008 financial crisis That's where we got Airbnb and a plethora of other companies very, very similar.

32:52But again, you've got these companies who are working within the lines, but actually achieving way more than they should. And I think that's the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that's really going to thrive or help this economy thrive, the UK economy. And I think continually innovating, finding new ways, sharing. I think that's going to be the key for me. I think the two things, to keep it brief, I would pick out would be a culture of ambition. that underpinned by collaboration and I mean hopefully on Business Leader we're doing our bit with that because with all the interviews we do and the stuff we publish we are hopefully inspiring and creating a sense of ambition and obviously the events we take part in as well the physical in-person events help that spirit of collaboration which is so important.

33:36Can I just finish with a quote that I think nicely follows on from what I've just discussed and I came across this when I was doing the research for the latest magazine and I've actually put it in the editor's letter in the new magazine because i think it's really relevant i nearly mentioned it at the start in terms instead of steve martin but i've saved it because i think it's from barack obama and it's about what he looks for in people whether he's hiring them or whether he's trying to work them out i just think it beautifully encapsulates what we've just said he said this he said just learn how to get stuff done i've seen at every level people who are very good at describing problems people who are very sophisticated and explaining why something went wrong or why something can't be fixed but what I'm always looking for is no matter how small a problem or how big it is somebody who says let me take care of that

34:33you've been listening to the business leader podcast with me graham ruddick dougal shaw Sarah Bizarre and Josh Dornbrack. For more business case studies and masterclasses, please check out businessleader.co.uk.

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