When business is serious game
SME FOCUS expert Douglas van Praet a few years ago drove home to me that “the only way to get someone to believe in your idea is to get them to believe it was their idea in the first place”.
I developed the idea for Rocket from the recognition that change in organisations has to be driven by people and that gaming (recreation or serious) is enormously powerful at engaging people. The idea really came from research I was conducting over five or so years into how to create environments that rapidly accelerate learning. Work in earnest started in 2016, we launched the firm in February 2017 and had our first paying client in August 2017.
What were you doing before you took the plunge?
I worked in recruitment for Paul Atkinson in Edinburgh, then in a niche accountancy firm advising business start-ups on optimising their planning. Over the past 12 years, I have been acting as a business doctor to help established SMES to build productivity and scale their businesses.
How did you raise the start-up funding? Having been made several offers of backing, I built a Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme package with my accountant and went to all my business friends and family. We had £100,000 raised within a few weeks. What was your biggest break?
Securing the appointment to Games Without Frontiers of Stuart Laing as our director of simulations and operations. Stuart has 15 years of experience in high-level simulation with major stock market-quoted companies and has helped rocket fuel our growth. I was fortunate also I had the IT underpinning created by Mike Perrin, formerly technical manager of Skyscanner.
What was your worst moment?
Some deals were delayed f a few weeks, which meant I had to go back to friends and family to ask for cash to keep the lights on. That made me more determined to make it a success.
What do you most enjoy about running the business?
Not running it. My modus operandi is to build each of my businesses to run without me. It’s safer for the staff, safer for clients and it means I can do the stuff I love, which is making sales, deciding on strategic direction, and inventing new things.
What are your ambitions for the business? We can train someone up to deliver a simulation session in just two days. We’ve designed our platform to work independently of an expert. If I am right, this has the potential to have massive consequences for the world of education, training and development.
My modus operandi is to build each of my businesses to run without me
What are your top priorities?
To select a team of world beating individuals and then to establish what formation they should play in and to uphold the standards and culture of the company.
What could the governments do to help? Walk the floor. Take the time to work in an organisation and understand the real problems that businesses face. They will quickly understand much of the support provided is not matched well to the very firms that organisations are trying to support.
What was the most valuable lesson you learned?
Sometimes one may be unaware of the loyalty members of the team have to the business, what we are trying to do, and also to me as the person who kicked it off. It’s a quality that might only emerge when things are critical.
How do you relax?
I don’t really because I am so passionate about what I do, but I walk and scuba dive and enjoy holidays with my wife and daughters Katie and Lexie on Scottish islands.