tutor2u - a family affair under the microscope

A first for me this week - a formal press interview to talk about our business.

It was great fun. Rachel Bridge, Enterprise Editor of The Sunday Times, arranged to interview me for her forthcoming book on entrepreneurs which I believe is modestly titled “How to Make a Million Before Lunch". Due out later this summer ahead of a run as a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe too.

As I explained to Rachel, “making it before lunch" is a bit of a stretch - even for a digital business like ours. Not that we've made it, either.

The discussion centred around the way in which family members can build a business together. tutor2u was founded by myself and twin brother Geoff back in 2002 on the back of a departmental website that had grown in popularity. At the time I was working for 3i and a various other venture capitalists, developing M&A deals in the leisure and travel sector. Geoff was, and still is, a teacher. It seemed like a neat thing to do - to build a business working together. And we've never regretted it for a moment.

One of Rachel's key lines of questioning was whether working as a family team in a fast-growing business can be fun? She also probed the advantages and drawbacks of working together. I concluded that the upsides far outweigh the downsides. The way we work together, communicating several times a day despite the 200 mile distance between us, removes the need for a formal decision-making process. We share the same instincts in terms of how we want to develop the business, but our skill-sets are quite different which turns out to be complementary. Fast, informal decision-making enables us to try things out that larger more bureaucratic businesses would take forever to do.

There are no committees at tutor2u; and we've never had to write a business plan or prepare a budget either. We invested £2,000 at the start (50% each) and financed the business entirely through retained profits ever since. My strong advice to Rachel was to encourage similar family entrepreneurs to avoid bank debt if possible, and diluting to external shareholders like the plague.

30 minutes of interview was great fun, and thought-provoking too. I conducted it whilst walking our labrador puppy along a quiet Yorkshire path behind the tutor2u office -a great way to think creatively! Hopefully Rachel will be able to squeeze some of our story into a paragraph or two when the book is published.