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Emma Jones CBE

lines on the record: 31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“First steps because I will come back to this point that we kind of started at the beginning starting and growing a business is tough and you do have challenging days but I think it can be one of the best things you can do in life. You get freedom, you get flexibility and especially with young people they want to change the world and they want to do it through enterprise. So I think it's a great way of running your life so yeah just do it.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But just do it with caution so you'll know this the rise of the side hustle, which I have loved watching again over the past decade. So what young people are doing brilliantly is they're either carrying on their education and starting a business at nights and weekends on the side or indeed they're getting a first job and saying well actually I'll start as a side hustle, I'll keep this salary coming in, gives me time to build my confidence. So my advice to anyone who's looking to start a business is take small steps towards it, write a business plan, make your first sale, get home on the web, make some more sales, all of that helps you build your confidence because the whole thing about building a business is it is a journey and if you take those first steps you'll then look back in 12 months time and be like oh my goodness I have a website I have sales I have a business the number of business owners who say to me I accidentally fell into this I'd say do it with a bit more structure than that but definitely take those”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Digital accounts report their income to HM revenue and customs. But fortunately, we have three big cloud accounting providers who say, I tell you what, we'll build the tools to enable that to happen and we'll deliver training to small businesses so they feel confident in doing what they're doing. So I love seeing big corporates who come out with funding, grants, competitions, showcasing small businesses because they're very good at doing that. And I think if we can continue to have that, we always used to talk about the ideal and as you say this kind of partnership approach. You want big corporates contributing. You want government to play its role and then of course you want small businesses who are actively embracing this because we can't do any of this if small businesses say, oh, I don't want support. So you need that open acceptance to it. But you get if you get that right then that's how you get the flywheel working.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting. I think corporates have done an amazing job pretty much over the past decade, and my life at Enterprise Nation was pretty much spent delivering programs for big corporates. So for Uber, we ran the Black Business Fund. For Amazon, we used to run something called Amazon Small Business Accelerator. We ran young enterprise programs. And I used to hugely respect these corporates who said, and their belief, because I met lots of them and said, you know, why are you delivering these small business support programs? Their belief is if small businesses do well, we do well. And so of course it comes from a place of philanthropy, but it also comes from a place of it's good business. So I do think corporates have done an amazing job. And if you look at different kind of sectors, so one thing small businesses are being asked to do at the moment, and again, you'll know all about this, is making tax digital. So more small businesses being asked to kind of file.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely But the job of government is to provide that certainty, and I think this is where the state steps in to say, right, we'll give you the certainty of future investment, future tax rates, what's coming down the line. So I think if you can get the mixture of both, we hopefully have a good enterprise nation in the running.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them, but critically they have to keep that optimism alive because the biggest thing you need as small business owner when times are tough is of course you have got to have that resilience every day to say let's keep going and I think that needs an optimistic approach. Where are the sales going to come from? Tomorrow will be better if today's been tough and let's kind of work through it until we get to those sunny uplands.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm going to come back to optimism. I think the biggest thing that, and you know, entrepreneurs are very optimistic by nature. And I think that's what they've got to keep in the bucket loads. And again, I'll go back to this chapter because of the US tariffs position. He has noted an opportunity which is selling coffee into the US. It's now cheaper to do from the UK because we've only got 10% tariffs compared to other countries where it's much higher. And as he told this story, I thought, you know, again, as an entrepreneur, he could be looking at all the bad things at the moment, higher national insurance, business rates, friction. And he is coping with that, but at the same time, you've got to keep an open mind to say, where am I sales going to come from? So I think the entrepreneurs that I'm seeing thriving are those who surround themselves with support. They focus on what they do best and they get others who do other stuff better to surround.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“key challenge for any business is how do you get the perfect blend using robotics introducing AI which of course is lower cost and more efficient but blending that with human intervention because it's”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think they're already doing that. And I mentioned this SME Safari where we connected policy officials to business owners. One of the entrepreneurs we met is a great guy called Jamal and he set up nine years ago a business called Change Please. And Change Please is a social enterprise that tackles homelessness through delivering coffee. So he's got five sites in London. He delivers coffee in 300 plus sites across the UK through big partners. So we sit in Jamal's coffee shop in Victoria. All the policy officials around him and I thought he would say, I'm thinking about selling coffee, business rates is kind of on my mind. The first thing he spoke about was the opportunity of AI for his business. I said, you're a coffee shop. How does AI help you? Anyway, what he's looking at is robotics in the shop that potentially, I mean, what's slightly worrying about this is where do humans come in. And I think this is kind of the...”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess the first thing I'd say is they are using AI. And one of the final things I did before leaving Enterprise Nation is we did a big report on this. And this was over a year ago. So it absolutely will have changed because of course everything's moving so quickly. But the report showed 57% of small businesses said, well, I'm already using AI because it comes inbuilt in the products that I'm using. So again, I feel this kind of two sides to this. And I was speaking at an event for Google recently because Google are delivering some brilliant events around the UK for SMEs on how to adopt AI. And I went to this event and said, okay, this is great because you need the big companies to be building it in intrinsically into the products. And then if you're a small business owner using anything from MailChimp to Google to ChatGBT, it's just there. So you're kind of using it already. But we do also want small businesses to have an open mind to say, okay, well, how can I take that further?”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great, but there is such strength of community. And this is what you quite often find, where communities feel, Westminster feels a long way away, London feels a long way away, therefore how are we going to do things? Well, we're just going to do it ourselves. And I think if we can have this community powered action, and to be fair, the government is trying to encourage this. So the current government is very keen on more local communities owning their local assets. So you see people buying the local pubs. The post office has got a very exciting future in terms of their role in local communities. So I think if you don't have this incredible ecosystem that we have in London, you just create your own. And so I think there's a lot to be said for community power. So, yeah, go Ramsgate”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've actually got sort of personal experience of this, so I have a property in Ramsgate, which is a seaside town in Kent. And when I kind of moved in in 2024, I wanted to give back to the community. And so we set up a community interest company called Ramsgate Space, which is trying to fill empty shops in the town with enterprising people and projects. So we've been doing lots of business support. We're about to bring out a publication called Seaside CEO, which is profiling all the local business owners. So every day I can see what an underserved area is doing and what they're doing and it's phenomenal to see is the community is just taking responsibility into its own hands. People come together, a traders group has been formed for the shopkeepers to say right, how do we work together? There is public funding available so Ramsgate is just benefiting from some public money which is”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I guess kind of just what I'm saying is just anywhere down of 86 hours would be great. So it's just this whole concept of, again, let's reduce the burden so small business owners can spend the time saying, you know, let's go for growth and spend it more productively.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is the difficulty about setting targets Remember years ago I took a part time while with government called SME Crown Representative and the minister at the time had set this target of saying I want government to spend £1 in every three with small businesses and everyone was hugely incentivised towards that target and it hasn't yet been met and it was meant to have been met by 2020 so that's the difficult”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple metric to measure what you then look at is there's again a lot of complexity and layered approach to doing that. So we're encouraging big businesses to report on payment, we're encouraging them to sign up to something we manage called the Fair Payment Code, we're encouraging small businesses to come to our casework team if they've got an issue getting paid and I'm doing lots of events and interviews to try and get the message out there to say let's build a positive payment culture because if you're a big company and you've got suppliers, you would never dream of paying your employees late but why would you dream of paying your suppliers late? So we want to try and get this message that prompt payment is just the right thing to do. If we can take away that piece of friction for small firms, take those 86 hours down it just frees up the entrepreneur's time to say actually I'll spend it on the things I want to do which is growing the business”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each small business owner spends on average 86 hours chasing debt. And again, I've been there as a small business owner. It's a really thankless task when your company is delivered and you're having to chase for an invoice to get paid. So that's the metric. So I've come in, I've been in for four and a half months in terms of enroll. We are what's called an arm's length body, so I'm a team. I've got a team of 14 people, small and mighty team, as I always keep on calling them. And what we've said is we're on a mission to make life easier for small businesses. The role we have to play in that is through getting money moving quicker through the economy. So the metric I would love to see, and my term is two years, so I'm very incentivised to say by the time I go, can we at all remeasure that 86 hours stat and essentially go back out to businesses to say right, do you feel we've bought down the hours you're having to spend chasing debt? And of course that's very”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, I'd love to talk about this because this is now Be careful because when running Enterprise Nation, I had the great privilege of working across the small business agenda. We talk about exports, we talk about finance. This job is very focused on payment. So I'm always getting told off. Should just be talking about this. But the reason why I'm very passionate about talking about it is payment is a big problem or late payment.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do I do? How do I kind of navigate these headwinds? But when they look up, they look and see a national economy where all they keep on hearing is bad. And so I think we have to kind of take the individual resilience and ambition of entrepreneurs and try and apply that at the national level. It helps when you've got a clear narrative coming from government. And as I say, I think there's more work to be done on getting a clear, simple, small business message out to market. But the more that we do that, more that we showcase businesses that are doing well, I think that in turn will start to lift the mood.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think we need to crank up the positivity. And so I think kind of more, and I know we're kind of doing a media content production at the moment, and we're in the city. Every day I read City AM. I'm a huge admirer of CityM, but I really want them to cheer up. I want them to put more positive kind of stories in the press. But of course, you can only reflect what it is that you're hearing in the market. And it's interesting, and actually earlier this week, I took policy officials from the government on what we're calling an SME safari. So we went to meet four individual entrepreneurs, so policyholders can meet people at the front line of running businesses. And actually, when you speak to individual business owners at the moment and you say to them, how's business? Every single one of them will say, business is good. It's challenging and it's hard, but it's good. So as an individual level, they're heads down, they're working on, okay, where are the opportunities?”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now I keep on repeating this. I think we've got to lift the mood music at the moment when it comes to business and enterprise because if we don't, businesses lose their confidence, don't feel so resilient about trade, and then we lose that next generation of entrepreneurship in the pipeline. So I think kind of what I've come to learn in this kind of accumulation of years is that pretty much how do we open up markets, take out the friction and make sure we can stay as positive as we can throughout doing that.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how do we translate that for very busy business owners? So in between that, I've been thinking okay, what do business owners want and how do we simplify that? And what's on my mind at the moment is across all the years. And regardless of what small businesses sell, because small businesses are all in quite different conditions at the moment depending on what you sell to whom and where you're selling. But across all of that, I think there's three things that business owners want. One is more sales, so access to markets either at home or overseas, and indeed selling to the government. The second is less burden. So they want access to more sales with less friction in their daily lives. And things like late payment, having to deal with complex officialdom, all of that creates friction. So they want higher sales, they want less friction, and across all of that, they want to operate in a positive environment. And I think that's one of our issues.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's interesting, and I mean, as you say, I kind of my career now is coming up to shockingly kind of 25 years of running my own business, hopefully helping lots of others. And I keep on reflecting on this because, of course, now I've come into government to try and effect change. And the one thing that's kind of really on my mind is there's thousands of people in government working really hard to try and build the conditions for small business. But therefore, because there's thousands of people, that breeds complexity. So, for example, the Prime Minister launched a small business plan at the end of July, and it was quite a hefty document, and it covered all the things that government is doing from the high street to access to finance to entrepreneurship and education. No small business owner is going to read that plan. So what I've been thinking is how do we take all of this good work and complexity that's happening in the public sector on behalf of small businesses?”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, first of all, Tenant had approached us, so it was up to them to kind of stay a value. But he also taught me the value of a business is whatever somebody is prepared to pay for it. And so, of course, you can do all your calculations again, speaking to two financial ladies. You can do all your EBITDA and valuations of, but ultimately it comes down to how much does the buyer want to pay. So the experience from Teclicate, and as I say, it was a quick flip. 15 months later, we sold. I then stayed with Tenon for 18 months. But the big learning was the power of getting support. And then you can see that reflected in what I've done since, which is how do we make sure that startups from the earlier stage get access to mentorship and support?”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started conversations, and the huge learning for me throughout the whole Teclik experience, we were only 15 months old as a business, we were five people still operating from home offices across the Northwest. But what we did have, because we would not have been able to successfully do the deal if we didn't have this, we had a brilliant mentor. And so the technique experience taught me the power of getting advice. So we had a mentor who was much older than us. It was very much an age thing. He'd got lots more business experience. So when Tenan came to us and said, okay, we'd like to acquire you, what value do you put on yourselves? We ran straight to our mentor. He's called Paul Rivers. And we said, oh my goodness, how on earth do we value a company? I was 27. My co-founder was 28. We had no idea. And you learn so much from a mentor. And in fact, I'll still remember what Paul Rivers told me because I've been repeating it to everyone ever since.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That someone was prepared to give us money when we did not know how we were going to realise value and pay it back. Anyway, long story short, we didn't take their cash. I said, come on, let's kind of hustle our way and start this business. So as two founders, we retained our equity. We started the business by pitching out. We thought it was a hoax. So, this is my other point for anyone who's a founder. When someone calls you and says, we're really interested in your business and we're on an acquisition trail, take it seriously.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never forget is we went to see a corporate finance firm and they said, Right, we're going to write a business plan with you to raise funding because that's what everybody's doing. And I still today have this business plan. My first business was called TechLicate.com and I still have the plan and the plan was like $150 pages and essentially it said we want to raise millions for this company but we don't know how we're going to make that money back and we took it to a very well-known venture capitalist. I was based in Manchester at the time. On the first pitch meeting they said yes we want to back you and I came out of this meeting and thought going back to the years of being in a restaurant I thought there's something that feels odd about this because in a restaurant you operate under business basics you attract in customers you hopefully give them a great service and great experience they pay you they leave they hopefully come back so you get paid for doing something and then of course you take that into account whether costs etc I couldn't understand”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I did do it again in terms of lessons learned. So, yeah, I learned a lot. So yeah, just kind of backtracking. So I spent five years with Anderson. And it was the height of the dot-com boom. So it was the year 2000. And again, sort of back to this point about championing, at the time the media was filled with stories of people raising money starting.com companies. And I was really inspired by that. And so what I was doing at Arthur Anderson was attracting inward investment into the UK. And I'd worked with a colleague called Adam Breeze. He worked outside of Anderson's and we started to talk about, well, actually, could we put the inward investment process online? Let's start a dot-com. And I went to my boss at Anderson's at the time and I said, right, I'm going to go and be a dot-com entrepreneur. And he said, okay, well, I'll help you. And so he took me to see a corporate finance. And I'm sorry I'm saying this in front of Barclays and a very esteemed accounting firm. But the first bit of the process, which I'll...”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It did, and I totally agree, and in fact, it's one of the things that I'm looking at really closely, and I did a post on this last week saying, have we got enough at the moment to encourage young people to start businesses? Because what I wouldn't want the UK to be is you only start a business if you've come from a family background of people who have. And so there are great organisations like the Careers and Enterprise Company, Young Enterprise still exists, universities are kind of doing lots of work, but I think what we're slightly lacking at the moment is this national championing of entrepreneurship that then makes young people feel, well, actually, rather than getting a job, can I consider self-employment? I know that Barclays does amazing job. You deliver life skills in schools, which is all about how do we teach young people about finance. So I think the more of that we can do the better.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First company I read this amazing book once I'd sold my first business called Free Agent Nation, written by an American guy called Dan Pink. And it was all about the rise of enterprise in America. And what he was talking about is lots of people are starting their own businesses, but do we have the infrastructure to support this? So I read this book. I was truly inspired. I bought 10 copies and sent it to kind of my mentors at the time. And I thought, I think the same thing is going to happen in the UK. People will realise the benefits. They'll start businesses. But do we have the infrastructure to support? So kind of that was then. I then built Enterprise Nation. And as you say, kind of now doing the job from within government, which is interesting.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was with Arthur Anderson, so I joined the accounting profession and got five years of incredible training at Anderson's and in fact again when I ever talked to young people who are feeling absolutely kind of hyped about starting a business one of the things I do say to them is maybe consider starting a job first go and build your business network get training build your confidence then maybe kind of consider starting a business so I worked for Anderson's I was with Anderson's for five years and then I left to start my first business which was at the height of the dot-com boom so maybe kind of talk about that but I think through that journey what I got to see is the benefits of enterprise so the benefits of being your own boss it's not always financial but one of the biggest things that people talk about who are self-employed is the freedom and flexibility they have to work on their own terms so kind of seeing all the benefits of that I'd sold”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to say it all sounds very historic, doesn't it? Yes, I guess it all started. I was brought up in a very entrepreneurial household. So when I was young with my brother, my mum ran restaurants. And we quite often lived above the restaurants. So kind of all I knew was enterprise, self-employment. I talk about this quite a lot, but kind of when my brother and I would come back from school, we'd have dinner with mum and kind of she'd talk about the day and the takings and we very quickly kind of got to learn that if the takings were good, we were like, great, we're having a holiday this year. If the takings weren't so good, then you kind of feel the pressure of kind of business performance. So I kind of grew up in that environment. My whole family were very entrepreneurial. I got aunties starting businesses and I think that helps because then enterprise seems like a very natural thing to do. But I kind of went through the usual university and I did get an actual job and in fact Natasha I know you run Hayes McIntyre, my first job.”
undated · Off The Agenda · Emma Jones CBE: Entrepreneurship & Britain's Growth Challenge | Off The Agenda | OTA Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source