Rockit - Bristol
This is a fascinating story and it really is a story of global success borne out of three dads’ frustrations in struggling to get their own children to sleep.
As Matt Dyson, co-founder and CEO of Rockit explains, they've won multiple awards along the way and it's a story of shed to global success. Inventing a product from that initial frustration of getting their babies to sleep, inventing it literally in the back shed, but pulling all their skills together, their design expertise, putting a prototype together and then going from there.
They are now selling hundreds of 1000's of units across multiple countries. So great success, but still managed with a small team.
There are fantastic lessons within their success story, and you could almost argue that they've already reached the stars.
So hard to chose just one aspect of business from this, but Rockit has been cash positive pretty much from the start and you might like to level up your Cash Habits using our scorecard: https://cashhabits.scoreapp.com.
Babbasa - Bristol
We have a real mix on ScaleUp Radio of people, some who are really gunning for the numbers, really going for those financials and some version of global domination, and every now and then we come across somebody who's much more about the purpose. That’s not to say that the others aren't purpose driven, but the words from today that really shone through are kindness, compassion, and respect and I really want you to listen to this discussion with Poku Osei who is the CEO and founder of Babbasa.
He's achieved some amazing things with young people. It's all about getting ordinary people together to help others who are more disadvantaged and listen out for how he describes what the name Bassaba actually means.
Loopin - Bristol
Antony Thompson is the co-founder of Loopin. They have a great mission, which is to provide a million managers by 2030, the ability to reduce burnout and attrition in their teams with the help of AI.
So, no surprise Loopin itself is a tool based on AI that helps managers to manage all sorts of aspects of resilience, burnout, but essentially around high performance teams.
This is a fascinating discussion. Both Anthony and his co-founder, Ben are ex-Marines although they didn't actually serve together. There's lots of reference to how they have taken some of those values of really looking after each other in the Marines – for example look after the person to the right and to the left of you and keeping each other accountable, but also looking after yourself. You'll hear how they've taken some of this into Loopin around managing those high performance teams.
Lots of great parts in this success story, including how they came within 9 days of running out of money and were down to their last £240 when investment money came in.
So quite a roller coaster of a journey, which take us back to that adapt and overcome attitude and that resilience.
Little Dreams Consulting - Bristol
Jenna Wilson is the founder of Little Dreams Consulting, and they help parents with young children to get sleep under control and get their life back.
Probably all of us as entrepreneurs are familiar with what happens when we don't get enough sleep every now and then. And maybe some of us have had young children as well that haven't slept very well, so we can well understand the kind of benefits that Jenna and her team bring.
Jenna was a solicitor beforehand for 12 years and then started Little Dreams when she was pregnant with her third child. We also talk about franchising, because Jen has moved into franchising her business. We uncover a lot of lessons around why you might want to franchise and some of the things you need to think about.
But it's not all about franchising. To be taken seriously within sleep you need to build up that credibility just like we do with any other business, and we discuss how Jenna establishes that credibility.
We also talk about building the culture and how to make sure that culture is maintained as more people become involved.
Altered Carbon - Bristol
Alia Rohafza is the CEO of Altered Carbon. They have some amazing technology, so it’s a bit about high tech and he's also on a ScaleUp Journey where they've already raised two rounds of investment and working with companies to help to prove their concept.
Imagine being able to create on a bit of graphene on a chip, something that's the equivalent of a nose, or a smell centre. So a dog or eventually, ideally, a human nose on a silicon chip.
And if you think about all the potential applications of that from whether food is going off to the escape of dangerous gases, all sorts of applications, in fact, that's one of their biggest challenges is how do they rein it in and decide exactly where they should focus.
We'll learn a lot about the way that Ali approached the idea of raising funding both for that first and for the second rounds. It's also interesting that his biggest challenge is not necessarily around the technology but as always, or as is very often the case, it's around people.
So it doesn't really matter whether you're in a high tech manufacturing business, whether you're in a service business, or whatever kind of business you're in, there's some really great learnings from Ali.
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