Why we started this company

We want to enable more founders to cross the barrier to sustainable growth.

Many people decide to start their own business at some point in their lives (the average age in the US and Europe is now >50).

Such a venture is very risky and most young companies do not survive to their 10th birthday. 90% of young companies fail. Either the founders abandon the project or they run out of money and are forced to give up

Aware of this risk, founders turn to incubators, business schools and accelerators to increase their chances of success.

While these programmes are certainly valuable, there is a lack of evidence that they are consistently effective and make a real difference to a small business’s likelihood of success.

We believe that all these methods lack effectiveness because knowledge and factual evidence are not important inputs into our decision-making process and have limited ability to change the way we act, i.e. how we run our business.

Millions of founders have engineering degrees. Millions have business degrees. Hundreds of thousands have MBAs.

A high level of education is certainly an advantage, and degrees have an important signalling effect to the outside world that should not be underestimated. However, education and degrees are not the key to entrepreneurial success. It is only when combined with the right mindset that they become an extremely powerful asset.

Many problems simply cannot be solved by knowledge. Most things cannot be fixed by education and training alone.

So the solution is not to pile on more knowledge. If we continue to rely on this approach, the survival statistics for start-ups are unlikely to improve. We keep doing the same thing; therefore we will keep getting the same result.

We designed this program recognising the factors that make us successful in our business. Our key goal is to significantly increase the survival rate of small businesses.

Remember when Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate? She had three equally qualified candidates to choose from. She chose Tim Walz because “in the end, it came down to chemistry”. “He’s just so open. “I really like him.

That is the person you need to be. You need to be the person your prospect wants to do business with. You need to be the person others trust. You need to be the one who is confident and persuasive.

It is our ‘mental tools’ that we need to sharpen if we want to improve the way we act, and the way we run our business. It is the only way to improve the way we confront the obstacles we face, how we cope with failure, and to avoid repeating the mistakes that we made in the past.