Louise Nicolson
Louise Nicolson, of Salt Strategies, is that rare breed: a hugely successful, multi-award-winning female entrepreneur who having set up one successful business is about to launch another that was set up during lockdown. Having started her first business when her son was six months old (she’d write business proposals at the kitchen table until 3am), she’d go on to sell her communications consultancy, Bread Public Relations, to a competitor in 2015. Her book, The Entrepreneurial Myth was published last year while she was receiving chemo for breast cancer. Behiye Hassan interviewed this truly inspirational author and businesswoman.
Louise Nicolson thinks there’s a myth about entrepreneurism. Which is: “We expect entrepreneurs just to find the answer in their gut. That it's easy when you know how, and you can do it all by yourself.” And all these things, she says, are untrue. Instead, Nicolson sees successful entrepreneurism as a process of connecting with others. “The irony, is that a lot of products of entrepreneurial businesses rely on community connection and collectives. Uber, Airbnb… all these brilliant business businesses rely on community. And yet rarely do we apply those collective community cooperative principles to entrepreneurship itself. We still assume it comes from an individual entrepreneur rather than an entrepreneurial community.” More damagingly, “we still accept crazy failure rates for entrepreneurial businesses. And it needn’t be like that.”
After selling her business, the journalist-turned-PR moved from Scotland to London, joined one of the City’s PR firms, and started writing the book, inspired by her Master's degree in entrepreneurship in which she had done research into the concept of the entrepreneurial myth: “There's this massive gap between how we present entrepreneurs and the reality of running a small business.” She dug her old university thesis out and began writing. “I sort of re-ran the research and found that this entrepreneurial myth really strengthens this kind of toxic presentation of entrepreneurs. It’s bad for the economy and bad for the entrepreneurs themselves.”
Because actually, entrepreneurship is a set of skills you can learn and develop she says. “It's not somebody you are. It’s something you can pick up and put down as your circumstances require it. There's this big sort of story around entrepreneurial intuition and risk taking. But we also need to consider that it's a set of transferable skills.” And Nicolson stresses that those resources are available, “if you connect with others, and share the difficulties. It's about learning from each other, from one another’s experiences, that will help us create stronger businesses.”
The core challenge, she says, is finding your place in the sort of entrepreneurial community – which, perhaps handily right now, are automatically online. “Most functioning networks are online,” she reassures. And for those who have been supported by the different government schemes, it may provide breathing space between that old business and their new future. “Support is available online,” she insists, “because people are open to the unique time we're in and, in my experience of the entrepreneurial networks, are helping each other.”
She also thinks lockdown is the ideal time to start another business: “I think because the majority of the world's entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs out of necessity, rather than lifestyle, we have this, I suppose, mythical belief that to be an entrepreneur, you've got to be like Richard Branson or Elon Musk, driven by one idea. But the reality is, entrepreneurship is a much more basic human drive to create and trade. So lockdown, when we’re jolted out of normal ways of approaching life, and business and family, is a good time to create a business. And the stats show that more businesses were incorporated in lockdown as a whole. People have had the opportunity to think again about what they want to do. And for some that has been forced on them: I don't deny how difficult and painful the process is. But it's also a jolt to how we think about business. There's an opportunity to think afresh about how we approach business creation.” Her new business, she says, is “basically being custom-made for a post-COVID world… it’s not like taking an existing business and working out how our employees should work remotely. We can actually design a business around the new requirements.”
So, how to handle the emotional rollercoaster of starting up a new business, let alone during a global pandemic? “There has to be a degree of honest connection,” she says. “An honest conversation about the realities of small business life.” Her advice, again, is to connect and network with others who are creating businesses, “because therein lies the strength to sort of tackle those challenges”.
Were there any big surprises about being an entrepreneur? Only that the entrepreneurial community is “much more colourful, vibrant and diverse than the entrepreneurial stereotype”. And that is its true strength, too. “I went in with a two-dimensional view of what an entrepreneur is. But when you start to connect in a real way, it provides a different perspective. That's the sort of glorious surprise really and why it's so exhilarating to create a business. There's a very real community waiting to cheer you on.”
The best advice she has for other entrepreneurs is to persevere and make the right connections. While the best advice she’s ever received herself is to hire and connect and partner with people with equal and opposite skill sets, a community of talents. “It's very tempting to hire people who are just like you, but your business is inherently weaker if you do that. And before you tap into that community talent, you need to know what you're good at, what your strengths and weaknesses are. And that requires a really hefty bout of reflection. But I think the core to business success is hiring people who are not at all like you – and then listening.” The entrepreneurs she most admires are who she calls “the everyday entrepreneurs… I get the biggest kick from meeting anonymous entrepreneurs, and hearing their stories one-to-one.” And for Nicolson, entrepreneurship is a brilliantly creative process. “I didn't expect to fall in love with the process of business itself,” she says, “but it's an intoxicating kind of drive. Really exciting, really fulfilling.”
Ten days before Nicolson completed her manuscript, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was while she was staying in a writer's retreat, a friend's cabin in the forest to finish it, that she found the lump. She got it checked out, and received a positive diagnosis. “That was devastating. I flew home. And the publishers were incredibly, incredibly supportive.” Given the choice between not filing the manuscript or taking a month extension she chose the latter – “because I didn't know what the future held. I finished the book at 4am and started chemotherapy at 11am so it was right to the wire. [But] we managed to get it over the line.” On the day it was published she was having a mastectomy at the Royal Marsden. “Some good friends of mine held the book launch while I was in the hospital.” While recovering there, the book reached top ten in the WHSmiths travel store charts. She dedicates it to the doctors that helped with her treatment: “They were helping to transform the brutal path into a hopeful one; they helped me plot a way back to who I really was.” The book is a constant reminder to her of “what I'm capable of.”
The Entrepreneurial Myth is available to purchase here