Louise Allcroft

Name:

Louise Allcroft

Business:

Complement Genomics Ltd.

Web site:

www.compgeno.com

Years in business:

8

Number of businesses:

1

Entrepreneurs' Forum member

I started my company as a result of an incredibly frustrating meeting with my ex-employer. It reached the point where I thought, we could do things a hell of a lot better than this, so I’m going to go out and do it.

My current business partner said to me at the time, do you think you can? I said yes, and the next thing I knew, within a couple of months the company was formed. It was a bit like fools treading where angels feared to go!

I’d never thought about starting up my own company; but that conversation was the trigger that I needed. Some people just need that push to suddenly think, ah, I can do this, and I will. We formed the company in 2000 on April Fool’s Day, as luck would have it.

My background is in science and research and I’d spent a year at Newcastle University doing a Masters in Medical Genetics. We wanted to sell our expertise, not only to the industry and biotech companies, but also to the general public. Genetics gets such a bad rap, what with Dolly the sheep and genetically modified foods. There’s a lot of good things about genetics too so the idea was to put a positive slant on it and bring that to members of the public.

One of the ways we thought about doing that was to encourage people to express who they are as a person. So we take their DNA profile and convert it into a gift like a set of ties or a paperweight with your unique DNA profile laser etched into it. A gift for the person who has everything! We do a lot of pearl necklaces for weddings, too.

We also wanted to get into paternity testing. It’s a controversial area but one of growth; babies are born every day. We’ve also found that we don’t just get inquiries from people who have just had babies; it’s older people as well. During the war a lot of families were separated and now they’re looking at coming back together and finding each other, so we’re reuniting families, which is really cool.

In order to be able to do the paternity testing and the gift side of the business, we needed to establish a credible laboratory. So we attained ISO9001:2000 certification and sold services to scientists as that’s our expertise, and built up the business that way to try and get a bit of cash behind us. That then allowed us to get into those areas that we really wanted to get into.

The biggest challenge we faced in setting up the business was that it was so bloomin’ expensive to get started! Some items of kit (equipment) we’ve got in the laboratories cost as much as £110,000, and not that many people have that amount of cash swimming around in their bank accounts. We certainly didn’t.

When we started though, we didn’t want to sell god knows what percentage to some wonderful venture capitalist who was going to tell us exactly what we were supposed to be doing. The whole point of our business was to do what we wanted, to achieve our goals - and not those of a VC. We had a vision of what we wanted to achieve and we wanted to do it our way.

We got around the financial challenge by getting a loan via the Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme through our bank and what was then the DTI. That allowed us to pay for the kit, get the staff in place and allowed a bit of working capital for the first year or so.

The personal challenge I faced was just the fact that I was a girl in my 20s and all the people I was dealing with were mainly men the same age as my dad. My business partner Neil who’s a bit older than me went to all these meetings with me. There was me trying to act all professional, but all these men in suits ignored me and just talked to Neil! They obviously thought I was the person he took along to make his notes and wipe his brow.

So for me, when I actually spoke to them and they realised that I knew what I was talking about, it was quite a good way of effectively shutting them up and making them take notice. They began to realise that, hey, she knows her stuff as well so let’s give her a bit of respect and listen to what she has to say.

Sometimes, getting over that (challenge) yourself isn’t tough - it’s just a confidence thing. You’ve just got to get on and do it. At the end of the day, they’re just normal people doing a job. So what if they’re a little bit older and they happen to male, it’s not really a problem.

Building a business- it’s an adventure, it always is. But at the end of the day, you realise that the buck stops with you. If a job comes in and you don’t do it, who else is going to? And when people come knocking, it’s going to be my name that they’re asking for. So it is a lot of pressure, but it’s good fun too. I’m the type of person that needs the stress though, so some pressure is good. I need to have that adrenaline to get me going

We received a lot of support from the region when we started up, especially from the Business Innovation Centre (BIC) in Sunderland. I can’t speak highly enough of them; they were absolutely fantastic.

Business Link was great too; over the past seven or eight years, if I’m ever not sure where to go for advice or funding for example, I’ll ask them first. We also got a lot of support from the Sunderland City Council and OneNorthEast. We’ve actually just been awarded some Selective Finance for Investment from OneNorthEast, which will allow us to upgrade some of our laboratory equipment and increase our capacity and throughput.

We are really grateful for the regional support that is available up here in the North East

I’ve really needed my friends and family’s guidance as well as professional support. My parents have never pushed me in any way, I just went on and did what I did and if I was happy and did my best then that was fine. My friends think the business is really interesting too, and one of my friends’ husbands is a graphic designer and he did some of our initial company logos for free, which was a great help in the early days. I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve had lots of support; I haven’t had anybody saying, ‘don’t do that it’s too much of a risk’ – we’ve never received anything but support.

In the beginning I looked at other scientific companies around and they were usually spin outs from universities. They had a fantastic idea and had the resources, all they needed to do was try and make it marketable, and perhaps get one of those aforementioned wonderful venture capitalists to come and help them out. We weren’t like that; we had nothing.

What we wanted to do was create and sell a number of services, and then have them as discreet business units so that at any point we can sell them off. dadcheck®, the paternity testing side of the business, is all trademarked. It’s got its own website with its own protocols and procedures in place so that if someone came along and said actually I quite like that, we can pick it up and hand it over and get on with other sides of the business.

The great thing about dadcheck® is that you’re dealing with the general public as well as solicitors and other members of the legal profession. I always wanted to be a genetic councillor; I loved genetics but I also liked talking to people. I never wanted to be stuck inside a lab all day but I wanted to be able to use that information to help people.

The key thing with dadcheck® though, is that you’ve got to be credible (scientifically) and know what you’re talking about. You’re dealing with some incredibly intelligent people but you’re also dealing with people who are going through an incredibly awful time in their lives. You’ve just got to be sympathetic, you can’t counsel or advise; you’ve just got to be there and help them through it.

We’ve got big industry competitors, some of which are essentially ‘factories’ which have all these huge pieces of automated kit which we don’t. We can’t really compete against these because we’re more labour intensive. But what we’ve found is that a lot of people come back to us because we offer a very personal service and we develop relationships with our clients, probably more so than ‘the big boys.’ There’ll all down south anyway, so what we’re aiming for is to be the choice for the North, and we’ll do that by continuing to build on our client relationships in the region.

We’ve been working on getting ISO17025 accreditation in place for paternity testing which is really going to help the paternity testing side of the business. At the end of the day, the information that we give out is potentially going to make or break someone’s life, so we’ve got to show these people that we’re good at what we do and we’ve got the appropriate controls in place.

Besides that, the accreditation/Quality Management System is always running in the background. It only really comes into play, god forbid, if you ever have to justify yourselves and your work. Then you’ve got that beautiful paper trail in place, it’s all there in black and white so you can just hand it over straight away and say there you go, job’s a good’un, and it backs you up.

Also, my staff are really good and they don’t see the quality procedures as a hindrance, they just do it as part of their daily schedule. When a new member of staff joins us they’re trained in the process as part of their induction and so the quality management system is just another part of the job.

In terms of staff though, it hasn’t always been that easy. Getting the right people with a passion for what they do can be tricky. You can have the best CV in the world but that’s just paper; the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as it were.

We get a lot of people emailing CVs to us who are just coming out of university. The thing we’ve found though is that they’ve become somewhat institutionalised whilst at uni; they’ve spent many years doing it their way and it can be too much of a culture shock. Some of the kids that are graduating these days aren’t ready for work. You get them in and it’s not spoon feeding sometimes, it’s drip feeding, and a lot of the time it’s not their fault.

That’s something that’s got to be rectified because otherwise I’m going to become a glorified training agency for the companies down south. We get people in, have a painful first six months, twelve months after that I can finally let them loose, but within a year they’re going down south to the big boys down there. They’ve fulfilled their training with me and they’re going onto pastures new. But that’s something that’s happening across the country and not just unique to us.

In terms of mistakes, I don’t think we’ve done many things wrong (we always made decisions based on the knowledge we had at the time and in the best interests of the company) but there was an occasion when we didn’t have the guts to do something.

It was when we had to release our first member of staff but we didn’t have the guts to do it. They carried on with us for another three months! We eventually did get rid of them but because it was the first time we’d done it, none of us wanted to be the bad guy, so you’re waiting for somebody else to say those awful words.

I’m very friendly and approachable with my staff and we get on really well, but at the end of the day I’ve got to act in the best interests of the company; it’s just a responsibility (as a director) that you’ve got to have.

We sort of rescinded that responsibility for three months because we were too scared to do anything about it. But if that person’s not doing their job properly, is a ‘bad apple’ and is effectively bringing the company down, in a small company you’ve got to get them out before everyone else gets affected.

I’ve found delegation pretty tricky. When you first start, the business is your baby and it’s very hard to let go and let other staff do the job. But I’ve learnt over the years that that’s what you’ve got to do because there are some really talented people out there.

Also, if you keep doing everything yourself, you’re your own worst enemy. People start to think oh it’s alright, good old Louise she won’t mind staying late. When I first started the business, I was working all hours. I was often at Asda at one o’clock in the morning getting some food on the way home from work. I was always saying to staff, I’ll finish that off for you. All of a sudden it becomes a habit: Louise’ll do it. Then you’ve got other people who are probably dying for that responsibility and you’re depriving them of that.

I’ve learnt over the years to delegate though, and now I’ve got some absolutely cracking staff who take so much pressure off me. They’re not scared of picking me up on things for example, if I need to sign something off or whatever and that’s great because it means they’re professional and they care about what we’re doing.

I decided to do a course in company direction (with the Institute of Directors) and when I got there, there were some directors working with enormous companies, dealing with hundreds of staff and there was little old me with just the four of us, but all their problems/issues were the same as mine.

A course like that is great because it allows you to pull yourself out and take a good look at your business. At the beginning I went to places like Business Link and just said, I’m going to do this can you give me some funding please. Now, I’m looking at developing myself so that I can help the company grow.

My baby’s starting to walk now, we’ve got the accreditation, but in order for it to run and do really well, I need to grow as a director. I’ve got various skill sets but there’s a lot of things I’m lacking in which I could be a hundred times better at with the right guidance.

I’m going to various organisations like the IoD and the Entrepreneurs Forum and the advice you get is really valuable. Their energy and experience is so important and you can learn a lot from people who’ve been there, done that.

I’m not sure I could have set the business up without Neil, my joint co-founder of the business. He’s got a lot of experience and skills that I simply lack. I’m going on about graduates not knowing enough; at that time so was I and that’s the thing: anybody can do it, you just need to balls to get on with it and ask for lots of help along the way.

If you’re thinking of starting your own business, I would ask if you’re prepared for what it’s going to involve; it’s not easy and you’ve got to make sure the people around you are going to support you and understand what you’re trying to do.

I don’t want to put anyone off because I think it’s fantastic. I can do what I want when I want and people come to us because we do a good job, and they say that to us too. I genuinely love what I do. But you need to have a certain amount of gritty determination and complete stubbornness. Don’t let things knock you back, and if they do, bounce straight back. David Beckham’s got golden ones; to build your own business all you need is ones of steel.

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