En Entrepreneur
one
minute entrepreneur Paul Aitken, the business mastermind behind award winning alternative lender borro, talks boyhood football fantasies, business realities, and why taking action is the key for any start-up.
What was your career dream as a boy? To be centre forward for Liverpool Football Club. The reality is that I did not have any idea of what I wanted to do until I was one year into my first job after University. Where did the entrepreneur in you come from? Is it a family trait? Yes most definitely. My father invented a synthesized guitar in the late 1970’s called SynthAxe which a number of famous musicians used. The business was financed by Richard Branson, and as a kid I used to go to him and play snooker while my Dad had monthly update meetings. To this day he is still creating new ideas for products, and was involved in the early stages of borro. borro was not your first start-up; you also successfully created and sold a mobile phone interactive company. How did that experience help the borro business? It taught me that if you have a good idea, you are far better off just doing it rather than over analysing it. You can plan all you like, but the reality is that every plan is wrong one way or the other. Within two weeks of starting borro we issued our first loan, and the learning began. You’re on record as saying you wished that you’d started your first business earlier. Was it lack of confidence, strategy or cash?
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Definitely not strategy. But at times a mixture between cash and confidence. While at University, a friend and I created a party ‘board’ game called ‘Around the World in 80 pints’- we did lots of market testing and it is fair to say that everyone who played it believes it to be the best game of its type. We paid for a prototype but did not launch it due to cash constraints. In 1999 I came up with an idea for an online platform that enabled students to manage social and sporting events. I tried to do a deal with the National Union of Students to secure distribution, but when that failed did not have the confidence to go for it direct to consumer - a typically British problem. Many entrepreneurs we talk to have a mentor and see them as a key part of their business - the objective voice. Do you subscribe to this approach? I think it is important to have a broad network of people whose opinion you trust on a variety of different matters. These people evolve over time. Over the years I have talked regularly to my first boss, Rob Sirs the Group MD of RM plc., a great friend of mine and senior partner at Graphite Capital, Mike Tilbury, Yoav Leitersdorf- my co-founder at Movotaand my father. With borro I see the nonExecutive board members as also fulfilling the mentor role. What qualities do you look for in potential employees? I spend a lot of time gauging how people will fit into our business. Everyone at borro is ambitious, driven, works well in the team, is fun, and really wants borro to make a difference to their career trajectory. I still meet with every single person we bring into the business in the