Manchester is undoubtedly a football city – and now its entrepreneurs can get support to become ‘match fit’ as they grow their businesses.
End Game is the brainchild of five respected ecosystem figures based in Campfield in the city centre. It is described as a new kind of venture company to help founders scale and ultimately exit their business on the best terms possible.
Nick Richardson founded and scaled The Insights Family, which provides data to brands around how kids, young people and their parents feel. Speaking to BusinessCloud about End Game, he said: “We work alongside founders at either the start or towards the end of their founder journey.
“Ultimately our goal is to help them maximise their exit strategy – by getting them match fit, and professionalising them and their business.
“We go far beyond a typical non-executive offering, due to our collective and broad experience in innovation, growth, fundraising and governance capabilities.”
Joining him are Naomi Timperley, a growth and innovation consultant, community builder and board adviser who co-founded Tech North Advocates; Vikas Shah MBE, who exited Swiscot Group last year and is a noted investor and philanthropist; James Akrigg, founder and CTO of Cloudy Software, who spent 18 years in senior technology roles at Microsoft; and Giles Harridge, exited founder of GettingPersonal.co.uk.
The quintet have all “been there”, in their words. The aim is to help founders navigate their own highs and lows, as well as to help them to make optimal decisions at critical points of their company lifecycle.
“In the last few months, we have combined our formidable ecosystem of companies and contacts to build a multi-faceted, multi-skilled network. We will be creating partnerships that accelerate opportunities for businesses not only in the Greater Manchester area but across the wider Northern Powerhouse,” said Timperley.
Shah added: “The feedback from founders, investors and other key stakeholders is incredible. As a result of that we are also looking at how we may further involve our End Game offering to provide other solutions for our clients and the Greater Manchester business community as a whole.”
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There are four types of founders that they will typically work with. High-potential early-stage startups, which they will help to unlock traction, funding and clarity; scale-ups, providing guidance and firepower to ambitious teams; ‘stalling founders’, unblocking challenges and burnout that stall growth and ambition; and ‘lost founders’, supporting experienced entrepreneurs ready for reinvention.
“We all know how hard it is for founders, to not only get going, but to also navigate the challenges of scale and the often-incompatible objectives of stakeholders,” said Richardson. “Our model is to fully align with their objectives and to guide them with our operational and governance experience, inspire them with our innovation and commercialisation experience and to ultimately accelerate them on their journey.”
The company is in advanced discussions with several clients to be part of their first cohort, as well as finalising a number of new initiatives which it will be launching.
“We have wanted to do things correctly, so we have spent time working together to build the processes in place and look at the criteria for our ‘venture decisions’.
“And like true entrepreneurs, we have even scoped a few solutions which we may even bring to market ourselves. We plan to announce our first cohort of clients before Christmas, once we have completed final diligence and legals.”
Whilst the company is not limiting itself to digital based businesses, Akrigg says the team’s “digital transformation experience is significant… our ability to support businesses with prototyping and digital transformation is a key part of our proposition”.
Harridge added: “We’ve built and exited businesses, transformed teams, delivered digital innovation, and coached hundreds of people to become extraordinary.
“Often founders don’t achieve the outcome they hoped for. Every deal is different, and our mission is to close the expectations and quality gap between founders and investors, to get founders match fit for when they engage to seek investment or exit.”
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