Yesterday Learning Pool hosted a visit from Northern Ireland Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Investment, Arlene Foster.  In case you missed it, at the end of 2011, Learning Pool was announced by Deloitte as the fastest growing technology company in Northern Ireland (as well as 6^th in Ireland, 26^th in the UK & 139^th in EMEA) based on revenue growth over the past 5 years.  They confirmed our growth to be a whopping 1,100% (gasp!).  The Minister expressed an interest in finding out more about the company so we invited her to call in.

We were a little apprehensive about her visit I guess.  As entrepreneurs we don’t have an awful lot to do with politicians (although maybe that needs fixing).  We didn’t really know what to expect from our allotted hour.

We needn’t have worried.  The Minister was friendly, personable, engaged & knowledgeable.  She spent the first half hour circulating around “Pool Heights” (our Derry HQ), chatting to our team and asking plenty of questions, her PA at her elbow jotting down a few notes.  The Learning Pool team are always keen to perform in front of an audience so they were in their element and there was a good bit of laughing and joking going on – especially when the Minister realised that we have two Americans on board (she asked them how come they live in the North West – you can guess the answer yourselves).  As we climbed through the floors of our building we watched members of the team showcase our new online finance training for government, demo some bespoke content and show the Minister a new set of graphics that are still work in progress.

Paul & I spent the last half hour in private conversation with the Minister while we all had a nice cup of tea (see photo).  Some of what we discussed was – the issues SMEs like us have in winning work with government, how we think procurement processes could be improved, some of the work we both do with Young Enterprise and our various digital interests (Paul with Digital Derry, me with Digital Circle), the role start ups play in creating a vibrant Northern Ireland economy and the work we both do with micro businesses, ideas around addressing the skills shortages we as a region are facing (we were glad the Minister brought that up and was well informed about the situation).

Thanks for coming by Minister, your new friends at Learning Pool are all fans!

I’m getting ready to move to London in the New Year.  There, I’ve said it.  Learning Pool started life in London in a rented loft in Crawford’s Passage in Farringdon before shifting our HQ back to Derry.  We used to call our London base Crawford’s Pass amongst ourselves because it made it sound more Irish.  In our early days we were paranoid about customers knowing we were a Northern Ireland company in case it was a barrier to us doing business.  As the last 5 years have progressed, we became less coy about our origins as we cemented our customer relationships although we hung onto our London phone number.  These days, our customers love the fact that we’re an Irish company and some of them have even been to visit us at our office in Derry.  Others have even been brave enough to join our team.

Our fabulous Head of Content, Deborah Limb, joined us from another more famous e-learning company.  Deborah had never been to Northern Ireland before her first day at Learning Pool.  She arrived at our office on a cold, wet, Monday morning in November 2007, clutching the remnants of a sopping wet map in her hand.  She still claims she never saw daylight during that first winter.

Now it’s my turn to go back the other way and it’s a bittersweet feeling that I have.  I lived in London for 17 years before moving home to County Tyrone at the start of the new millennium.  I left the pushiness of the city behind & moved right into the middle of rural Ulster.  I’ll never forget waking up that first morning & hearing no sounds.  Nothing at all.  I remember the relief I felt & ever since that day, I’ve half felt as though I’m on holiday – a sort of working holiday where you work harder than you’ve ever worked before but your colleagues & neighbours are so friendly that it somehow compensates you.

I quickly learned to be less brusque & more chatty in my interactions.  More talk about the weather & people you know & less focus on the agenda is the Northern Irish way.  Gradually the sharp edges from all those years spent living in the city were worn down a little.  Of course I’ve been back in London pretty much every week since 2000 – sometimes twice a week – but always as a visitor, staying in a hotel room, running for a plane home as soon as the meetings are finished.  I’m wondering how I’ll slot back into the hurly-burly of London life after the deep, deep peace of country living (quoted with a nod to Mrs Patrick Campbell).

So why am I as a person and why are we as a business doing this?  I guess we’re fed up with fighting for what’s right (that it should be just as easy to do business from Northern Ireland as it is from any part of the UK or indeed Europe) & accepting what’s reality.  Like it or not, London is indeed where UK government’s beating heart lies.  It’s also where a large number of our customers, a huge number of potential customers and some of the people we’d like to work more closely with are based.  On top of that, our Northern Ireland location is stifling Learning Pool’s growth as there just aren’t the skills here that we need to recruit in to grow our business.  We’ve raised this point many times with Invest Northern Ireland.  We’re further hampered by having an ornament of an airport 5 miles from us in Derry that we never use as the flight times aren’t conducive to being anywhere on time to do business – and the government agencies and politicians seem more interested in in-fighting & scoring points off each other than looking outwards & making Northern Ireland an easier place from which to operate internationally.  In summary, we’ve concluded we’re missing out on opportunities and holding ourselves back by not having a London presence.  And I think that’s a very sad state of affairs.  Learning Pool was recently confirmed by Deloitte to be Northern Ireland’s fastest growing tech company & the 6^th fastest growing on the island of Ireland, but we have to look to London in order to continue our expansion.

Of course there’s plenty of upside.  I’m looking forward to being back in the heart of the capital for a six month period and I’m intending throwing myself into the whole London work/social scene and spending plenty of time with friends & colleagues, old & new.  I’m looking for somewhere to base Learning Pool London right now so watch this space & all will be revealed.

I know this is an emotive topic, especially for other Northern Ireland businesses – so I’m looking forward to your views & a lively discussion in the comments below.  Keep ‘em coming!

A few of my contemporaries were surprised to hear that I was at the CBI Conference this past week and given the demographic amongst the conference attendees I’m honestly not surprised.  We had a laugh on Twitter about how only 5 of 1,000 or so delegates were tweeting – but that’s a subject for another blog.  From my perspective, it was worth the time & effort just to hear Fiat & Chrysler Group CEO, Sergio Marchionne, speak about how he’s wrestled Fiat back from the brink of oblivion, kicking & screaming – again a subject for another blog.

My real interest was in hearing what the CBI, the Prime Minister & the Foreign Secretary had to say about helping SMEs with potential high value overseas opportunities get started with and be more successful at export.  Just to give you some background, we at Learning Pool have had what could be described as quite a frustrating experience of export as a UK based SME.  Our online learning content has been created exclusively for the UK public sector, and as such is of value & immediate interest to any of the former British colonies, especially those that have adopted the UK local government model.  Here in the UK, we have 500,000 public sector employees & stakeholders (primarily school governors, elected members and government “partners” such as community & voluntary sector groups & charities) making use of our learning environments & sharing great content.  However, despite displays of strong interest from overseas governments in our products, we have spectacularly failed to convert any of that interest to tangible sales – and I promise you we’ve tried really hard.

Learning Pool completely gets that the economic future of some UK based SMEs will be dependent on their ability to sell to the emergent BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) who together are forecast to import goods & services valued at $4 trillion over the next 10 years (source, Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, CBI conference 21 Nov 2011 – he also coined the BRIC acronym a decade ago).  Our issue has been that it is incredibly difficult for overseas governments to buy from a “foreign” SME – no matter how fabulous & suitable their product is.  Our experience of this is that the type of export assistance our own regional development agency here in Northern Ireland, Invest Northern Ireland, has been able to give us (up to 40% financial assistance for trade missions overseas, paid after you’ve spent the money) is not what we need.  We’ve repeatedly explained to our contacts at Invest NI that what we actually need is some assistance from their people based overseas – but unfortunately those people are tasked with bringing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Northern Ireland & are therefore unable to help us.

I was therefore very heartened to hear from first the Prime Minister, then the Minister of State for Trade & Investment Stephen Green, then from William Hague that the current government has helping UK SMEs export firmly in its sights.  They each described how training of UKTI employees is taking place to make that team more commercial (I was a bit dismayed when someone said this consisted of forcing their people to read the FT every day – but hopefully that’s just a start!), how 30 and 50 new business-focused employees have been brought into the UKTI offices in India & China respectively, and how the new UKTI Chief Exec Nick Baird (appointed September this year) has a remit to encourage more UK SMEs to move into the international domain.  William Hague specifically described how the role of the Foreign Office has been reshaped to place more emphasis on commercial diplomacy and David Cameron reminded us that our overseas embassies are there to help UK businesses host launches and win orders.

I am pleased to have seen David Cameron lead trade missions to India, China & Turkey since he became Prime Minister and as a co-owner of a small SME fail to understand why he has been so publicly criticised for this.  Governments of the BRIC nations understand how important it is to build relationships with other countries and take a long term view of commerce.  The UK has been swamped with visits from teams from the emergent nations and the lack of reciprocal behaviour is leaving the UK behind the curve.  At the moment, the value of UK exports to the Republic of Ireland is greater than total export value from the UK to the BRIC nations...surely everyone can see how that path isn’t sustainable?

We are serious about growing Learning Pool and seizing our opportunities so what does that look like for us?  We’ve accepted that it’s nigh on impossible to achieve from a Northern Ireland backwater so we’re grasping the nettle and opening a London office in January that I’m going to be heading up.  We’ve also asked our contacts at the Cabinet Office, on the back of Learning Pool’s success in the Innovation Launchpad competition this summer, to request a meeting for us with Nick Baird so as we can talk directly to him about how UKTI can help Learning Pool get started in India, selling to their local and central government.  I’ll keep you posted on how we get on.  Interested in your comments or advice as always.