One year on: a celebration
It's been a hard, hard year for so many people – us included. But here's why we're glad we started a business at the start of a pandemic
A high-level Forthwrite board meeting, laughing in the face of adversity
No small business start up ever got successful by reading the economic forecast in The Financial Times and saying, ‘Oh, well, there's a recession. Let’s go back to bed’.
However, a call – this time last year – from my former colleague, Mark Jones asking if I might be interested in setting up a new business did baffle me. There was a global pandemic, the country was in lockdown, a national toilet roll shortage threatened our civility, my children were expecting to be home-schooled – and we were facing the worst recession for 300 years. That’s since Queen Ann was on the throne. The world was going to hell, and probably didn’t need another small business to stick in the handcart.
While I muttered a non-committal ‘er’, Mark continued. The idea was that Mark and a bloke called David, whom I’d never met but was a hugely successful advertising executive, were going to set up a writing school. The difference was that they wanted to teach people in business how to write better. If you have ever sat through a woolly Powerpoint presentation for hours, you will know where they were coming from.
I listened some more. If I joined, the three of us – the adman, the writer and the editor – would give our clients the benefit of experience from our different disciplines. It did sound interesting. All through my career as an editor, the best part of the job was always mentoring: helping rookie reporters to write better features, get better jobs and earn more money.
But still, there was COVID. Mark reassured me: ‘David has a tradition of starting businesses on the eve of massive economic downturns. His last company Caffeine was created in 2007. One year later we had the crash.’ I am not sure how reassured I felt.
To be honest, I think I said yes because I tend to say yes to things. Then I hung up, thinking it will probably never progress anyway and went back to home schooling.
I hadn’t counted on David, though. He turned out to be a force of nature in terms of making us get things done. We had thrice-weekly brainstorms, worked on a business plan, our USP, discussed plans to launch in September and came up with a company name, Forthwrite. And all the time, the headlines kept coming about economic gloom, recession, unemployment and business failures. Why would anyone actually start a business in the middle of a pandemic?
Starting a new business is fraught at the best of times: around 60 per cent of new businesses go under in the first three years. The trends weren’t moving in our direction either: we wanted to go into companies to teach better business writing, just as COVID-19 emptied out offices. And would companies invest in training the benefits of clear, concise and persuasive writing when the economic forecast was so bad?
But we were undeterred, and far from the only ones: even now, the number of companies in the UK is growing fast. At the end of September 2020, there were 4.63m companies on the Companies House register. While that includes almost 396,000 being dissolved or liquidated, it is still 120,257 more registered companies than at the end of June.
Launching during COVID did make us compromise. The delays were the hardest challenges. September came and went: it just felt like the wrong time to launch. So we did a bit of test marketing on our friends and made some adjustments to the courses. Sometimes being patient pays dividends – our friends made the courses immeasurably better.
Our first Forthwrite coaching session was held over Zoom, something none of us had been keen to do. But despite our reservations, the three of us enjoyed it. We learnt from each other and our ‘guinea pigs’ seemed to enjoy it too. One attendee wrote, ‘This is an investment that pays dividends’. We couldn’t have been more delighted.
As we discovered, it was no bad thing to launch during a pandemic. It tested our mettle and made us think harder. Building Forthwrite taught us to be centred and optimistic (most of the time). And it fulfilled a long-held ambition for each of us: to spread the word – the well-written word.
During the past year, we all have had to adapt to rapidly changing trends. But a crisis also creates entrepreneurial opportunities — especially when, like this one, it coincides with technological revolution. It is not just the likes of Amazon, Ocado and Matt Hancock’s mates that can profit from disruption. Start-ups and small companies have a chance too. Today, our company, Forthwrite is probably more nimble and agile than it would have been without the pandemic.
The three of us always said that our company would be real when we had a website (Forthwrite.co.uk), a cadre of followers and, most significantly, our first paying client. And, on this poignant anniversary of the first lockdown, we’ve done it. Proving if you have a good idea, fit for the times, it might just fly. Pandemic or not.
Other hero pandemic start-ups we love…
Noon.org.uk
When Eleanor Mills lost her job, she panicked, floundered, then had an idea to get midlifers like herself back on the horse. Now, her new platform www.noon.org.uk exists to help others in free-fall reboot. Eleanor has written a hugely heartfelt feature about the whole process in The Telegraph, which is well worth a read: https://bit.ly/3cinCfA
Pepper & Seed
While at Belmond, Brand Communications Director Samantha Strawford was pivotal in the dramatic rise in global brand awareness, culminating in its acquisition by LVMH. Accolades rightly followed for Sam, including a place on The Walpole Power List 2020. And then? She gave it all up and started her own consultancy. One to watch.
Winning business in the worst downturn in history. The writing school of hard knocks.
We are now focusing on bid (RFI) and proposal (RFP) writing and pitch presentations because we feel the economy is picking up and everyone needs to win the business that’s out there. So if you want to maximise your chances of winning new business in the next few months, email hello@forthwrite.co.uk to sign up for the next course.
Fungible times on Twitter
Beeple’s Everydays: There’s a word for it
Mark Jones writes: It’s always an exciting moment when a piece of highly-technical jargon crosses into mainstream English.
So it’s been this week with Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs.
If something is fungible, it can be exchanged for an identical item of the same value. The classic example of fungibility is cash. You lend me £10. Two weeks later, I pay you back. The note I gave you isn’t the same as the one you gave me: but that doesn’t matter. We both agree that our different £10 notes are worth, well, £10.
But what if I own a £10 note with the Queen’s head facing the wrong way? Perhaps this was a one-off mistake at the printer. But that means I now own something unique in the world. There will never be another note like it. It’s thus not only a non-fungible token, it’s also extremely valuable.
This week, the founder of Twitter, Ray Dorsey, sold the first ever Tweet to a Malaysia-based blockchain company for $2.9 million. It was marketed as an NFT: those particular data entered at that precise moment can’t be replicated – but the code can be protected.
NFTs are already getting big in the digital art space. A digital collage called Everydays – The First 5,000 Days by an artist called Beeple was sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s on March 11. The work is an NFT and was paid for, of course, in cryptocurrency.
It’d be a shame if NFT becomes the common term and people forget what the F stands for, however. Fungible is such a great word. And you wonder how you might extend the usage. ‘Please accept these roses as a non-fungible token of my affection’.
I scuttled to my old complete Oxford English dictionary, the one you need a magnifying glass to read, hoping to find that ‘fung’ or ‘funge’ is also a verb. It isn’t, sad to say. All the other words with a ‘fung-’ prefix are to do with mushrooms.
Let’s end with a note from Douglas Adams
Many writers struggle with writing. But few had a more difficult relationship with the act of writing books that Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels.
Adams suffered from something worse that writer’s block: it was more like a physical aversion at times. No wonder he had difficulty with deadlines, although he claimed to love ‘the wooshing noise they make as they go by’.
His notebooks, just published, reveal an interesting motivational trick he played on himself in the shape of a ‘General Note to Myself’. Here it is:
Writing isn’t so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don’t be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don’t strain at them. Writing can be good. You attack it, don’t let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it!