The Secrets of the Seven Alchemists

This book mixes the inspirational stories of seven highly successful entrepreneurs with the author's distilled wisdom on how to create a winning business model, based partly on interviews with these subjects. The entrepreneurs include Keith Able, who started selling potatoes door to door in Catford 25 years ago after failing his bar exams.

Today, his firm Abel & Cole turns over £65 million (€81.7 million) and delivers organic veg boxes to 75,000 customers. Then there's Nick Jenkins, a commodities trader who revolutionised the greeting card business with Moonpig. com, which he sold for £120 million and Rupert Lee Brown who turned a £25,000 start-up pot into an international payment platform called Caxton FX, with turnover of £600 million.

Rosling sees connections in these stories and feels he has cracked a code. His advice is not to focus exclusively on the product that is your business as this can stifle long-term success. Instead, you need to consider a complex interrelated set of characteristics that are described here as assets.

They can take the form of culture, talent, systems or unique products among others and they are the secret alchemy of your business that fuels its growth and gives it real sustainable value.

Investing in these assets and fully implementing appropriate strategies in a particular order is the secret to building a high-value business – one that delivers incremental future profits.

Rosling discusses a model called the seven layers of valuation, developed by Shirlaws, an international business consultancy, of how to systematically develop a business. This puts talent, capability and culture at the start, followed by a focus on systems and product innovation, then product extension, channel extension, brand architecture and finally scale.

Shirlaws has also developed a Stages model, based on an analysis of thousands of businesses across the world.

This is a model of business development that can determine where a business is in its lifecycle based on the feelings and energy that the leadership team articulates.

The start-up stage produces frantic excited feelings, which lead to payback euphoria. This is often followed by frustration, stress and disillusionment. The business owners then either engage in research and become reenergised or they go into decline.

Knowing where you are in your journey is not only hugely valuable in helping determine priorities and operational activities and operational efficiencies today but also is also a powerful predictive tool to help formulate strategy for the successive stages of the journey.

Two simple pieces of advice here are to ensure that you are as fully funded as possible at the start and to do your research in granular detail. As Nick Jenkins reflects, many businesses fail not because of bad ideas or bad management; they simply run out of cash. He would have done so too by year three had he not set some aside, he admits.

Similarly, a two- to five-year horizon thinking about a start-up is a common experience of the successful entrepreneurs featured in the book.

The thrust of this book is not so much about how to start a business as how to build a mature business. Highly practical, it contains a useful series of action plans at the end based on the author’s study of hundreds of successful firms.