Scots tech entrepreneur sees the light on trip to Silicon Valley

Colin Hewitt.

Age:

38.

What is your business called?

Float.

Where is it based?

CodeBase in Edinburgh. It’s a hub for tech companies and startups; the idea is we can all complement each other and spark new ideas.

What does it produce, what services does it offer?

Float is an automated cloud-based cash management and forecasting tool that helps businesses keep on top of their cash flow. Float can tell you what you have in the bank today, what you’ll have in three months’ time and six months’ time. It integrates with popular cloud accounting packages like Xero and Quickbooks.

To whom does it sell?

We’ve got over 1000 customers worldwide including many firms with five to 20 employees. These are companies that don’t yet have an in house financial controller but need to be very aware of cash flow.

What is its turnover?

Our current turnover is around £250,000 and the goal is to double that in the next 12 months, and keep doubling year on year for the next few years. One main route for growth is adapting Float to work with more accounting platforms. We’re looking at a few currently.

How many employees?

There are 10 of us in three teams: engineering, product development and marketing.

When was it formed?

We launched Float in the summer of 2011.

Why did you take the plunge?

It was a curious combination of things.

I was running a digital agency that had a team of about five people and I struggled to manage our cash flow each month. I randomly applied to go on a one-day course for entrepreneurs being held in Silicon Valley in 2010 and, surprisingly, got a place. A few months later I was sitting in Berkley listening to Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook and Jason Fried from Basecamp talking about how they set up, how they grew and the pitfalls and opportunities of being tech entrepreneurs.

I strongly felt l wanted to change from being a client service company towards being product company, so I started thinking about some of my business’s biggest problems were. Cash flow and financial reporting were top of the list.

I pitched the idea to a developer friend who became my cofounder. He did the tech and I did the product development. We were lucky as it was also a time when hosting a web server in the cloud was becoming affordable; a few years before the idea would have been prohibitively expensive.

How did you raise the startup funding?

I sold my design agency and my cofounder and I lived off that for the first year. We raised £20,000 and did some crowdfunding with our users, raising around £20-30,000.

We then did a proper funding round in September 2013, raising £110,000 and getting angel investor Rob Dobson involved as our chair. We attracted some more private equity investors and, in 2015, we won £100,000 under the government’s Scottish Edge programme, half of which is a loan.

What was your biggest break?

We travelled to Australia in 2014 to a conference run by one of the software solutions we integrate with - Xero - and we won best emerging product. That gave us international publicity. We had a real spike in sales and it put us on the most popular page on the app store, which helps.

What was your worst moment?

There are moments in startup life when the financial realities can be pretty scary. But more than that, it’s the relationships that bring the most ups and downs. Saying goodbye to some great colleagues who also became great friends is never easy. It’s always pretty gutting when paths diverge.

What do you most enjoy about running the business?

I love it when a plan comes together. It’s genuinely rewarding to meet a Float user who gets value from what we’ve built.

Also, choosing to work with really great people and the fact that we can make the business whatever we want - there’s no unnecessary bureaucracy, no politics, and a huge amount to learn just to keep up.

What are your top priorities?

Making Float compatible with all the cloud accounting software available, and making everything work even faster and better for our customers. The focus is on product development and honing our communication.

What can the Scottish Government do to help you?

We’ve had a lot of help from the government through Scottish Enterprise, the only problem is that it takes a lot of time. Business models are completely different now to what they were five to ten years ago. Finding ways to get the grants into startups’ hands, with less red tape, is something that would help the tech scene here hugely.

What was the most valuable lesson that you learned?

The most important thing you can do is become good at spotting talent, hiring the right people and knowing how to manage the process from beginning to end. It’s absolutely critical.

How do you relax?

I play a bit of golf when I can and I like listening to podcasts. I have three kids under 10 so lying down in a darkened room probably ranks pretty highly right now!