Business needs confidence, passion and resilience but cultural change is also required

Currently the independent charitable foundation’s finance director, the Irishman told the Go Business Radio Show with Hunter & Haughey that cultural change would be instrumental in instilling confidence in people who have great business ideas but often fear failure.

“It’s the same across the water in Ireland,” said Mr McGrath. “There’s an issue with getting ahead and being successful – and a fear of failure when failure is the best route to success. So, we must bring people together to help them understand the importance of connecting with others to create a culture of change where it is OK to succeed.”

Connectivity, he added, was one of the other big challenges, noting the success of the “Can Do Collective” programme that the Entrepreneurial Scotland Foundation runs with the Scottish Government. “It’s a great programme based on collective impact, methodology that came out of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology),” he explained.

“It brings the ecosystem that supports entrepreneurs together and the collaboration that comes out of it is amazing – bringing people together to collaborate on the thing they are passionate about then corralling them and pointing them in the right direction,” said Mr McGrath. “Over 80 organisations are involved, all moving in the same direction.”

Pointing out that there must be connectivity on an individual, business and government basis, he said the foundation was working every day with businesses that “really care about Scotland and Scottish society, and they care about being part of the solution, not the problem”. But he added: “We are also working with people in government who are the exactly same.”

Asked by Donald Martin, editor of The Herald and The Herald on Sunday and host of the Go Radio Business Show with Hunter & Haughey about his passion for leadership development, Mr McGrath said: “An organisation is only as good as its people and you need to invest in yourself.

“It is about bringing people together and learning from others in the same situation,” he said, pointing to what the Entrepreneurial Scotland Foundation calls “entrepreneurial CPR” – confidence, passion and resilience. “They are the most important skills we can impart on people – to protect their passion for their business. Without that they can’t succeed.”

The foundation’s mission, he noted, is to “make Scotland the most entrepreneurial society in the world”. “It exists to promote the power of entrepreneurship – not just the traditional concept of an entrepreneur who sets up and runs a business but people who think in an entrepreneurial way,” he said.

“We try to work with people who have the potential to be entrepreneurial and young people who have the potential to go on to be the next generation of leaders that Scotland needs.”

Asked why he chose to become an accountant, Mr McGrath said that when he visited business owners and people who ran companies in his sales role “he always had an ambition to be sitting in that chair”, stating: “I knew I wanted to lead and influence growth of an organisation and I found out that a lot of decisions in business were made by the finance director or the managing director who was previously the FD.”

He admitted: “The skills and attributes that have helped me get to this position are not the ones I learned as an accountant, but the ones I learned in sales at the coal face – but it was the credibility I got as an accountant that helped me to progress and push on.”

Lord Willie Haughey, the Labour peer and owner of City Facilities Management Holdings, later revealed that Mr McGrath, who in 2011 left a successful career in sales with brands such as Red Bull to train as an accountant, had played a part in bringing the Go Business Radio Show with Hunter & Haughey to fruition having participated in a similar show in Ireland.