When does a startup become a scaleup?
The definitions vary: according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for example, a scaleup grows above 20% in turnover or workforce over a three-year period.
However many companies with a steeper growth rate – and those gaining a solid reputation in the worlds of business and technology – continue to refer to themselves as startups.
Manchester-based Orka is a tech platform connecting temporary shift workers with large organisations. It has raised almost £40 million of funding to date: a mixture of debt financing and equity funding from the likes of Praetura Ventures, the British Business Bank Future Fund and former UK CEO of Adecco Peter Searle.
Now employing 50 staff and ramping up its technology stack – Orka Pay allows workers to withdraw up to 50% of their pay as soon as they’ve worked a shift, while the upcoming Orka Check is a passport system that will eliminate the need for background verification assessments – co-founder and CEO Tom Pickersgill is maintaining an early-stage mindset.
“Describing yourself as a startup is a mentality,” he tells TechBlast. “It’s a good thing: it determines how you approach problems and build-outs.”
Leadership team
However, given that time is the enemy of every startup founder, Pickersgill says building a leadership team which enables him to delegate tasks with confidence is key to the scaling journey.
That team includes CCO and co-founder Nick Groves; people & culture manager Sophie Kinloch; CTO Andrew Tutt, who joined this summer; and finance chief Karan Vij.
“It’s enabled me to delegate all those different tasks and areas of growing a fast-paced business, such as hiring and onboarding people,” Pickersgill explains. “My job is to make sure we’re all aligned as a leadership team, saying: this is our mission. This is what’s true to us. Are we all bought in?
“We can then share that with the teams and make sure we go after it in a concurrent fashion. That is a really big part of that first step as a scaling company – getting the leadership structure right.”
Prateura partner
Earlier this year a key member of the team arrived in the form of advisor Mark Slade, vice chairman and co-founder of global derivatives trading and education company OSTC. Slade, an operational partner at Praetura, joined Orka’s board as part of its £3m investment.
“Mark has come in and transitioned the board into ‘we’re looking to be a really big company – this is what we’ve got to point towards. This is our framework’,” says Pickersgill.
Praetura marketing director Ben Davies adds: “Mark Slade has done everything from pies in stadiums to trading derivatives – a proper no-messing-around kind of guy who can turn his hand to anything.
“As with all our operational partners, they get involved because they genuinely enjoy working with our startup companies.”
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Peak performance
Pickersgill was speaking at a ‘Scaling up Manchester’s tech ecosystem’ event held by Enterprise City and Tech Nation, where he featured on a panel alongside fellow entrepreneurs based in the North West city.
On Manchester VC Praetura’s impact across the North West, Pickersgill adds: “What Praetura has achieved with the likes of Peak, they want to do with all the businesses they’re backing now. They’re not going to manage your quarter-to-quarter sales, but they want to 10x your business.
“If you can 10x or more that business, you can then bring more investors into the journey at a later stage, which takes the pressure off while they continue to invest and grow that company into a global business. There are some great horses in the [Praetura] stables.
“Hopefully, there’s going to be some big, big companies in Manchester, and hopefully that ecosystem gets stronger.”
Davies says Praetura wants to “fix” aspects of the Northern tech ecosystem, despite it looking more positive. “72% of founders in the North can’t name more than three VCs here. If that’s the case, how can we not expect to lose them to London?”
Embrace the journey
Former Morecambe Town footballer Pickersgill is enjoying the journey with Orka, a company he founded back in 2016 under its former name Broadstone Engage.
“As a startup founder, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes; but you shouldn’t regret them,” he advises.
“Keep persevering and pushing. Keep having conversations. I think it’s all part of the journey – you’re gonna have some holy s*** moments! Embrace them – it’s meant to be hard, this journey. You’ll figure it out.
“Everyone perceives founding teams as having unique insight and huge levels of IQ, but realistically it’s about understanding the journey, picking up little optics – ‘which bit should we go after next?’ – and challenging what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”