Spotlight on Richard Osborne

Richard Osborne is the founder of Business Data Group and UK Business Forums. Business Data Group is a platform that provides reports and analysis into what's going on in the economy for small business. And UK Business Forums is an online support community for small business owners that's been going for 20 years.

How did you get to where you are today?

My business journey started in 1999. Probably not the most orthodox way of getting into a business, but I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown and in a depression, and things were collapsing around me really due to issues I’d had growing up. I was in a situation where the job I had at the time, things were falling apart with me, I couldn’t keep on top of the projects I was running. Things that happen when you have a breakdown, I couldn’t face getting a job. I didn’t even know how to get a job. I knew I had to get a job, but I couldn’t face applying for and doing it. So, I left my job I had and started doing website design at home, that literally was my first step into running my own business. Within a couple of months, I also got married as well, because starting a business isn’t stressful enough!

The web design company, I say sold, was actually lost to somebody in a dodgy business deal that didn't really go to plan. A couple of years later after I’d spent a year working for this other company, I started another business, which I ended up selling and then another business I end up selling. Then Business Data Group started life as a company called E-filing in 2007, funded out of the money that I'd made from originally selling UK Business Forums. And it has grown and evolved from there.

What had you decide to buy back UK Business Forums?

I’ll cover what UKBF stands for, because that gives some idea as to part of the reason why I sold it. In 2003, I was in a situation where I was trying to build up a business, but I was on my own. I was married and had a young daughter at the time. But what I found to be the case with so many people when you run your own business and you are on your own, you don’t have a board of directors or co-founders or other people to bounce ideas around. Not even a management team around you. You literally are on your own. You have nobody to speak to really, you have nobody to sound out or nobody who appears to be going through what you’re going through who understands the worries you’re having. In that situation, back in those days when social media didn’t exist as it does today, putting up a website with a forum, as it was at the time, was the done thing. And UKBF was born. As it turned out, just by putting the word out there, spreading on a few news groups, emailing a few people, eventually what happened is it turns out there were 1000s upon 1000s of people who were all in the same boat. UKBF grew to the point where I think it was about 50,000 members, all communicating online on these forums, all supporting each other.

By the time I was approached by a media company in 2007, and sold it to them, UKBF continued to grow under that media company to a point where about 50,000 people a day were accessing the community for help and peer support from each other.

During the COVID pandemic, two things came to light. One was, like so many businesses during the pandemic, we were exposed to a vulnerability in the business - a lot of our revenue was generated from particular sources and those sources dried up. We needed to find another way of building a business case. The other aspect was the people who I sold it to had already approached me saying we want you to buy it back, because we're going down a different tangent.

Through other work that I'm involved in, through networking, my involvement with the Chamber and things that have happened over recent years, you see people still face the same challenges and same issues they do today as they were 20 years ago. There's lots of advice and support out there, but it's very scattered across many different sources. UKBF was already an established brand, a high traffic site, high membership, and hundreds of 1000s of members within. So, let's put all those free resources and information available on that platform for people, whether it's ranging from a business plan template, a cash flow forecast template, business guides, there’s a community on there, that we can just give it away to. And then from the business ourselves, Business Data Group has the technology we've built, where we can monetise that basically through advertising. It just all made sense to buy it back. And there is a sort of a sentiment there how UKBF helped me when I was in a pretty dark time trying to start on my own.

What is it you don’t like about the word “entrepreneur”?

It’s an awkward one to answer that one, because I’m going to contradict myself. The problem with the word entrepreneur and in my personal opinion, and there will be people that disagree with that, it’s become commoditised. Anybody, if they are in a leadership position for a business, in government or marketing, everybody calls everybody an entrepreneur. The problem is there are so many different definitions of it. My personal definition of it is more along the lines of somebody who overcomes adversity to create something greater than themselves, that they can pass on and bring people along with them on that journey. The reason why I contradict myself, even though I don’t like the term because it’s just overused, is I can appreciate why some people turn around and call me an entrepreneur. But it’s not my place and not my right to call myself an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is a title that somebody else will give you.

What is your “why”? What motivates you?

With anybody who runs their own business and has done for a while, I would suggest that their why or their drive changes over time as they go through different stages of their life. The reason I started my very first business was out of desperation! I felt there was no other choice not, there were no other options open to me. That was all I could do. At that point, it was just hand to mouth, day to day.

Then when my daughter, our first child was born, that why changed overnight. It was like, “holy shit, I got a life to support”. That took me back to some of the experiences I've had in my past. I've had time where I've lived in a women's hostel. Before my wife's parents took me in, before we were married, I was sleeping on some mattress on somebody's floor with my worldly possessions in a small pile next to the mattress. When you think of that and various aspects of what I experienced, I thought I don't want my children to go through that. A switch just went inside and my determination that I need to create something more than just putting food on the table. Now my daughter is 20 years old, my “whys” have evolved somewhat significantly now. I want this organisation to outlive me and to create an environment where I have members of a team here, who can take over the reins and give them a platform or something they can takeover, that's not me.

Personally, I'm looking at my own life gradually over the years to step aside, and what's more important to me is supporting other business. Where I can help others achieve what they want to achieve. The business now is a vehicle to create jobs and wealth for others.

What had you decide to become involved in charities?

So as many people will see, there are a lot of charities out there, and you can walk through the town and there are so many good causes that anybody can support. Some advice that was given to me many years ago, was pick the causes you want to stick to and stick to them, because you can’t help everybody. The two causes that I support personally, are related to young people with special needs or learning difficulties, and disengaged youth or disenfranchised youth.

The latter one is a charity that used to be called Youth at Risk (now called Grit). They haven't done anything in this region lately, so I've ended up doing some of that personally, where people have known me or approached me directly saying, “There's a young person here, would you support them or mentor coach them”. It is young people who often are identified by social services, local authority, or the schools or maybe out of school, who are at risk of exclusion, or maybe have been excluded from school and getting in with the wrong crowds.

What I hope to do whenever I'm working with young people is to inspire him. Help them to focus on a path ahead of them, that takes them down a legitimate, potentially business route. My thinking there is the people who think differently, who challenge the norm - and often these children might be considered the troublesome ones in schoolthey're the people I would argue are the entrepreneurs of tomorrow who really do shake up industries, create great businesses, by just breaking the mould around it. Quite often these young people have never had an adult that they can rely upon, never have an adult who's actually going to listen to them, let them have their voice be heard, and talk through whatever it is with them. The sort of coaching work that we do within Grit, or I do independently, is sitting down with these young people. Two ears, one mouth - listen to them. What I love about that kind of work is there's no wrong. It's just what you want, where do you want to take yourself, let's work through those different options in front of you. Just get them to think differently about their lives their future. The reality is you could speak to ten of them, and you may only break through with three or four of them, but you still keep chipping away at that. I was one of those kids. My life was turned around by a number of things. A big part was played by a small business owner who invested in me.

The other aspect, the learning difficulties and special needs - that came around because I was asked by the Local Enterprise Partnership, who were looking at piloting a project that might roll out nationally, with connecting businesses with schools. There was a special needs school that had applied. Based on my experience of working with young people, they wanted me to work with that school. I was quite unnerved by that because I had these preconceived ideas of what special needs actually meant. As it happens, jump forward a couple of years from there and my son ended up being diagnosed with dyslexia and high functioning autism. We went through a whole load of heartache there fighting for support, he ended up going to the school for a couple of years where I was volunteering as an enterprise advisor.

Now I'm actually Vice Chair of Governance at that school. I've got very involved in there. As soon as I started getting involved, I actually got to see how difficult it is for young people with learning difficulties to get into any form of meaningful work. Employment opportunities statistics are heart wrenching. This is a wrong and I just got more and more involved in it. As an individual and as a company, we support organisations like Track for support supporting autistic people into work. As an employer, I would welcome anybody with any particular learning difficulties or special needs into employing them here. My ambition is to improve the employability and career opportunities for people with learning difficulties. And the work at Northgate School, where I’m a governor, is fantastic. I've become connected with a number of schools and people within the local community who do such great work.