“There’s nothing particularly special about me,” claims Rob Wood, ignoring the fact that the Newcastle born-and-raised businessman is a highly successful entrepreneur with an £84m deal to his name.
The 59 year-old was born on the city’s Stanhope Street, just a stone’s throw away from St James’ Park to a coal miner dad and betting shop clerk mother. He took his wife back to visit the council terraced house - now demolished - and jokes that he was stopped by the police who thought his new car looked out of place.
Having grown up without much money, it was the unlikely event of joining a squash club that introduced him to businesspeople and what they did. “All of a sudden there were people wearing suits in this completely different world that I didn’t know about,” he says.
His school performance was, by his own admission, unremarkable, but a stint in retail led him to become the Ƶ’s top-performing shoe salesman for Topshop. Later he followed a friend into pharmaceutical sales. The job further developed his natural talent for selling - and he went on to cultivate a well paid, senior career in the industry, eventually running a major division for AstraZeneca. But the self effacing, mild mannered Geordie recognised an itch that needed to be scratched - an ambition to be his own man and start a business.
“I got to the stage when I was about 41 when I didn’t want the second half of my working life to be the same as the first - working for big corporate organisations. I’d always had a craving to do something on my own. So, I gave myself a year, while I was still at AstraZeneca, to think of an idea that might work. I came up with something new but it was a bit of a risk because maybe it had been tried and failed or maybe it was just a silly idea. But it struck a nerve.”
Mr Wood quit corporate life to act on his idea. After a “wobbly” first six months, it took off and went global with nearly every pharmaceutical company becoming a client. He spent most of the time outside of the Ƶ, particularly in Asia, before successfully selling the business nine years later in that multimillion-pound deal.
Since then, he has built a global investment portfolio, one in which he’s very much hands on as a consultant and mentor to technology companies. It has seen him rub shoulders with a multitude of entrepreneurs and get a keen sense of what drives them. Now, he wants to “plant the seed” in a broader spectrum of people.
“I wanted to leave a legacy and after I sold my company I gave a lot of thought to what I could do and I came up with this idea. I thought: 'What am I good at?' I’m good at selling, entrepreneurship, setting up a business and helping lots of other people with their businesses. So I realised that’s where I could help, and give back something.”
Mr Wood has given £1.25m of his own money to fund the Rob Wood Enterprising Futures Academy at his MBA alma mater, Newcastle University. The project will target about 129,000 younger people from the age of 14, every year - opening minds to the possibility of entrepreneurship. The academy is not snooty about the ultimate ambitions of those students: owning a small floristry shop is equally as valid as pursuing a go-getting international business career, Mr Wood says in a promotional video.
And not all will go on to even start their own business. But that’s OK, as the entrepreneurial skills they will pick up and nurture are in demand by employers everywhere, says Mr Wood.
“I think you can measure business success in a lot of ways, but probably the most valid is: How do you feel? How do you feel in yourself? It can be stressful when you set your own business up, but it can be massively rewarding,” he says.
“There might be people who think that’s not for them, because they might think 'I’m never going to be a business person, I’m never going to be an entrepreneur'. They may be right, or they may be wrong. But what I’d say is, it’s OK to make mistakes, it’s OK to fail. If you think you’ve got something inside you that will make you feel much more self fulfilled and give you that independence, then why not give it a go?”
The Academy will offer a mix of online and face-to-face programmes that aim to give practical insights and inspiration to would-be founders - showing them examples and putting them in front of mentors who’ve walked the walk. At its core is a “give it a go” attitude which is refreshingly different to the sometimes intimidating, uber-confident entrepreneurship evangelists of places like LinkedIn.
“One of the principles we need to get across to young people - well, people of any age really - is that it’s OK to do it scared,” says Mr Wood. “When you set your own business up, it’s quite a daunting thing. But that’s Ok. I also want to get across that it’s Ok to fail. Even with a successful business, you’re going to have some failures and you’ll learn from them and get better. But, even if the business ends up failing, at least they’ve had a go.
“I would have thought that any mega successful person in the world now - the household names of worldwide business leaders - I bet they were a little bit scared when they first did it. Otherwise they’d be a bit of a lunatic.”
For Mr Wood the aim of the Academy is typically modest, but no less worthy. He says: "If in five or 10 years time, even if one person has set their own business up, then that's good. But I'd have hoped that a few people have taken the plunge and set their own business up. But also, just planting the seed in people's minds that at some point in the future, maybe it's the thing they should do."
