Kate Craig-Wood - Memset

Fast growth is both a blessing and a curse for small companies. It is something Kate Craig-Wood has had to grapple with in the past few years. In 2008 Memset, the IT hosting company she set up with her brother Nick in 2002, was ranked 32nd on the Deloitte Fast 50 list. The prestigious ranking of the UK’s fastest growing technology firms, revealed Memset’s five-year growth rate of 823 per cent, based on the percentage revenue growth from 2003 to 2007.

As Memset grew Craig-Wood was forced to make a choice between pushing the company forward, or taking her eye off the day to day business to ensure she was complying with onerous red tape. Although Craig-Wood stresses she was lucky that Memset was able to get on top of issues such as health and safety and employment legislation, which come with size, she is aware that such burdens can cripple less fortunate companies.

“Red tape can be an issue,’ she says. “With so many small businesses you grow and don’t notice that you have suddenly hit £5,000 a month and then £10,000 a month and that there are then health and safety issues and employment legislation. We have everything sorted now, but there was a phase when we were not quite following the law because it was overtaking us.”

And she says getting the right structure in place was a bit of a headache. “I would say to companies they should tackle things early,” she says.

Craig-Wood has become something of a role model in her industry. Memset counts KFC and Hilton Hotels among its clients; it has won awards such as best Web host in the UK for three years running by PC Pro readers; and Craig-Wood has been a finalist in the Blackberry Women in Technology awards.

Such attention has provided good PR for the company and a significant morale boost for employees, but Craig-Wood has seized the opportunity to spearhead several challenges from promoting the role of women in IT to encouraging green issues to have a part in the business.

And she is also passionate about nurturing the new generation of entrepreneurial talent. “Small firms play a vital role; they are critical to the engine of growth,” she says, explaining they count for some 50 per cent of the UK’s GDP.

She believes that better signposting would help companies to understand what support the government can give. “One thing I regret is not using the best of the Government’s systems like Business Link,” she says. Instead her focus was on the networking groups such as the Institute of Directors and the Chambers of Commerce. “These are a gateway to great advice and offer a way to bounce ideas off peers – that is especially important in the current climate.”

Craig-Wood is a great believer in small companies being able to fund themselves without having to go to the Government for grants. She says: “You should have a business model that can cope without external money.” However, the current economic downturn has turned conventional business practice on its head. And Craig-Wood says that solving the lending issue is crucial to encourage small firms to grow. “A lot of business models rely on lending not because they are poor businesses but because they need that money to grow. In the current climate the government needs to carry on what it is doing in terms of getting liquidity back into the market.”

Craig-Wood spends a lot of time with groups such as the Chambers of Commerce where she gets to meet people and where she can advise entrepreneurs how to get over their hurdles.

Her work with promoting green IT is particularly inspirational. In 2006 Memset became the UK’s first Carbon Neutral ISP. Not only has it helped with winning new business, but has given Craig-Wood the opportunity to mix a personal interest in the natural world with commercial reality. Memset proved firms could be good to the planet and cost effective.

Like many entrepreneurs Craig-Wood’s approach to life is to grab every opportunity with both hands. “I have always had a work hard play hard attitude and like to squeeze every last thing out of the time I have.”

Last year she skydived from 29,350ft to land on the side of Mount Everest. It was an important milestone in the journey to highlight the gender imbalance in the IT industry where only 16 per cent of tech workers are female, falling from a high of about 21 per cent five years ago. On top of that, at 23 per cent the gender pay gap in the IT sector is much worse than the UK's 17 per cent average.

As Memset continues its upward trajectory Craig-Wood is keen to continue using her position as a prominent IT entrepreneur to encourage new business blood. However she is adamant that it takes a really special combination of qualities to be a successful entrepreneur. “It is something core in your being,” she says. “You have to be a risk taker and you have to be prepared to lose a lot and then pick up and start again.”