Our nine month love affair with Mayfair came to an end last week and we skipped across London to new offices near Chancery Lane.
We had completely outgrown our shared accommodation, which had seen us expand from three to 14 people. Cramped conditions were not only a pain for us, we were also proving to be an increasing burden on the fast growth of our incubating company, Extraprise, an international e-services company.
Incubators have a mixed reputation within the industry. Some, by providing real expertise, resources and contacts have delivered considerable value to their businesses beyond that of simple investment. Others have been accused of preying on the unwary, using the promise of additional services - from office space to legal advice - as an excuse to take an unhealthily greedy share of the equity of the new business. It helps that the potential entrepreneurs most likely to be attracted to the services of an incubator also tended to be those with less business experience or commercial understanding.
Our own incubation experience was a little unusual. The founders were working for Bridgewater, a specialist growth consultancy (since taken over by extraprise). Bridgewater had an entrepreneurial outlook and the directors were interested in building additional expertise within e-commerce. They were excited enough about our idea and had sufficient confidence in the team to want to invest and to enhance the new business's chance of success by providing additional support.
Although an incubation arrangement would not suit everyone, there were a number of benefits to us. Because we knew the organisation we were under way that much more quickly. We did not waste time initially seeking seed funding, finding new offices, or setting up IT systems - it was all already in place and familiar to us.
We gained most from the advice that we were given. With retail partners, this included guidance on the most appropriate approach and also whom to contact. More generally, the fact that many of Bridgewater's senior team had been involved in growing their own business themselves from scratch meant that we had a good sounding board.
The nature of the relationship between the incubator and ourselves has inevitably changed over time. As we have grown we have become increasingly independent. The most significant change occurred when we completed our main funding round in May. We could then afford to be entirely self-sufficient. However, the vagaries of the London commercial property market meant that it took more than two months to secure and move into new premises.
We have little day-to-day contact with Extraprise now that we have moved out, though we keep up-to-date with developments in each business. Overall our incubation experience has been positive. The relationship was not always smooth - negotiations around investment and differences of opinion on when to seek further funding stick out in our memory - but it was productive. At the most basic level, it is extremely unlikely that we would be where we are now without their initial support.
Adam Hamdy and Guy Mallison are the co-founders of rools, a new service that lets teenagers buy online without a credit card
