Partner Article

Are You Ready for the Country?

London tech businesses grab a lot of headlines but country start-ups are proving just as successful.

Given the hype surrounding London’s Tech City, you may be forgiven for thinking that the only plausible destination to start a tech business is the capital city. But you’d be wrong. There are ways of creating successful innovative digital businesses outside London and, what’s more, there are many benefits to being an out-of-towner.

In 2010, after having worked as a creative director in digital marketing agencies in London, I decided to quit the rat race, move to Cirencester and start my own business. The iPhone and the app market was picking up pace and having worked on over 200 viral games for many big brands, I saw an opportunity to use my expertise to carve out a niche in this dynamic new market.

An initial challenge that out-of-London entrepreneurs face is building a company that people will be prepared to up-sticks and move home to join. Convincing graduates and young workers to move to London is not nearly as challenging as convincing them to move to a perceivably sleepy market town such as Cirencester. Obviously, having great products – in our case successful mobile games including Flick Football, Paper Glider and Traffic Panic – is essential to persuading talented individuals that this is the right place to come to work. But there is more to it than that.

To encourage people to move to Cirencester we knew that we had to stand out from the crowd of big city mobile games developers, so we went about creating a distinctive culture and ethos that would make us a more attractive proposition to potential employees.

Prominently displayed on our website are 10 reasons to work for Neon Play which includes simple details such as a day off on your birthday, dedicated pub-time on Friday afternoons and a promise that ideas are king. No matter if you’re a senior member of staff or an office junior, if it’s a good idea, we will listen. It’s the people that make a company and showing that you intend to make employees’ working life as pleasurable as possible is extremely valuable.

Starting up in a place like Cirencester has enabled us to move into a large space called The Old Museum which is backed by The Bathurst Estate and Cirencester Park. Not only is it a beautiful part of the world in which to work but has an additional element of practicality in that the rent is much lower than would be charged for an office our size in the centre of London. As any budding entrepreneur knows, keeping costs down is imperative to the success of a start-up. Create a colourful and inviting work environment; furnish it with a dart board, a pool table and an X-Box or likewise and you’ve got yourself one very happy workforce.

Putting the small details in place; working hard at your craft and punching above your weight gives you credibility no matter where your company is based. Sure, you’ll have to commute to London every once in a while but the payoff is a sense of autonomy that will imbue your company with an idiosyncratic and pioneering spirit.

We’ve had people move to Neon Play from Liverpool, Falmouth, Greece and Hong Kong which just goes to show that, sometimes, being a big cog in a small team is far more desirable than being part of a big company’s cookie cutter production line. It is easy to see why people focus on London as the hub of tech activity but in the brave new digital world, anything is possible.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Oli Christie .