If anyone is going to escape the recession intact, it will be the woman who set up Lastminute.com.
Martha Lane Fox has a knack of getting out of scrapes in one piece, although a car accident in 2004 put her in hospital for a year and she still walks with a stick. Despite the downturn, she’s feeling “realistically optimistic” about her current karaoke venture, Lucky Voice.
Few internet entrepreneurs have become household names and even fewer have moved on from where they made their fortunes to such an array of other projects. Like her co-founder Brent Hoberman, Lane Fox was a poster child for the dot-com era. Lastminute.com floated at the height of the bubble and could’ve been one of its most
high-profile casualties, yet survived.
Lane Fox is now a non-executive director at Marks & Spencer, runs Lucky Voice, and has founded Antigone, a trust that provides grants to healthcare, education and criminal justice projects.
So where does her motivation come from? Typical of many entrepreneurs, she feels it’s innate.“I think it comes down to your personality,” she says. “I can’t imagine anything worse than giving up. My energy comes from people around me, doing things, creating a business and working with various charities through my foundation. These are the things that make me feel better.”
Curve ball
Lane Fox will need all the energy she can muster in the coming months. Like many entrepreneurs, she is focusing on growing her business in the face of a failing economy. Lucky Voice will be opening a new venue in Brighton this year, adding to its Soho, Islington, Cardiff and Manchester sites. But she says the impact of the recession is being felt, most notably through her staff. Their increasingly delicate morale has been affected by fear and concern about their futures since the news of bank bail-outs hit the headlines.
Initially, she says, her team probably thought she was a bit mad when she forecasted the global financial crisis, but when they started seeing her predictions reflected in the newspapers, they began worrying for their own livelihoods.
“They were instantly asking: ‘What should we do? How is it going to affect us?’ I just keep saying: ‘You’ve still got your jobs, you’ve still got your homes. In fact, your food and fuel has got a bit cheaper.’ It’s about trying to keep that balance between realism and confidence,” says Lane Fox.
It seems even healthy businesses are coping with insecure employees worried by the negative media coverage and the continually updated job-loss body count. Despite the fact that many people in the UK have not, and will not, be badly affected by the recession, most claim to be feeling the pinch and are changing their behaviour as a result. It is a trend that concerns Lane Fox.
“The curve ball, and the difference perhaps between this recession and others, is the media,” she says. “I am not blaming the media, but it does set a different tone, because everywhere you turn you’ve got internet news sites, digital radio channels and masses of TV channels. So even if you aren’t feeling any adverse effects yourself, you might think you should be. If you are overloaded with information, you start to change your behaviour.”
Silver lining
The headlines may be getting to her, too. Although she describes herself as an extremely optimistic person, even she is concerned about what 2009 will hold. And yet she still thinks there are opportunities for clever businesspeople.
“If you think about the number of companies who are going to lay off staff and how that has an impact on the wider economy, all the house repossessions there might be and all the repercussions up the chain, it’s not going to be a good year. But realistic optimism is the only way.”
But what is there to be realistically optimistic about? While it’s easy to dwell on negative growth, it’s perhaps more constructive to consider that money is still out there, more people are employed than out of work, and ultimately the need for goods and services remains. Lane Fox can see that people have been spooked, but urges entrepreneurs not to recoil completely.
“People have to look at their own business and ask: ‘What does this mean for me?’” she says. “There are still opportunities. People still need to live and are still going to go out. They will continue to buy food and new clothes. Whatever your industry or your sector, you’ve just got to work even harder to ensure customers get great value out of what you have as a business.”