Patricia Keating, Tech Manchester’s Executive Director, on fear of failure, SME mentoring, and the FastForward podcast

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You can’t buy the experience of trying to build your own business. Everything is hard, every single thing is hard because you’ve never done it before and you have to learn yourself.

The latter half of her two years building the company was spent at the ESpark accelerator in Belfast where she learnt the more technical and financial imperatives of launching a startup. After discovering that they were building a lifestyle business, rather than scalable one, the company came to an end due to the lack of high-net-worth clients in Northern Ireland.

After deciding it was time to leave Northern Ireland, she had a choice to make: head to Dubai to do a similar role to the one she had been doing at Regus, or move to Manchester after being recommended to lead UKFast’s Tech Manchester project. 

Patricia came over to Manchester for an interview but initially turned down the job offer, returning to Belfast for the Christmas period. She said: “I spent some time with my mentor and he asked me to rethink my decision. I realised that I was only saying no because I was scared of failure, because I had just failed at my startup, and a number of other things in my life.

“I decided that was a terrible reason to say no, and that was a huge turning point for me. I thought I would come to Manchester to see if I could make this work, and if I couldn’t, I would go to work for Regus in Dubai. Three years later and I’m still here!”

Building Tech Manchester

Patricia was brought in as employee number one for Tech Manchester, and even though she had UKFast’s resources and funding at her disposal, it was basically all on her to make it a success.

The idea of Tech Manchester had been around since February 2016 however. Patricia added: “It was the brainchild of Sir Howard Bernstein, who, at the time, saw the inertia in the Manchester tech community. It was all a bit disjointed, and he had a desire to bridge it and bring it all together.”

She spent the first year interacting with SMEs, companies, accelerators and stakeholder organisations, understanding where gaps were and how Tech Manchester could fill them, rather than replicating similar services already run by the likes of Tech North, Manchester Digital, and The Growth Company.

“The results showed that there was a lack of available mentoring for tech businesses. So we figured that with UKFast’s portfolio of five thousand tech businesses, surely we should be able to inspire some of them to get involved.”

The inaugural initiative was the mentoring programme, with a launch event in July 2017 attended by over 120 people – half of whom went on to volunteer their time to help other companies. Following further consultation with companies, Patricia shaped the mentor programme to include a speed-dating style for matching up mentors with suitable companies, improved training of mentors, and a structured 12-month timeframe. 

Three years have passed since it launched and it’s now the largest mentoring program in the North West that has trained 190 business leaders into mentors, with no sign of growth slowing down.

The next Mentor Match Up for Tech Startups is part of Digital City Festival

Following the launch of the mentoring, she continued to dig deeper into what the ecosystem could benefit from with, and after looking at the research she’d done, she identified other key areas businesses needed help with. In January 2018, Patricia launched the Tech Class series, a number of digital workshops which were then recorded and uploaded to YouTube. 

Some of the topics that the community wanted covering, such as inclusivity, company culture, or raising your company’s profile, didn’t lend themselves to a workshop format so in October 2018, Tech Manchester launched the FastForward podcast series on AudioBoom.

Providing through podcasting

The FastForward podcast now has over 65 episodes and listeners in over 50 countries around the world. “It’s all about having your finger on the temperature of the local community and subjects that are topical,” she adds.

The whole of October’s podcasts were dedicated to mental health topics to coincide with World Mental Health Day and April’s podcasts will be focused on Angel Investment – a topic that listeners highlighted as something they wanted to understand better.

Besides providing evergreen learning resources, another benefit of the podcast, according to Patricia, is to continue to raise the profile of the North West. “Now I know that we have an audience beyond the North West, it’s an opportunity for us to actually showcase what’s great here and encourage other potential investors to consider the businesses here.”

Tech Manchester’s ambition for the coming year is to consolidate all of their resources on the website, creating a content hub that all sorts of businesses, wherever they are based, can benefit from. 

Talking about the growing community in the city, she added: “Tech groups and businesses collectively want to make Manchester better, no matter what their commercial goal is. If you’re interested in making Manchester a better place, then people are interested in working with you and are open to listening to what you have to say.”

Opportunities to sponsor and exhibit at Digital City Expo are available now. Find out more here, or contact Becky Mellor on hello@digitalcityfestival.com, or 0161 533 0681. Click here to find out more ways in which you can get involved.