the times | Monday April 4 2022 39
Business
More companies expect international
orders to be driving future growth than
they do domestic demand, in the latest
sign of weakening business confidence
in Britain’s economy.
In a quarterly survey of more than a
thousand companies with at least
£1 million in turnover that trade over-
seas, 37 per cent named markets abroad
as sources of growth, compared with
34 per cent citing UK markets.
It is the first time since the Santander
UK trade barometer research began in
2017 that overseas markets have
trumped the domestic arena as the
main driver for company growth.
Twenty-five per cent of the compa-
nies said that they were selling more in
international markets than they had
done before Brexit on January 1, 2021,
up from 17 per cent saying the same in
the final quarter of last year. However,
20 per cent reported that exports were
still in decline after Brexit.
Rishi Sunak acknowledged that Brit-
ain’s recent poor performance in trade
Richard Tyler
Overseas growth ‘will trump UK demand’
compared with its G7 rivals “might well
be” due to Brexit. The chancellor told
Commons’ Treasury select committee
last week: “It was always inevitable, if
you change the exact nature of your
trading relationship with the EU, that
was always going to have an impact on
trade flows.”
More than a third of businesses sur-
veyed by Santander said that the Brexit
trade deal was insufficient for them to
continue trading with the European
Union and 52 per cent believed that the
Northern Ireland protocol was causing
significant difficulties.
Aspiring exporters, in particular, are
adjusting their plans, with 51 per cent
saying that they would look outside the
EU as they pursued their international
ambitions.
Expansion plans could be stymied by
a lack of skilled staff. Seventy per cent
of the companies cited recruitment and
retention as the most pressing problem
they faced, with businesses in IT, travel,
tourism and leisure particularly con-
cerned. Other challenges included
rising transport costs, cited by 58 percent, rising to 85 per cent of wholesale
and retail businesses.
One business targeting growth in
Europe is Screen With Envy, an
Aylesbury-based seller of decorative
garden and indoor screens, fences and
gates online. It was founded by Sophie
Birkert in 2017 and sales rose to £14 mil-
lion last year.
She said that sales in Europe had
been growing at a faster pace than those
in Britain and she was looking to open
a distribution centre in southern
Europe to complement one she opened
in the Netherlands towards the end of- She said that transporting
oversized packages to customers in
Europe from the UK was no longer
commercially viable because of Brexit
and pandemic-related surcharges.
“What I sell is difficult to ship. It was
either stop selling in Europe or open up
in the Netherlands,” she said.
In November one third of monthly
sales went overseas. Birkert is also plot-
ting expansion to the United States,
having secured £3.75 million in funding
from Santander for working capital.
ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMESBusiness
With Lord Sugar’s
backing I found a
new way to sell
my friends selling on commission
when I was a schoolgirl and the
consultants, whom we call
ambassadors, selling on
commission, doing pampers, giving
facials and making people feel
confident. It made perfect sense. It
also meant that we could continue
to make the products fresh in small
batches because we were sending
direct to the customer. Lord Sugar
and I looked at each other and we
just said: “Let’s give it a go.”
One of the best things about the
model is that it is a way of sharing
our success with the ambassadors
who work with us with our
multi-award-winning products. They
really are the best on the market
and their passion for the products
always shines through.
We could just have paid a few
celebrities to promote our
products, but instead started with
those 400 ambassadors, who now
make a living through their
commission.
Lord Sugar is very much about
driving entrepreneurialism. He
loves it when people say they have
started their own businesses or that
they have been inspired by The
Apprentice to do something off their
own back. And so he really loved the
idea of championing these
ambassadors.
It was hard work in the early
days. We started off with a range of
five products. I would travel the
country to do training with the 400
ambassadors to show them how to
demonstrate our freshly made
products and to teach them about
our ingredients and unique
formulas.
It was nearly nine years ago that
we stood on stage at that auditorium
and it has been an incredible
journey since then. We now
celebrate more than 20,000
ambassadors, with more than 250
products that we still freshly make
in batches. We have a dedicated
team employed to ensure that
ambassadors have all the tools and
knowledge they need to sell Tropic
products.
We still formulate everything in-
house and we now have a state-of-
the-art lab where we have ten
talented chemists and biochemists
working on everything from sun
care to baby care. It is amazing and
my favourite section of our HQ
building, based in Surrey.
Tropic is now one of the fastest-
growing beauty companies in the
UK. Richard Branson and I are now
friends and before it closed we were
placed on the Fast Track list of fast-
growth companies for five years
running, which funnily enough was
sponsored by Virgin. It’s funny how
we’ve come full circle.I
still remember the moment
that Lord Sugar and I got on
stage at Hertfordshire
University to officially
announce our social selling
model. It was May 4, 2013, and the
room was filled with 400 people,
ready to share and earn from selling
Tropic products.
I felt immense pride, and a sense
of commitment to these men and
women. They had entrusted us to
start a business, believing in us and
our products. I felt a great sense of
responsibility to ensure that they
would thrive.
I’d had people selling on
commission even before I
considered the social selling model
that we have now. When I first
started Tropic while revising for my
GCSEs, I used to pay my friends a
commission to sell my scrubs at
various markets across London.
I used to sell at Greenwich
Market, my boyfriend at the time
would sell for me at Camden
Market and other friends were
selling at Spitalfields Market. I
would also go to various events
throughout the year. I would be
there with my friends and whoever
wanted to join me and I ould pay
everyone a 20 per cent
commission on whatever they sold.
After Lord Sugar invested
£200,000 in 2011, we were looking at
routes to market and, while
£200,000 is a large amount of
money, it vanishes quickly with
buying ingredients, packaging and
machinery and premises to move
out of my mum’s kitchen.
Getting bricks-and-mortar shops
was also not going to work and I
wanted to ensure that we made our
products fresh. It was important to
me to maintain the freshness that
we had when I was making the
products at home in my mum’s
kitchen.
Then Lord Sugar and I
stumbled across an opportunity.
Sir Richard Branson used to have a
cosmetics company called Virgin
Vie at Home that did social selling.
After it finished trading, Virgin Vie
consultants got in touch with me:
“We have lots of experience in
social selling, we love this industry
and have teams ready to go. Would
you consider it?”
At that time it was not something
I had ever considered. However, I
started to see the synergy betweenSusie Ma
Anya McKenna,
founder of Hexe
Digital, strives to
avoid bullying at her
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