“I would like to build another Dyson, but bigger, is the truth. I’m still young. So that’s our ambition as a business.”
Adam Norris certainly has lofty ambitions for his latest venture - Bristol-based electric scooter company Pure Electric. But when you factor in the millionaire businessman’s track record, you pay attention.
The managing director of Hargreaves Lansdown’s pensions business aged 33, Norris helped the FTSE-100 financial services firm list on the London Stock Exchange before retiring at 36.
Not done there, the now 51-year-old - ranked 610th richest person in the UK with a personal fortune of around £200m - has since backed more than 30 start-ups through his Horatio Investments vehicle.
All the while, he supported his racing driver son Lando Norris to plot a course into Formula One. He now has his sights set on tackling a global challenge - tackling the pollution, congestion, inefficiencies and costs associated with travelling around cities.
“I spent a year looking at lots of different problems the planet is facing and solutions that were emerging. I didn’t want to invest in something where the solution was unproven, like nuclear fusion - it may or may not work.
“I wanted something where the industry was embryonic but it had all the right signs it was actually proving to be a success, it just needed to be scaled.”
Having seen the same transport issues being played out in cities from Singapore to New York, and the development of electric motor and battery technology by the likes of Tesla, Mr Norris came upon what he thinks could be an answer - e-scooters.
He began assembling a team - an aspect of business he sights as one of his strengths - drawing from the ranks of another South West powerhouse he says he admires “in many ways”.
“I asked, ‘Who is probably the best at designing great new products that radically change things?’ And the one that has produced more than anyone else is Dyson.
“They’ve developed amazing products and they’ve created global scale. Dyson has developed amazing hair dryers and vacuum cleaners but I want to deploy those same brains into solving problems for our planet.”
Along for the ride is Dyson’s former long-term chief executive Martin McCourt, while its former head of research Sam Bernard is now Pure Electric’s chief technology officer.
Mr Norris believes a “mass migration” of commuters to electrified micro mobility vehicles is set to take place across the globe - and it seems he’s not the only one.
Fast-growing Pure, which has seen a six-fold increase in revenue to £35m over the last two years, recently launched its first crowdfunding campaign after smashing a £1m investment target in a private raise just hours beforehand.
BusinessLive can exclusively reveal media executive Simon Wear, the founder of Bath-based Play Sports Network and its YouTube channel Global Cycling Network, later acquired by Discovery, was the lead investor of the private round.
Mr Norris said despite exceeding expectations and hitting the target, Pure Electric elected to continue with the crowdfund, which forms part of a wider £15m round, with the firm having secured a £10m finance deal earlier this year to fund its growth.
“When I floated Hargreaves Lansdown on the stock market, we found that having lots of customers as shareholders, they would help us with understanding what we were getting wrong and right about the business and be our advocates.”
Pure Electric is looking to capitalise on its growth across Europe, where the firm has sold 200,000 e-scooters across the UK, France, Belgium and Spain.
Mr Norris said the firm is taking an “ambitious but steady” approach and wants to sell a million scooters a year in five years’ time. Comparatively, Mr Norris said the world’s biggest scooter brand Segway sells three million a year.
There have been, and still remain, some bumps in the road. Earlier this year Pure Electric said it had taken a “difficult, strategic decision” to move away from selling e-bikes and focus exclusively on its branded e-scooters, resulting in the closure of the majority of its almost 20 UK stores, except its flagship outlet in London.
The firm has recently struck a deal with Currys to sell its scooters in 66 of the retail giant's UK and Ireland stores and on its website. Currently, while it is legal to sell and buy e-scooters in the UK, they can only be ridden on private land with permission from landowners, with only scooters attached to approved rental schemes allowed for use on public areas, roads, cycle lanes and pavements.
Mr Norris insists Pure Electric is a global business in outlook, adding its biggest market currently is France.
'E-scooters will be legalised in the next 12 months'
“It’s a bit like Mercedes thinking they can't sell their car in Germany; it would be a shame, but from a global business it’s not”.
Mr Norris added Pure had been “working closely” with the government on the matter, including on safety guidelines, and predicted that the public use of privately owned e-scooters would be legalised “in the next 12 months”.
“We’re the last major country not to have legalised, so Germany’s gone, France, Spain, US - nearly every major country in the world have got scooters except for the UK. [The government’s] argument was Brexit slowed us down and then with Covid we’ve got other things to concentrate on. We were just the slowest is the truth. Nearly everywhere else in the world is legal and I think we will just adopt the same rules as they have in Germany.”
According to data recently published by the government, there were around 1,350 collisions involving e-scooters last year, of which around 320 included only an e-scooter and no other vehicle.
When asked if it may be seen as irresponsible to be selling a product that is effectively illegal to use on roads and could potentially cause accidents, Mr Norris said “anything can be misused”.
He added: “There are people who are using them wisely and then there are people who are not using them wisely. What we need to do is get laws replaced, so people understand how they should be used on the roads.
“I think part of the problem is people use e-scooters abroad, in France and Spain, and they come back to the UK, and some people assume they can use it the same way - the same way you can drive a car. All cars meet safety regulations for Europe, our scooters meet the same regulations. We just need to get the legislation through."
'Whether it's the congestion or the climate it’s our mentality in Bristol to try new things'
Originally from Somerton in Somerset, but having worked for the majority of his career in Bristol, Mr Norris praised the city’s approach to tackling pollution, including the introduction of a clean air zone and the Voi e-scooter rental scheme trial.
“Whether it's the congestion or the climate it’s our mentality in Bristol to try new things and do things. We’ve got one of the highest percentages of transport on small devices like bicycles and scooters, and I know it’s been one of Voi’s most successful trials in the whole world.
“We know a lot of people will be coming to our shop and buying them, and our scooters haven’t been made legal [on the roads]. So we’re just waiting for the laws to change. I think you’ll see a lot more in the streets as soon as they're legalised.”
Bristol is where Mr Norris earned himself a reputation for innovation as the head of Pensions Direct, where his vision of selling pensions via the phone and online received the backing from Peter Hargreaves and Stephen Lansdown, before the companies later merged.
Mr Norris credits a hard work ethic, long-term approach, ambition and recognition of risk to his success, achieved from such a young age.
“There’s a lot of other people who stop because a journey gets difficult or painful. I persevere. I slept in the office when I first started [at Hargreaves Lansdown]. They’re just things that a lot of other people don’t do, because they’re not normal. Whereas, I am happy to do things that are not normal, if it means delivering what we need to do.”
Mr Norris said his level of ambition led to him feeling constrained at times while working for Hargreaves Lansdown.
“We listed on the stock market, the founders wanted to reduce risk and make it safe. And actually what we had done is, I’d come up with opportunities and introduced new partners. Peter and Stephen had backed my business from the beginning. I then merged my company into theirs.
"They were at a different point in their life and wanted to reduce risk and slow the business down. They both said to me after that I’m far more ambitious than they ever were. So I imagine it is, and I think it probably is, true."
Mr Norris points to Elon Musk and US aviation pioneers the Wright Brothers as people who take risks, and have grown businesses or projects but in a controlled manner. He says it's what his company is doing now.
"It’s about having a really positive impact on the planet and to do that you need to be global. Previously we were just trying to sell some pensions. This is a mission that is actually about doing something great for the planet.”
Mr Norris draws parallels with his own success from a young age with that of his son, McLaren driver Lando, who was 19 when he made his F1 debut in 2019 after more than 10 years of training.
The entrepreneur said while he was successful he wasn’t wealthy enough to support Lando’s fledgling racing career, and his son had recognised that if his father hadn’t worked hard they wouldn’t be going to the race track.
“I was the one who was working throughout the weekend to make sure we had enough money to pay for the racing. He’s seen that work ethic from me, that I will work Saturday and Sunday, and I am sitting there at the track.
“While all the other dads were having a coffee and chatting, I was sitting in the car working, because I needed to earn the money. And then they ran out of money. While we were travelling together I was always making phone calls, and they saw that.
“In one way you could argue it is not nice for children to grow up seeing their parents work really hard, but I think it’s also passed on to them. [Lando] didn’t grow up into a very wealthy family, he grew up into a family where I was having to work and scrape every single day to make a success to be able to pay the bills. I think people assume I have always had the wealth I have today, I haven’t.”
'Lando is promoting our scooters, and if more people switch out of cars... then that’s a great thing'
Lando has appeared riding Pure Electric’s e-scooters in promotional campaigns. With Mr Norris placing environmental concerns at the heart of Pure Electric’s purpose, is there not some small irony, given his son’s profession?
“I loved cars growing up. What I have realised is that there are some negatives that come with them. The pollution and the congestion. I think [Lando] is a good person, it helps our business because it helps with publicity, and it raises awareness of the problem. I was watching Greta [Thunberg] on television and what she has got is a voice that people listen to. Lando is promoting our scooters, and if more people switch out of cars who live in cities then that’s a great thing.”
He added that Formula One as an organisation had set out an “aggressive roadmap” to reduce its environmental impact, including the adoption of biofuels and heat recovery systems.
“They’re trying to make the whole of F1 greener by carrying less stuff around the globe with them. Behind the scenes, and people don’t see it, there is a lot of work being done to reduce the impact to the globe, and to raise awareness the other way, using technologies that will spill into cars and make the whole planet a better place.”
Despite his many successes, Mr Norris said he felt he hadn't achieved a lot, and added that a lack of self-belief has stopped him from doing more than he has.
He tells a story of when, aged 30 and back at Hargreaves Lansdown in Bristol, he and his colleagues were remarking at how small Britain looked on a map of the world in the office.
“That evening I went down to the pub. Someone came up to me and said: ‘You’re the most successful young guy in Bristol'. I just stopped and thought, ‘The most successful guy in Bristol?’
“We were struggling to see how small the UK is on the map of the world. Bristol is this tiny bit of a tiny country, and that sort of gave me a different perspective.
“From that day, I went back and had a look at the globe, and thought, ‘Wow, let’s not just compare ourselves to British people or Bristol people, let’s compare ourselves to the whole globe’, and ‘What are they doing in Silicon Valley?’
“I still don’t feel like I have achieved a lot. I feel that I have served my apprenticeship by the time I am 50, and now this is my thing that I’m going to make into a really big success."
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