Humber Business Week founder Dr Paul Sewell OBE has told how inspiration remains key when it comes to creating an entrepreneurial culture.
Addressing the festival’s launch as the programme of events for early June emerges - with internationally-acclaimed figures and domestic champions heading to Hull - Dr Sewell urged the city’s business leaders to get behind the annual activity, in a bid to banish economic gloom.
“Thank you all for keeping Business Week alive and kicking,” he told a healthy audience. “It is needed just as much now, if not more, than it ever has been. There’s still a dependency culture, going cap-in-hand for hand-outs, when we should be creating our own indigenous entrepreneurial culture. If business doesn’t do it, who will?”
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An ambassador of self-start and localism, the Sewell Group chair said: “Business still needs its role models. We don’t have enough role models to convince young people to look at business over anything else.”
He recalled how in the formative years of Humber Business Week a study had revealed how only 6 per cent of students were looking at enterprise as a career, with professions and public sector roles dominating.
“How do you build an indigenous entrepreneurial culture with 6 per cent? We have to have business role models. Sugar, Branson, Meaden, there aren’t many. I know, I’ve tried to fill the bill for business conventions, and you have to branch out to entertainers and sports people, and get them to talk business.”
Dr Sewell then revealed how he discovered two of the “endangered species” on a recent retail study tour of Japan and South Korea he went on with son Patrick, who runs Sewell on the Go.
There he met Tesco’s managing director for convenience formats, Kevin Tindall, who recognising the accent, introduced himself as being from Bransholme. Then he met his chat show format Elevenses event guest for Business Week 2023, Debbie Robinson, chief executive of Central England Co-op.
Hailing from Burnley, “she gets the north” and is a “role model to women who want it all”, he said. “She has a great career, she’s worked for WH Smith, M&S was chief executive of Spar, and now is at the helm of one of the original ethical businesses. Brands are pressured to do that now, The Co-op started 175 years ago! She’s a mother, a grandmother, has a great family life all while running the last 20 consecutive London Marathons - so she’s an athlete as well!”
Of Mr Tindall, who will be invited up in the future, Mr Sewell said: “What a role model for the area he is. He has worked up from free school meals, went to Tesco at the bottom of the ladder, and worked his way up by doing the right thing. It is not a main route nowadays, but this guy did it.”
Having underlined his input, he called on others. “Business Week may be a networking play, a learning and development play, perhaps a promotion play, but it is a passion and energy play. From today, right up to the week, we have got to inject passion and energy into it.
“Anything going so long, so well, tends to lose energy. We need to boost that because this city needs us and Business Week.
“When it was originally created, that very first year, we said it needs two things ‘it has got to be business and it has got to be quality’. If we inject a little fun while we’re doing that, then great.”
The event came after a week in which a change at the helm was announced, with Kath Lavery, who took over from Dr Sewell, stepping down, and Pat Coyle taking it on from next year.
Reminiscing on how “Kath had been a controversial choice” having then been a councillor and not a business figure, albeit with the business brief at The Guildhall, Dr Sewell said: “She assured me she got it, that she believed in the need to buy local and have that indigenous business culture, and she proved she did. I remember on the announcement day, I texted her three letters - D F U - she thought it was Don’t Forget University, and they have been a great supporter ever since!”
Mrs Coyle, a long-standing member of the steering group, introduced the launch alongside DoubleTree by Hilton hotel general manager Samantha Dunion, praising Dr Sewell for unstinting support.
“He is the founder of Business Week, and without his inspiration and his work, it probably wouldn’t be taking place now, all these years on,” she said. “It was his baby, it has grown and grown and grown since then, and I am really delighted he still supports the week, and will do again this year.
“We’ve had two or three tough years now, through Covid one was cancelled completely then we went online, and I’m now really delighted to see it coming back in force and the number of people here to support it is testament to the support we have.
“We have 20 events launched, and many more events coming up in the next two to three weeks. We have the staples, Marketing Humber launching, the Expo The Business Day, and we’re bringing back the Humber Business Week Lunch.”
An event that had been her own addition to the programme previously, she said: “Our guest speaker is someone you will have never heard of, but if I asked what Michael Buble and WWE have in common, it is a guy called Carl Leighton-Pope. He is an entertainment entrepreneur involved in music and entertainment business since the late Sixties. He will be an inspirational and entertaining speaker.”
As well as Buble, he has acted as agent for Patti Smith, The Motors, Dire Straits, Simple Minds, UFO, Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Bonnie Tyler, Billy Ocean, and Chris Rea.
On taking the helm for 2024, Mrs Coyle added: “It is daunting and challenging, but something I will really look forward to getting my teeth into next year. It is not just me, the steering group is amazing, very supportive, it is just me fronting it all. I’d like to say a huge thank you to the steering group, it takes the event, runs with it and puts it on for Hull and the Humber region.”
For full events listings, check the Humber Business Week website by clicking here.
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