The female founder of a fast-growing natural skincare brand has said she has put plans to raise investment on hold after it took too long and distracted her from her business.
Ama Amo-Agyei, the founder of Plantmade, which hit sales of £5.3 million last year, said: “For us fundraising has been extremely tough. There was a feeling I had to prove myself … more than I usually have to.”
Speaking on a panel discussion on the challenges of growing a business, hosted by the Times Enterprise Network at the UK Black Business show last Saturday, she added that investors were being understandably cautious after backing other online brands that “aren’t returning the way they thought they would”.
She has now paused her efforts. “When you’re raising investment you’re taking time away from the business. We were in London four or five times a week — I’m not from London — trying to have conversations, going to networking events, and I was tired. I was not giving enough back to my business,” she said. Amo-Agyei runs the business with her brother Fred and fiancé, Travis Hill.
Amo-Agyei set up Plantmade in 2020 with £100 after being made redundant during the pandemic. She started by making bottles of hair oil at her mother’s kitchen table, and orders quickly grew. She has not taken any investment to date and the business featured at number 29 on this year’s Sunday Times 100, a ranking of the UK’s fastest growing private companies.
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Amo-Agyei said she does not need cash as the business is profitable, but was considering bringing in investors to help fuel further expansion. She said she will try again next year, “but on my own terms”.
She was joined on the panel by Lottie Whyte, the co-founder of MyoMaster, which makes equipment aimed at helping people recover more quickly from sports injuries. Whyte recommended the audience check whether they’re eligible for Google’s Black Founders Fund after receiving a $120,000 grant last year as part of the scheme. She also got a $100,000 credit towards Google cloud products as part of the initiative and described the experience as “life changing”.
The Google scheme aims to tackle what it calls “the stark inequality in venture capital funding” that black entrepreneurs face. It said less than 0.25 per cent of venture capital funding in the UK went to black founder-led startups in 2020.
While the grant was very welcome, Whyte said it had other benefits too. “Above and beyond that is the relationships I’ve built with the other founders. When you’re going through the strain of starting a company you need to be surrounded by other people who are on a similar journey.”
She also shared a story from earlier in MyoMaster’s journey where a promised £250,000 investment from a private individual failed to materialise at the last minute. “We went back and forth with him for about four months and upon reflection there were several red flags but I didn’t see them at the time … Then on the day he was supposed to sign the papers, he ghosted me. He just completely ignored me.”
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Their fellow panellist, Royden Greaves, raised £1.8 million in venture capital earlier this year for his pension service called Jarvis, but said there was a nail-biting moment when the business nearly ran out of cash.
Royden Greaves, founder of Jarvis
AYO ODUNIYI /A&O STUDIOS
A small amount of money raised from angel investors kept the business afloat until the institutional investment landed, by which time Greaves admits he was burnt out. “I was speaking to investors in Australia, the UK, Europe and San Francisco. And that went on for months. That nearly broke me.”
Like Whyte and Amo-Agyei, Greaves agreed that cultivating a network is essential to growing a business and securing investment. He originally met Rodney Appiah, the founder of Cornerstone VC, an investor in early-stage businesses including Jarvis, much earlier in his career when he was an intern at UBS, the Swiss bank.
When asked by an audience member for his tips on raising investment, he suggested tapping into the networks of friends and other connections. “When I look back at the 150 people we spoke to, every single person who invested in Jarvis was connected to someone I know.”
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