Entrepreneurs Forum

To mark the first event in our series of emerging talent suppers for this year, we invite you to dinner with a businessman who has a real passion for people and an acute business sense.

 

Linking like-minded business people up to share knowledge and gain advice is what makes the Entrepreneurs’ Forum unique, we therefore urge you to attend this gathering for what promises to be an evening of inspiration.

 

Will Dracup has taken the company he founded in 1989 and made it a fantastic global success, mixing digital imaging innovations with the life sciences.  Started in a shed, quite literally, with funding coming from various credit cards and the sale of his home to raise capital, Nonlinear Dynamics helps scientists to identify what is happening in diseases and the “exquisitely complex” machinery of life.

 

Today Nonlinear employs 25 staff, exports more than 80% of its sales and counts all of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies among its customers.

 

During dinner, he will elaborate on the difficulties he faced starting the business – including his infamous meeting with the bank manager who turned down his business loan application – which prompted him to take out a personal loan instead.

 

 

A graduate of Manchester University, Will is the first to admit he didn’t have a clue what he wanted to do when he graduated.  Attending a careers fair he decided that he might be quite good at flying fast jets for the RAF!

 

Whilst undergoing treatment on a dodgy knee prior to joining up, Will taught himself about computers and software to pay the bills.  It quickly became apparent that the RAF wasn’t for him, but software was.  Will quickly won a number of contracts with varying degrees of success, before securing work within the sector with local firms.

 

He said: “One of them was for a company in the North East called Joyce-Lloebl. At the time they were building their own huge, specialised computers to run the software they needed for the science they were supporting. I could see that the way computers were headed, PCs were going to be able to do that job in a year or so.

 

“So I tried to persuade them that they needed to put their software onto PCs. Customers were paying high prices for their systems at the time, but as soon as they realised they didn’t need to, they wouldn’t fork out for them anymore. Joyce-Lloebl didn’t listen – they couldn’t see past the revenue they got from the computers - so I decided to put my money where my mouth was and do it for myself.”