Why taking the first step is a victory with Dr Marc Reid

Dr Marc Reid is a chemist, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, podcast host and author based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

In this episode Marc shares the story of his first business venture, Pre-Site Safety, and what he learned from it including:

• The deeply personal mission behind Pre-Site Safety and why he is ultimately grateful that it didn’t work out
• How important conversations and customers are to a budding venture
• Why you’ll never be able to map the road ahead unless you take that first step

Connect with Marc on LinkedIn, X or visit his website.
Find out about Marc’s latest venture Kineticolor
Follow the Academic Adventures podcast on LinkedIn 

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky and is proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.

Transcript

Marc Reid

At the time, again, this is back in 2018, 19, that was a horribly bitter pill to swallow.

These are the times where you should be taking these risks. The worst thing that can happen is they don't work out. But the thing that would be worse than that is never having taken the chance at all.

Podcast Intro
Welcome to the Academic Adventures podcast. This podcast is all about people who have embraced the opportunity to combine their academic work with entrepreneurial ventures. You’ll hear about the highs and lows, balancing responsibilities and grabbing opportunities, plus advice for anyone thinking about following a similar path.

Sarah McLusky
Hello there I’m your host Sarah McLusky and my Academic Adventurer today is Dr Marc Reid. Marc is first and foremost a chemist, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. But he is also the host of The Reid Indeed podcast, the author of the book You are not a Fraud: A Scientists Guide to Imposter Phenomenon, and of course an entrepreneur. 

Marc’s first business Pre-Site Safety was a deeply personal mission to improve major incident training, inspired by his father’s experiences of the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster. Although this first venture was ultimately unsuccessful Marc has taken everything he learned about business, from VAT returns to customer discovery, and applied them to both his new venture Kineticolour and nurturing the next generation of academic entrepreneurs.   

Sarah McLusky 
Welcome along to the podcast, Mark. Thanks so much for coming along to tell us a bit about your experience as an academic entrepreneur. So I wonder if you could tell us first of all, a bit about what it is that you've been involved with.

Marc Reid 
Firstly, it's a pleasure, Sarah. Thank you very much for having me along. I grew up as an academic and the entrepreneur bit I thought came along later, but it was really something that came out later from something that was always there with me. It's taken me a long time to understand it. But the cliff notes of that are that I grew up training as an academic chemist. I've gone through what would be the sort of linear track to go through the ranks of PhD, postdoc, and eventually set up my own academic research team in chemistry. And the sort of chemistry that I have been passionate about and grown up learning about is how to use the signals of chemistry over time to figure out the story of how the chemistry actually works. And that's really important to people, not just developing new reactions in size of a teacup but those who then manufacture chemicals on the size of a swimming pool. So knowing how the story of chemistry evolves over time has been how I've gained my expertise as an academic in chemistry. But within that, and there's several different stories here, but within that there's always been a desire for me to not just stop at writing a paper. I think the paper is, peer-reviewed paper I should say is the bread and butter of any academic and it's what we tend to focus on, it's what most of our incentives are aligned with, it's what makes us look good to our peers and to help continue climbing the ranks of academia. But it's most certainly not the best way to get your work and your research and your innovations into the hands of the people who will be the end users of that and want to see it in a neat package that allows them to use it for their problems as quickly as possible.

So through several different research projects that my team have had, that thought has been there. How do you go beyond the paper? If the paper is step one rather than the final step, what comes next? And that provocation has been the thing that's then helped for several projects to think about, what does it mean to set up a company? Or what does it mean to try to do knowledge exchange rather than merely research creation.

Sarah McLusky 
Yeah, certainly. I can see why that would set you up that thinking about, you know, where does this go next? Not just making it work in the lab, but where does it go next would lead you down that route of entrepreneurship. So I understand that you've had a couple of goals at this entrepreneurial business. I wonder if we could, particularly because with this podcast, we're really interested in hearing about what people have learned from some of the challenges that they face and you had one spin-out company that didn't quite go as planned. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about that.

Marc Reid 
Definitely. This story was really my eyes being opened to what the difference was between a startup and a spin out. And when you're in a university, spin out is the natural term to use. You tend to be thinking about research that you've done within the university walls that you want to break out from that bubble, create its own entity with the university supporting it and having some equity in that business. That's spin out. and start-ups when you do it from scratch, all on your own outside of university, right? 

This first business for me, which was called Pre-Site Safety, started as one and attempted to end as the other. So back in 2018, I had a chance encounter through my university's entrepreneurial network with someone who was an alumnus of the university and was coming back for this entrepreneurial networking event to find out more about how businesses are created. He was thinking about creating his own. And we happened to get chatting over lunch, which then led to us having dinner. And led to me, as a chemist, learning about this person, Paul Nicholas's safety business. Entirely different to anything I'd worked on before. But through a complete chance, we got talking about how his safety business, which was another planet in terms of expertise from what I learned, was linked to a lot of problems in chemistry that I did know about. How chemistry can go a little wrong, how A and B mixed together can not just give you pretty colour changes but explosions that might hurt a lot of people. This is stuff that can happen on a daily basis if things aren't adhered to properly.

But where things took a more interesting turn is that was the first chance that I had ever had to talk to anyone properly about my first link with safety and how things can go boom. And that was the fact that my dad was involved in the 1988 Piper Alpha oil rig disaster. 

Sarah McLusky
Goodness me! Yeah.

Marc Reid 
He was one of the lucky survivors of that. But it was lucky with a pinch of poison because he lived the rest of his life struggling with PTSD and alcoholism. And that was a very, you know, it was involuntary, it was unfortunate, but it was my skin in the game to have a very intimate understanding of how safety and accidents don't just happen in a moment, but they can last for a very, very long period of time. And the reason that all of this was random luck, happenstance, whatever you want to call it, was that during this conversation where I was talking about this for the first time, Paul happened to be looking for someone to come into his business and give a safety motivational talk and help his colleagues learn about how, you know, safety isn't just red tape boxes to tick, forms to fill, but it's your way of preventing very long-term damage long after an accident has ended. 

But before I could give that talk, I couldn't go into this business because they required to register you as a vendor. They required a company name, LTD at the end of it, and VAT registration. I'm rhyming off things that back then sounded like another language to me. I had no idea what any of them meant. But for this opportunity to come to fruition, I had to learn about this. This was the skin in the game. It wasn't a nice to have. It was an absolute necessity. Otherwise this thing would not happen. 

Cutting a long story short, having given that first talk about my dad's experience and how you psychologically, there's more learnings from that. That was without me really realizing at a startup. I had to go into Companies House, create this business and start to advertise the fact that I could help companies by coming in and telling this story and helping discuss the specifics of their safety concerns that might be in oil and gas and might not. 

Where it overlapped with university work is again without real design here at the same time I was working on a risky new idea for my research team which was related to safety and chemistry not in oil and gas nothing to do with my dad or at least I didn't think it did consciously, where I had the idea to look at how safety training was done in chemistry for sites where if something went wrong it would go wrong on the scale of something like Piper Alpha where hundreds of people are affected and hundreds of people die. Safety training is normally in a classroom with someone dictating the pace to you. You're lectured at rather than interactively trained. But something like virtual reality as a technology at the time was one that was really coming to its peak in terms of adoption and use and people being open to it. 

So we had the idea to build new training programs that would allow people to experience what an accident might look like and how they might respond to it before the real thing ever happened, God forbid. So it was a way of, in other words, training people for stuff that no trainer could ever replicate in real life. It was getting you as close to the danger as possible without putting you in harm's way. And so that was stuff that I was doing in the university. We were looking at writing papers. We were building pieces of technology, pieces of software that went with certain pieces of hardware. Things that in other words, you could start to package up and call a product in a company. 

So I tried to work through the university system of doing that every university is slightly different, but there tends to be tiers of operation hoops that you jump through to show that the business idea turns into one that is not just a nice idea but actually has high potential to be a viable business over the longer term. So I tried doing that, got through several of those hoops, trying to marry what was a start-up, small-scale consultancy to do speaking with a potentially much more scalable technological spin out service and wrap these all into one package.

The problems came, I guess, to wrap things up in a neat nutshell for something that was much messier, was that the excitement of wrapping those two things together, my emotional attachment to the whole enterprise based on how it started. It made it very difficult to see that the number of customers was n equals one. And we were actually finding it very difficult to document any traction of, you know, the fact that we had one customer that looked like one massive customer that would be excellent to get this off the ground. We weren't ever able to get past that first step and convincingly tell the story to the university that n equals one will become 10 will become 20, will become 50. 

There wasn't any evidence of potential growth to then make it of interest or make any sense for the university to support it as a spin-out. And at the time, again, this is back in 2018, 19, that was a horribly bitter pill to swallow. There was a lot of it that went wrong because the cards just didn't land well on a particular day. But at the same time, taking a lot of responsibility for it, it's given me a lot of opportunity in the years that have followed to not only hold on to the bits of it that were start-up and useful for me to carry as a little smiley badge on my chest to say that I at least gave it a go. But all of those failings that made that startup never ever turn into a spin out. I've been things now that have evolved from skin in the game to being long-term lessons for myself and for other people who are trying this out. So I'm really grateful looking back on it , but I would never have said that to you if we were talking in 2018 or 19.

Sarah McLusky 
Oh, thank you for being so honest about that. I can see why on paper it sounds like a good idea. You know, as you say, it makes a lot of sense that you can't train for these huge disasters theoretically, you know, or you can't really prepare people properly. So it does sound like a really good idea and one so personally connected for you as well. So what, I mean, you've said there, there was the challenge around making sure you had a customer base or enough customers to make this happen. You've also mentioned that for yourself, just the business skills involved in understanding how to get it off the ground. Were there any other things that, or are they the biggest challenges that you had, or were there other things that proved really difficult to navigate.

Marc Reid
I think one of the most valuable things I learned that was difficult to do, not because I didn't have the skill, it's just simply a difficult thing to do period, and that is customer discovery. Because this thing was, it had suggestions of being a spin out when the opportunity was presented to me to take part in my first ever technology accelerator. To go along to an intensive five, six, seven week program where you're sharing the business idea with like-minded people who have their own business. And each of us is trying to figure out what is the market or markets plural for this thing, who actually needs it, if anyone. That was the first time that I really had mentors in front of me looking into the blacks of my eyes and say, pick up the phone and talk to as many people as possible in his many different walks of life. And when you're finished talking to them, your goal of the end of that conversation is to figure out what your next conversation looks like and who it's going to be with.

 And in a way, I was terrified by that, but I did in a previous life work as a gym instructor. And that was much earlier, this was like my teenage years was a terrifying exposure to having to talk to a lot of different people on a daily basis about a lot of different personal challenges. And this was like an echo of that, but nonetheless I was petrified to get started because the further and further into academia you go, yes you have collaborations and it's brilliant to talk to a lot of scientists and to build your own team for whom you become a mentor, but in balance as an academic you do get to spend a lot of your time by yourself in a room writing a lot of stuff for grants or papers. There's a lot of welcome solitude as an academic to get some thinking done. But when you're an entrepreneur, that is not the skin in the game that you have. There is an absolute imperative to go out and talk to people. 

And this customer discovery exercise in the tech accelerator taught me that, that it's not simply trying to get people to pat you on the back and say, that's a cool thing that you've developed. It's finding those people who would say, that thing that you've created there is the thing that's going to scratch my itch. And I've never found another way to scratch that itch. And going further than that is trying to find ways to talk to people who will tell you enough of their story to signal their value that what you have is useful to them. And crucially without you ever having to stand in your soapbox and sell it to them. 

That's the main thing I learned about customer discovery was is that you're going out into the world looking for conversations, but being a sounding board rather than a billboard for what it is that you're trying to sell. If there's something there that you have got that is of genuine value that will come out in the conversation without you having to say that this bell and whistle that I've got here is bigger, faster, sharper, cheaper than the thing that you're using now. That was completely counterintuitive to me back then, but that stayed with me in a positive sense ever since.

Sarah McLusky 
That's really useful learning there. I think it is all that idea of taking this idea that's in your head and going and telling people about it can be just the scariest thing in the world, can't it?

Marc Reid
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Sarah McLusky
So from what you've been talking about there, it sounds like you were really, like almost like this business was you. Were you the, what was your kind of role in the business? Did you have other people around you? How did that work?

Marc Reid
Yeah, so you've really hit the nail on the head of what was both good and bad about it at the time. As I said, it came from a very personal incentive and an opportunity to talk about that story as a startup before the research and the spin out part came along. But even then the spin out stuff was, you know, things that were coming out of my lab, things I felt very close to, very dear about. And as any entrepreneur will empathize with, I think one of the skills you need to develop is letting go of your own baby in the end. And given that this was my first real serious attempt at entrepreneurship, it proved very difficult for me to do that and to let many others in. 

I did have a prospective business partner in Paul, who I mentioned earlier, in the story and we remain friends to this day, but we both look back on it thinking that we were spread too thin in all the other things that were going on in our life to really give this prospective business a decent shot. Yeah, that was part of it where it was me holding on to it, but the other part of it was those who were involved in the business weren't thinking only about the business, were thinking about a lot of other things at the same time, trying to spread ourselves far too thin for it.

And that's, I guess when I now play that sort of mistake back to others, that I can see mapping out their own projects, be they entrepreneurial or otherwise. You know, I really deter people from thinking on a multitasking basis. I think multitasking is deeply, deeply overrated. I think we are creatures built for serial tasking. You know, do one thing at a time, do one thing properly until it's done. And then move on to the next thing. And the counterintuitive part of that, that I've found out the hard way is, you'll probably get more done more quickly doing it one at a time than trying to do all things at the same time. One of my mentors now, that like to close this point, the thing that really plays back in my head over and over when I find myself slipping into old habits is, if you try everything, you'll finish nothing.

And if I forget everything else about what I've done in the past, that just echoes through and through my head again and again. If you're starting to try everything, remember that you're more likely to finish none of these things.

Sarah McLusky 
I think that's a really nice point to ask you about how you balance doing this work with your academic responsibilities or with your other life responsibilities.

Marc Reid 
Not always well, but I do try and I do try and live by what I'm sort of semi preaching about here and trying to do one thing at a time. But when there isn't an ability to do one thing at a time, it is dedicating specific time for specific things. I will do these things on these days, these other things on other days, or I'll do this thing in the morning, dedicate the afternoon for this other thing, giving yourself chunks of time, long enough time to get into a flow state where it isn't constant exhaustive task switching, blocks of a couple of hours at least where possible to do one thing and do one thing well, then take a rest before dedicating a different chunk of time with a similar number of hours at least to doing something else where you've got time to get into a flow state and think about that other thing.

Sarah McLusky
And were these activities something that say your head of department or your colleagues at the university were supportive of?

In terms of this pre-site safety business, as I mentioned, there's a process whereby you're giving increasingly robust litmus tests to whether the business can be a long-term business before it actually ever formally spins out of the university. And all along the way through each of those hoops you're having conversations with your head of department or others in the faculty or others at the university level and you'll have to pitch to panels who are composed of those internal to the university external consultants who are coming together and figuring out whether or not they should green light this thing to the next stage if not spin out entirely. So those things are always happening and I never really came across a point where anyone was desperately unsupportive of it. 

I think one of the real values that I hold dear looking back on is that so long as you are tipping the fullness of your responsibilities, these are the times where you should be taking these risks. The worst thing that can happen is they don't work out. But the thing that would be worse than that is never having taken the chance at all. I think that's why a lot of these folks are very supportive and when you're talking about people at that level, you know it's not always the case, I can't generalise this, but you have a higher chance of you finding yourself talking to people who have been there, seen it, done it, who might be on the surface very successful academics, but they've actually had a go at a spin out themselves, or they might actually have one that is often running and they don't really have any cause to talk about anymore, but you being perhaps a generation removed from them professionally won't ever have seen it and perhaps won't ever have realised that that's been part of their professional career. So on top of any support, I found it a really insightful and enjoyable way to figure out the stories of colleagues, parts of which would never come up in any other setting if there was no incentive to talk about it. So it's been a bit of a discovery exercise as well, thinking back on it.

Sarah McLusky 
Yeah, it sounds like certainly that you've embraced learning about this new world that you've found yourself in. And what are the biggest things that you think you've learned going into? You've certainly started another venture now, haven't you? So what are the learnings that you're taking with you into this new venture?

Marc Reid
So, yeah, having moved on from Pre-Site Safety, no, again, to cut a very long story short, the complexion of my academic career is now very different to what it once was. I've got a longer term fellowship, I've got space to think very long term about a different type of technology that will serve a different body of chemists. And within that ability to think longer term with that different sort of academic career there is the ability to build into a longer term plan the desire to turn that technology into something that does what I mentioned earlier. It starts at the papers, but it doesn't finish there. It will be reported to the research community, but it won't end there. The end users might be elsewhere. So in a nutshell the technology our team now works on, which we call Kineticolour, which is a mixture of kinetics and colour, is our attempt to enable chemists to point a camera at their chemical reaction and for the video footage from that camera to tell the story of what's going on without the chemist ever having to touch or poke or prod the chemistry itself. And having learned everything that I did with Pre-Site Safety, the rather, it almost sounds patronising but the simplest thing that I've learned is having the awareness of what the process is going to be to spin out. Being able to actually see the road ahead, like seeing what the territory looks like, rather than having to draw the map as I went along, as was the case with pre-site safety. I knew there were going to be four big hoops to jump through to get spin out support. I knew who I would have to talk to. I knew what the paperwork looked like. I knew what good would have to look like before ever attempting to jump through any of these hoops.

So having taken the first risk, if it doesn't work out, like it's only with that hindsight I can now see where one of the victories of having taken that risk was to actually map the territory itself, whether or not that first thing succeeded didn't actually matter in the end .

But now with this new, what we would say is a computer vision-based technology, we're at the point where it's not just me now. I might have been the one tinkering and invented it, but this is not something that I hold as my own baby now. It's not something I put my name to. It's not something where even at this point that I'm really doing most of the leadership and customer discovery. I'm doing some of it, but this new opportunity with the ability to think longer term and the ability to use all the mistakes of the past has led to me being able to support one of my postdoctoral researchers to grow as a potential business leader and to help show him what it means to have meaningful conversations and then to watch him become so good at it that he's better than me. Finding these people to talk to and figuring out whether there's genuine interest from someone or there's just nice pats on the back from others, the people who have been kind enough to give their time at least. 

All of this stuff has come to the point now to cut to the chase where I very recently had the experience of getting to a point where we were ready to jump through the next of these hoops to spin out. And we were sitting in front of a very eminent panel from one of the UK's funding bodies who support this knowledge exchange and company creation type work. And I wasn't the person in the chair. I wasn't the person going through the slide deck or saying most of the piece. It was this other member of my team who could do that for themselves without me feeling that I had to be the one who clung onto the baby. And I got to sit in the wings, you know, outside of the panel, watching the panel watch him. And that was a very unexpected joy because you get told that it's worthwhile building a team around you and get told that at one point you'll have to let go of your baby even if you're the one that created it. But until you're sitting there watching that baby being looked after by the team of other people, you don't truly believe it. And my shoulders went from my ears down to my chest just relaxing to actually having seen first hand that this can work and I do not have to be the one person, the one man band who does everything. It was a really unexpected joy .

Sarah McLusky 
I can tell just from your body language how much that meant to you. So what that's making me wonder if, has your idea of what it means to be successful changed then now from that previous situation to where you are now.

Marc Reid 
Oh yeah, that's a deep rabbit hole to jump into. But in a word, yes. And the ways that it's changed my view of success is that I think at one point in my life, you know, I did have the feeling that you had to be the one-man band and show that I could do all of these things. But, you know, success is really down to the metrics that you will allow yourself to be tied to. And there's so many things under the hood of that you cannot put a number against. And it's things like, you know, being able to tell the stories of your experience and share them with others who then soak that up and become better at it than you ever were. You know, show me the H index that you can put that behind, right? That does not exist. And it's all of these things that are between the lines that really start to flesh out what success really means. 

And as I say this out loud, it's only occurring to me that, you know, I read more and more articles about, you know, very eminent scientists who are, you know, let's say being interviewed for a magazine article and they're looking back over their long careers, like they're elderly folks at this stage. And there's a very insightful consistency that you see that at the top of their list of things that they enjoyed in their career. They all put mentoring others. They all put the PhD students that they supported, all of the staff members that went on to do bigger and better things with steeper trajectories than they could ever imagine. They don't jump to talking about how many times they've been cited and stuff like that. These are the numbers we choose to put against what we think success needs to look like. But when you're looking back over a stretch of a career, the thing you focus on is the people, not the papers, not the numbers, the people. That's the thing that will outlast you in the most positive sense .

Sarah McLusky
Now that's, I think, resonates with me as well as something that, yeah, what really matters, that's what really matters, isn't it? And it comes down to it. Well, I think perhaps that's a nice place then to ask you if there was somebody following in your footsteps, you know, your next generation, your postdoc, somebody you'd be mentoring, what advice would you give them?

Marc Reid
If nothing else, take the risk. The thing you will regret, I'm really just repeating something I've said earlier here, but it's important enough that I think that should be the one point. Don't allow yourself to feel the regret of never having tried it. That there's a dangerous game you can play where you think that everything you try should succeed. What you should try to get into the habit of is failing a lot more than you succeed. And being able to play that game in a way that you can survive to try again and again and again. The worst thing that will happen is that it doesn't work out, but you'll live to try again. You'll live to try the next idea and try the next thing. It might be your 10th spin out attempt that actually works. Maybe the 100th. But if there's zero. then there's no story that follow that. Taking risks is really the only way to get an outsized return on any investment. If you play it safe, then you'll get beige in return. A risk is not something to be frightened of, but something to be harnessed and welcomed whenever you've got the opportunity to take it.

Sarah McLusky
I love the fact that as somebody who works with colours and chemical reactions and stuff you've been talking about, that your analogy there is live life in colour, not in beige.

Marc Reid 
Yeah, you've pun partly intended here, you've caught me red-handed.

Sarah McLusky 
Yeah, I like it. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. So much really valuable learning there. So thank you for your honesty and thank you for your time.

Marc Reid
Cheers, Sarah.

Podcast Outro
If you’ve been inspired by this podcast head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You’ll find a link in the show notes or search for Academic Adventures podcast.

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and me, Sarah McLusky. It was funded by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.