Most Founders Pitch the Summit. Smart Ones Talk About Base Camp: A Conversation with Mike Bradley of Dorset Business Angels
What does a career spanning four decades of tech, mergers, acquisitions and venture support look like? We sat down with Mike Bradley, Ambassador and Due Diligence Lead at Dorset Business Angels to find out.
Christchurch-based Mike Bradley is not your typical angel investor. He doesn’t write cheques. He doesn’t sit on boards for the prestige. What he does, and has done for the better part of forty years, is help businesses become the best version of themselves. “Venture optimisation,” as he calls it, is both his methodology and his passion.
His career reads like a tour of the technology industry’s most pivotal decades. Starting at Data General in the early eighties as a systems engineer, Mike moved through the ranks working with companies like Digital Equipment, IBM and Computer 2000, where he ran a videoconferencing division before taking on the Cisco business. A stint running the UK subsidiary of an Italian hydraulics company in Norfolk (“boring, the products don’t change”) confirmed that tech was in his blood. He returned to the sector, forging very successful strategic partnership across Europe for a major American firm, before launching a significant joint venture across India, and eventually setting up his own mergers and acquisitions brokerage.
The Everest Analogy
Ask Mike what’s missing in most business plans, and he’ll tell you it’s the bit between the dream and the numbers.
“Everyone’s selling the idea of planting a flag on the top of Everest,” he explains. “But your next objective shouldn’t be the summit; it should be the next base camp. What are you actually going to do to get from base camp one to base camp two?”
He calls it a Taxiing-to-Takeoff Plan™, a practical, stage-by-stage roadmap that bridges the gap between financial projections and real-world execution. It’s a framework he’s been refining since he wrote his first financial plan for a bank back in 1989. He also provides a version called Turnaround-to-Takeoff Plan™, for ventures like the hydraulics company which needed rejuvenation.
Joining Dorset Business Angels
Mike joined Dorset Business Angels around a year ago, drawn by the opportunity to apply that expertise in a local context. As well as serving as an Ambassador, he leads due diligence on selected pitches, work he approaches with the same win-win philosophy that has defined his career.
“There’s no point covering things up,” he says. “Due diligence is about making sure everyone gets a fair understanding of what the opportunity is and what the potential really is.”
He’s a firm believer that founders should build their due diligence data room from day one, organising supply agreements, customer contracts, and partner arrangements into a clean, logical structure, rather than scrambling to locate everything when a funding round arrives. “I’ve seen it quite a lot,” he admits. “It’s surprising how ill-prepared some companies are.”
His advice to founders pitching to angels? Be realistic about where you are on the journey. Don’t pluck a funding or valuation figure from thin air. And remember: if you’re a founder and you’re not selling, you’re missing a trick. “Everyone in business is a salesperson.”
The SPF Formula for the AI-ce Age
Mike has a name for the era we’re living through: the AI-ce Age, a period defined by artificial intelligence, constant change and accelerating competition. In this environment, he argues, companies that survive and scale will do so through what he calls the SPF formula: Speed, Partnering and Functionality.
Partnering, in particular, is something he’s evangelised and executed throughout his career. “You can cold call and hope someone lets you sell to them,” he says, “or you can find a partner who already has traction in your marketplace or prospect-base and go to market together.” The logic is straightforward: leverage existing relationships rather than spending years building them from scratch.
On AI, he’s pragmatic rather than evangelical. He sees enormous potential in using intelligent tools to free people from the grind: For example, “why have your best salespeople spending eighty per cent of their time trying to get a meeting?”. But he’s also frank about the risks. He’s currently working with a company that addresses one of AI’s most underreported failure points: data integrity.
“Only twenty-five per cent of AI deployments in large organisations are actually succeeding,” he says. “Seventy-five per cent are failing because the underlying data foundation is inaccurate. In a large enterprise data ocean, full of contradictions, if your databases are giving different answers to the same question, your AI is going to be a problem.” This is a huge problem for effective AI deployments in large, long-in-the-tooth multinationals. The trick is to fix the problems, one harbour at a time!
Advice for Entrepreneurs
For founders at any stage, Mike’s counsel is characteristically direct. Be prepared. Be open. And watch out for what he calls Corporate Triple A:
- Arrogance — believing you’ve got it all figured out, and it won’t change
- Amnesia — forgetting that customers make up the numbers in the spreadsheets
- Asphyxiation — rising so high in the organisation you stop breathing fresh air and knowing clearly what it’s like at ground floor level
“Get out and talk to your customers,” he says. “Talk to your employees. Customers are what make up the spreadsheets.”
Why the Private Sector Matters
Underpinning all of it is a conviction that business is the engine of society. “Public services would not exist without private sector taxes,” Mike says simply. “Without growth in the private sector, there’s no potential for the future of the economy. Entrepreneurship is fundamental.”
It’s a belief that makes his work at Dorset Business Angels feel less like a hobby and more like a calling. His particular passion? Traction, optimisation, growth, and follow-on investment, going back to companies that came to DBA at base camp one, have since reached base camp two, and are ready to push on again.
“That’s what I want to see,” he says. “Companies going forward.”
Mike Bradley is an Ambassador and Due Diligence Lead at Dorset Business Angels. He also runs webinars on AI optimisation, fundraising, joint venturing and selling a business, as well as supporting Founders and ventures with board advisory, and eventually exit, through his ScaleUpArena shop-window, at scaleuparena.com.
To find out more about Dorset Business Angels, visit www.dorsetbusinessangels.co.uk