Entrepreneur Will Butler-Adams, who gave the closing presentation at this week’s HTA Garden Futures Conference,  expressed surprise bordering on shock when no-one in the audience owned up to owning a Brompton folding bicycle.

For Will is the company’s chief executive of Brompton Bicycles, and has masterminded the company’s growth from a ‘cottage industry’ manufacturer to a £30 million turnover operation making 50,000 machines a year and running its own World Championships!

He delighted delegates with his stories of business derring-do. “I like to kick things over and see what happens,” he said.

He also divulged details of what he described as the company’s ‘Fuck it! Fund’ – a £250,000 contingency to bank roll next moves with no questions asked on when it all goes wrong.

He revealed that the company is working on a product he felt might encourage members of the audience to become Brompton owners….an electric bicycle. The original £20,000 budget had ballooned to £1.5 million.

Nuggets of business advice included:

• “Let your people get stuck in and have a go. There is so much potential to flog stuff out there. Be innovative, take some risks and get people to do stuff.”
• “Go into the cities. You as an industry need to be more outgoing. Work at the social side.”