Simon Biltcliffe is one of our most interesting Entrepreneurs in Residence being a marxist-capitalist evolutionary proudly from Barnsley. Simon was raised during the Miners Strike which opened his eyes to the abuse of power by those with power.
He believes Capitalism must work for the people, not against them and for the planet, not against it.
Simon has now gone into politics, as well as continuing to run Webmart, so this blog will cover business then politics. Simon mixed the two up throughout his talk for us on the 17th March, but I thought it would help if I tried to separate them
Webmart
Webmart was started by Simon in 1996 after he left University. Webmart is an integrated marketing company which now has sales of £20m with 40 members of staff. It has never borrowed any money and paid the staff their normal wages throughout the pandemic, the average income of staff is £47,930pa, which is 153% of the average UK income.
Being a marxist-capitalist company it shares the profit as follows: the first £400k is retained in the company, profit between £400k and £1m goes 50% to Simon and 50% to the staff. Anything above £1m is shared equally between the staff. The company has donated £696k to charities which are chosen by the staff.
Measure success by 3 tests:
Intellectual, Financial, Emotional
Or what are you good at, what pays well, what do you have
Politics
Simon used to be a Labour supporter, but can’t now see what it stands for. So he has joined The Yorkshire Party and is hoping to represent them in the South Yorkshire area. The ambition is to create a Regional Assembly for Yorkshire, like the assemblies in Scotland and Wales.
Political Leadership requires
Transparency and Truth = Trust
We need to move beyond adversarial politics – working together is better, and more fun. The Yorkshire Party is drawn from all parties.
There are more healthcare companies in Yorkshire than in Cambridge and Oxford combined
The Yorkshire Party manifesto will be published on 1st April
Nick Butler 21/03/2022
