The Yorkshire Post’s article on the Sheffield chapter

By Nick Tyrone

“We’ve already sold £1.5 million and made a dozen new jobs. But this year, we’ll do better than that.”

This is what Tom Milton of Amodo Design told me when I asked him about his company’s prior year sales, as we sat in Mow’s Coffee on Arundel Street. I had come to Sheffield looking to speak to entrepreneurs and CEOs, and part of that was wanting to understand the tech sector in the city. That this man in his twenties seemed sheepish about telling me that his sales was only £1.5 million communicated a lot about how I had to raise my expectations in terms of what I’d find in Sheffield.

Beyond the tech angle, as I say, I had come to the city to speak to as many local entrepreneurs, CEOs of larger companies, charities, and politicians as I could find for a big report around business in the city. That report is out today through a charity called the Jobs Foundation, entitled Sheffield: Forging steel and embracing tech. The people I spoke to in Sheffield led me to believe that the city is on the verge of something big.

Tom, co-founder of Amodo Design, grew up in South-West London but attended the University of Sheffield. Like so many other entrepreneurs I spoke to during my research, Tom was someone not originally from Sheffield who nonetheless stayed in the city and started a business after studying there, creating jobs and growth in the process. I think this pipeline between the university and entrepreneurship will be a big part of the story of where the city is going over the next twenty years. Beyond mentioning the university where he studied, Tom told me he had managed to get his start partly by locating himself at Sheffield Technology Parks.

Through the Amodo Design owner, I spoke to the CEO of the Tech Parks, Tom Wolfenden, and that furthered my idea of the exciting things that are happening in the Sheffield tech sector, as well as the regeneration of the city centre. The city’s technology firms attracted over half a billion pounds of venture capital in 2022, with the 2023 figure expected to be in a similar range. That’s a phenomenal number. The city has more than 14,750 people working in the tech sector within the city, almost double the number it had in 2015.

Yet there is still a rub up against the old and the new in Sheffield at times. As Tom Wolfenden told me, when talking about a guy in the Tech Parks who had a clearly scalable business, except that going more into it would have meant leaving behind a stable job, “His parents, his wife, all his mates were saying, ‘What the hell are you doing? You’re on 50k a year, you’ve got a nice house, why do you want to risk all that? Think of everything that could go wrong!’ Four years later and he’s just exited his business, setting his young family up for life and creating a dozen careers for his employees.”

Our report also looks at more traditional industries in Sheffield, most notably steel – and finds that tech still plays a huge role there. One of the competitive advantages steel companies in Sheffield have managed to locate over the last two decades has been being able to use homegrown tech to their advantage. This is what keeps the steel industry in Sheffield afloat, when the business could have disappeared to India and China.

“Our parts go into nuclear submarines,” said Chris Seymour, CEO of William Cook Cast Products, one of Sheffield’s oldest and strongest steel companies. “The specifications are incredible. The metal grades and quality control procedures are stringent and the testing requirements are exacting. There is a lot of front-end planning going into the castings, then a lot of back-end testing as well.”

Yet there are concerns out there as well, amongst the Sheffield business community, and Sheffield: Forging steel and embracing tech highlights these as well. Like most of the country, lack of necessary transport infrastructure was mentioned – that it takes almost as long to get from Sheffield to Manchester as to get from Sheffield to London was a common complaint. Another striking fact is the number of startups raising venture capital from the US rather than the UK. While their chutzpah in doing this should be commended, it highlights a growing problem for UK firms, namely the lack of domestic sources of funding.

These are all problems for which this incoming Labour government will have to find solutions. Yet they can take solace in the fact that cities like Sheffield already have all the ingredients there. Sheffield: Forging steel and embracing tech is both a study of where the city is right now – and a call to arms for the business community to play its role in generating more employment across the city. Sheffield should have a bright future ahead of it, so long as businesses in the city continue to do what they do best.