ALM Intelligence's Nathan Simon recently sat down with EY's Global Growth Markets Leader, Annette Kimmitt, to discuss EY's programs and services aimed at start-ups through companies with annual turnover of up to $3 billion, including all those related to entrepreneurs, start-ups, family businesses, and IPOs.
ALM Intelligence: What is your background and role at EY?
Kimmitt: I started at EY in 2005 as a Partner in the Financial Accounting Services Group. As EY's Global Growth Markets Leader I am responsible for the firm's service offerings for entrepreneurs, family businesses, start-ups, and middle market companies. I also lead all EY's Asia Pacific markets across all sectors. Over the course of my career, I have developed a passion for empowering women and supporting entrepreneurship and in 2012 I cofounded Scale Investors, Australia's first seed capital organization focused on equipping Australian women with education and deal flow opportunities to invest in high-growth, female-led businesses at an early stage in their development.
ALM Intelligence: "Ecosystems" have become a hot topic, but people seem to ascribe a lot of different meanings to them. What does ecosystem mean for EY?
Kimmitt: At EY, we talk about "growth markets." In terms of definition, EY categorizes companies with revenues of up to $3 billion in this way. But for us the term relates more to an ambition than a category. That ambition is to accelerate growth and outperform markets, while putting in place the capabilities that can sustain an upwards growth trajectory over the long-term. We view ecosystems as communities of entrepreneurs, advisors, investors, governments, and academics, who together enable early stage companies to realize their growth ambitions.The really exciting part for EY is that ecosystems in this sense are not just good marketing; they are real. EY began a research program five years ago that has demonstrated that, while the innovation they unleash is, indeed, the engine of economic growth and job creation, entrepreneurs can only perform this role when they can work together with governments and the broader business community. We call this the "power of three." Fostering this sort of ecosystem fits perfectly with EY's purpose of building a better working world.
ALM Intelligence: What are some of the ways EY engages with growth markets?
Kimmitt: EY's proactive engagement with growth markets goes back 32 years to its first Entrepreneur Of The Year award, which it launched in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After globalizing the award program, EY established its "Strategic Growth Forum" in 2007 to bring entrepreneurs together with a broader community of established business leaders, governments, investors, and advisors to better understand what is shaping the global economy. That program now counts two thousand participants each year. Alongside the growth forum, EY operates targeted programs for women, early stage, emerging market, and young entrepreneurs.
ALM Intelligence: How's EY evolving its engagement with growth markets?
Kimmitt: Each of the programs EY runs for different groups of entrepreneurs provides targeted EY services to support them in realizing their ambitions. These include one-on-one advising and coaching. This experience taught us two lessons. One is that by orchestrating these communities we have a unique vantage from which to identify the essential capabilities entrepreneurs need to realize their growth ambitions, but we lacked a formalized point of view on these. Beginning four years ago, we launched a research project to assess the growth journeys of the best entrepreneurs and distill the learnings of over 500 EY practitioners who had worked with them. The result was EY's "Seven Drivers of Growth" approach, which we built our "growth navigator" benchmarking and maturity model tool around. EY now uses this tool when it begins relationships with entrepreneurs to rapidly assess the drivers of risk and opportunities in their businesses and develop a three-year roadmap.
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