My name is Stephen Henderson. I'm the director of Ruach music, a musical instrument company based in KilKeel in County Down.
We manufacture guitars, cajons, which is a percussion instrument,
pedalboards and effects pedals.
I started Ruach when I was 16. I started it because I couldn't afford to buy a cajon,
so I decided to build my very own version.
From there, I had enough material left build another five, so I decided then, to build those five and advertise them online.
And we went from there. When I started the business it very much so, wasn't meant to be a business.
It was more that I just wanted to get rid of these excess units that I'd started making.
But then we started getting
feedback from different people around the UK, asking us to introduce unique features and functions that the market didn't have.
And so I thought that there's obviously a reason why the market wasn't offering these features and functions.
But then I decided to flip that, and go ok, there might be an opportunity here, and then introduced those features.
They started selling very, very well.
At the start of the business, I was part of an accelerator programme held by Invest NI, called the Propel Programme.
And that was really instrumental to the success of the start-up years of our company. The entrepreneurial skills
I needed to start a business, really was around determination, determination and
really, not being afraid to fail. The main advantages I find, of starting a business as a young entrepreneur, is
around energy, I have a lot energy to devote to the business. As well as that,
I don't have a lot of responsibilities as a young person, so I can take a lot more risks.
I have a lot more time to actually take those risks as well.
At the beginning I was just looking into the UK market.
I didn't realise the actual size of the musical instrument industry, it's actually quite a niche market.
The entire market itself is only worth in and around 17 billion dollars globally. So I found out very soon because our instruments are
niche within the instrument market, we had to export very quickly.
In relation to products and product development, a big lesson I learned was around outsourcing. We outsource a lot of our
manufacturing the other companies in Northern Ireland, and also to the Far East.
Very quickly I found it's very hard to keep control of quality,
especially as we're such a small company.
So what I would recommend people to do is, try and keep as much in-house in your early stages, in order to maintain that quality
assurance. Then as you grow, you can look to outsource elsewhere, and you can then make the most of economies of scale.
In the early stages of our business, we were involved with Young Enterprise and even back at school,
they really started the spark in me, to become an entrepreneur, and showed me what it could be like to be an entrepreneur in Northern Ireland.
So from there, after I started my business,
I wanted to keep involved, and stay involved with Young Enterprise.
And so we've been involved with them, working with young people and trying to create a culture of
entrepreneurs within the youth demographic in Northern Ireland.
The biggest challenge of starting my business was that I was 16, I had no
career and I had no business experience at all.
So I had to learn on the go. As I grew the business,
I was learning about accounting, and about exporting,
and about how to actually scale a company, as I went along. The biggest challenge of running the business, as you grow it from start-up phase,
is delegation. This is my baby, and you're trying to
delegate tasks to other people, and trust them to do that, and just completely 100 per cent let go.
Learning how to do that has been a very tough,
but it's something that I'm very excited about, because you're starting to see growth from different areas where you didn't expect it, and
starting to find out where my strengths are, and where I really should be devoting my time, to allow others to come in with their strengths.
The biggest thing I would change about my business so far, would be the delegation of sales. I'm not a natural salesperson,
and I very much so struggled with that for two to three years, trying to sell stuff when I knew it wasn't really natural to me.
So I would actually go back and outsource that straight away and get somebody good to come in,
who is very well experienced and knowledgeable in that area.
My top three tips for young entrepreneurs starting out, would be to seek financial assistance early.
There's a lot of support here in Northern Ireland for financial support, and also for mentorship.
On top of that, I would say to do your market research early on, and go very deep into that, to find out the global market,
and where you're actually seeking to sell your product or your service.
Lastly, I would say you need to be determined, you need to go right to the very end, and not be afraid of failure.
Being an entrepreneur is a lifestyle and it's not a nine-to-five job, so you need to be committed.