Investment guru Justin Urquhart Stewart said he hasn’t seen business change in other regions in the UK as positive as in Northern Ireland.
And he said “Northern Ireland has to go out and market itself and bring [investors] in” and cannot rely solely on traditional finance methods.
“Ulster has to go through this and realise that this isn’t just a change, but a continuous process. The youngsters realise have to realise, they don’t just join a company, they have to be changing. Everyone will be working for themselves in one form or another.
“I haven’t seen a change like this in other areas which I’ve been at talks. There has been consistent change over a decade.”
He was speaking to Ulster Business after hosting this year’s MLN Summit. It brought a host of top speakers and business leaders to Titanic Belfast, focused on leadership and management – including Sir AP McCoy, Gerry Hussey and entrepreneur Bobby Healy.
“You’ve got people who have been doing it and learning from themselves,” Mr Stewart, who has family connections to Ballymoney in Co Antrim, said.
“For a lot of the small businesses here, they can sit down and actually say ‘we can do some of this’.
“[Firms] are using proper technology and developing things themselves. They’ve actually matured into something which can be a larger size – scaling a business.”
Mr Stewart is a British investment manager who was the co-founder and head of corporate Development at the investment fund 7IM.
“[The MLN event] is now developed into something which is showing real growth,” he said. “You can see more visitors coming to this.
“I would like to see some of the numbers in terms of the turnover and the money they are making.
“The next thing they have to do is get more finance in. There’s lot of money which can be used… there are more methods of funding these days so we need to make sure we are bringing those in. So more companies can get local funding, faster.”
He said Northern Ireland should be looking at attracting investors from elsewhere in the UK and outside our shores.
“How do they funnel in? If there’s a mechanism, whether it’s crowd-funding or whether it’s through a form of electronic exchange, to be able to get them into that so they can invest and exit in due course.
“That’s the bit that is missing at the moment. Relying upon traditional methods of finance isn’t going to be good enough, so that’s going to take some initiative.”
