Meet Richard

I left school without much to show for it. I was the kid at the back who was written off as trouble, and by most measures of the time I was. I fell in with the wrong people, I had a rocky home life, and nobody looking at me at sixteen would have picked me out as someone who would go on to build companies.

I mention that first because it is the part that matters most to what I do now.

Business

I started my first business in the late 1990s and lost it in a deal that went badly. I have grown and sold several since, through three breakdowns and a good deal of depression along the way. I say that plainly because the version of entrepreneurship that gets published is usually the tidy one. In business circles, I’m known more for my UK Business Forums, Quick Formations, and eFiling ventures.

In 2002 I founded Quick Formations, an online new company formation service introducing the UK to a simple online service for starting a UK company. It which quickly grew to the largest provider in the country, and in 2004 Companies House data confirmed that 13% of all new UK businesses we’re registered by me operating, at that time, from my kitchen. Quick Formations won many innovation awards, and the technology eventually launched my eFiling business, and later Quick Formations (following a rebrand to QF Registrars) was sold in 2013.

As QF Registrars we worked with a number of high profile clients, but by far my proudest moment was when QF Registrars was approached to incorporate the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust in 2012 on behalf the now late Queen Elizabeth II.

In 2003 I founded UK Business Forums, which became the UK’s largest online community for small business owners. I sold it in 2007, reacquired it in 2021 as part of Business Data Group, and subsequently bought it personally in 2024, before selling again in 2026 as part of the combined sale of Business Data Group below.

In 2013 I brought external investors into eFiling, my software business supplying the company formation industry. It was rebranded as Business Data Group in 2017, grew into a multi-million pound operation, and was acquired by ANNA Money in 2026. Sitting across the table from a board of investor-appointed directors was the experience that taught me what a good non-executive actually contributes, and it is why I now do the same for other people.

Nearly thirty years of it, in short, and I still think the interesting part is what happens to the people inside a business rather than the numbers at the bottom of the page.

Campaigning

Running a company formation platform gave me an uncomfortably clear view of how easily UK company registrations were being abused. I could see fraud happening at the point of registration and there was no mechanism to stop it.

So I led the Robust campaign working alongside Transparency International and Global Witness, arguing for identity verification and real accountability at Companies House. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act received Royal Assent in October 2023.

I am proud of that one. It is rare to get to fix the thing you have been complaining about.

Education

Following the publication of the ‘Enterprise for All‘ report published by the late Lord Young, I was invited to a meeting in December 2014 to support a government pilot connecting business leaders with schools. I accepted, and became one of the UK’s first Enterprise Advisers in January 2015, in the original Northamptonshire cohort, before the initiative was rolled out nationally as the Enterprise Adviser Network under the Government quango the Careers & Enterprise Company. To this day, I am the UK’s longest serving Enterprise Partner.

I was matched with a special school. More than a decade later I am still there, now as Chair of Governors at Northgate School Academy Trust. Almost everything I have learned about how education fails and rescues young people, I learned in that building.

Alongside that I trained as a coach with Grit, the charity working with young people at risk of falling out of education altogether, and I support the Alternative Provision setting run by my daughter’s business, MA Equestrian, in Northamptonshire.

Personal

I am autistic, and I have come to see the way my brain works as one of the more useful things about me professionally. I notice detail other people skip, and I am constitutionally incapable of nodding along to something I do not understand. Both of those are assets in a boardroom.

I am also a parent. My son is autistic and has additional needs, and I have spent years on the parent side of the SEND system, in annual reviews and assessments and the long wait for support.

I have been married to my best friend from school since 1999. We have a son and a daughter. Outside work I ski, ride motorcycles, spend an unreasonable amount of time in a space simulator, and run a community of thousands people who do the same.