Briefing Content

Many business owners and entrepreneurs have a lack of understanding of how numbers work and this is probably the main contributor to business failure and underperformance.

Hear from Sir Steven Wilkinson who will tell us that entrepreneurs, for all sorts of reasons, struggle with this the financial side of the business particularly.  He often hears variations of “my mind goes blank when I look at financial reports” - such admissions undermine entrepreneurs confidence and always stores up trouble for the future!

Now residing in County Wicklow, Sir Steven Wilkinson is the founder and Managing Director of Good & Prosper Ltd which provides practical wisdom to founders and leaders of human-scale businesses.

The organisation does this through leadership consulting and advisory work, writing, courses and putting our extensive network in their service. They act as critical thinking partners with the aim of supporting the leader - usually the founder or principal - and their business weather the ups and downs of economic entrepreneurship whilst prospering personally and commercially.

Steven is author and publisher of the popular Pitchfork Papers a weekly essay on Substack for business owners and the economically interested exploring topics at the intersection of leadership, literature and finance.

Who is Sir Steven Wilkinson? 

I have been involved in business finance and investment for the best part of 30 years having started working for Merrill Lynch Investment Bank in Munich, Germany in 1987 at the tender age of 24. I now run an investment company and a knowledge platform teaching finance to entrepreneurs which goes by the name of Good & Prosper. My focus has always been on Small & Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) primarily in Germany and Europe and mostly in some sort of distress or need of restructuring. I work at the seam between strategy, finance and leadership and bring three decades of experience as a finance and investment professional to the world of SME operations. Good & Prosper also offers courses to entrepreneurs and SME business owners to enable them to further their expertise in finance, capital allocation, leadership, culture and strategy, as well as individual leadership coaching and mentoring.

Since 2017 I have served as one of a number of business professionals working as mentors to high growth entrepreneurs with the Ryan Business Academy Mentoring for Growth“ Program.

In 2018 I was elected to serve on the founding steering committee (supervisory board) of the MyData Global Organisation, an Helsinki-based foundation set up to ’empower individuals with their personal data, thus helping them and their communities develop knowledge, make informed decisions, and interact more consciously and efficiently with each other as well as with organisations.‘ and was delighted to have been involved with that organisation in its founding year.

I believe that business can and should be a force for good in our society and that the more people take entrepreneurial responsibility for their lives, the better our society will be. I also believe in Benjamin Franklin’s dictum of “doing well by doing good” and in that Abraham Maslow was right when he wrote „The difference between the great and good societies and the regressing, deteriorating societies is largely in terms of the entrepreneurial opportunity and the number of such people in the society. I think everyone would agree that the most valuable people to bring into a deteriorating society would not be 100 chemists, or politicians, or professors, or engineers, but rather 100 entrepreneurs”. Amen to that. Cultivating Confident Capitalists!