Lyall Cresswell is the founder and CEO of Transport Exchange Group (TEG), a fintech platform for the logistics sector.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, Cresswell discusses why founders should worry more about establishing a sustainable business model than quickly raising funds, the importance of knowing your market intimately and his background as a student of architecture.
What advice would you give to a first-time founder?
Know your market intimately – don’t delegate this, it’s too important. Find a genuine need, and build solutions that directly address it.
Start with a minimal viable product to validate demand before overbuilding. Focus on creating revenue from day one rather than chasing investment rounds.
Seek out early adopters willing to pay for your solution — they’ll become your proof points.
Most importantly, be authentic, lead from the front, and maintain your core values even as your business grows more complex. Innovation doesn’t always have to require massive funding, bootstrapping your tech business is a viable option.
What’s a common mistake that you see founders make?
Many founders put too much focus on raising funds at the expense of building a sustainable business model.
Success isn’t measured by how many millions of dollars you’ve raised in VC funding – and even when there’s a successful exit, those founders often see their shareholdings excessively diluted.
I frequently come across overhyped products and the results can be a car crash! Founders can easily lose sight of their original mission while chasing growth, compromising core values or their unique value proposition.
Having said that, it’s also good to know when to pivot an idea and not get too precious if that becomes necessary.
What’s a fact about yourself that people might find surprising?
People often ask me what my background is and are quite intrigued to hear that I studied architecture before becoming a logistics-tech entrepreneur.
In fact, my first business, which I started in my mid-twenties, was a specialist freight-forwarder which gave me the background knowledge and industry insights to make TEG successful when I founded it just after the millennium.
It might seem unconventional by today’s standards but has given me a uniquely rounded approach to innovation – it also helps me to look at problems holistically and in multiple dimensions.
In another life you’d be?
Steve Jobs! What an amazing entrepreneur he was, the world misses him. I ran my first business on networked Apple Macs back in the nineties when most other businesses were still using MS-DOS and suffering from the Windows “blue screen of death”.
Excluding your sector, which nascent technology holds the most promise?
Everyone in our business is incredibly excited by the prospects for AI, especially agentic AI.
We’ve seen so many opportunities to improve the services provided to customers whilst reducing cost to serve at the same time. It’s early days but the amount of innovation in this area is incredible to see.
Founder in Five – a UKTN Q&A series with the entrepreneurs behind the UK’s innovative tech startups, scaleups and unicorns – is published every Friday.
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