Made in the UK Mondays: SimVenture

Find out how a Sims-style business software is empowering aspiring entrepreneurs around the world.

York-based business SimVenture is bringing learning to life through its simulation-style software products.  

Founded by brothers Peter Harrington and Paul Harrington, SimVenture started in 2005 out of a desire to address the increasing failure rate of startups. Education, they believed, was key to reversing that trend.   

Although simulations as learning tools were widespread in the aviation and healthcare industries, it was yet to permeate startup circles. So, drawing on their software expertise, the brothers set out to create their own digital learning environment: a business startup simulation where users could make authentic startup decisions and experience the outcomes of those actions ‘virtually’ as a real-life scenario. 

SimVenture has since developed a suite of simulation products where budding entrepreneurs can ideate, map, test and share their business ideas – creating an interactive and shareable digital portfolio, with options for teams to collaborate remotely. Users can also build and compete with their virtual businesses as individuals or in teams for up to 10 simulated years. That includes making quarterly decisions across sales, finance, operations and R&D, analysing the impact of their decisions and learning from those outcomes.    

It became quickly apparent that the benefits of SimVenture’s simulations extended far beyond the UK startup scene, attracting the likes of Asda, Barclays, the University of Bristol and the British Council, just to name a few.  

Within 3 years of launching their business, the brothers’ simulations started to turn heads overseas and its products are now sold in more than 20 countries, with contracts recently signed in the United States and Algeria. 

Its exports have from grown from just £5k of revenue in 2008 to a point where over 25% of the company's total annual revenue is being generated in international territories. 

Earlier this year, SimVenture was named winner of the ‘Education’ and ‘Edtech’ category in the our Made in the UK, Sold in the World Awards, due to its strong demonstration of research and development, product innovation and export growth planning. 

We spoke to SimVenture Co-Founders and brothers, Peter and Paul Harrington, to learn more about SimVenture’s export journey:  

1. How has selling overseas helped your business grow?

Export growth has played an essential role in getting our business to where it is today. Our journey began in 2008 when we secured £5k of sales following our first trade mission to Nova Scotia in Canada. The visit had been supported by the UK Government. Since then, we’ve continued to grow our exports with the help of trade visits.  

One of the key methods we’ve used in each country is to appoint distributors, or what we call ‘Partner Agents’. Our first was five representatives from a family-owned business in Mexico who we’d met at an awards event. We still work with the business to this day and over the years they have played a key role for us in, for example, translating products into Mexican Spanish and expanding our sales operations into Columbia and wider South America.   

More recently our appointment of a Partner Agent in China has transformed our export to turnover ratio by 50% as the result of the translation of one of our simulation products into Chinese. 

We now have 15 Partner Agents distributing SimVenture products in over 20 countries around the world and they all play a critical role in not only translating our products (into Chinese, Arabic and Spanish) but in providing the feedback relevant to our services when being hosted in different education and training environments. 

2. What has exporting taught you about how your product or service differs in international markets? 

When we first designed our products we’d never envisaged exporting our products outside the UK so when we did our first software translation into Spanish it was a big learning curve. Now all our products are designed to be easily translatable from the start.  

Another learning has been about cultural differences. Whilst there aren’t major differences in how people learn about business internationally, we’ve learnt, for example, to avoid ‘piggy bank’ icons in Muslim countries and to ensure Arabic text (that is read right to left) can be added into the software.   

Likewise, we learnt in the USA that students tend to be solely tested on business performance, rather than ‘learning through failure’ as is more common in Europe, so our software is designed to be as collaborative or competitive as educators require. 

3. What role does exporting play within the context of your sector?  

As our primary business is in EdTech, the products are online, so exports plays a major role in our sector.   

As most EdTech products generally ‘live’ online, exporting is not just a ‘nice-to-have' but a reality of selling products that don’t need to transcend physical borders.  

For example, global competitions are increasingly in-demand by the higher education sector, our primary target market. In 2017 and 2018 our UK team organised a series of business simulation competitions for the Chinese market, where we supported Chinese students with visiting the UK and competing against people from different countries. Likewise, in 2013 we ran a competition with 190 learners from 11 countries. 

All these cases provided great opportunities to strengthen our relationships with Partner Agents, improve our software and products through strong feedback channels and have helped to build the SimVenture brand and reputation globally. 

 4. What support have you received from the Department for Business and Trade? 

We have a long-standing relationship with DBT who have supported us through international trade missions and exhibiting at conferences in the UK and abroad. Most notably our CEO, Peter Harrington is also an Export Champion.     

 5. What's next for SimVenture? 

AI will play a critical role for the company moving forward because it will speed up translation of our products and reduce costs.  

Specific plans include adding an AI-powered chat bot to provide users immediate feedback on their performance, which we will roll out in the UK first then in at least 10 countries internationally.  

We then expect product translation and AI costs to reduce significantly after the first roll-out and aim to generate 5x revenue per country per year wherever we establish a new distributor.   

Every Monday we’re profiling one of our Made in the UK, Sold to the World Award Winners, next up: Mosaic Smart Data . 

To access free business support along your international journey, visit great.gov.uk.