SME Flamingos

By Billy Hamilton-Stent

Have you taken the flamingo test? You might have done so at a family gathering. Everyone lines up in age order: Grandparents first, then parents, followed by children and you all see who can stand on one leg the longest. Wine intake aside, you’ll find a predictable pattern appears where raised legs hit the ground in age order, old to young.

It’s actually a thing. There is a logarithmic scale based on age and balance that you can pretty much set your watch by. The graph below shows NHS data to the nearest second, so you can test yourself.

In ‘strategy’ we often plough through what is known in the trade as a shit tonne of data.  Factoring, regression, T-values, clusters and coefficients. It’s an endurance sport that comes with the territory. But every now and then you get a simple, satisfying nugget of insight that opens up a world of ponderous Planner potential.

Whilst digging in the mine of GWI Works data for B2B insights on SMEs for a pitch, I found a perfectly formed cross tab:

What it shows very neatly is how our expectations on growth [of the businesses we work in or own] temper with age. The younger we are, the more likely it is that we expect the company to grow in the coming year. 

Fair enough. On reflection, a bit like the flamingo test, the result is less than groundbreaking. But there is something in the essence of the chart.

Oscar Wilde once said, “When I was young, I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I’m old, I know it is.”

The innocence of youth and its boundless enthusiasm contrasted with the sobriety of age and experience. Hang on, though…I thought Gen Z was a ball of shivering snowflakes? When did they all turn ‘Wolf of Wall Street’?

And like so many things that marketing people like to call ‘insights’, it’s not so much the data you can see, it’s the thought that it provokes. Because there’s more to this idea of growth and youth in business to unpack. 

SMEs live on energy. If your business is you and a handful of colleagues, or maybe just you and a handful of peanuts, the ambition of the business has a material impact on pretty much everything. Alan Greenspan, ex head of the Federal Reserve, once said about US Gross Domestic Product [GDP] that “it doesn’t weigh much.”  Meaning that for all the complexity of what constitutes GDP, it is abstract. Ambition shares some of the same qualities. It’s a priceless commodity, but weighs nothing and in practical terms is absolutely free.

It’s almost certainly the case that the 56% of younger people in this chart who expect their businesses to grow next year are wrong, and the 17.5% of 55+ respondents are right. But what company would you rather be part of: the one seen by the seasoned realist, or the one driven by ‘give-it-a-go’ Gen-Zedders?

What we do know is that the average age of a business owner in the UK is between 35-40 years and it’s getting older. A simple case of demography and population trends. So, amongst all the conservatism that business requires, is there a chance that we get what we wish for?  

I started a tech marketing business in 2001 with some mates, ten days before the Twin Towers came down and signalled the end of the ‘dot com boom’. For all the turbulence of the time, I recall us all being pretty much untroubled by the winds of change. Fast forward to 2025 and I can get vexed about the lack of bananas in the office fruit bowl.

I’m reminded of an anecdote that George Harrison shared once about a tour van that ended up in a ditch on the roadside on the way home from a gig. As the Fab Four all sat there in their yet-to-be-famous, internet-free world wondering what they should do, Paul McCartney said, “Don’t worry lads, something will turn up.” It became an apocryphal tale about The Beatles’ attitude to life in general – an attitude that contributed to them becoming the biggest selling pop group of all time.

Paul McCartney said, “Don’t worry lads, something will turn up.”

As the battle of the ages plays out in everything from home ownership and health to the merits of scheduled terrestrial television, it also appears to be alive and well in business. At 52, I’m racing towards the right-hand side of the ‘SME flamingo graph’, but my sense is that the economy (and everyone in it) could do with a good dollop of whatever is going on to its left. 

Perhaps the best thing we can do at work the next time we have a big decision to make is to think about it standing on one leg?