Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister on Monday, and within hours the question on most business owners’ minds had nothing to do with Westminster. It was simpler than that. What happens to my business now.
Britain is about to get its seventh prime minister in ten years. The Labour leadership timetable runs through July, with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham the favourite to take over, and the usual carousel of speculation has already started about tax, spending and what a new government means for everyone trying to run a company through it.
Matt Haycox, an entrepreneur and investor who has put more than £1 billion into UK businesses, thinks most owners are asking the wrong question. “Every time there’s a change at the top, my inbox fills up with people asking me what it means for them,” he says. “My answer is usually the same. It means a lot less than you think, and the worrying itself is doing more damage than the politics ever will.”
The instinct to wait is the real threat
When the news breaks, the reflex is to pause. Owners hold off on the hire they were about to make. They sit on the funding application. They tell themselves they will move once things settle down.
Haycox has watched that pattern through Brexit, through Covid, through three prime ministers in the space of a few months in 2022. “Waiting feels responsible. It feels like the grown-up thing to do,” he says. “It isn’t. It’s just fear wearing a suit. The owners who freeze hand their best months to the ones who don’t.”
His point is blunt. A change of prime minister does not change whether your product solves a real problem, whether your margins work, or whether your customers can find you. None of that gets decided in Downing Street. “Show me the line in your accounts that moves the day Starmer walks out of Number 10,” he says. “There isn’t one. So why are you behaving like there is?”
What you can actually control
Haycox argues the job in a week like this is to separate the noise from the levers, then ignore the noise entirely.
The levers, in his telling, are the same ones they always are. Your cash position. Your access to funding. Whether customers still want what you sell. “You can’t vote on the next prime minister and you can’t set the base rate,” he says. “You can count your runway, you can sort your funding lines, and you can pick up the phone to your customers. Spend your energy where you actually have a say.”
That sounds obvious. The reason it matters is that uncertainty pulls attention away from exactly those things. Owners spend the week reading political coverage instead of chasing the overdue invoice or the warm lead. The Office for National Statistics has long shown business investment intentions soften when political uncertainty rises, and the British Chambers of Commerce regularly reports confidence dipping around moments like this. The pattern is real. Haycox’s view is that knowing the pattern is how you avoid getting caught by it.
Why instability tightens the money first
There is one practical reason not to wait, and it is the one Haycox cares about most.
When the political picture gets cloudy, capital gets cautious. Lenders tighten their criteria. Investors slow their decisions. The money does not disappear, but it gets harder to reach, and it gets harder fastest for the businesses that need it most.
“Here’s the trap,” Haycox says. “You wait for certainty before you sort your funding. But certainty is exactly when everyone else is asking too, and the lenders have already pulled their heads in. You wanted to play it safe and you ended up at the back of the queue on worse terms.”
His advice is to do the opposite of the instinct. Sort your funding access before you need it, while you can still negotiate from a position of not being desperate. Owners who want to see what that looks like in practice can find how Haycox structures it through his own funding approach. The principle underneath it is older than any government. Borrow when you can, not when you must.
The businesses that take share in a wobble
Haycox’s most contrarian point is that a moment like this is an opportunity, and that saying so out loud makes people uncomfortable.
“Every wobble transfers market share,” he says. “Some of your competitors are going to spend the next month paralysed. They’ll stop marketing, stop selling, and tell themselves they’re being prudent. That’s a gift. While they’re hiding, you’re in front of their customers.”
He is careful not to dress it up as fearlessness. The point is not to ignore risk. It is to keep acting while everyone else stops, because that is when the field clears. “You don’t need to be braver than the next guy,” he says. “You just need to keep doing the basics while he talks himself out of them.”
What Matt would do this week
Ask him for the practical version and he gets specific. Check your runway and know your real number, not the optimistic one. Get your funding lines in order while the door is still open. Stay in front of your customers, because they are worrying too, and the business that keeps showing up looks like the safe pair of hands. And stop refreshing the political coverage, because none of it is going to file your accounts or close your next deal.
“A new prime minister is somebody else’s problem to manage,” Haycox says. “Your problem is the same as it was last week. Build something people want, make the numbers work, keep enough cash to carry on. Do that and it genuinely does not matter who’s standing outside Number 10.”
It is not the answer most owners want in a week full of headlines. It might be the only one that pays.
Matt Haycox is a UK entrepreneur, investor and business mentor who has funded over £1 billion of business activity. He works with founders on funding, growth strategy and financial discipline.