What I learnt… from captaining Manchester City’s youth team

Murvah Iqbal, 28, started Hived, a London-based courier company that uses electric vehicles to make its deliveries, with co-founder Mathias Krieger in 2021. It has 70 staff, clients including Nespresso, Asos and John Lewis, and has raised £15 million from venture capital firms including Planet A Ventures, Eka Ventures and Pale Blue Dot. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Iqbal played football for Manchester City’s youth team for seven years and was captain of the under-18 squad.
I kicked a ball as soon as I could walk
I have a brother four years older than me and he’d want me to play so he could practise. Then when I was ten years old, I was playing for my school football team — I was the only female on the team — and I got scouted for Man City ladies.
Being from a family of diehard [Manchester] United fans, it was a bit difficult for them to take but Man City have an incredible academy for female players. I played for them until I was 17.
Playing sport at a young age sets you up for good discipline
You’re watching what you’re eating, you’re watching what you’re doing and you’re making sure that you’re sleeping properly.
When I was younger I was training once or twice a week but as soon as I got to 14 or 15 it increased to three times a week, with matches at the weekend. From 7am Saturday or Sunday I’d be travelling around the country to play. It was incredibly demanding as well as taxing on my body physically. I’m still paying for it.
At 15, I started working for the family business, a fast-food restaurant chain called Archie’s which operates in the north, managing all of the social media. It was all very hard juggling football with my job and school work as well. My parents sacrificed a lot for me to go to Manchester High School for Girls, one of the best schools in the northwest.
I learnt skills including prioritisation, delegation and leadership
As captain you have to learn about being direct and straight to the point, but there’s also a sense of responsibility where if we’re losing I need to be the one to motivate the team and get people moving again.
In football you go through ups and downs. Even the best football teams in the world don’t win every match; they will lose high-stakes games and it’s all about how you recover from that and what you learnt.
I remember we would learn so much from tactical analysis after we lost a match and it’s similar in business. If we launch a new feature and it doesn’t exactly go to plan, that’s fine so long as we learnt something. What can we take from that to move forward?
Hived is our second start-up
The first sold advertising space on delivery vans in London, the same way that you see advertising on taxis, tubes and buses. It wasn’t a huge, fast-growing business which is what we wanted to build. What we did have was the GPS data of all the delivery vans in central London. And with that we realised, ‘Woah, this is really inefficient, there must be a better way to build a [delivery] network for the 21st century’. We looked at more and more data and did more digging and we realised how unloved the industry was.
In late 2020 and early 2021, Mathias built the first version of the product and I got the first few customers on board. I delivered parcels for seven or eight months on my bike before we realised we needed to raise some venture capital. We did our first round in August 2021 and have been growing at a blistering rate since. We now work with five of the ten largest ecommerce companies in the UK and deliver a quarter of a million parcels every week.
The leadership skills I learnt on the pitch helped prepare me for life as a founder
Giving direct feedback is something else I learnt from the age of 15. But it has changed as the company has grown. In the early days of Hived when there were ten of us in a room, it was very direct. But now with 70 staff, you can’t do that, there’s more of a process [for giving feedback].
You also have to be constantly iterating and adapting as a leader and making sure that you have the right support network around you. I know I have a lot to learn if I want to be the best at my job. If you look at an athlete, you have support, you have a coach telling you where to improve. And I think that’s equally important as a founder. You have to put your ego aside.
I started off with a few business coaches but something wasn’t clicking for me. Then I got introduced to Danny Donachie, who is also from a football background, and it’s been life-changing. Everything in the business is happening at a million miles an hour. Danny can’t tell me if a decision was right or wrong but [challenges] me as a person. Am I being calm? Am I being present? Am I being the best leader I can be and building the right culture?
It’s so easy not to prioritise your personal health and development because you think the needs of the business have to come first. But to work with Danny and to zoom out from the day-to-day and reflect has made me so much stronger because as a founder you go through so many ups and downs every day, it’s crazy. And you have to be resilient to deal with that.
Murvah Iqbal was talking to Hannah Prevett, deputy editor of Times Enterprise Network