This week, Christopher Nolan’s much anticipated retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey arrives in cinemas and Mia Smith, Investment Manager in the Commercial Team at leading mid-market private equity firm, ECI Partners, believes there are business lessons to be learnt from this classic study of resilience and of a leader trying to make it home against many obstacles: “Having studied Classics and now working at a PE firm that has backed more than 250 businesses, the theme of resilience feels close to home. Growth is almost never a straight line, and the most successful companies are rarely the ones that dodged every storm, but those that pulled through despite the odds and were stronger for it.”

Here are Mia’s five key tips for building businesses that last, inspired by The Odyssey:

Nostos (Homecoming): never lose sight of the mission
Everything Odysseus does is focused on one goal: getting back to Ithaca, his home. The landscape might change but the destination stays the same. CEOs will recognise this – markets shift and strategies change, but the core reason a business exists, its “why”, is what keeps it steady when everything else is in motion. For example, when ECI Partners backed Bionic, the multi-product digital marketplace, its mission was simple: help Britain’s small businesses get a better deal. Almost everything else was reinvented, as it evolved from its original positioning as a telephone-based energy broker, to cover more sectors including insurance and finance. ECI also sees this in the ‘Tech for Good’ businesses it backs – not only does the mission drive the strategy, but it is also what motivates employees and helps them retain top talent. Know your Ithaca and keep sight of it even when things change around you.

Metis (Cunning): strategy beats resources
Christopher Nolan has described Odysseus as ‘an amazing strategist and a very wily person’. Homer’s Odysseus is not ‘sophos’ – learned or wise; he is ‘polymetis’, a man of many wiles: resourceful, quick, able to solve the problem in front of him with whatever is to hand. The strongest companies are not always the ones with the most capital or the biggest teams, but those able to think on their feet and problem solve quickly. Mia sees this in many of the companies ECI Partners has backed, where they face much larger incumbents: “It isn’t likely you will be able to outspend all rivals, but you can out-think them, focusing relentlessly on a particular target customer, or building a better service that meets a need ignored by larger competitors. They are the ones that make better choices and use the tools at hand more cleverly. Former ECI portfolio company Auction Technology Group is a good example. Rather than pushing more spend into the traditional auction world, where it had its origins, it backed a simple but powerful insight: that the future of auctions was online and data led. It built the marketplaces and the technology to match, turned a smart idea into a category-defining platform, and in 2021 we took it public on the London Stock Exchange, realising our remaining shareholding in 2024, generating a 4.4x return.”

Atē (Folly): don’t be tempted by the easy route
The Lotus-Eaters, Circe, Calypso and the Sirens all try to pull Odysseus off course, and the danger isn’t always obvious. The Sirens sing the sweetest song of all and in business, they are the easy answers, and success often depends on interrogating what looks attractive, rather than taking it at face value. One of ECI’s portfolio companies, Avantia, does this very deliberately through OKRs, the objectives-and-key-results framework popularised by Google. It sets three a quarter, and the business leaders debate and agree the top priorities to pursue. Its CTO, Dan Huddart, says that implementing OKRs forces you to prioritise and this discipline keeps a business pulling in one direction, rather than chasing every passing opportunity.

This practice is also important in M&A; deciding which acquisitions not to pursue is often just as important as deciding on the ones to progress. Duncan Painter, the Founder of ClarityBlue, the customer intelligence consulting and systems integration company, who went on to pursue around 30 acquisitions at Ascential plc, before joining ATG, has said: “It’s not something we would want to do too often, but we have pulled out of a couple of deals on the last night where we’d spent six to nine months on them. This isn’t failure, its making the right choices.”

4. Homophrosunē (Like-mindedness): build the team that stays the course

Odysseus gets home in part because the people who matter stay loyal: Penelope, Telemachus, even his old dog Argos. Long-term success depends on that kind of trust, because culture drives commitment. But the Odyssey tells a subtler story about teams too. Most of Odysseus’s crew never make it home. Some are reckless and don’t listen. Others are lost precisely because he doesn’t trust them: they open the bag of winds because they have no idea what’s inside. Trust runs both ways, and a more open or trusting Odysseus might well have reached Ithaca sooner. The best businesses understand this and see two-way communication as transparency, creating an open and inclusive culture as a genuine driver of growth. Mark Eastham, CEO of Avantia, a specialist home insurance Managing General Agent (MGA) says a good leader is one who asks the right questions rather than always having the right answers. Teams and leaders that are open and trust each other, tend to go further and faster.

5. Moira (Fate): control what you can

Storms, gods and sheer luck shape Odysseus’s voyage. Poseidon sends the waves, and no amount of seamanship stops this. In the same way, business leaders can’t control wider factors such as interest rates, geopolitics or regulation, but they can control their company culture, strategy, talent and execution. Tusker, a leading car benefit scheme provider, is a clear illustration. It couldn’t control changes to BIK tax rates, interest rates, used-car residual values or a pandemic-hit car market, but it could control its response: the decisive pivot to electric vehicles, the strengthening of its leadership team and the rebuilding of its technology. It was those controllable choices that carried it through to a sale to Lloyds Banking Group. When the storm