Me

So you know my name, but what is it I do? What makes me an entrepreneur? And why is it I hate the word so much? I’m not promising any poignant words of wisdom, nor do I expect anything to come of this, I merely thought it may help the odd individual who like me started with a dream – to be the next Richard Branson. I have broken these answers in three pages, mainly because it’s a long read in one sitting, but also because I realised my story is really made up of three parts; What made ME who I am, what have I learned about MYSELF, and what I do now.

This page is on what made ME who I am.

I started my first business at uni, and I won’t lie, it was purely to pay for my beer fund. Ironically, while pretty much everyone I meet assumes I did some kind of business degree, I didn’t. In fact, Sociology and Gender is hardly the foundations of a city based businessman, but it suited me well with only 8 hours of lectures a week, and generated some intriguing debate on what my friends later coined as my ‘neo-modernistic feminist slant’. What it did do was highlight one, more than obvious but often overlooked fact – everyone is different. One size does not fit all, nor should we make it. You’ll probably understand why that has any relevance as you read on, if you can bare to, but back to the business side of life. My first business was in fabric printing, and to be a little more specific, t-shirts. Uni seemed like a ripe cherry when every other club and society wanted some kind of t-shirt or another. I even managed to get into embroidery and manufactured my first rugby team kit within 6months of starting. Truth be told, I hated it. With the amount of things that can go wrong during a printing run, it was a miracle I ever really got passed a douzen prints. Never the less, I opted to continue in the print game when I finally graduated with a respectable 2,1 – ‘standard’.

What dawned on me rather quickly was that my clientele, all Uni clubs and societies, had rolling Chairs and my contacts diminished almost as quickly as my alcohol tolerance. Clients gone, I took on a partner and shot for the starry world of fashion prints. My partner was a graphic designer by trade, and a very gifted one at that, but he was also a friend. Our first collection in one hand, and at the time what seemed like a hefty investment of £5,000 in the other, we dove head first into our first exhibition. Now we weren’t naive, which is to say we had plodded around London Fashion week to see how the pros did it the month prior to the show, but neither were we quite prepared. Our thing was printed graphics, all themed around saving the planet, being green and all the other things which seemed to be popular as a means of expression back then. The problem was we did not have our own t-shirt cut, we simply printed onto Hanes or American Apparel t-shirts, and in a time of economic prosperity, people were looking for the complete package. We waddled on for nearly a year before in the end, we realised it was not going to work. Looking back when people ask what went wrong, I realise the answer is simple. We were two mates having a laugh, thinking it would all be too easy. I don’t remember ever working past 5pm, and if we were in before 10am we were doing well. That’s not to mention the pub lunches. It is easy to say I did not work hard enough, which is of course true, and while I am not trying to divert the blame, I do think that leaving university to go straight into your own business is foolish. Uni certainly encourages laziness. It promotes self learning which is a positive, but when every student knows that a few weeks of cramming at the end of your third year can grant you a ‘standard’ 2,1, what’s the point? Looking back, a year or two in a hard job in London would have done me well.

So what next, four years in business and so far not a lot. Well, I then met a guy called David King, now a business partner in many ventures. Dave saw a gap in the market as a small boutique digital agency building websites for local businesses. The theory was simple, there were a lot of technically gifted contractors who could do dazzling things with the web, but they were not exactly what I would call born salesmen. Not that I would call myself that either, but I generally get on with most people and I understand the needs of a business. We worked on a commission only basis and tried to sell what we could, but together we started coming up with some outrageous uses for web based platforms, and while neither of us were overly technically minded, we knew somewhere in there was a golden vein waiting to be tapped. Starting without a portfolio was never going to be easy, but small businesses had started to cotton on about the need for a digital presence. The usual sentiments were that the Yellow Pages were making smaller returns and custom was on the down, lost to something called Google. It was the first time that my age (22 at the time) was not a problem but an advantage. There was an assumption that I knew everything to do with the Internet, and while that was not quite true, I had learned enough to put me in good stead to hand over to the real experts. All in all things were going well, we hired in-house staff and continued to take on bigger projects with higher returns.

It was at this time that I learned something that even to this day I struggle with. While turnover was up, overheads were up too, and the difference between me taking a wage and nothing at all was thin. It was a harsh reality to learn that you need to pay staff, no matter how many extra hours a week you work beyond them (often double at least), while taking nothing for yourself. Not that I minded, I knew my reward was long term, but it’s tough when every sale you make goes on the overheads rather than lining your own pockets. We continued to grow for two years, taking on staff in the first and second alike, but still receiving little ourselves. Finally getting frustrated by a lack of personal funds, we sought investment from a man who taught us a huge amount about how not to do things. His flash Ferrari and contact list was certainly impressive, but when we found out that he had simply inherited (and subsequently squandered) a large financial empire, we realised that he was full of hot air. In fact he finally left us in debt with a host of clients who were pretty awful at paying bills. As I said though, we learned a lot, especially that we were undervaluing our services. We were making a huge amount of money for our clients and making very little for ourselves.

Somewhere along the line, something just clicked. Our knowledge as marketeers had developed to a level where we could boast we could sell anything online. I think we made a lot of mistakes on the way there, but we arrived at a place where results started really coming through. We could promise and deliver on some challenging briefs, and creatively we had hired individuals that much like us, were bubbling with ideas. We had won several large accounts of note, particularly the launch of a new health insurance product called Childsure underwritten by Aviva. We also won the Jimmy Choo Couture website, a mobile campaign for the Ritz Casino, and developed the new brand for Teepol, the chemical offshoot of Shell Oil. We now continue to build awareness online for some huge companies and our head office is based in Moorgate.

I think all in all our success on a personal level came down to a few simple things; working every hour given to us, being prepared to go through hell to get to the other side, and learning everything we could about our sector. As a company, having a core team of hard working and exceptionally skilled individuals allowed us to deliver on our wacky ideas. We hire contractors regularly to keep overheads low, and we put a lot of pressure on them to deliver exceptional results every time. Clubbed together, it all seems to work relatively well. Recently we have had to adapt to changing times, namely the dreaded ‘R’ word, by working more and more often on performance related fees. I guess at the end of the day, we need to be willing to put our money where our mouths are. So coming full circle, how does this relate to my degree and what I learned about the fact that everyone is different. Dealing with clients, you quickly learn that not everyone needs to be treated the same. Some like regular reports, some like regular meetings, some like to know the tiniest details about a campaign, others are just concerned by results. I have needed to adapt accordingly, but it means I have generally kept good relationships with all my clients. The same applies to marketing campaigns, I hate companies that try and sell you a single marketing product. Google AdWords, Thompson Local, Best of, press space, online display. It is dishonest to sell the same product to everyone, and I stand by my belief that one size does not fit all. We try and look at all the options and do what is right for the client. That’s why I love digital marketing. It is very measurable, which is another way of saying accountable, and it means we only use the most effective mediums to promote a given client. We seem to be a culture of buzz words where clients come to me and say, I want ‘x’ or ‘y’, so now I simply ask why. There is probably a more cost-effective solution than what they have picked up from a friend down the pub or sales call.