It started with a phone
Many founders of fast-growing businesses set out with the most modest of intentions.
For example, Pierre Omidyar originally set up eBay as a vehicle for his wife to trade collectables called Pez candy dispensers. Omidyar had no inkling of what the site would become.
Adrian Portlock, whose Gloucestershire-based company Recipero has built an online database comprising the serial numbers of 100 million stolen goods, agrees that this is “often the way with businesses. If you see an opportunity based on providing a solution, that’s normally a good basis for a start-up.”
One only has to look at some of the ridiculed inventions on Dragon’s Den to see the perils of trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist (what problem could have give rise to the ironing board that doubled as a piece of lounge furniture?).
Adrian, 50, set up his database, Check Mend, after an irksome experience highlighted a need for such a resource.
“I lost a phone on the Tube in London,” he recalls. “And when I went to the lost-property office they said ‘can you identify the phone?’ So I said ‘a Nokia 6310i.’ And they said ‘well, we’ve only had 35 of those today.’
“Then they wanted an IMEI number, the serial number of the phone. After much messing about my network gave it to me and I managed to get my phone back.
Eureka moment
“It then occurred to me that there was a market for keeping those details somewhere central, so if that if people lost any gizmos they could log in and find them more easily.
“So that’s how it started and it did really well.”
As is often the case, however, the role of the database changed after another eureka moment.
“People started telling us that they’d had something stolen or lost something, and would we update their account on the database? So it then occurred to us that the information that something had been stolen was actually more valuable than getting the registration in the first place.”
“It’s a very simple idea that’s grown into this pretty large system.
Proof surely that bad experiences need not be entirely valueless and that apparently trivial occurrences can have far-reaching implications. Who would have thought that, far from being a minor inconvenience, losing his phone would prove to be a defining moment for Adrian Portlock.
“It changed my life!” he says.
Restless
Via a HND in hotel management, Adrian’s previous career was in hospitality.
After cutting his teeth with a major hotel chain for two years, he opened the first of many hospitality businesses, a restaurant, aged just 23. That first business, an upmarket French brassiere, was then followed by several hotels and more restaurants.
After selling his chain of businesses in 2000 for a sum large enough for him to retire before 40, Adrian decided to take some time out. However, he soon became restless and was embarking on another venture before the year was out.
“It sounds great, but you can only mow the grass once a week before you get bored! So then I got interested in what we’re doing now.”
Adrian obviously didn’t need to approach any banks.
“I was very lucky. I had some cash of my own, but I had a business colleague who I’d known for a long time who introduced me to another guy who’d also sold his business.
“They both decided that my idea was quite interesting and became investors with me, bringing some experience and additional knowledge.”
The decision to invest was soon vindicated.
“We got into profit reasonably quickly. We had a five-year business plan with a view to breaking even in year three, which we did slightly before that.”
Similar services to Check Mend do exist for particular industries, such as cars and antiques, but Recipero’s database is unprecedented in terms of its enormous scope.
Demoralising
“All this other property was never in one place before. It was spread over insurance, warranty companies, law enforcement, the public themselves… all over the place.
“So our remit was to try and bring as much of that information into one place as possible in order to eventually offer a service where people could check the provenance of what they were buying second-hand.”
Sourcing the information from so many different places was a tortuous and occasionally demoralising process. It was, says Adrian, “extremely difficult”, involving “an awful lot of pounding the pavements, going to see people, explaining what we were trying to do.”
They also had to get “data-sharing protocols in place with all these different providers” and “talk to law enforcement, who are obviously difficult to deal with because of their security around information.”
That such an experienced hotelier and restaurateur was almost beaten by the task, really gives you a sense of its scale.
“It was an awful amount of very hard work to get all this information into one place, very daunting.
“A couple of times we almost thought about packing it in. But we got there in the end – through bloody-mindedness as much as anything.”
The silver lining to their labours is that any prospective competitor would also have an extremely tough time surmounting the barriers to entering this industry.
Brain power
More than most, Adrian’s story proves the axiom that the first two or three years of a business’s life are usually the most gruelling for the founder.
Despite the trials and tribulations of getting Check Mend to where it is today, Adrian insists that he enjoys running Recipero “a lot more than my previous career”.
“You have to use a lot more brain power in this job. It’s less manual and there’s more thinking and planning.”
Nevertheless, some of the principles he learnt to adhere to during his 17 years in hospitality are just as relevant to online businesses, he says.
“There are still elements of making sure that what we do works for the consumer. I think a lot of ‘techie’ businesses don’t actually think about the consumer, about their experiences.
“This is especially the case with the web. It can look like it’s been designed by a techie, not someone who’s designed it from the consumer’s perspective.”
Growing reputation
Speaking of techies, they now have a broader IT skills base having acquired a software house.
“We now have our own internal programmers and technical people who look after all the systems, which has made a huge difference. Originally we outsourced some of that.”
As staff numbers have grown gathering information has become easier, something also aided by Recipero’s growing reputation.
“More people are seeing what we’re doing as beneficial to the consumer and more are willing to talk to us now because we have a track record.”
Now firmly established, the company is set to expand internationally, with the US the first stop.
By the end up the year Adrian also plans to “get the Asian market up and running. And in the next week or two there’ll be a European site based on all the EU information that we have as well. It’s pretty exciting really.”
As well as expanding internationally the company is looking to forge connections with some of the web’s biggest marketplaces.
“We’re trying hard to get some integration with social networking sites and auction sites. That’s our next big target – to get the actual system integrated into these listing processes.
“It’s good for them because not only would it be on a revenue share, but we’d also give these communities a really powerful tool to protect each other and themselves.”
Bringing the interview full circle, Adrian warns start-up entrepreneurs against allowing their focus to drift from the raison d'être of the business.
“You have to be focused, you have to patient and you have to keep in you mind’s eye what the end game is. If you’re convinced that what you’re trying to develop is a really worthwhile product or service, then beware of being drawn down too many blind alleys, as we did.
“You have to stay as focused on what you’re trying to achieve. You do end up being a bit obsessive about it.
“And crunch the numbers,” he adds. “Make sure that you have enough funding in place to see you through to profitability.”
