How we built a business out of recession - Chapter 15 - John to the rescue
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 15th chapter about CitNOW, the company started from a kitchen table in Winnersh, Berkshire. If you’d like to read from the beginning, here’s a link to chpt 1. Each chapter is a 5-minute read. It’s an early draft of a book.
CitNOW was founded by Andrew Howells and Donna Barradale in 2005, although the company was only registered in 2008. In February 2018, we sold the company to Tenzing, a UK private equity company. It has been sold again since.
Help sometimes comes from unexpected places. I’d known John for years. He’d been my Danish distributor when I worked for Videologic, a PC company based in Hemel Hempstead. At the time, it was making a bit of a ruckus getting video onto a computer screen, something we all take for granted now.
Since the warm welcome received when I first met him, John’s become a longstanding friend, attending both my weddings.
At some point, I explained the new CitNOW business to John on one of our irregular catch-ups. He was checking in to see how everything was going. I concluded after the call that he didn’t think much of the business, gently pointing out an immediate flaw he’d spotted. Why wouldn’t dealers use FaceTime** for free, rather than a proprietary video solution which would cost them money?
There are many reasons, but it’s a fair question when you only consider the tech perspective. Of the hundreds of prospective dealers I met, the objection to paying a monthly fee for CitNOW because they could use FaceTime for nothing came up once.
I distinctly remember the well-informed Sales Manager raising the objection too. If we need to send a video, we’ll just use FaceTime. They never needed to send a video because the manager focused, not surprisingly, on everything else that was shouting for his attention. The group signed up two years later, and the dealer got CitNOW. Focus was finally brought to bear, and videos started to be sent.
I first met John at Aarhus Airport, a few miles from the second-largest city in Denmark and John’s home. He told me he’d be wearing an Apple badge on his jacket, so there’d be no identity issue. I arrived on a late Sunday evening flight from Copenhagen, a convenient internal hop which only lasted about twenty-five minutes.
I had luggage in the hold, so waited briefly for my bag to appear. Most people had already left when I walked the few metres into the meet and greet area. I think there were ten people left waiting for their friends or family. Only one man was wearing an Apple badge. He’s kept me laughing ever since.
That night, I assumed we’d drive to my hotel (which he’d arranged) and meet again in the morning. But John had other plans. There was no hotel. Instead, I stayed with his family at his lovely home in downtown Aarhus. With bags dropped and hi’s delivered to the lovely Karin, John’s wife, we chatted further at a local bar.
I slept soundly that night on a mezzanine platform, reached by a ladder, in the attic. It wasn’t just the beer. I loved being up in the eave of the house and have enjoyed it many times since.
There was a very unusual alarm call that first morning, though. I was woken by a 4-year-old with ash blond hair and curious blue eyes peeking over the top of the ladder at the bottom of my bed, Dad behind, making sure she couldn’t fall. Line (pronounced Lena) was off to kindergarten and was very interested in seeing what men from England looked like. I hope I didn’t disappoint too much; I wasn’t exactly at my best.
Not long after my discussion with John about CitNOW, he offered to loan the business £15,000. I was gobsmacked. It wasn’t something we’d discussed beyond my complaints about myopic banks and our lack of working capital. He also insisted on only taking an interest rate a few percentage points above his stingy Danish bank, which was still less than we were already paying on our UK overdraft.
It was an incredibly generous offer, especially given that he had doubts about the potential longevity of the venture. It certainly gave us new impetus and bought us some time. We were still surviving on roughly £5,000 a month.
I never dwelt on failure; what’s the point? I already knew what it felt like and was keen to avoid it happening again. But this was a personal loan, even if the legals said otherwise. Whatever happened, I was going to pay John back. I’d done it before with Mum and Dad’s loan on my premature adventure in my late twenties, and I’d do it again now if I had to.
On the rare occasions when I did consider a future with another failure on my hands, probably in the Vauxhall Corsa with no radio, after another presentation went nowhere, I decided what my open in case of emergency recovery would look like.
Painful as it would be, I’d take another sales job with a decent enough basic, something to guarantee survival, with the biggest open-ended commission structure I could find. If that company sucked, with promises which were more fairy-tale than reality, I’d leave for another until the monthly income was back where it needed to be, better if I was doing my job well.
I could only ever think of one flaw with my emergency deployment. How might it affect the time I was able to spend in Bristol with the kids? The one great advantage of self-employment, even in cash-strapped start-ups, is the freedom to organise your work to suit your life. It’s a huge benefit and one I’ve been hugely grateful for.
With my divorce came a significant commitment to my kids. From the beginning of the business and the divorce, I always planned one school day in Bristol, taking them and picking up for tea afterwards. Over the years, that weekday moved around as they got older. Friday was always locked in the diary. We booked a family room at the Premier Inn if it wasn’t my weekend, or we all headed back to Wokingham, where Donna’s two children eagerly awaited their return.
I was never short of work, even when I was holed up in a caff all day. More options appeared when we started signing up dealers in the West Country. A typical day might have been pick the kids up at 08:10, school drop-offs, meeting in Exeter at 11:00 am. Back to Bristol — admin for an hour or more before pick-up.
Sometimes, when I’m in Bristol, I visit one of the many Boston Tea Party caffs from where I worked after dropping the kids, just for old-time's sake. It’s not quite the same now.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
**FaceTime is a proprietary videotelephony product developed by Apple Inc. which is free to use.