How we built a business out of recession - chapter 2
The story of CitNOW*
This is the second chapter about CitNOW, the company we started from a kitchen table in Winnersh. If you’d like to read from the beginning, here’s chapter 1. Each chapter is roughly a 5-minute read. They are all early drafts for 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.
A few years after the corridor conversation, I started looking for a solution to my Honda conundrum. By then, Simon had left to sell holidays at Lastminute.com, the start of a rapid career progression after 14 years with Honda.
Ian, who I’ll always be grateful to, remained my go-to at Honda. Apart from the work I continued to do for their TV channel, he was always open to discussing other opportunities, and I kept him abreast of anything I thought might be of interest.
It was how Honda’s TV channel had come about. I’d introduced Ian to a new British Telecom startup, which had launched a rival interactive TV platform to Sky. The media costs to have a presence were small. Still, it represented another early opportunity for Honda to start interacting with viewers and gather some data on who was watching their ads.
Before today’s internet, where we take TV-style content and options to shop, explore, and request almost anything for granted, television advertising was a one-way event. TV viewers who watched their favourite soap operas, dramas, and films were also expected to watch the advertising during breaks. There was no opportunity to interact with the brand, and the biggest concern for the advertiser was what sort of numbers were really watching. Ad breaks were, after all, convenient stops for visiting the loo and making cups of tea.
Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half, attributed to John Wanamaker (retailer) in the US and Lord Leverhulme in the UK, is a famous quote which still had some relevance even then for the traditional TV advertiser.
A TV channel that just showed ads, even those as engaging as Honda’s, wouldn’t have received many second visits, so I started looking for content. There was the occasional gem like Charlie Butler-Henderson racing around a circuit in a Civic Type-R, which Weidens had shot for some reason, but not much else.
The channel could have been swamped with endless hours of powerboat racing, but fortunately, Ian stepped in. He found some budget to shoot videos of the current car range, and I organised a week-long shoot at Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome in Leicestershire, famous for its Avro Vulcan jet bomber.
My interest in cars started young and peaked early, when I took delivery of a VW Corrado Storm while working for the ad agency with the Volkswagen account. I quickly went into terminal decline several years later when the car was traded for an annual season pass. In my divorce settlement later still, my ex-wife kept the people carrier and I had her aunt’s old Vauxhall Corsa with no radio. It had been our runaround gift several years earlier once her shiny new one arrived.
I loved that Corsa. It was a grey, innocuous, nothing of a car that covered thousands of miles up and down the country without complaint. Although I hadn’t planned it, the lack of entertainment gave me many hours to think about the business, mulling over problems and how to possibly solve them.
Despite a distinct lack of interest in cars, aspirational or otherwise, I still couldn’t help feeling some excitement when a transporter came through the gates at Bruntingthorpe with at least half a dozen new cars on board, including an S2000, their two-seater sports model.
It happened on a quiet, sunny May evening at a disused aerodrome in the Leicestershire countryside. The transporter left, leaving me alone in this surreal throwback to an RAF station. I had no one for company apart from a security guard at the front gate, a bunch of keys in my hand and miles of wide concreted runway. I most certainly did explore the circuit several times pretending BBC’s Top Gear had hired me to create a feature on the very nippy S2000.
Fresian Way was the first of a handful of rentals when Mrs H. and I moved in together. It was described as a linked detached, a wonderful marketing term for a semi with more detachment. Our landlady visited us several weeks into our agreement to enquire how many people we had living there. She knew about the family of four and was a little concerned that this might have ballooned. We explained that I also had three children who would regularly visit from Bristol. It seemed to appease the situation despite our lack of bedrooms.
It would be more than ten years before the banks finally thought we were an acceptable risk for a mortgage again. Even then, it was touch and go, despite Santander having provided a £3m loan facility for the business.
I wish I could find Mrs H’s picture taken of me sitting in this house's kitchen. It sums up the beginning of everything related to CitNOW and the pleasing notion that the business started around a kitchen table.
I’m sitting in a plain blue rugby top, sleeves rolled up. The children’s climbing frame is visible in the garden behind me, one reminder of why we might be doing this. I’m aware of the camera, a slight smile and the need to pretend to be busy. There are several sentences written down on an otherwise blank page, the A4 pad secured inside one of those folders, a conference handout from a goodie bag which I couldn’t afford to attend anymore. My mobile phone is conveniently located next to me, ready for calls, a rare event at the time. There is also a pen, wistfully situated on the pad, ready for the vitally essential discussions yet to take place.
I can now measure the distance between this moment in 2005 and when we sold the business in 2018. There is so much to do, so many mistakes to be made, and so many disappointments to come mixed in with the occasional wins. Sitting in our linked detached in Winnersh with five children between us, we don’t have an inkling of quite how difficult the journey ahead is going to be.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
Although I came later, I am proud to have been part of the CitNOW journey. Great times working for you and Donna.