How we built a business out of recession - chapter 19 - eating doughnuts.
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 19th 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.
Not long after Alistair came on board, we had our first encounter with Autos on Show (AoS), our first real competitor, hailing from Cardiff.
They started at a similar time with an umbrella organisation called LifeOnShow, offering streaming video solutions to several sectors, including sport, property and automotive.
We liked that they were working in other markets and were hoping they’d find success there, continuing to distract them from turning all their attention towards automotive. It was a challenge we would come to face later. But then, in our early skirmishes, often at trade shows, our only focus was automotive. It proved to be the right decision.
Aside from not spreading ourselves any thinner than absolutely necessary, we took very different views on company image.
The P’s, the owners of AoS, were very much a married couple, always together at trade shows; Mrs P head of sales and marketing, front of house. She reminded me of the Welsh mythical goddess Rhiannon, dressed to impress, framed by her long, flowing, straight hair, which would have easily reached a horse’s saddle had she been sat on one. Mr P, the software engineer, was very much a background figure, always wearing an expensive, crisp, collared shirt, never a tie. We never spoke, but I often watched him on their stand, deep in conversation with someone I invariably hadn’t spoken with. I often wondered whether I’d just lost another sale.
Their website was predominantly pink and shouty, with a confusing melange of products and prices. They always offered an immediate discount if you signed up today. Ours offered an immediate live demo - 15 minutes or less, and a promise that we provided the world’s best automotive video solution.
The live demo never proved too popular (fear of that word live again), and the headline was eventually removed when a friend of the Ps complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. It just shows how toothless that organisation is. Not only did we establish who the complainant was, an admin error on their part, but we continued to use it on all our printed material at the various automotive shows until we finally ran out of leaflets over a year later. This was in full view of our competitor, who never uttered a word of complaint. We were, of course, delighted that we’d got under their skin.
While our staff knew Donna and I were a couple, we rarely worked together, never talked about our relationship, and used our different surnames to reinforce our business relationship, nothing else.
We wanted to appear more significant to the outside world than we were. Being a cosy couple from Cardiff or Wokingham was not how we chose to do it.
I’d also been burned before. One of the most painful but valuable lessons I ever learnt from our failed first partnership in interactive TV was to keep a much quieter public profile. Then, I’d never hidden that we were a couple and had done plenty of outspoken press interviews boasting about how we were changing the world of TV advertising. Column inches written might have been abundant, but I was also starting to draw attention from powerful forces who might be tempted to make life difficult for a start-up.
There were two early instances with the doughnuts, the nickname which stuck after AutoTrader, the all-powerful advertising platform for new and used cars, summoned us both to present.
AutoTrader’s management team was having a quarterly gathering at a Surrey hotel, and someone thought it would be helpful if we were on the agenda. Ultimately, it turned out to be a fact-finding mission on their part. No contract to provide a video service was forthcoming for either company, despite assurances that this was the prize at stake. They were undoubtedly aware of the growing number of links to videos being populated on some dealers’ ads - mostly ours, I’m pleased to say at the time. The question they were posing was whether video volumes were likely to grow and, as a result, whether they could increase advertising revenue further, making video a premium service.
AoS went first. When we were finally called in to do our pitch, the AutoTrader team joked about us not bearing gifts, although they were grateful that we hadn’t thought to bring another dozen Dunkin’ Donuts.
The second instance involved Wessex Garages, a successful Bristol and South Wales dealer group. This would be a significant win for us until we got the bad news that AoS, who’d not been involved in head office discussions in Bristol, had convinced Chris, the Ops Director, to choose them when he’d been visiting one of his Welsh dealers where AoS had been piloting. Who could blame him? The price on offer was better, and he preferred their picture quality.
A tense conference call, at least for us, followed several days later with Keith, the Wessex MD, Chris, Alistair (now our Sales Director) and Tim from G-Forces in attendance.
Tim was involved because Wessex was also a G-Forces customer, and they’d been responsible for the initial contact. Like our other web agency resellers, G-Forces had opened the door, and a significant order was now about to slip away.
What became apparent very quickly and the reason Tim got involved, was the lack of relationship between G-Forces and AoS. It had become acrimonious when AoS continued to insist to any interested dealer groups that they worked with G-Forces when, in fact, the opposite was true - no shared clients and no relationship.
It was all patched up later, but at that moment, Tim won us the business and never took any commission, his reward being the outcome.
I enjoyed developing a good working relationship with Keith and Chris. Bristol was perfect for me, and as their Account Director (I wore many hats), I often arranged our reviews on a Friday.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.