- We faced a number of barriers we had to overcome in getting the... >
We faced a number of barriers we had to overcome in getting the business off the ground, and it was mainly just keeping the technology up and running. In 1992 IT technology didn’t have quite the same robustness as it has today. We spent a lot of time with the computer network down, not that many people knew what a computer network was!
Access wasn’t around, you didn’t get it free with your computer, and a database was an extremely novel concept. Nobody had really done it before apart from British Gas privatisations which was an entirely different thing altogether, so the trials and tribulations were really just centred around keeping the technology stable enough to do anything with it. We were building Marketing Databases, Customer models and IT networks when they didn’t exist.
We started the business with a 12mhz computer that cost £5000; we paid £1000 for another 20mb hard drive and we had a printer. For direct marketing, what we did is sleep on the settee because the printer only had a 200 paper tray and wouldn’t print the copies off fast enough to get them out. So if we needed to do a 5000 or 10,000 mail out someone had to sit up all night and keep putting 200 sheets of paper in the printer. Slowly but surely we grew the business from there.
I think if you start looking at things as challenges though you’re probably never going to get anywhere. I just went ahead and did it, and we overcame the stumbling blocks in order to have a business.
Alan Timothyi-snapshot
