It was a creative place for me and whilst it was mid holidays and the majority of students were on vacation, I really got a sense that I was in a special place. I had a great summer and made some lifelong friends and although I considered moving there, I was fundamentally a musician and back then, wild horses would have not dragged me from my vocation.

I never realised just how important Palo Alto was going to be in the technical revolution that followed. With Stanford University on its doorstep too, the area is steeped in history in the same way people look upon Manchester as a central point for the Industrial Revolution, Palo Alto and Silicon Valley have to carry similar weight.

Since then we’ve seen meteoric rises from a number of the worlds largest technical giants, Apple, Cisco, eBay, Google, who house their head offices there.

One of the most recent of the dominant players is Facebook who moved to Palo Alto in 2003. They have had an interesting rise to fame and good fortune, although the fortune is a little more recent.

With traffic volumes exceeding Google, Facebook has more than 830 million users, and as a result has to be the world’s most high profile website.

In recent years it has entered everyones homes and hearts, linking families, businesses, long lost relatives, school mates, it has done the impossible. It is doing the unimaginable. It crosses borders as easily as water and it knows no boundaries. There is no culture that has rejected it. It works in every language. Fundamentally it feeds the needs of all humans, whatever creed or continent.

The billion dollar question is how far can it go?

There is no point trying to work out how Mark Zuckerberg created such a masterpiece as I doubt he really knows. There was evidently a gap in our social lives that none of us knew about and Facebook filled it. What Zuckerberg has done extraordinarily well is exploit that gap and give us exactly what was needed.

So with talks of the Facebook IPO, is it worth the $100 billion that they are hoping to raise? It sounds like a lot of money and with economies all over the world facing tougher times around the corner, it seems crazy that a website that allows us to communicate with each other can be worth so much.

Yet, if you put it into perspective, $100 billion is only 27 times the annual revenue of $3.71billion, when Apple went public in 1980 it was valued at $1.19 billion 25 times its earnings. It is moderate in comparison to Googles who went for 218 times earning back in 2004. Yet Google delivered and in the last 8 years changed the face of advertising. Facebook would have to be the world’s first $700 billion dollar company to replicate Google’s rise.

When you consider Facebook grew 88% last year, it is a tempting gamble, yet a great many brokers are warning against investing in the rising giant. Personally I can see it going for a great deal more than 27 times even though the market currently dictates around 12 times. There is an emotional attachment that people have with the site and that sometimes carries a great deal of weight, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial entering is particularly high.

If you scrape away all the hype though and compare it to Apple who grew its profit 85% to $25.92 billion, Apple trades at a modest 13 times its price to earnings.

If you apply the Facebook multiple, UKFast would be valued at almost $1.0 billion.  ($939 million to be exact.)

Maybe I should have stayed in Palo Alto after all, especially when you apply the Google multiple, UKFast would be worth $7.5838 billion. Now even my wife couldn’t spend that much.

Whatever the outcome, you have to hand it to Zuckerberg, he’s done well. And inspite of a great many people all professing to have either come up with the idea or influenced it, he has hung on to the lions share getting credible people in around him who have track records in designing large scale corporates, enabling him to remain creative.

This is the thing I admire the most in any business. Its the first thing that suffers usually. Demands on the entrepreneur dictate new pressures and larger responsibilities as businesses sky rocket, so much so they often suck out the life and fun of most founders. Yet in spite of this and some pretty stupid gaffs, Zuckerberg enters the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame as one of the youngest internet billionaires.

On the subject of gaffs Zuckerberg paid David Chloe a graffiti artist who decorated a wall of his first office in Palo Alto offering him shares instead of a few thousand dollars. Those shares are now worth an estimated $200,000,000.

Ironically, the fee for the picture David Chloe painted is more than the cost of the building that they left. I am not sure I’d want to paper over that mistake.

So as Facebook move to Menlo Park Campus to their new HQ, I cant help thinking of the neglected piano. I do hope with all that money sloshing around someone takes the trouble to give her a tune and a tinkle every now and again.

Each season, we review the effectiveness of the relationship and the benefits of a symbiotic relationship with a sports club. There are a great many things to consider, performance on the field, management, community contribution, hospitality, the list is endless. In spite of a poor 09/10 season and some drastic management restructuring we decided it was the right thing to remain with the club regardless of potentially difficult times a head.

But a year on, with all the changes at UKFast and the recent changes to the Sharks squad and management, it feels the right time to hand over the mantle of “Proud Main Sponsor” to another lucky business owner and their team.

When we first got involved, Hodgson was an unknown, a little like us. I have watched him grow and develop into an awesome player, husband and dad, and it has been an honour to be his personal sponsor and friend. Its incredible to see my colleagues at UKFast develop in a similar way too. And along the journey teams change, I have lost people from time to time, its upsetting but sometimes people just need a change of scene.

I do think Charlie’s leaving will be a big loss to the Sharks though. He is one of the most underrated players in the Premiership. People naturally remember his early Twickenham and England appearances and remember a very young man who missed a number of kicks. What people weren’t aware of was that the England kicking coach an ex-school master of Johnny Wilkinson insisted he changed his run up and stance, in spite of Charlie’s superior kicking stats in the premiership.

It took Charlie a few seasons to building confidence to say “No!” but sadly the damage was done.

He has been an amazing ambassador for the Sharks. He is a very calm and well-respected player, both on and off the field, and even with all the difficulties with the appointment of Mike Brewer, Charlie went about his business and kept the players united.

There is no doubt the change in management style with Brewer’s appointment changed the dynamic of the club and when I heard Charlie was heading to pastures new, it is a good reminder that nothing lasts forever, especially where sport is concerned.

We originally got involved with the Sharks as a Technology Partner building their site and helping them with their marketing.

Back then the team played at Heywood Road where a few thousand fans stood in the Birtles.  I have lost count of the number of CEOs and senior managements who have come and gone since then. But the club grew from strength to strength.

We’ve been on the sidelines cheering them through their toughest times and through some tremendous times. I can count the number of games I have missed in a decade, on one hand. My daughters first game was at 10 days old!

The memories I have will last forever and I do not regret one minute or one penny I invested in the club. Jason Robinson’s last game, what an occasion, the dying minutes, Jason turned on his magic and turned a losing score line into a victory, in one of the greatest displays of British rugby I have ever witnessed.

Stood in the Birtles 12 years ago, Gail and I set a goal, “one day we’ll be the main sponsor” it was a pipe dream back in the early days.

So a few years ago when the Sharks lost their main sponsor McAfee, I was eager to throw my hat into the ring. We had grown enormously at this point and in a very proud moment we signed a seven figure contract. In fact to achieve this goal was one of the highlights of my time as a businessman. And in spite of the looming recession back then I still believe it was the right thing to do.

And now as the clouds lift on the recession, UKFast is blossoming and I have a lot to thank the Sharks and their fans for. We have grown 43% on the previous year and although this is marvellous news, it leaves us needing huge amounts of cash to develop more data centre space.

We have spent millions in the past 2 years building our first and I believe Manchester’s greenest data centre. It is due to open in June 2011, literally weeks away. It is large enough to house more than 12,000 servers. However in the last 2 years we have grown so much that actually it is clear we now need 5 times the space imminently. The latest plan is to build 100,000sq ft. This requires every available penny and more!

And so, in spite of the most perfect symbiotic relationship any business has ever had with a sports club, sadly the decision is made for us. It’s game over.

For a Manchester business wanting to align themselves with Manchester’s premiership business owners and colleagues, there is no better organisation in Manchester to support in my opinion as pound for pound the value you get from rugby sponsorship far outweighs any other sport.

I wish Brian Kennedy and his team, the new CEO and all the supporters all the success for the season ahead. You never know, as our business continues to grow, we may be back!

In the meantime, I’ll see you on the sidelines, like the old days.

PRESS:
Jonathan Bowers
jonathan.bowers@ukfast.co.uk
07720 222 227

This sounded very much like a challenge. And as someone who hosts hundreds of online retailers, some huge ones too, I knew I couldn’t lose.

I bet them £1 I could prove them wrong.

Sitting with my web designers and marketing team, we immediately found ways of improving their system. Their e-commerce shop was clunky although the photography was stunning, the site could never live up to the brand, because the site was slow and the user experience was poor.

We got stuck in as a project and actually built Henleys a new website and content management system to help run it. I know this is some way from our core business, however we were helping out friends and after all, I had a pound at stake.

With in a few months of UKFast getting involved, the site was bringing in significantly more money, and in December that year, they did more than £1,000,000 on the site. We’d actually done nothing more than make the user experience the most important focus point. By speeding up the site and putting the ecommerce shop on seriously fast servers on the UKFast lightening speed network and the results to date, speak for themselves. We didn’t do any “SEO” or optimisation, we didn’t try and stuff the site full of keywords, we didn’t try and cheat the search engines, we built something that users would just love, and they did!

So what went wrong?

Well this is a lesson for us all. Luckily the site is still going and although the brand is taking a battering at the moment, the site is still in action, though sadly it is not performing like it used to.

As a marketeer, when you change something, you monitor it. If it’s good you carry on, if it’s bad you stop and revert to previous stage.

Henleys recruited some in-house SEO Experts. The revenue the site generated warranted more investment in this area and quite rightly, this is what they did.

However, in my opinion, they changed too much in one go to measure what it was that stifled the traffic.

Along with moving to a new web designer, they moved their infrastructure to their designers too which resulted in a massive slow down in site performance. This was not picked up by the team as when they viewed their site, it was super fast as all the images were cached on their machine. To a normal visitor arriving for the first time, they did not have this luxury, to them, the site ran incredibly slowly.

They also changed their domain name from HenleysClothing.co.uk to Henleys.co.uk

This is a fair enough decision in the board room, however, henleysclothing.co.uk was now a massive asset and well used and loved by hundreds of thousands of consumers. It was also very popular with Google who attributes “track record” historical performance information to every domain. A new domain, is literally starting again.

With a number of other UK businesses with the name Henleys in the title, Henleys Clothing descibed the business perfectly.

This coupled with umpteen other changes to their strategy and layout, image sizes, all made it impossible for even the best marketeers to monitor what works and what doesn’t.

The result, they lost momentum and they never recovered.

Sadly, they were already doing everything right and if they’d just left it, it would have continued to flourish at the rate it was.

We have all been there. When something starts to go well, we want more. Its not until you lose what you had, that you concede where we were, was actually where we wanted to be. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and this is why as a business owner or manager or if you are involved with an online business, there is so much information available to help you track your progress. The important thing is, no matter how excited you are for growth to keep the board happy, make small steps and measure. I call this Stop, Start, Rewind. Only when you get really good can you do the fast forward, however use this mode with caution, and if you really cant resist, make sure you have the right people on your team who will tell you the truth at every stage. More importantly, never put middle managers in between you and your key suppliers.

I had real problems reaching Ben and Simon once the site was established. When I was told news of the domain change I did everything in my power to get them information that I had on hundreds of other companies who had done similar things. I was always batted back to the same person who was pioneering all the change.

If you have people helping manage suppliers, make sure you check in regularly to ensure your team are not holding back information to protect themselves. No one likes being responsible for failure, so its imperative that you keep a close eye on the things that really matter in your business.

On a positive side, Henley’s still has a very strong brand, great clothes and if they can get the site back up to speed (quite literally) in my opinion this is fixable. If Simon and Ben are remaining at the helm, I’d imagine they will bounce back very quickly and learn from these very difficult lessons we have all had to face at some time or other. They are tremendous entrepreneurs, it is important not to underestimate what they have achieved building a huge brand in a very short amount of time.

We have an amazing statistic that the vast majority of people who leave our network, return at some point in the future. We had one this week, Gypsy Media. We had hosted them from early 2001-ish for 5 or 6 years. They left for a more competitive solution. They found that that didn’t work. They tried a more expensive solution with a competitor of ours, and after bouncing around a few suppliers, they returned. It is the most rewarding feeling, helping people achieve their goals. At the same time, it is a thankless task. Whilst it goes well, everyone assumes its the SEO specialists and the marketing teams, when it goes wrong, it’s the hosting.

Still I love it and its an amazing era. Who knows where it is going to take us, all I know I am going to keep going, small steps at a time, and measuring as I go.

The UKFast girls work incredibly hard. They are all super intelligent, fun characters with big personalities with the caring gene which means they make the perfect hostesses. You find the UKFast Girls at all the outside events, Twickenham, Sale Sharks, Silverstone Grand Prix and all corporate hospitality. They also fly with me on a great deal of my business travels and commitments.

I find it helps having fun people around. The girls help break the ice at events and play an invaluable role in so many areas of the businesses. They all double up in some capacity or other – be they a PA, sales person, account manager or even senior manager. By hanging around with the girls we develop strong relations with each other cementing a bond which is necessary when working under pressure.

I personally believe it is the toughest of all the jobs at UKFast. They are expected to always greet people with a big helpful smile, a task they do very naturally.

They have been a big hit at the premiership rugby this year, we have never had so much involvement directly with the players.

The photo here is of the girls thawing out after a morning skiing. They have all been involved with the 2010 UKFast Hosting Summit in Verbier’s prestigious venue, The Lodge.

After a heavy week discussing how to revolutionise our product offering, The UKFast Girls are due to be flown back to Manchester by Private Jet so they are fresh and ready for the Internet World, where they are hosting the UKFast stand at the hosting worlds biggest conference.

Why not come and say hello! If you are in London this week, Tues, Wednesday and Thursday, come and visit us there and meet the ultimate team that helps make UKFast one of the most unique businesses on the planet.

UKFast Girls on The UKFast Private Jet

So why a sport sponsorship deal?

It was not an easy decision spending millions of pounds of a hard earned marketing budget in one go, with the recession still firmly gripping society however I felt it important to take the opportunity and be decisive. Its a 3 year deal and when an opportunity as large as this comes up, in my opinion you grab it with both hands.

It is also important to look beyond the economic downturn. The credit crunch will not last forever and it is important to stand by what you believe in. For those fans who go to all the home games, you will know that UKFast gets a mention every time Charlie Hodgson scores. A few seasons back, he injured himself and although we were offered a replacement player, we stuck with Charlie. He came back, stronger, fitter and in my opinion is one of the greatest fly-halves in today’s tough game.

So when McAfee wavered, I made sure we had a window where we were able to negotiate without interruption.

I have had a few chats with Brian Kennedy, and he is grateful for the support and for the fact that there are others in the Manchester and Northwest business community who understand and believe in what the Sharks are doing.

It is the work the Sharks do team building in schools and with kids which sealed it for us. It is so easy to disengage and get transfixed on your financial goals and loose site of what is really important. Gail and I put as much emphasis on hitting personal goals as we do the financial ones, and this had been born from a discussion a decade ago, when First Software were on the shirts “one day, we’ll be main sponsors.”

10 years on, the Sharks, UKFast partnership is more than a logo on a shirt. It gives us an opportunity to say thank you to Manchester and the surrounding community. It is the fun part of being an entrepreneur which enables us to do something as exiting as this.

Just cant wait for the season to start now!