No email, no internet, power cuts, sideways rain and no mobile phone access.

Brilliant!

Castell Cidwm is an inspiring place, a real hive of activity. This week we had various groups down doing different activities. A few of the directors were giving the UKFast Management Training Program a final polish, whilst I had the arduous task of taking a team of apprehensive colleagues through the hills above Beddgelert. I don’t need much of an excuse to get my walking boots on. I get a great deal more done in the peace and quiet of the mountains as opposed to being back in the office.

I have learnt that walking is a great place to discuss plans and get to know people. People seem less guarded, less preoccupied with portraying themselves in polished way in the countryside and by mixing fresh air and an increased heart rate, it also makes work more enjoyable.

Over the past 12 months I have been considering how to best manage UKFast as it continues to grow at a rapid pace. I have no formal business training apart from what I pick up from those around me and from the mistakes we make. With 125 staff and contracts of £14.5m already this year, it is a very different business than the one we started in 1999 in a tiny 2 man office on Fountain Street. But as it grows, do we have to run it differently?

This is a question I have been pondering over for some time. I think there is a way where we can maintain that small business feel.

UKFast covers a wide array of clients, SMB / SME and Enterprise and Government organisations. All these organisations require very different levels of care managing their solutions and after significant analysis, 2 very distinct groups emerged.

I remember reading Losing My Virginity and being intrigued why a businessman would chop his record company businesses in half when they reached 100 staff. It seemed alien to me at the time, as there were only 16 of us in UKFast when I read it. It was not something I gave too much thought to.

And so, after much deliberation and analysis, we made the decision to split the team into 2 new distinct groups with defined responsibilities. It was this new team that I invited down to Wales to walk with me whilst we discussed our futures. Being away from work gave the new team time to bond and digest the proposal and concentrate their energy on this new task in hand. I can confidently say I could not achieve the same result in an office environment. Even though our office is a great environment, sometimes you just have to swap the walls for heather.

The team left Castell Cidwm enthused and empowered with an exciting journey ahead.

The result is that now everyone benefits, both clients and the team alike.

Over our 11 years in business we have managed to win some amazing brands and like our other clients, we look after them and we support them through their growth.

It will come as no surprise that our bigger clients require more attention. They tend to have significantly more complex hosting requirements and as a result, they need extra help.

It is impossible to provide one member of staff for all of our thousands of clients across the whole UKFast client base, yet at the top level, we have clients now who get exactly that.

When I first heard the idea I assumed that the main benefit is that by keeping the businesses small it maintains or increases the energy in both parts.

Now this is true, but I underestimated some of the other benefits of the change too.

The main benefit is that instead of losing great people along the way, when top level jobs and management positions are already filled, it creates the perfect progression from Team leader to Manager, Manager to Director, from Director, to Director of a new division.

Each time someone is promoted, you create a gap to fill with enthusiastic team members.

And when you are considering bringing in new talent. Have you considered the ones under your nose?

A friend of mine told me “promote people to a level above they’d ordinarily expect. They will thank you for it and work significantly harder.” He gave me a couple of examples and mentioned a cleaner of one of his businesses, and how she went on to be the manager of the entire division.

It reminded me of some questions I was asked recently, one of them was, “What did you learn from your first job?”

I said, ‘the person brushing the floor, might be the one with the biggest drive and most potential.”

In short, I have learnt, never underestimate anyone as I was the person holding the brush.

It’s very easy to underestimate people. I know I have personally done it numerous times. It can be a scary prospect entrusting a position of responsibility to someone. It’s always a gamble. Yet it’s a bigger gamble when you bring someone else in.

Recently Sale Sharks lost their Commercial Director Nathan Bombrys. It’s common knowledge so I am not talking out of turn, it’s merely a good example. He’d been with the club a decade. He’d arrived at around the same time we got involved, shortly after the game turned professional.

He understood the club and the sponsors inside out. He was extraordinarily passionate about both the club and the owner. After about 3 or 4 changes to the CEO role, Nathan realised that the opening would never have his name on it. Consequently he decided to move on and instantly was snapped up by Scottish Rugby.

Over the last 10 years there is no supplier closer to Sale Sharks than UKFast. I worked alongside Nathan and helped him fill the stadium on numerous occasions. I knew that Nathan was undoubtedly the man for the job, I had first hand experience of this man’s talent. He was the right person, back when they gave the role to Niels de Vos and although I think Niels is a smashing guy, Nathan was the one pulling the strings. Not many people know that, but that is a fact.

A very clever Stamford professor, Jim Collins wrote that in almost every case of the businesses who achieve greatness for a sustained period of 15 years or more, the leaders were grown from within.

Yet it is hard to trust in talent you might already have. There is no right or wrong answer. There is just opinion and conjecture. Either way, whatever you do in business, it’s a gamble.

Certainly not, and there starts our journey.

A little like Jim Collin’s theory on ‘the Purpose.” A business needs an unattainable goal to aim at for the rest of their days (eg. Disney and Walt’s “Purpose” To Make People Happy).

Just like a purpose, we need another goal, STANDARDS. We can do this easily from the comfort of the boardroom, where quite often we are protected from a disillusioned customer or team members who might challenge the status quo.

It is maintaining the standards that is the ongoing challenge. Anyone who sells a business and stops work, quickly finds out that they are bored. This is because maintaining high standards is more than a full time job, its a vocation, where you are never allowed to settle.

Before I explain I want to set the record straight. I am a big believer that UKFast is an awesome organisation, but do we have challenges maintaining our highest standards? Absolutely, ever single hour of every day!

So how do you maintain standards? And what are standards?

I believe “you get what you tolerate.” So whatever you tolerate becomes the level where you will settle. If you tolerate poor standards you will get poor results.

It’s when you choose not to tolerate something, when the complications kick in. If you are unhappy with a standard and you refuse to tolerate it, you need a driver to influence future behaviour.

There are only 2 driving influences you can use, Fear and Praise.

Fear is a negative driver, resulting in pain when something goes wrong.

Praise is a positive driver resulting in positive emotions such as empowerment, confidence, joy.

If you are successful in a negative environment and you have been fearful of failure, you immediately feel relief. Relief is an important emotion, but it is not a motivator. In fact it is the opposite. Once you experience relief it is far easier to switch off than re-engage. If you are no longer fearful and you have been trained to respond to fear you sit back and savour the feeling of comfort.

If you are successful in a positive environment where you are encouraged. It is highly likely that the emotions created from praise when you do well create positive emotions, such as joy, happiness. These emotions don’t allow you to settle. Quite the opposite, they build momentum and determination. They provide rewarding feelings for everyone around and people feel included.

In an office environment, if you berate someone in public, imagine what this does for the person you are embarrassing and also for the rest of the team. Everyone gets demotivated.

It gets more complicated too, as most business owners use a blend of both fear and praise. Some choose to use just the one. In my experience it is far harder to manage both fear and praise well. It’s predominantly the business owner who focusses on one of the drivers, fear or praise, that usually has the more extreme results. I use the word extreme, not better, because unless you try the opposite way for a sustained period, you have no measure of just how successful your business might have been if you’d adopted the opposite strategy.

The reason why I believe fear and pain is difficult to balance, is because people like consistency.

When people know a business is managed with an iron rod, they are able to plan to avoid the implications of doing something wrong. The fear is a great driver, (argued by many business people as the greatest of all drivers) people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid pain.

If you predominantly rule your business with an undercurrent of fear, but you try a different approach for a time and start praising people, it has no impact. People are still fearful. Now you are just viewed as inconsistent and people don’t know where you draw the line.

There is no right answer, you have to find the balance for what works for your work force. In my encounters it amazes me how many more people use fear as the driver over pleasure. Personally I think it is counter productive. I think you get short term results and high staff turnover which in itself is costly. Life is to be enjoyed and who are we to spoil the party.

We only have a 3rd of our lives to ourselves, we sleep another 3rd and the remaining 3rd we spend at work. I regard it is my duty to ensure I create a space where everyone has as much fun as humanly possible.

We all have our own ways, our own styles and its important to respect each others values, but I love influencing others to improve their environments because so many people benefit. We have a healthy profit margin because people work significantly harder for UKFast than they might for a previous employer. I know this is true, yet people often say to me, “its easy because you turnover millions and are very profitable.” Well, we didn’t always, yet we have always invested in the team and their morale. And when I use the word invested, our biggest investment was our enthusiasm and passion for people. All people, colleagues, clients, prospects even competitors.

I have lost great staff who have been poached because they wanted to try something else. It doesn’t take long before the phone rings and they are discussing jobs with us again. People who were once successful, inspired and driven beyond belief simply drift in the wrong environment.

I come back to the thought I wrote earlier, “You get what you tolerate.” If you read between the lines with this statement, who is at fault? The person you are tolerating or you for tolerating them?

If you want to be successful, raise your standards, stop tolerating and keep praising. This applies to everyone, not just business owners. Managers, mums, dads, everyone!

It may look as though UKFast sprang out of nowhere suddenly winning awards and accreditations for a wide variety of things however what we are now experiencing is nothing new. Countless businesses before us go through the exact same process.

We have for a decade (in September) been slogging away with the rest of the world oblivious to our presence. This is typical in the business world, and the best analogy of this comes from Jim Collins the author of the best selling business books “Good to Great” and “Built to Last”. He describes this common scenario in businesses by describing his “chicken and egg concept.”

“Imagine an egg” he describes, “sat there doing nothing. Totally uninteresting to the outside world, yet inside there is plenty going on. One day, the egg hatches and out pops a chicken. Suddenly everyone is amazed and shocked at the new discovery. Although the egg has been sat there for a very long time incubating, until the day it hatches, no real interest is shown in it.

It is very easy to run a small business and think that you are getting nowhere. Whist your competitors fly past with VC (Venture Capital) backing and lavish their shiny brands in your faces in the best of the trade magazines. But you must not get disheartened. Easier said than done, now we have a business which appears to be moving on from the ugly duckling stage!

But it hasn’t always been that way. I have had many businesses and even more daft ideas! Although each one has made money and I even sold one to Granada in my 20’s, I never stuck it out to the hatching stage.

There is a danger these days with the DOT COM bubble and conceptual businesses which attracted interest, one thing still remains firm from that time, the ridiculous question of “when is your exit point?”

To me this cheapens your business and all the hard work you and your colleagues put in to nurture and build something special. I have been scorned at by some pretty large entrepreneurs for not having a set exit date or amount of money we will sell for. I hate the word exit anyway. An exit is place you look for when the building is on fire or when you have to leave somewhere in a hurry. I get equally blank faces when confronted with the same question from accountants, lawyers and the like. What is wrong with wanting to build something solid, with longevity? A family business or a small business where you don’t feel you want to set the world on fire.

I believe these make the best businesses. UKFast was conceptualised in a garden, one summer. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew the internet was going to be massive as I had spent a year on and off in America and the whole of the US was obsessed by it. The only thing I was sure of was that my new girlfriend Gail Everton would make a great person to have on the team.

Years later I found out from reading Good to Great that this process was a tried and tested method for launching a successful business. Collins talks of getting the right people on the bus and the wrong ones off, then when you are confident you have the right team, find your product. It seems a backwards way of doing things, but ironically now I look back this is what we did. It was just a very small bus, or may be a tandem! The first 4 people (myself included) that sat in the Ducie House surrounded by a plethora of other tiny businesses all with similar dreams and aspirations, are still with UKFast , 9 and a half years later.

It took us the best part of a week to find out what we were going to be doing, and ironically it wasn’t through sophisticated analysis or market research, it was because we tried to register and host a completely different business called thegallery.com. The irony was that the company we tried to do this through was appalling and so we tried another, then another, then another and so it went on until I turned to Gail and said the opportunity is not in the website idea thegallery.com, it was in the hosting of websites for other people.

Daft as a brush, and with out realising the might of the organisations around us, without the technical expertise at that time in house, without sufficient finances to pursue such a dream we set about finding a name.

All this because we were frustrated with the shocking attitudes of these new businesses that were growing by default, because their industry was exploding.

I didn’t care whether or not we made money, I knew there was a hole to fill in the market and part of my destiny was to fill it. A decade later we still fill the gap. Yes, we have had to evolve our product and service and our ability as managers and business professionals, but our core values are still the same as the first day we set up. We still have the same attitude. It is this attitude you need if you want to be truly successful. It is something we all experience in our lives, be it as a child, at school, or on the sports field. It is something easily watered down, forgotten or drowned by mediocrity if not nurtured and rewarded. But it is in all of us, it is why we evolve, it is why we were put on this planet.

You have to believe that you are going to be the best at whatever you do. If you are not going to be, you may as well shut up shop and look to do something else. Yes you may fail, time and time again, but as long as the attitude is there you will eventually succeed.

Companies who go against these giant industry leaders do so knowing that deep down their service is better, their staff around them are better or their product maybe better. After years of diligence in the incubating pre-chicken stage eventually they emerge with an amazing business. All it takes is belief, resilience and perseverance.

So if you are in the incubating stage, don’t give up. Don’t let anyone knock you off your path, or make you feel your product or business is worth less because you do not turnover millions. It is highly likely that you will succeed. It is also likely during tough times like today’s economic environment that you as a small business have a major competitive advantage over your largest competitors. They will be in a position where they are having to hit numbers to impress share holders and stock market analysts.

Remember there are still customers out there you just have to fight harder to win and keep them. Work hard and when the recession lifts you will emerge a fitter, stronger organisation and if you have not already hatched, you will be ready.