Lawrence Jones | Lawrence Jones

How to get the most out of life? Sir Richard Branson sums it up in a single word

March 2nd, 2010

I will always remember my first night on Necker Island home to Sir Richard Branson. We were just settling in and being made to feel very welcome. We have the entire island to the 4 of us and it is the most idyllic setting for a family holiday.

Stood in the Great House on the hill looking at a photo of Sam Branson and his friends, I turned around and Richard walked up to me arm outstretch and with a warm smile he bowed his head gently and welcomed me to his home. It is the greatest thing for me to meet such a distinguished businessman. I have many friends who have become incredibly successful. Most of them though are particularly hard with their staff and rule their businesses with an iron rod. Richard is someone who clearly breaks this mold and it is refreshing to see that he is a million miles away from the ludicrous business ethics they portray on The Apprentice.

It didn’t take him long to suss me out and pretty soon we were discussing sport. He is currently in training for the Virgin sponsored London Marathon. He had already heard I was a keen exerciser and immediately asked if I’d like to run with him. A couple of Richard’s guests arrived for drinks, they were staying on the nearby island. They owned and developed Vale and Beaver Creek in the US. (An amazing Ski Resort) During the conversation with Janet and Paul from Beaver Creek, one thing stuck out and it made an indelible mark in my brain that I think will be there forever.

Richard said, “well, if you say Yes! to everything, you are going to have a far more interesting life.”

In my 41 years on this planet nobody has ever give me such great advice or such a great directive. And it makes perfect sense. How many of us just potter through life and procrastinate. I have only been on the island less than a week, but I am 100% sure you will never see Sir Richard Branson procrastinating. He is a decisive character, who doesn’t stop for breath.

Before leaving for bed, I asked what time we should meet. He said “pop around to the house at 6.45am and just shout me if I am not up.”

I didn’t sleep a wink that night, excited at the prospect of continuing a great conversation with a fantastic philanthropist and entrepreneur.

We have since run for a number of hours together and I have had some solid business advice during my time following in his great footsteps. Advice that once you have heard it appears like complete common sense. However you could read a 100 books and find 50 different ways from a variety of experts which all contradict each other. So to hear it from someone you respect, immediately fills me with confidence. And actually now we have discussed it, I totally understand and I cannot wait to get back to UKFast and start implementing some of these great ideas.

Yesterday I ran with him a little later than before, and I reminded him of what he had said to me and what an impact it had.

I explained that you could have written an essay, yet in one short sentence he summed up just how simple you need to make it.

“If you say Yes! to everything, you are going to have a far more interesting life.”

What a great piece of advice and for anyone setting out as a young entrepreneur, in business, in school, wherever and whatever you are wanting to do, this is good advice. It is a simple strategy that I can promise you Branson lives by. He is a man with a large appetite for life and it grows bigger by the day, and I am sure his positive attitude towards just doing things straightaway, off the cuff without procrastinating has to have something to do with his enormous success.

I am very interested in how he portrays his feelings on this subject, as he decided to use the line as subject matter for a column he is doing for the New York Times. It is definately something to look out for.

Lawrence Jones UKFast

Dedicated Server Hosting, Manchester

Tags: advice, dedicated servers, entrepreneur, hosting, Lawrence Jones, motivation, Richard Branson, UKFast, young entrepreneurs
Posted in Business advice, Business motivation, Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurial Spirit, Lawrence Jones, People development, UKFast | 1 Comment »

My Journey To Necker

February 25th, 2010

It would be a great deal easier just to explain that I hopped on a plane and flew there, after all I am currently flying on the smallest plane I have ever been in that we have chartered to take us from Barbados to Beef Island.

But in real terms the journey started way before. And if Richard Branson has taught me anything, the brand experience is truly transferrable between Virgin businesses.

My first encounter of Virgin was Culture Cub. A great band in the 80’s. They wrote a song called Victims, which has truly the best piano introduction of any pop song.

I went on to approach Virgin Records years later with a demo after recording a song called “Whenever the Leaves Fall” on a load of old recording equipment once owned by John Lennon. It was in a tiny recording studio, not much bigger than this cockpit.

I spent months trying to talk myself into an appointment at the old Virgin headquarters on Ladbrook Grove and Harrow road, London.

It was there I learnt the art of instant relationship building and the importance of getting to know the gate keeper. I’d ring back in different accents, and the receptionist would say, “is that you again Lawrence?”

I never gave in and one day after hearing the receptionist ask a colleague “is Danny in?” after I asked to speak with the head of A&R, after getting knocked back again, I rang back 10 minutes later and confidently said, “hi there, is Danny in yet?”

I was promptly put through. This technique and confidence has stood me in great stead for many years since. On this occasion I was quickly brought down to earth with a bump after a lady answered the phone.

I said, “hi is Danny there?” “Danny speaking” the lady replied. I was taken aback as I was expecting a man!

In true Virgin style she was lovely and said on the basis that I had got this far, she agreed to see me.
I remember the meeting well, and she liked the track. The disadvantage I had was that I did not have a readily formed band. She was in the process of signing The Railway Children, ironically my next door neighbours in Salford! What is the likelihood of that?

In my opinion they signed the wrong act, and the Railway Children never left the platform. They spent their advance on MGB roadsters and were dropped after never cutting it.

I went on to get an offer from a chap called Brian St.James Carr, a well known solicitor involved with The Sex Pistols, PIL (Public Image Limited) and Andrew Lloyd Webber. He heard my songs and got me involved with a chap called Lawrence Roman an incredibly gifted classical musician who did all of Lloyd Webbers musical arrangements.

He did the clever stuff in my opinion and made Webber look amazing, however I was young and I thought I’d get loads of opportunities like this and I turned it down.

I then made a decision to make it on my own in business first and pursue my music later. I knew I would either be incredibly poor or incredibly rich but it was highly unlikely to be the latter on the basis of how the industry works.

I had also developed some friends who worked in the arts, and I quickly learned that I was not someone who coveted the limelight. I’d have thrived off a publishing deal, but being a star was not a motivator for me.

To be successful in anything you have to devote yourself to it fully. 20 years later, I am still devoted to the cause and although hugely successful in certain elements of our business I am only on the first few rungs of a very long ladder.

And the music? Well one day! That is if I ever calm down my love for developing people. When I met Gail, I sold my recording studio and focussed on developing UKFast.

Not a bad gamble as it turns out. Especially when you consider the odds that were against us.

If you use the Jim Collins 3 circles principal to identify should we have set up UKFast as a hosting business, I’d have quickly identified that this was a daft venture to embark on. However it does demonstrate that passion and determination can on occasions replace common sense and logic.

can we be the best at it?
Well truly honestly at the time, no way. We were competing with multimillion pound corporations. That being said, we have won 6 years out of 10 the ISPA’s Best Hosting Provider accolade, so it is funny how things turn out
are we passionate about it?
Absolutely. After trying to host our own domain name thegallery.com we had appalling trouble with a business called Newnet. Peter Coates (who recently sold his business for £3m) and his son Gary had huge potential, however they were techy people and appallingly arrogant. My wife just reading this laughed and asked if that was tetchy or techy? They were so bad that when we moved, we simply left our equipment with them as we couldn’t face dealing with them further.
is it financially viable?
Well, if I’d known the difficulties ahead, I would not have ventured down this road. We were self-funded, which is a posh way of saying we had no money; so everything had to work immediately. We had to work so hard around the clock, if we made one error, we were dead in the water. That was the simple truth of the matter. Not something you want over your shoulder, yet that being said, you wont get a bigger driver! If I didn’t sell, we didn’t eat.

Times are very different now. I have 2 wonderful kids and a wife, who is still my business partner, with the added responsibility of a working mum. We have been very lucky. We still have no debt (which is a posh way of saying, now we have money in the business) and we have had numerous offers from competitors to buy UKFast including one for in excess of £50m.

But it is not the money that motivates us, it is the journey that we are on, and I simply love every day and I live for the challenge.
So why Necker? Well, when I was turned down by Danny Van Endon at Virgin, I set a goal. Right, I thought, I will get there myself. One day I will do business with Branson and Virgin in some capacity. I will become successful on my own.

A few years later, I hired a Grand Piano to the Virgin company for a new artist at a place called the Boardwalk in Manchester. I remember the Fax Header, with all of Richard Branson’s businesses and locations. It was incredibly inspiring. It had Necker as one of the destination boxes to tick. It was then that I decided, “I’d like to go there and one day meet the man behind the company.”

Last year whilst staying at The Lodge another property owned by Virgin, I said to Gail, we need to find out who hosts this business and get them as a client. It transpired they are already a customer, and have been a happy one for a number of years. We also host UKTV which is owned by NTL part of the Virgin Group.

And 15 years on from that Fax and that initial goal, here I find myself, mid air on the way to paradise.

view from the main house, Necker Island.

Lawrence Jones

Tags: entrepreneur, goal setting, Lawrence Jones, motivation, Richard Branson, UKFast, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Galactic
Posted in Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurial Spirit, Lawrence Jones, People development, UKFast | 6 Comments »

A really BA Experience Destroys Brand Value

February 22nd, 2010

Jim Collins recently sent me his latest book, How The Mighty Fall, which I have not managed to prise off my wife yet. If he’d written a British version of this book, it would have to feature BA. British Airways. How on earth has the greatest British brand fallen out of the skies to such depths of despair?

I asked a couple of members of the BA staff, does BA stand for Bloody Awful, after the worst experience I have ever encountered of substandard behaviour by representatives of BA.

I was checking in proudly to my first class seats at the BA counter in Manchester, when I met the second rudest woman I have ever had the misfortune to meet. We had telephoned the night before just to ask advice on the recently introduced ESTA. (An official government document required if you are flying to or through America.) The advice we were given by BA was “don’t worry about it, arrive at check-in in the morning and we will deal with it then as technically you don’t need one as you are not staying in the US.”

We trusted the advice and when checking in, told the lady at the First Class counter why we had not filled out the ESTA as per our instructions from the BA staff the previous night. At this point she categorically refused to check us onto the flight and promptly blanked us. I asked for help, and pleaded with her for someone more senior who could assist.

Enter (stage right) the rudest woman I have ever met. She arrived with a plastic smile that she maintained for the best part of 45 seconds before laying into my wife who was beautiful in her calmness. The BA official told us we should have filled out the ESTA online and that we should have and I quote, “put that you are staying in Miami in the destination box.” I explained that our final destination was the British Virgin Islands, I didn’t dare tell her it was Necker. “we advise people who are traveling through the US to the Caribbean to put down they are staying in the Continental in Miami.”

I explained that this would be incorrect and that this was a US official immigration department document!

Without another word the 2 rude BA staff disappeared.

We were kept waiting 40 minutes. Powerless and no other members of BA staff were prepared to help. When we asked for help, they said, “we are not getting involved.”

It really was like a farce. And if she hadn’t made my 6 year old burst into tears I’d have have been laughing in disbelief. We had turned up to enjoy the first class experience.

Enter Simon, a scruffily dressed man in jeans and a creased polo shirt. ”Because of the delay at check in and that my staff members had not known how to deal with the ESTA, we are able to board this flight to Heathrow, but unfortunately it was now too late to attach the luggage to the connecting flight.”

He advised us that he had personally seen to it that the plane to Miami would wait for us. He apologised for the behavior of the 2 staff and he assured me we would be met by ground staff and hurried through at the other end.

It was clear this man just wanted rid of the situation. He was working on the principal, Out of Sight Out of mind. (perhaps a new management course BA are running)

My 6 year old asked me , “Daddy, why was that lady so rude?” and I was unable to defend her.

This farce had actually delayed the plane leaving Manchester and stressed 100 or so other people also connecting to Miami and other destinations.

On arrival at Heathrow, there were no ground staff waiting to assist us between the planes. Luckily everyone else just managed to get their flight to Miami, but no surprise, we missed ours waiting for our luggage.

I saw the striking BA logo with the words CUSTOMER SERVICE in massive letters. Fantastic I thought. I’ll pop over and get some help. The 2 ladies (who reminded me of Les Dawson’s characters) with folded arms grunted back at me when I politely said, “I don’t suppose you can help and tell me where to go, we have missed our flight.”

“We’re baggage.” I continued and the other one piped up, “have you a problem with your baggage?” “No” I replied, “well we can’t help you then. Like my friend told you we are baggage” They carried on talking and I couldn’t help pointing out the irony in how they described themselves.

Walking away I pondered, does BA stand for Bloody Awful. It should do!

Eventually after a series of equally idiotic encounters with various Bloody Awful staff I found someone who was lovely. She was kind and called Jeanette. However the damage was done. The brand was dead in my eyes.

She did start quite hard like the first Bloody Awful staff in Manchester, telling us that as we had missed the flight and it was more than likely non refundable. First class tickets can be as much as £9000 each I didn’t dare ask Gail how much she had paid. I must have turned white with the sick feeling. 4 tickets wasted. 3 demoralised girls, 2 hours extra waiting and 1 missed flight! Jeanette quickly realised what had happened.

She explained the check in staff in Manchester were all agency staff. She fixed the ESTA issue in a few minutes putting “IN TRANSIT” in the destination box.

She went on to explain they had not had a pay rise in 2 years and that they had no idea if their jobs would even be here tomorrow. “The spirit is dead, and I am so sorry you have had all this trouble.”

Every cloud has a silver lining. And thank God, Jeanette booked us on to a Virgin Atlantic seat. One of our daughters, the 3 year old had some sort of anaphylactic reaction on the plane and needed emergency care. 2 doctors on board helped out giving her adrenalin injections, oxygen and salbutamol. Nikki, the Upper Class Senior Cabin Crew team leader was amazing, along with her team particularly Ross and Sacha.

We sat on the floor of the cabin outside the cockpit. The captain regularly came out to check on our 3 year olds well-being and after nearly the entire flight she recovered miraculously as kids do!

So how does something so great, become so Bloody Awful? Fancy not rewarding your staff and undermining them so they don’t know if their jobs are safe. I can’t imagine the people at the top have had similar pay problems?

British Airways is overweight in some areas and anorexic in others.

In our business if you have a potential weakness in an area you invest in it, and you allocate the best, strongest most aligned individuals. You certainly don’t cut back. The problem with BA is they have multiple areas of weakness, so as fast as you build relations with the likes of Jeanette you have sledge hammer Customer Services or disconnected agency staff with their own challenges. Invariably you destroy the brand value.

I think one of the issues BA also has is whilst they are busy infighting, arguing over pay and bureaucracy, the Virgin Atlantic team is taking conflict very seriously indeed. Going about their business with the Sun Tzu approach.

“He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.”

Well, in my mind BA does stand for Bloody Awful and although I have enough free airmiles to fly around the world 7 times, I’d sooner pay to fly a proper airline. Britain’s best airline Virgin. And I wouldn’t swap our seat on the floor next to the loo for a BA Experience.

Lawrence Jones
UKFast

Tags: BA, Branson, British Airways, business, communication, customer service, holiday, hosting, Lawrence Jones, Manchester, Richard Branson, Virgin, Virgin Atlantic
Posted in Business motivation, Lawrence Jones, Manchester, People development, UKFast, Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

A New Year “Revolution” for 2010. It’s time for change.

January 1st, 2010

We are all looking for success in life, be it in your career, in your family, in sport or a blend of all. What defines success? And why do some people become more successful than others? Is there a secret? There are a million questions that need answering on this subject. It is a subject that I am fascinated by and that I have been studying for as long as I can remember.

I have been lucky enough to have met some incredibly successful individuals over the years, particularly in sport, business and music. These are 3 very different areas and you would think they all require very different needs to make the individuals rise to the top of their game.

In reality though, the answer is “not at all.” The people at the top of their game whatever their profession, share common values. This is evident in all successful people. You will hear experts on this matter talk about “passion, determination, motivation, self-belief.” Yes these are all common in high achievers, so they are the obvious ones to get picked up. They all might also eat 3 meals a day and this does not guarantee success. It is also easy to assume that the confidence a successful person has, once they have achieved greatness, was the same at the beginning of the journey, and this is not always the case either. So what is the secret common ingredient?

It is simple when you think about it. What is the most precious commodity known to mankind? The one thing in life that cant be cheated. Time. Successful people all understand the importance of time. By understanding the clock is ticking, just like in a race or a sporting event, every minute is a minute wasted when you are not working towards a greater goal.

Ironically, it is the one ingredient we also have in abundance, so much so, in my opinion this is why we take it for granted.

The only reason I started to become successful was after a near death experience. Once I experienced the possibility that death was just around the corner, I realised that life was to be lived. I made the slightest change in attitude towards time, and this made a massive difference to everything I touched from then on in.

The answer to every question is “do it now.” If someone had asked me before my accident “do you want to go to the gym?” or “do you fancy organising the house?” The answer would have probably been “maybe later” or “tomorrow.” Ask me the same thing now, and if I now say “tomorrow” it will be because I have genuinely crammed so much stuff into today or rather my wife has! My wife grasped this concept at the same time. When Gail arrived in France and found me in a hospital attached to 2 drips covered in wire and hooked to all sorts of contraptions, it was just as real for her on the other side of the fence.

So when you are doing your New Year’s resolutions. Scrap them all and just do one. Make a conscious decision to treat time as leverage to do more. Imagine what would happen if you crammed in a weeks worth of achievements in to a weekend. Pretty soon you will be doing a months worth in a week, and when you get super efficient, there are people who achieve more in a year than most people do in a lifetime. Think about it, in today’s society, doesn’t that automatically make these people more successful.

So today, and what better day to make a change, New Year’s day; take 3 things that you have been putting off and just go and do them, now, with out hesitation. See how much better you will feel, then tomorrow, just do the same, and so on.

All these small achievements will amount to massive change a year from now. Try it. It is easier than you think. After all what have you got to loose? Only time will tell!

Time is the most underrated commodity in business and life in general. Have no regrets and live life to the full.

Happy New Year and have a great 2010.

Lawrence Jones

Tags: 2010, business, goal setting, Lawrence Jones, motivation, New Year resolution, passion, success, successful
Posted in Business advice, Business motivation, Lawrence Jones, People development | 1 Comment »

Thanks for a great 10 years @ UKFast

December 20th, 2009

A decade ago when Gail Jones (then Gail Everton) and I embarked on the journey of setting up a business on the Internet, I had no idea what lay ahead.

In fact if it wasn’t for a pretty horrendous experience when trying to register and host a domain called theGallery.com, we’d never have changed direction and set up a business in the hosting arena. And I suppose it was the “bad experience” which forged the direction we took to provide the very best in service right from the outset. It was this start which also gave us an understanding of exactly how a client feels when the hosting provider goes wrong or doesn’t listen.
If you are a client of UKFast and you ever have a problem, write to me or pick up the phone. I hate having matters left unresolved and I cannot settle when I know a clients server is down.

Although it is a decade ago, I remember choosing the name UKFast very carefully. The name needed to reflect exactly what we were about. UK, obviously for it’s location, Fast, because we hated slow service and slow connectivity, .net because we were a network and hosting related. Partly too because the .co.uk version had already been registered. It took us 3 years before we were able to acquire the UK TLD version of UKFast.

We must have trawled the who-is directory for 3 days trying every name possible. It was during the boom so the world and his dog were registering every derivative of every word. Design agencies were popping up everywhere linking colours to animal names. Blue Pig, Black Sheep etc. You can almost pin point a company and its date of origin from the style of the name.

So 10 years on what has changed? Well just about everything, in fact it is easier to highlight what has NOT changed. Neil Lathwood, then a teenager working in a computer shop, found by my wife on a search for someone who could network some machines I’d sold. He came in a for a days work experience and never left. He is now the IT director and one of the most well respected boffins in our industry. It is safe for me to say, I do not know a harder working man on the planet. His desire to continually learn and stretch boundaries is only matched by an identical skill inherent in my wife. Together we formed a solid senior management team and 10 years on we continue to disagree and challenge each other. We are considerably more beefed up now with Jonathan Bowers, communications director and Paul Harris, marketing director, yet we all still have to learn new skills every year to ensure we are capable of managing a continually changing business and horizon.

So what lies ahead in 2010. I am so excited by the challenge ahead this year. Even more so than usual. Last year saw UKFast able to compete with a bigger marketing budget. It is one of the challenges of funding a business privately and not borrowing form banks. We have seen many businesses fly past us on our journey, a lot now we have caught up, some we have overtaken, the others give me the challenge and the determination to continue to grow UKFast to be the best of the largest business to business hosting providers in the UK.

Last year we saw the benefit of the Castell Cidwm acquisition, a hotel at the foot of Snowdon in the National Park in Wales. It is an invaluable asset used for training and team building. It is a place where status is removed and replaced with rack-sack and compass, a place where team members can see their managers in as much pain as they experience themselves. We have run more than 40 trips touching more than 100 staff. Put simply it cements all the people who invest time and energy down there and lifts camaraderie when we are back in the office.

This coming year we are focussing on growing the business further and we have some exciting announcements expected in 2010. We are also exploring the opportunities of some potential acquisitions and some new services which will compliment our existing offering.

In the mean time, to everyone who has helped UKFast grow, people past and present, thank you for your ideas and contribution. To our amazing client base, thank you too. By having such a strong client base we are able to invest in infrastructure that ordinarily none of us would be able to afford singly. Thank you for having the foresight to choose UKFast and if you are not already a client I look forward to meeting you one day on our quest to speed up the Internet and improve the way we all do business online.

Happy Christmas.

Lawrence Jones

Tags: business, customer service, Gail Jones, hosting, Jonathan Bowers, Lawrence Jones, Manchester, motivation, Paul Harris, team building, UKFast
Posted in Business advice, Business motivation, Lawrence Jones, People development, UKFast | 2 Comments »

How to get the most out of life? Sir Richard Branson sums it up in a single word

My Journey To Necker

A really BA Experience Destroys Brand Value

A New Year “Revolution” for 2010. It’s time for change.

Thanks for a great 10 years @ UKFast

Recent Blogs

Lawrence on

Business growth reports

UKFast Blogs

Archives

Tag Cloud

Archives