I am here planning the next exciting stages of UKFast. Over the last few years I have been lucky enough to take advice from some extraordinary entrepreneurs. As a result I have helped catapult UKFast on to a very exciting stage in its development. We have grown year on year, not just in profits and turnover but in our resolve to make a difference.

By rubbing shoulders with people playing at a higher level than you, you most certainly develop at a faster rate.

We employ superstars. Are you in a position where you feel you have something extra special to offer?

You maybe like me 20 something years ago. No qualifications and no idea of which direction to go. On the other hand you may have every idea of your goals and direction. Either way, graduate or completely unqualified, seasoned professional, whatever your status, if you are a great person looking to do great things, I am waiting to hear from you.

If you are interested in meeting me and finding out what life and work balance is truly about, get in contact.

I can’t guarantee great weather. I can guarantee great food and great company, UKFast.

What are you waiting for? Destiny beckons……

Loz

Please contact Jayne Pitman and find out how to apply now on 0844 576 3999

UKFast
City Tower
Piccadilly Plaza
Manchester
M1 4BT

We even had Clem Curtis and the Foundations as the band and the entire squad of Sale Sharks players, girlfriends and wives came too. Clem celebrated his 69th birthday that day and still rocked the house like he did back in the 70′s.

This years annual party is even bigger. To celebrate an amazing first half of the year and for just being in business together, we are having UKFest. Yes that is UKFest and not a typo. It stands for UKFestival. We are throwing a weekend festival for friends and family of UKFast down in Wales on the Castell Cidwm estate, and if I can convince the farmer behind to borrow his field, we can squeeze in some extra tents and portaloos and invite even more guests.

But its not just parties and nights out. Your team mates need constant training, their environment needs to be just right. People are sensitive. Quite often, new starters bring with them associations of what businesses are really like. It’s their first hand experience from a previous job and they have the association firmly set in their mind that management equals pain and inconsistency and all businesses are the same.

Sometimes you can never break that association and people go through their lives really not enjoying their job.

We are currently in the process of kitting out our office with a huge amount of greenery. It is partly to celebrate the start of a brand new business venture with a friend of mine who has been in the world of trees and horticulture for 17 years with his lovely wife Clair. It’s also a great excuse for me to have fun and reinforce that by creating a fun environment.

So once you’ve created the Best Place To Work, what then?

I am a great believer in working with people to get them to be their happiest they can possibly be. But you know what, sometimes you just cant please everyone. If you have an individual who doesn’t quite get your core values and what you really stand for, they will probably work against you. Not necessarilly deliberately, but nevertheless, by them not “buying into” your culture and philosophies, they can cause a huge amount of damage. If that person is in a senior position, you have even more trouble.

I read a book called The Extra Mile that focusses on alignment and engagement. The 2 buzz words of corporate HR.

Objective number one is go get everyone aligned with your way of thinking, then get the most engaged people into positions of seniority (as long as they fit the mould) and then work towards getting every individual engaged.

Easier said than done and it is an ongoing quest when you have hundreds of staff. But it is possible. UKFast is living proof of it and although we are more a work in progress than the finished article, we are having fun learning about each other in the process.

The same book states clearly that if you have a manager or someone in a senior position who is either disengaged, or engaged but not aligned, you are in for a rocky ride, but there’s enough to discuss on that topic to warrant a dedicated blog.

I love puzzles. Getting your team right is the ultimate puzzle. It is like doing the rubiks cube in the dark!

So do people really understand the importance of alignment and engagement? I think not. It amazes me how many office environments I see or hear about that are simply not places I’d want to work. And working from an industrial unit is not an excuse either. I went to see James Timpson’s offices in Wythenshaw. Apart from the fact James was building a swimming pool off the staff canteen area, everything about his office was simply a “Wow!” And that being said, I don’t think you could find a managing director who places people and their well being higher on the agenda. James is a credit to British business and an example to other business men and women who want to build something extraordinary. He not only followed in his father’s footsteps, he strode on ahead and paved the way for a new era of “upside down management.”

And so after my FD at UKFast put it so succinctly. “We have colourful staff, but the office is a bit grey” I thought it time to take our “fun initiative” to a new level and start living some of our values! You can always do more, and if you ask yourself that question, can I do more at every stage, you will normally get better results.

So does it pay to invest in your staff? Absolutely! Invest in the workspace, training in every aspect of people and career development. I am just beginning to see the fruits of our labour, and it is worth while. It is difficult to quantify human emotion, we all understand monetary values, but when it comes to effort and passion, we don’t have a scale to measure it. As a result, I think it falls by the wayside in order of importance in 21st century business.

With regards to the office environment, when people ask “what is the rationale behind such a beautiful office?” I simply  say, “when I come to work I want to feel a million dollars. I want my team to feel te same.”

If you have any comments or ideas on how we can continue to develop at UKFast, I’d be very glad to hear from you.

Yes people do seem slightly more cautious. But this is partly to do with the fact we were told we were heading for recession. I remember backing out of a property deal after the Nothern Rock crisis. Thank goodness Gail and I plucked up the courage and pursued the deal, it was Castell Cidwm, the UKFast training property which is now an integral part of our successful recruitment and training strategy.

The reason for my comments are not flippant, I know a great many people have been through difficult times, my point is this. Is this a recession, or is it merely a change in the way people do business? What do I mean by this? Well, it is safe to say that people have changed the way they buy things.

When you purchase something there are 2 decisions that you make.

1/ do I want/need this product or service?

2/ where shall I buy it from

In the old days! People went to shops and bought there and then.

Then came the internet. Now people looked online, researched and then once they’d narrowed down what they wanted, they headed to the shops and bought it there.

But, then came the new era. An era of confidence where people simply go online to do research and then simply buy it without hesitation.

Well this is a massive shift. It surely makes sense that if you as a business have not embraced this you are going to be in a huge amount of trouble.

I believe the cultural shift in how we buy is SO extreme it is literally wiping businesses out who do not have a credible online presence. Look at Woolworths, they felt that the internet would not work for their business. Yet Argos who embraced it is now one of the biggest online retailers in the world.

I was at a round table this week discussing the economy and budget. I heard numerous businesses explain that they had zero growth. The same businessmen stated clearly when I asked them do they use the Internet to attract new business, “people  in our industry do not use the internet to research our product!” The irony is I have helped a few businesses in the exact same sector generate millions of pounds worth of new business, all via the internet! But how do you educate people who simply do not believe it is possible. These sort of limiting beliefs are lethal and often are the main reasons why businesses simply stop evolving.

If only I got a pound for every time I heard business people say “my customers wouldn’t use the Internet!”

Over the years, I have won a few £1 bets to people I have met at Sale Sharks who said, exactly that.

Caunce O’hara, now giants in the Insurance industry were about to spend a fortune on a website. I asked them to consider a different option. For less money I helped design and build a new system that not only worked out an accurate price for the insurance premium, it took the money and attracted new business. I won my pound.

It’s not a business model I’d advise people to follow, I am lucky enough to be able to do this as a hobby as I have a huge R&D team, I also have done this enough times to know, I’d succeed.

I have done the same in a variety of industries. Debt management, clothing & retail, one business in particular (again who said it cant be done) is now invoicing more than £1,000,000 per month from online sales!

I can guarantee these people dont think we’ve just been in a recession.

The problem is, “you don’t know what you are missing until it is too late.” It’s people’s own shortsightedness that is simply holding their businesses back, or in some cases damaging their business.

I have 15 year old kids who are customers and a great many small businesses who are doing extraordinarily well. It’s never the brands who are riding the crest of the wave, they simply think they are. A lot of the high traffic sites are below most peoples radar. The people who win, are the ones who realise that customer experience is everything, and they build a super fast and effective site and host it on a dedicated server for that added umph. Before they know it, they are getting customers from Google, and the customers are coming back in their droves because the experience is perfect.

When we explain to people that their site is slow, they don’t understand. They look at their own site and say, “it seems fast to me!” This is the biggest misconception. They are ususally viewing a cached version of their website on their own local machine. What does this mean? Well basically, your machine stores images of sites that you visit regularly. So it stands to reason that when you look at your own site, you do so though rose coloured spectacles. You are in effect getting an artificial view of how your business is really NOT performing.

On the flip side through your customers eyes, it doesn’t hide the harsh truth, that for new visitors, your site is like jelly waiting to set.

This is particularly noticeable for people who end up hosting in the US to save money. People can simply drop out of the UK arm of Google once the search engine picks up the foreign IP address. Google simply assumes that your main focuss is probably aimed at the foreign market, as your site will perform better in the country where it is hosted. Some of the largest hosting providers in the UK, host their customers in the US and Germany. Rackspace host thousands of their clients sites in the US on their Cloud environment. One and One (1&1) a German company who also own Fasthosts, who market themselves a the hosting worlds market leader , host their servers in Germany!

Personally I believe keeping it simple is the best way. Host your site as near to your customers as you can. We are lucky, by being in Manchester we couldn’t really be more central to the whole of the UK.

I hear horror stories all the time on this subject. One thing worse than going abroad to host, is taking it in house! The ultimate in stupidity. Let’s stick our server on the end of our broadband connection or a leased line. So what if it is 100Mb. You may as well attach it via string! Yes it might work occasionally but not enough to get noticed on the search engines. Telcos for years simply resold 100Mb lines time and time again, and guess what? They attached them to a 100Mb line. The ultimate in bottlenecking.

If you imagine the internet works on the basis of regions. You can host your store on the main high street, the Oxford Street or you could host it on a back street. Which gets more traffic? Obviously the high Street. Yet so many businesses spend 10′s of thousands of pounds on their websites, yet they think they dont need to invest in their hosting. They think they can simply stick it on some shared space, or a cheap dedicated server (down a back street). Even worse, they dont realsie why it doesn’t work properly or why they dont get awesome results.

At the same time, we come across small businesses who take our advice or dip their toe in the water with UKFast. Experience the speed of the UKFast network and then get addicted. These companies listen to their customers and upgrade every time their site slows down by a fraction. These are the businesses who are the next generation. It is not the brands you know about, these are the new kids who a carving out a new horizon. They not only get my vote, they get my help and support in every way. They are the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

So be warned. If you have a business and you are NOT taking your online marketing seriously, or worse still you are spending the bulk of your budget on the design and leave nothing for the location of your window to the world, you will not get the results you are wanting, but you will get what you deserve.

This does sound harsh, but it is a really harsh world out there.

If you are a web developer or you run a business designing sites, if you are hosting your sites on a single server to save money or to create a revenue stream, although you may think you are doing your client a favour, you are actually suffocating their business. If you wish to try a server to see the difference, drop me an email at UKFast or post me a comment. Every business I have tried this with has increased sales. Its not  rocket science, but it will certainly pay for one!

I think it is Ken Blanchard who says “people never arrive in the same demotivated state as when they leave.” He blames the management, saying they deteriorate through poor leadership.

It happens at a time when 4 people return to the UKFast team, so out with the old, and in with the even older! The common theme being, “you don’t know what you have got until you haven’t got it anymore.” I am sure it is not the case for all of the people who leave UKFast. Businesses are always on the move. The direction and speed of all businesses differ. You have to find the one that suits you the most, the one that is going in the right direction and at the right speed and is full of like-minded people. You have to be realistic though, people join you for a certain duration, often mapped out as part of their career goals. Even the most motivated of people can leave if it is part of a wider career strategy.

So how do you keep staff?

Whether you are a seasoned entrepreneur, or one that is just starting out, I believe your business need an identity. You need Core Values. Now you can copy these from other businesses, yet a word of warning. It wont work. Many of our competitors have mysteriously adopted similar or identical core values and marketing initiatives, but unless they are genuine and come from within, you will not be able to live these values day in, day out. And when you attract people with similar values that you are professing to have, they will soon recognise a pretender and once you are found out, they leave. It also creates discord amongst your existing team who will voice cynicism, worse still you wont even know about this as it will be done behind closed doors.

You need to ask all your team for the words that they like to be associated with whilst at work. Words like Honest, Professional, Hard working, etc there are litterally hundreds of them to choose from. When we did this at UKFast we used a local PR agency with a good reputation to come in and do this. We felt it essential that we did not influence the process in any way. Mike Perls the managing director of Manchester’s MC2 helped us out in person and he decided to go through each department seperately.

The results were astounding. Mike quickly realised that every department chose the same 5 core values. He explained the rarity of such a discovery and professed “you may be on to something here!” This was back in 2003 / 2004. The prediction was right. Our core values were set, and although up to the time of the exercise we did not know what they were, ironically we were all living them. Is this an accident? I have to say yes, as I have had no formal training whatsoever to run a business and my steep leaning curve has come from getting stuck in and not being frightened of making mistakes. The irony of finding 6 departments within the business with identical values is probably down to our recruitment strategy. I think we simply employed people we felt we will all get on with. Our early strategy (although that’s a bit too posh a word for it) was people first, qualifications second. I look back with close to a decade of experience and on hindsight, it wasn’t such a bad HR strategy.

As an 11 year old business we still recruit on a very similar basis. I am not interested in CV’s or stories of someone being the best sales person in their last job. With the right attitude and values I believe I can turn anyone into an even better one. Qualifications can often be camouflage for some absolutely awful candidates.

This is why our training centre in Wales is so important to us; Castell Cidwm. If you can get through there and you are still smiling, you’ll fit in.

So how do you identify your own core values?

I’d recommend what we did at UKFast back in the early years and split up your business into teams, keep the departments together if you like and ask everyone to write down 10 values that they hold dear. I’d then encourage them to discuss them as a group and get them down to a maximum of 7. Once they have argued which ones they want. I’d make them re-do this until they come back with 4 or 5.

A business should not have too many values. It simply becomes to complicated to manage if it does. After all, you can only feel one emotion at a time. You cant feel happy and sad, frustrated and angry, bored and vexed. We are quite simple folk at the end of the day (especially us Welsh), so simplify the values as much as possible.

It is unlikely that you will get the same result we got back in 2003 and you definitely wont get the identical list of values we chose either. I have done this now with many businesses and I have never had the same result twice. What does this tell you? Never, Never copy someone else’s. By copying others, you do yourself and your business a disservice and furthermore you waste a great opportunity to unite a team.

Now that you have your core values in place and everyone is in agreement you need to invest in your staff. (Part 2)

hedge your desk

Greenest office in the UK! UKFast

The event I was kindly invited along to started with a training session racing around the Velodrome. I was fortunate to get some one to one training with one of the Olympic team. I was keen to pay attention as I quickly learned that a break in concentration could prove disastrous. The bikes have no breaks and if you stopped peddling for any reason you were in danger of being catapulted across the track; which was incredibly steep on the corners.

Being in a room with the North West’s finest entrepreneurs is an interesting place. There is a huge amount of testosterone pumping around everyones veins and the bravado was evident amongst the friendly competitors. But once on the track, it was head down and down to business. It was clear why these business people at the top of their game. They all take competing very seriously in whatever they do.

It is also immediately evident that there is little or no difference between the winning attitude of the highly motivated business people and the Olympians and although we all got beaten, roll back the clock a few years and give us some proper training and I reckon there’d have been a few contenders in the room. My attitude was such that I thought OK, I am going to give these guys a run for their money. I was absolutely convinced that I could win. Of course I got battered, but at least my attitude shone through and it made me compete to my highest possible standard.

After a lovely dinner where we ate the food the cyclists eat on a daily basis, we were treated to what in my opinion was the best part of the night. Rebecca Romero and Sarah Storey sat down and were interviewed. They talked of the Olympic challenges and the drive that got them to the highest point in their sport. Rebecca is an interesting phenomena as she has achieved one of the rarities of Gold medals in different disciplines. She started in rowing and then transferred to cycling. With in 6 months she was hitting the speeds expected from the Olympic cyclists.

Sarah a para olympian has won medals in every games since 1992. She talked openly about her challenges. Having only one hand there were people throughout her life that treated her differently. What was lovely top see is just how that motivated her and drove her even harder. She explained how she was inspired at the age of 6 years old watching the Olympics on a tiny TV and saying, that that is what she wanted to do.

Goal setting! You can’t beat it, or her in this case.

During the questions and answers it was interesting to hear their reactions and opinions.

When asked;

Silver medal, winner or loser? Both firmly stated without even a second to think… ‘Loser!”

What do you think of skiing and snowboarding that are adapting some of  their races and styles to introduce bigger sponsorship?

Again both passionately said, “what is more exciting than 2 people competing head to head? The sport does not need to reinvent itself and we do not want any more money. We simply just want to compete.”

It was blindingly obvious that the attitude that these 2 Olympians have is identical to that of the entrepreneurs in the audience. The belief that you require to get to the top of your game is identical whatever you want to achieve. Although the goals maybe very different, the hard work that is involved in reaching the top of any industry requires stamina and determination. When the vast majority give up, there a few people who kick into another level. These are the natural born winners, although actually I don’t think they are born, more socially conditioned. Something in each of these successful business people and athletes lives inspired them to want to go to these extraordinary lengths.

So what are you going to be if you never grow up? That’s the million dollar question…. quite literally! Choose, take aim and go get it. And don’t stop no matter who tells you you cant do it. Normally if someone tells you something cant be done, it is usually from talking from experience, their own experience. Do not let other people’s limiting beliefs limit your own.

And most of all, no silver medals. Aim high and win.

Why does one of the shortest words start the longest conversations?

On Friday one of the girls from our recruitment division MySort.co.uk came to me and asked “do you have 5 minutes to see a prospective new recruit for the sales department?”

I am always keen to get feedback and develop the business and where better than from an fresh pair of eyes. I followed Abbey into my wife’s office where Tom sat, looking relaxed, sitting back and at home. After talking with him for a few minutes, I asked him “do you have any questions for me?”

“You clearly put a huge amount of effort into making this a great place to work, from your website you look like you really value people much more than other businesses I’ve come across since moving to the UK 7 years ago….. why?”

“This is indeed true,” I replied. “we sleep a third of our lives, we have a third to ourselves and we work the rest. As I do not want to waste a minute of my life I am focussed to ensuring that I enjoy every second whilst I am wide awake. This means the time at work is just as precious as the time I spend outside of work.

I therefore concentrate my efforts into making my work environment as stimulating as possible. To guarantee this I need to make sure everyone around me is stimulated and performing at their very best too, so a large part of my energy goes on ensuring the team is as focussed as me. The end result is that if you come to work here at UKFast or any of our companies, you are going to have fun. A BIG part of that is you are going to develop quickly.” I paused for thought and then asked him a question.

“Are you ready for such a journey?”

” YES PLEASE.” Tom said eagerly. “I can see that everyone here loves their job. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door.”

I got up and shook his hand saying, “I am sure you are going to be very happy here.”

I left the office knowing that I have a very excited new recruit who is going to really enjoy his new job. Is that not stimulating enough to inspire me to be an entrepreneur? It amazes me that most business people just don’t get that people are the most important ingredient to a successful business. There is a saying, behind every successful businessman there is a great woman. Isn’t that the truth! But the same applies to businesses as a whole. Behind the scenes of every business are hundreds if not thousands of great people.

I see businesses starting to struggle as they get bigger. When businesses are small they have personality. The smaller group the bigger the personality. As the business grows the personality is watered down. The founders of the business usually get further from the coal face, middle management is put in place and then the whole thing collapses as it grows. To save the business from absolute failure and total melt down from over expanding, the businesses usually shrink back to the size of when they were more successful. This is one of the reasons so few businesses fail to get past the million pound turnover mark.

I like Richard Branson’s philosophy, something he said is, “business has to give people enriching rewarding lives or it’s simply not worth doing.”

And there you have it. Master that and you have the secret of a successful business, and as we are all stimulated by different things, what works for one business may not work for another and so the challenge begins.

But that is what gets me out of bed early every morning to improve the puzzle I started 11 years ago. I’ll let you know if I ever find the answer

We have been down at the Internet World trade show at Earl’s Court. The Internet is a very male dominated industry being a techy lead industry. Sadly there are not enough women in our industry. A statistic we at UKFast are doing our level best to change. Women in our work place are essential. They are great communicators and organisers, and life would be very dull without the dynamic that mixing men and women together brings.

That being said, why is it that people automatically assume a pretty girl dressed in heels on a stand is not as smart as those around her? It is funny though, there were a few people (mainly women I am sad to say) who got a bit of a shock after making comments like “get yourself a proper job!” That particular comment was addressed to my personal assistant who takes great pleasure in being part of the team at these events and she manages the girls and their taxing schedule. If only they knew. Rachael took the comment on the chin, smiling at the lady as she laid into the commercial director Gail Jones (dressed in shorts too!) “why do you let them do this to you?” Gail simply said, “I want to dress like this. Last year I wore a dress, but but it’s too hot. The shorts are great and I love the atmosphere we create.”

The girls on the stand all work for the UKFast team. Most of whom have just come back from Verbier. They have the toughest job in my opinion. 30 hours in heels is something I know I couldn’t do! I admire their spirit immensely. I make sure I spoil them as much as I can. They work long hours and never grumble. They all have roles with in the business, some in sales, account management, customer care, but they enjoy the responsibility of representing UKFast publicly at all our sponsored events and client facing hospitality.

For me it’s imperative to have people who work for UKFast all year round representing us and not to outsource. The difference between the UKFast Girls on our stand and the others was so evident and the majority of people who came on to our stand commented, showing their surprise and pleasure that the girls all were able to understand their requirements and business needs, talking comfortably on subjects like clustering and load balanced environments.

But I think this is evident when you look at UKFast. We are so different when you take the trouble to look a little closer. This is why in the week Gordon Brown called someone a bigot for all the wrong reasons, sadly there are bigots out there, maybe someone needs to explain the meaning of the word to him, and for those real bigots, you should take the trouble to look a little closer, stop stereotyping and be a little nicer. There is a place for everyone in this world, and I am only glad the ladies said these hurtful comments to the UKFast Girls and not others who may not be as tough or as confident.

As Rachael my PA put it, “If only they knew, I have been in 4 countries in 10 days, they should have a go at trying to manage your diary.”

That being said, even superheros have to sleep, and boy, do they deserve it. To all the Girls on the UKFast stand, especially Laura, thank you for the energy you put into the event, you are amazing! Lads, you weren’t bad either.

They are human after all

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

If you go to the Virgin Limited Edition website we will see a whole host of amazing properties. They all have a similar style of layout with long sociable dining tables, comfy spacious chill-out lounges and bars where you can help yourself to just about any drink or cocktail you can dream up.

One of my favourites is The Lodge. It is particularly special to me as my early memories of the Alps always involve bus trips and cheap hotels. As I grew a little older I progressed to chalets, but invariably you get what you pay for. I am in a fortunate position to be able to experience The Lodge, at £80,000 to £90,000 per week, it is a place for the discerning skier who wants to really live it up in the mountains. It is the ultimate hideaway, with a beautiful style of bleached & distressed wood throughout the building. Down stairs there is a swimming pool and jacuzzi with a steam-room and gym. Although the gym is small, really with skiing all day (if you fancy it) and mountains to run up and down, even I seldom use it.

Another great point is the location. And even though it is only 250 yards from the bottom of the main lifts in the resort of Verbier, Switzerland, the team here drive you to and from the lift entrance.

Do you remember the queue at the ski rental shop? Here the guys from the ski shop bring the boots and skis to the Lodge for you to try on at your leisure. Nothing is too much trouble for the team of superstars that Branson and the managing director John have hand selected.

The food really is something else too! We are not the easiest people in the world to cater for. We are incredibly disciplined and my wife and I eat no dairy, wheat, and my wife takes it even further with zero citrus as well. Yet the chefs are all too accommodating. Cutting out wheat and dairy more or less rules anything scrumptious out of any meal. Not for these guys, Gerwyn the head chef and his crew design and make cakes you could not believe were possible, using blends of rice and tapioca flour and soya milk. The Michelin stars are evident the moment you put food to the palette.

The bedrooms are wonderful, all spacious and have great touches like funky ducks on the sides of the baths, and bath hats you feel compelled to take home for the kids. There is nothing quite like the Lodge. The jacuzzi, a cup of tea and a Bolivar cigar complete a good days skiing and prepare you for the evening of kicking back and enjoying a bottle from Richard’s wine cellar. That is something that is common to the Virgin Limited Edition properties. You really do feel you are in someones home, and with pictures of Richard Branson with his kids and wife and friends on the shelves, it simply makes it all the more special.

I know it is out of most peoples price bracket, however the touches that these guys lay on can be done by any operator. It’s just that people don’t overlay this layer of attention to detail. Things like:

• your names are written on your door in chalk
• the boot room has an elaborate system which dry and warm your boots so they are warm in the morning and again with areas named for your hats gloves and equipment.
• postcards with stamps already on them are in every room
• a cuddly toy dog with “let sleeping dog’s lie” to leave outside your room if you want a lie in
• great books you can pick up and put down everywhere, in every corner of the house

the list is really endless.

Hat’s off to Hannah and her fantastic team and best wishes to Hannah and Paul who are expecting their first little-one soon. We are thinking about you and we look forward to returning soon and catching up.

If you are thinking about having the ultimate mountain holiday skiing or even mountain-biking in the summer, this is the number one place on the planet for it. I use it for team building and training sessions too where I am able to take people outside of the office environment and get their undivided attention. It is a great place to work!

The Lodge, Main lounge

BBQ Lunch on the veranda

1. Cancel the Hosting Summit in Verbier

2. Wait for the news that we could take the private jet

3. Consider other options?

I am confident at this point as the pilot had been on to the powers that run the airspace and in-spite of the doom and gloom on the news, there was no reason in his mind why we would not be able to take off at 9am on Sunday morning. Little do I know!

It’s late Saturday afternoon in Manchester, a good friend James who runs the very successful business Printerland turned to me saying “you are not going to Verbier Loz, they are not going to open the airports.”

Thank God James said this. I might have waited if it wasn’t for this comment.

It was this one line that inspired me to change my mindset. I realised that everything hung in the balance of nature and the weather.

This was not a great situation to be in. James bet me £1 that I wouldn’t get there and that was it “game on.”

I picked up my mobile and rang my PA, “Rach, put everyone on full alert. I want everyones bags packed and around at our house in the next 90 minutes.”

Gail was already looking at options to get us across the Channel. The P&O website was inoperable, clearly a business who doesn’t host with UKFast! We found away via another site and we booked the ferry for 4am.

News was coming in from my PA of everyone’s whereabouts. It wasn’t looking good. 2 in a beer garden, one in Wales without transport, one getting ready for her grandfather’s birthday party. One gone walkabout and, one thankfully at home – Charlotte.

Charlotte started to help round up the troops. Meanwhile, I had another problem.I now had one car and 8 people. I rang my bro, Jonathan who is my communications director. He was in Sainsburys.

“…..well leave your trolley where it is, you are not going to need it.”

I had another driver, but I was still a car down. I then rang the marketing director Paul Harris. (Big Frank)

Paul and his lovely wife were getting ready to go out for a dinner party with friends.

It’s times like this, when you realise just how committed friends are.

“I’ll be there for you in half an hour” he said.

This was great news as Paul had just bought a Porsche Cayenne, which meant the vehicles for our RoadTrip were 2 very handsome black beasts.

The team was now complete, and with a bit of creativity we prized the boys from the beer garden and Wales and Rach even made her Grandfathers party; cut short admittedly, however I had done the calculations using the satnav, and I knew that as long as we left no later than 8.53pm we had a good chance of arriving at the early ferry, Dover.

James and Sue, his wife, were laughing at us, as this was going on in support of the madness required to change direction with little or no thought or regard for the consequences.

Grandma turned up, and with an emotional “goodbye” our 2 little daughters headed off a night early.

It was the best thing we could have done in hindsight and I owe James for bringing the realism home. Else we wouldn’t be sat here.

We made it to Dover and with 2 minutes to spare we boarded the early ferry at 1.55am.

The ferry was a far cry from the private jet and I remembered the times we did this as a kid. It was different from how I remembered it. Already tired, I couldn’t sleep. There was a great buzz amongst the team who had arrived at the house with lots of hugs kisses all ready for the adventure.

There was a massive sense of relief, as all of them had thought this great trip would inevitably be cancelled.

We headed from Calais across France, past Lake Geneva and into the Alps. The trip was exhausting and the hairpin bends were the only thing keeping Ross my co-pilot awake. The sheer fear of each bend approaching kept him on the edge of his seat.

This stage of the journey took us 8 hours, and with the exception of one flashing speed camera, and being pulled over by the French police for misunderstanding the speed limit, we had a great journey.

In fact, the French police made the  UKFast RoadTrip complete and after a couple of UKFast baseball cap souvenirs and a massively reduced fine, they ignored the 3 girls sleeping in the back seat. They escorted us to the cashpoint at the next service station, we shook hands and we were on our way again.

So as the rest of the world is grounded (apart from Richard Branson, who set off anyway from Necker yesterday in spite of the uncertainty of where he might land) we found there is always a way. But it does remind me the importance of friends, because none of this would have been possible with out the flexible grandparents, John and June, “Thank you.” To Paul’s family, especially Claire, the ultimate working mum, “Thank you”. To everyones parents, girl and boy friends, “Thanks, it is much appreciated.” Most of all, to my 2 little-ones who didn’t get a choice in the matter, “thank you T & P, I miss you lots!”

We are here to redesign and shape our product offering to ensure UKFast clients get the very best service and solution in the IT and hosting industry.

But, because we believe so much in our philosophy that fresh air, exercise, coupled with learning and sharing experiences drives better decision making, we have chosen this years retreat to be hosted at The Lodge, Verbier. Mountain retreat to Sir Richard Branson. Mine and Gail’s personal favorite winter retreat.

Today’s itinerary for example, is play hard in the morning with plenty of Skiing and Boarding.

2pm lunch back at the lodge

3pm – 7pm Focus Groups and product shaping

7pm – 9pm Dinner

9pm Coffees and home made biscuits

9.30pm – close

Midnight relax and pre-detox drinks.

I have a mixture of members of the sales team here along with 4 directors and my personal assistant. In a way it doubles as an incentive, because although we dont take the biggest earners or highest revenue generators, who are usually the people you reward in an organisation, we take people who contribute to the highest level, and for them it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to hang out in the ultimate property in the alps, whilst being fed by the best chefs in the world.

I remember as a smaller business we started to struggle to run events as the numbers were increasing and hotel bills and training fees were mounting.

In the end, we brought our own training centre, that’s how seriously we took it, even back then.

And now, a few years on, the difference between our tight knit culture and most businesses is evident, as soon as you walk through the door or pick up the phone.

That phrase “think outside the box!” is a telling one but how many business owners and managers are guilty of staying in their box to do all their thinking.

This week sees me heading off to Snowdon. There is a group of new recruits going through their paces at Castell Cidwm our dedicated team building training centre in Snowdonia National Park and I have decided to gate crash it.

Jonathan (my mad as a hatter Director of Communications) and I have arranged for an interview, on a ridge adjacent to the summit of Snowdon. To cap it all off I have agreed to stay the night camping on the ridge, which is currently covered in deep snow and prone to 90 mph winds.

Who am I to say NO!  I can see this getting me into trouble!

So why team building? Its expensive, you are taking people out of the business, its more often than not cold, it’s always wet, what do we gain?

We gain an insight to the individuals who participate.

We take them outside their comfort zone, and throughout the days as the pressure mounts you see people’s true colours. Who contributes with the washing up? Who gets up first? Who is fun? Who avoids work? All these answers are invaluable.

Quite often, people come down to Wales and they never make it back to work at UKFast. When someone does not have the necessary credentials we require for them to fit in, contribute and have a great time under pressure, they really wont enjoy the fast paced life ahead at UKFast.

I also believe we do some of our best thinking in the mountains. When you are away with colleagues, you are able to bond in a different way, especially if you genuinely want to get to know them. I think if you put on an event and only show up for the press photo or don’t show up at all, I think you will get the result you deserve. You have to passionately care about your team if you want them truly to develop.

On the flip side of the coin, I know plenty of businesses which do incredibly well with out the significant investment of team building. There is many an accountant who can put up a firm argument that the expense cannot be proved to transfer on to the bottom line. It’s sadly true. How do you quantify the benefit of a weekend away with colleagues?

All I can say is it seems to work for us at UKFast. We do put people high on the agenda and the results the team bring home for us are amazing. I am sure there are many ways we could make more money at UKFast but if they involve inhibiting the investment in people and dampening the culture, then no way!

Mind you saying that, I wonder if I will be saying the same tonight on the top of Snowdon, bedding down for the night. When you are having your cup of Coco spare a thought for me.

Although I have not made massive changes, I find myself with a massive lifestyle change.

I was given advice by one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our lifetime. And in my opinion there is a BIG difference between an entrepreneur and someone who has a successful business. It is possible for anyone to make a success of a business venture. It is highly unlikely that that person will go on to have a string of successes. Someone with this skill, is an entrepreneur.

The advice I was given was to step back a little. Take a couple of days off a week to work elsewhere.

It is far too easy to get too stuck in to the operational issues that confront you every day of your life running a business. Especially as entrepreneurs have an “obsessive” gene. When I get stuck in, I like to get completely immersed. However, if I am honest, I have staff who are significantly more skilled than me in every area of the business.

This week we have had the most successful week of UKFast’s history but not just revenue, which these days appears to drive most businesses. The energy in the business, and the levels of passion and excitement simply went off the scale. Yet I cant have spent more than 8 hours in the business this week. On a normal working day (before my hols) I’d have done 8 hours by lunchtime. That’s not to say I have not been contributing. If anything I have achieved a great deal more. By stepping back, I have done all my paperwork, report reading and emails.

In fact, I have never been so busy. This week I have met more likeminded entrepreneurs than I have done all year. My diary is stacked full. I am not usually a fan of networking, and with my “say yes to everything” approach which I adopted recently I find I am not just cramming more in, I am enjoying events that previously I’d have shied away from. As a result of my minor change in attitude, I find myself joining a body of people who make up North West’s greatest entrepreneurs, and also joining the board of one of Manchester’s finest orchestras.

It is worth offering a word of caution. I am blessed with a great team of people working at UKFast and our other emerging businesses. I was given the advice by someone who understood me, and our business model. If you have major weaknesses in your business, or if your business relies on you to drive it forward, every minute of the day, it is not advisable stepping back too much too soon. Perhaps try it one department at a time.

If you are wanting to grow to the next level, ask people for help. You will be amazed at just how forthcoming great business people are. I only wish I’d asked sooner!

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

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.

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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

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

It was 11 years ago at Granada I first used the Grand Ballroom at the Palace for an event. It was to raise money for the Christie’s For Cancer Appeal. The night was a huge success and I fell in love with the room. It is the perfect room for hosting a ball.

I knew the hotel well, as I’d originally played the piano there in my early years when I first came to Manchester. I had some great memories of the place and I made some fantastic friends. It was during the era of Les Miserables. And the cast used to pile in there for a few drinks after the show, before dragging me out until dawn. It was a real experience and my links to the area so strong, I bought an apartment in Oxford Place next door.

Years earlier I had my first job in a shop called A1 music, right opposite the Palace on New Wakefield Street. I did a range of jobs, from brushing up, to decorating. The funniest of these jobs, (although not at the time) was when Ann the proprietor asked me did I know anyone who could do plastering? Fancy asking a 17 year old for advice on building. Of course I promptly answered, “I can.” I had seen people plaster many times  with the houses my father used to renovate when I was growing up. I failed to mention my specialty was demolition.

The plaster eventually went up and although not particularly smooth, I was quite proud of the job. I spent that evening building all the furniture for the room. The next day I was greeted by Ann’s husband Graham who was furious. He marched me up stairs to see my handy work. All the plaster had peeled off the walls and had covered all the brand new furniture. It had then promptly dried over night!

I did a variety of jobs at A1 including their book keeping, but it was the selling I enjoyed the most. As a “Saturday boy” the professional sales guys hated me in the sale floor, so I was only able to cover for people when they were on their lunch.

Guaranteed with out fail, every lunch I would have a field day selling. I learned that by being honest and directing clients to what they needed as opposed to what the thought they wanted was a great recipe for success. I also realised I only had an hour, so I concentrated my efforts and honed my craft.

As I held the record for the biggest sale in the company’s history, Ann was much aggrieved when the sales men clubbed together and convinced Graham to put me in the basement wiring up reconditioned speakers.

Happy to accommodate, to the basement I went. It was there I was told to answer the telephone and I learnt a knew skill. I was now only able to sell when carrying the speakers across the floor. So this is precisely what I did, and I learned how to get to the point almost immediately, and with in months, we had sold every pair, with me selling the lions share. On the telephone I was also developing relationships, there were a few massive deals where I convinced the keyboard player of a touring band who were playing at the Apollo, who were number 4 in the charts at the time to come in and part with £21,500. Eventually Ann forced Graham to concede that it was ridiculous to bury someone showing promise.

It was around this time that I got my first job as a professional pianist, and rather than rock the boat with the other guys, I moved on and decided to use my musical talent to further my career. Which brings me full circle back to the Palace.

The event on Saturday was seamless, from the outside at least! Behind the scenes, the band, Clem Curtis and the Foundations were without a drummer who had broken down in Nottingham, and with 45 minutes before the start, I called my brother-in-law to ask for help. Dave is a fantastic drummer and agreed to lend me his kit, so we could get it set up and sound checked whilst everyone enjoyed the champagne reception upstairs. He also offered his services as a stand-in drummer too!

There is a saying “you cant chose you family,” and if you could, I couldn’t ask for a better guy. His attitude and calmness meant I was able to enjoy dinner and even with 30 minutes to spare when the actual drummer turned up, I couldn’t have been more relaxed.

On hind site though, it reminds me why I dont do this sort of thing for a living anymore.  If you think computer hardware is unreliable, you should try managing musicians!

I also was reminded of what I loved about event organising too. Giving pleasure to so many people is so rewarding. Being on this side of the fence too, where I was the client and the organiser, meant I could make the right decisions there and then. The team comprising of Gail, Rach, Paul and Jonathan literally had the entire evening organised and scripted to the minute. I could not have asked for a better team. Jim Collin’s description “the right people on the bus can be moved anywhere” was demonstrated by the way my events team, comprising of a few of my senior management team, changed roles as efficiently as a chameleon changes colour. But although I had great fun revisiting this former profession, I would not swap what I do now for the world.

Well, maybe it’s time for that discussion.

A couple of weeks ago we were planning our new “School of Hosting” campaign. This was at a time when we had just had a very successful day where staff dressed up in St.Trinian’s outfits to raise money for charity, it was suggested, why not use the photography and continue the theme to promote the School of Hosting.

Business men and women of City Tower Manchester are used to the staff at UKFast turning up in all sorts of outfits. Dressed in suits for 4 days a week, from time to time UKFast relaxes its dress code policy in line with various calendar events or charity days.

This particular one was done in a similar vein.

As soon as the advert hit the shelves and the banners appeared on various websites, a few people complained. Now I am a great believer in freedom of speech, just as I am a believer in the right to express oneself and exercise your individuality.

We all need our own passionate driving forces and conflicting views, that is what makes the world such an interesting place.

Personally I feel the advert is completely innocuous and as it was designed and created by women and as I know it was never meant to offend I think it was harmless. It is funny how people automatically assume something like this was dreamt up by the men in an organisation. But to the thousands of positive comments and visitors to the site, thank you.

So, going back to the original comment about being raised in a convent, growing up amongst 150 girls does have its advantages. The greatest of these was that I was able to gain an understanding of how the “other half” work, their minds, their behaviour, their communication, their sensitivity.

It is safe to say, as a result of my social conditioning, I empathise far more with women than men. I feel far more at ease on a night out with 30 mums from the school our kids go to over a rugby club networking dinner full of men.

I am not sure of the split of men and women in management  positions across the UK, however at UKFast it is clear to see my trust in women is carried into the work place. In positions of trust where a high level of autonomy and delegation is required, the split of men and women is 50:50. We have 9 ladies and 9 men, managing 102 staff. As we have more men in the business overall, it is a fair claim that on average, the women at UKFast hold higher positions over the men.

I hope it is not too sexist to say also, out of all the management, I have slightly more confidence in the organisational skills of the women over the men.  (Oops, sorry guys)

My wife has put her views on the subject of the advert itself here.

The 3 circles. You may have come across Jim Collins a lecturer at Stamford University, he is an authority on the study of successful businesses. He predicted and charted the growth of some of Americas biggest businesses and when challenged as a young lecturer by a student not much older than himself on the success of Apple (a then unknown) he decided to put his formula down on paper and test it amongst other great fortune 500 businesses.

One of the things he found with his research is that all of the businesses which grew at a faster rate than everyone else, did some things in common. One of these was called the 3 circles principal, adopted by the likes of Walmart, Sony, Apple, Microsoft.

The 3 circles are:

Can you be the best at something?
What are you passionate about?
What drives your economic engine?

If you answer YES to all of these when venturing into new unchartered territory you cant go far wrong.

Can you be the best at something?

There is no point setting up a business if you cant genuinely create a better company that those which already dominate an industry. It make years of trying, but ultimately you have to aim high and keep focussed on the end game, to provide a consistently better service or product offering than already exists. But just believing it isn’t enough, you have to have a scientific plan and competitive edge which separates you and existing competitors.

Ask yourself, what things have I already which help enable us to be the best?

What are you passionate about? Is this new business going to make you incredibly satisfied? If it is purely a vehicle to make you money, I guarantee it will not work. You have to have enjoyment first, which comes from passion and determination, long before the success and the financial gains.

Mohammed Ali said, “I run on the road, long before I dance under the lights.”  Although he became incredibly successful and rich through his boxing, he focussed on his training and the outcome of each fight, never on the purse.
What drives the economic engine? Is it sensible to make this investment? Do we have a competitive advantage with cost savings if we enter a particular industry?

For example, UKFast entering the world of Cloud Hosting makes perfect sense. Although the investment of £500,000 seems on the steep side, we already have the technical know how and infrastructure in place to run this type of business. It therefore becomes very easy to bolt on this sort of new venture.

Data centre space is another good one. We already have the expertise to be the best at it. We are incredibly passionate about the thought of improving resilience and customer care and does it make financial sense? Absolutely, we will save £1.5m to £2m each year as a direct result.

Do we venture into data centres? Already have done is the answer.

Using the same principal, on ideas that have not gone so well. The mobile phone division of UKFast.

Can you be the best at it? Yes absolutely and we were.
Are you passionate about it? Not really, driven by the fact that we were making money.
Was it financially the best thing to do? Although it made good sense to go into this venture at the time, on hind sight, yes we had a competitive advantage writing the software that made this company immensely successful, the business model was too far removed from UKFast’s hosting model.

Business to consumer vs. business to business. This one fundamental difference made it impossible to be financially viable. Our entire existing infrastructure was designed to manage the business to business relationship. We underestimated the amount of work involved in the change management.

The same applies to UKFast’s entry into the broadband arena.

Can we be the best? Yes and we were undoubtedly. We were too good and the strain this put on the existing support team was not sustainable.

Was it financially viable? NO! It was a disaster. BT had designed a business model from hell. The only winner was BT, the customer, the supplier, everyone lost out.

Were we passionate about it? No, we love hosting and we love the fact that people appreciate what we do. Supplying broadband which was effectively turned into a commodity by the telco’s (BT, Pipex, AOL) was not fun and we were too small to roll out a business model that was incredibly niche.

The result: Doomed! Luckily we were able to foresee this and we sold off our connections to a small business who specialised in this area. We were very careful not just to “ditch” customers as they also had hosting with us and they were incredibly important.

So the 3 circles principal is key to tackling the unknown. And if it is good enough for the businesses like Gillette, Nike and the others I mentioned earlier, it is a good enough litmus test for me too. Try it with your business ventures past, present and of course the import ones, the future ones!

Go have fun.

Bank managers, strategic advisors accountants, business consultants have all said to me at some point, all small businesses are about the “owner-operator” and take them away and they fail.

I have always hated this attitude and could never understand it. Until today and after sitting with fellow business people and for a change I was the MD of the biggest business there, I could see how they arrived at their theory.

We were discussing training. A subject I am passionate about and one I do not feel I am an expert at as I have so much more I want to learn. Nevertheless I have helped shape a training department at UKFast which seems to be pretty unique.

The general consensus from these owner operators was that you should outsource your training, do it once or twice a year at the most and do it externally.

This pretty much summed up peoples unanimous opinion.

When I explained my position, people were horrified. I explained that I agree with taking people away, and I am such a fan of this we bought a hotel in Wales to conduct intense training and team building programmes.

I seemed to strike a nerve and a few of the woman attacked my philosophy one saying “I wouldn’t want to work for your organisation if it were the last in the world” and another stated “you cant make people go up a mountain.”

I was amazed as Tony Fogett of a very successful web design business said  “none of may staff would ever do team building” as though it were an alien exercise. He laughed saying “we just go to the pub!”

I explained that this was a team building exercise too, the only difference was his involved alcohol and ours involved fresh air and adrenalin.

Ironically one of my team members who was a massive fan of our Snowdon trips (long before we bought the Castell Cidwm estate and Llyn Cwellyn) went to work for Code, Tony’s business. She had discussed with me coming back to UKFast however sadly this is against our company policy, she cited the team spirit as one of the best things about UKFast and one of the things she missed 

But the regular sessions in the pub obviously work for Tony as his business in my opinion is incredibly successful especially for the creative market place.

I realised though the vast difference in outlooks around the table seemed to be in direct relationship with the success of peoples businesses. 

The other business owners dismissed my theory as “inappropriate” as UKFast has over 100 employees. Even though our businesses were similar ages and Gail and I started UKFast with just the 2 of us and no staff!

The difference is simple and businesses who adopt this principal grow, businesses who don’t run the risk of failure when they grow.

‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” There is another great quotation from someone (I think Jim Collins of Stamford University) “people respect what you inpsect.”

Measuring training is imperative too. We test staff before and after their training sessions so we know how much they have learned, this enables us to measure the trainer’s performance.

We have a TV department, which films all our sessions. Each film is edited and placed in their personal dashboard where they can download them on to their company supplied ipods.

We include funny (not for public consumption) videos too of office parties, charity events and people tipping over in canoes at the training camp.

Two things are important to me. Alignment and engagement.

We start, believe it or not with engagement, hence the team building stuff where everyone gets to have fun, cry, break bread together and get what we call cyan coloured (UKFast) blood. The second is just as important and that is aligning everyone to the common message. Whatever department you are in at UKFast  you need to understand that excellence is the standard and nothing else is acceptable.

We were once described by a competitor who rang me up to complain about a member of my staff who had telephoned and emailed a customer of his, as a sales and marketing organisation. I think he meant it as a dig, however I was deeply complimented by this.

I have always felt we were weak in this area and therefore slow off the mark, however he and other competitors had begun to notice more activity in their sector from our team and from prospects talking about UKFast.

All this energy and passion came from training. The same training that enabled us to recruit 30 graduates in one day and have them up and running in less than 1 month.

I believe your best training is in house. You will already have champions in a variety of areas. Use the resources you have around you, have focus groups and share knowledge. You don’t have to spend huge sums of money with consultants. Often the best sessions are the simplest ones even impromptu.

A study from the writers of the book “the extra mile” cited training as the single biggest reason why people stay and leave organisations. Recognise this and act on it and I’ll see you out on the battlefield.

I always say, “well I’ll be leaving work at about 7pm this evening.” I hear this question 3 times a week.

I think it is important to know where you are going. Businesses need direction. I am a great believer in goals and raised a laugh at the How-Do convention recently when I admitted my wife and I have a “50 year plan.”

But why not? I work on the principal that you need to know where you are going. What is wrong with mapping out your life to when you are in your 90′s. You are far more likely to get to a desired location or destination if you have thought about it prior to setting out. One thing is for sure, I know we will be together as we are both integral to it.

What happens when you go shopping without a clear understanding of what you want to come home with. My wife’s wardrobe was littered with rubbish when I first met her. Shopping was haphazard and directionless and she probably felt this was part of the fun. Ask her now how much more fun shopping is, especially when she brings me along.

So when do you sell your business? You have to have made something worth selling first of all. This needs a plan in its own right. When we set up UKFast we were tiny. The smallest company in the fastest growing business environment and for years no one knew we existed.

But we had a plan, and we were sticking to it. And when the internet bubble burst and businesses were dropping out of the sky affected by the calamity we just carried on regardless. And still no one really knew who we were.

And over the years we have readdressed the plan, yet we still continue to stick to it. Even during the recession we felt it was more important to keep firmly on track than to falter.

And as the business got bigger so do our goals. Our latest 5 year plan includes a target and MAP to hit £100m turnover. Now as this plan unfolds people are begging to take note of us.

The problem with our initial plans were they were too small, and therefore so was the outcome. You get what you focus on so in my opinion you are better aiming higher. If you miss you still are probably better off than you would have been if you’d been conservative.

But on the journey of growing your business, when do you sell? UKFast is already worth far more than we anticipated in the first plan we wrote. So surely I’d be happy to sell?

For me it is not about the money.  It is about the game. I love work. I love people and I love competition. If I didn’t work at UKFast what would I do? I’d be bored sitting on a beach for more than 22 minutes. I don’t drink and I am consumed by learning.

For me, you sell when you stop learning or when you cannot learn at the speed you need to, to continue driving your business in a controlled fashion.  I am fortunate to work alongside my wife. When we have problems we are able to tackle them together.

We are on a weekend business trip and I am writing this, she is tackling a “too heavy for me” book on Balanced scorecard management, whilst we fly from Rome to Amsterdam for our next meeting.

If you have a business partner that is this close you are able to take on much more than if you do it alone.

What is most fun about UKFast is that we are having to learn at such a pace it is incredibly exciting. We take it so seriously that each year we review our goals together in the Maldives and have the final week of a 3 week break where we then strategise and plan for the future.

We have literally hit every goal we have set, and the crazy ones which take time all have a MAP (massive action plan) and we monitor their progress.

So when do you sell you business? In my opinion only when you are bored. But if you are bored, simply pick up a book and find another challenge. There is always something out there waiting to tax our hungry minds. After all isn’t that why we are in business in the first place?

Great question, and there is no right or wrong answer.

I explained that I have tried and failed many different things. The important thing in my opinion as an entrepreneur is to dust yourself off and have another go. Great entrepreneurs are resilient, they don’t know how to give up, they are prepared to push the boundaries and if they fail they do not see this as a negative emotion. In fact failure to a receptive mind means you are learning.

If you are going to try something new I think it should compliment what you are doing in other areas. Venturing into completely unknown territory carries more risk and therefore should warrant more research.

I enjoy new challenges, however I don’t see myself as a big risk taker. I have never had the luxury of huge sums of money to invest in new projects so the downside to most of my ventures is never a particularly alarming one.

We are currently venturing into the data centre arena, and although this now does involve millions of pounds of investment, it is a “related area” and therefore compliments what I already do elsewhere in the dedicated hosting industry.

It actually not only allows us to improve the quality of the service we currently receive, it also saves us millions of pounds each year of money which for the past decade has been growing some very happy businesses in Manchester and London.

I am not sure my current suppliers of data centre space will share my excitement. UKFast makes a very attractive anchor tenant however this sort of diversification is one I wholeheartedly recommend.

If you can provide a service where you are already paying considerable sums to a supplier and in our case competitor to boot, this should help you in your decision of where to diversify.

We once diversified in to the mobile phone arena specialising in Orange phones. We were good at it and we got about 20,000 customers in our first year trading. However it was so far removed from our hosting product. We were selling Oranges network when we had our own UKFast.

We got out of this industry after Orange put pressure on us to stop bulk text messaging to win business. Companies like Carphone Warehouse and other high street retailers were complaining that we had an unfair advantage. Our route to market was incredibly effective and hit our customer right at their heart. A simple text message encouraging them to use UKFast was all it took.

It worked famously until one day I received a phone call from my distributer saying that we had just inadvertently sent messages to the board of directors of Orange themselves during a board meeting. The message said, “upgrade your mobile phone with the latest Nokia on the Orange network, call UKFast now to find out more.”

Orange were fuming, mainly because they hadn’t thought of this themselves. They switched us off.

I could have targeted them and switched hundreds of thousands of Orange customers to other networks who our distributer put us in touch with, however this wasn’t our style.

We had invested huge sums of money and a great deal of time. We weren’t just the fastest growing supplier of Orange phones back in those days, we were the best. Each customer of ours also received confirmation text messages with Royal Mail special delivery tracking codes so they could know where their parcel was. Royal Mail even printed UKFast on the special delivery bags next to their name as we were shipping so many. They even sent us our own van each day.

Quitting whilst you are ahead is not quitting. Ironically Orange came back to us weeks later and asked me personally if I’d redesign their systems and manage their call centre. Someone had produced a report comparing all the dealers, distributers and Orange themselves. UKFast came out above everyone for the best customer satisfaction and retention rate.

The mess Orange are now in is indicative of their poor management and decision-making ability.  A decade on they still are not using the technologies that we brought to that industry. Shortly after we left, Oftel banned the use of direct text messages as a form of introductory communication as too many businesses jumped on our “banned” wagon: A shame really as they were exciting days. We would send out 20,000 text messages in a morning and sell 250 phones. The inbound phones went wild. If you were a visitor, staff member of a different division of UKFast or a prospective supplier, and were in our building when we pressed send, you were given a pad and pencil and told to answer the phone. Some of my funniest memories of this time include 2 bank managers caught up in the frenzy for a couple of hours locked in my office taking orders.

This was one example of diversification that was too far from our comfort zone, however I wouldn’t change this chapter for the world. We learnt everything we know now from this era.

The other actor was far less famous. Successful in his own right however on a much less grander scale. He was in a failure of a programme called Eldorado. A late night version of Crossroads. He was called Jude and he was a lovely guy, and he was dating my flat mate Caroline.

The argument was over “what constitutes a proper actor?” Ashley had touched on the subject of “how much you earn?” and tied that into your credibility as an actor, Also “how well known you were?” also cropped up too. Two things that immediately elevated him above Jude, as Ashley was being paid £7000 per week (a footballers salary in those days) to play the prince in Aladdin in Oxford.

Jude was quick to point out this recent role hardly made him Dustin Hofman. And so the argument continued. Although Ashley probably won the argument through pigheaded stubbornness and the fact that it is very difficult to discredit someone who is very successful and to Ash’s credit, he was, Jude definitely had the last laugh.

I also wonder what impact that discussion played on Jude’s future success as he was incredibly upset, passionate, determined to prove himself right that night. Yet sadly I never saw Jude again after he and Caroline stopped seeing each other later that year and Ash moved back to Adelaide and I am ashamed to say we never kept in contact.

A few years ago on a long-haul flight, I asked Gail what she was watching. I switched on my TV and joined her. I commented “that looks really like an old pal I used to know from yeas ago, Jude.”

She responded quickly saying “it’s Jude Law, He is one of the most famous up and coming actors in Hollywood.” I thought it cant be yet the more I watched I realised it was him. I remembered the argument in my flat all those years ago. I remembered what Jude had said.

“Mark my words, I may not be as successful as you yet, however I guarantee you, I will be the most famous British actor ever to break the US. I will live in Hollywood and if money gauges your success, then I promise you I will definitely be the biggest success.”

This was an emotional rant and left Ashley’s girlfriend who was sat on my piano singing and I cheering “go Jude!” as most people never confronted Ashley who was renowned for his headstrong tenacity.

I don’t know whether Jude Law wrote down his goals, I don’t know how much he actually planned his journey, however that night he was coherent and his determination did not sound spontaneous, quite the contrary, it sounded well thought out and everyone in that room that night believed him, so much so that when he went to bed we carried on the discussion about his passion and determination.

Earl Nightingale said “the most powerful thing in the world is a single thought.” It all starts with a thought and then develops. Although it has taken me more than 10 years to see the link between that passion and determination that night and the actual success in the flesh I cannot think for a moment that it is coincidence.  Jude Law is one in a million, the difference is that I have heard thousands of times people stating that they are going to do “such and such” but they lack the conviction, and without that belief a very different journey awaits.

The other girl in the room that night, Julia Worsley went on to be a very successful singer and one of Cameron Macintosh’s favourites making a real mark in the West End. She sang in Evita and became a friend of Madonna after getting the role as Madonna’s sister in the film Evita. Julia was a huge fan of Madonna and always said that she felt an affinity with her. It was later confirmed when Madonna faxed my house with a note for Jules arranging to hook up when she was coming to the UK.

Ashley failed to live up to his accelerated early start and shrank into insignificance in acting terms lost in Australia.

Musically I have not hit any of my goals I set in my early life, yet they are not forgotten and at some point I will rebuild my recording studio and reassemble some of my old friends for the next chapter. Meanwhile I have one focus and that is UKFast. It is as exciting as composing and conducting an orchestral overture and all consuming.

Is there more to goal setting than meets the eye?

What if goal setting was a scientific art form? What if you could literally pinpoint your every move in the future and design the outcome of every turn years before you arrive there, long after the memory of even setting the goal.

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it. Yet my wife and I have built a business on this very principal.

I am in Amsterdam at present and yesterday went to Anne Franks house to visit a very important place preserved in our history. The one thing I came away with is the memory of something written on the wall.

“I have a goal, to be free from this place and to dance again and to breathe the air.”

This may appear to be an innocuous quote in amongst much more profound remarks, however it is the word goal that strikes me as interesting.

In a world long ago that I care not to even remember let alone imagine being a part of where countless millions did not survive, there is one child who defied the laws of everything that was controlling the world at that time in war torn Europe.

She had a goal and she wrote it down and she not only survived years of German occupation against all the odds she then went on to influence millions of people with her writing, long after she died. You might argue that her goal never worked, as she died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, less than 2 months before the end of the war. However she died of typhus and not at the hands of the Germans. She also lived an amazing life and for the short time on this planet her goal kept her determined and focussed on surviving, which she did for a great deal longer than most in her situation. Her father who is the most remarkable man who lived till the ripe old age of 91, it was he who was responsible for inspiring his daughter and family. He was the only one of the 8 to survive the holocaust.

My job here is not to convince you of goal setting though, I already believe in it and we have thousands of examples of it working literally to the letter.

A great example of this manifested itself this morning when Gail and I went through our goals we set on the 7^th January earlier this year. (2009) Gail brought my attention to a goal which was written simply:

“Weekend Amsterdam + Rome”
As we were sat in Amsterdam in the lobby of The Grand Hotel reading this we were able to tick this one off, however when we wrote this goal what we had really meant to write was a weekend away in either Rome or Amsterdam.

What is the likelihood of hitting an obscure goal like this, 2 cities in different countries thousands of miles apart, different climates. Not the sort of trip you’d plan deliberately.

Even though we had written this goal down 9 months earlier and had also forgotten it, a very strange thing had happened.

On the Saturday morning we were flying to Rome. I was not over-enamoured by the idea of a weekend queuing and site seeing, however I arrived in Rome with an open mind. We arrived at the hotel by the Spanish Steps, however there was some sort of rally on and the place was crowded to say the least. That night Gail and I decided to take the plane to a much more chilled destination Amsterdam after a lovely dinner marred only by the chanting of a distant crowd in the square adjacent to the hotel. The plane and pilots were still in Rome for the night, so Gail called the pilot and arranged to meet them on the runway the next morning. So we hitched a lift with them on their way back to the UK.

It worked perfectly, we escaped the chaos of Rome had a few relaxed days in Amsterdam, hit a goal in to the bargain, to the letter.

So as my wise old Gran used to say, “Be careful what you wish for!

My goddaughter just achieved 4 A’s. Incredible! A far cry from my terrible attempt.

Yet you dont need A level results to be successful.

Here is my itinerary for yesterday:

• BBC Radio Manchester 7.30am
• BBC Online photo shoot and interview City Tower, Piccadilly 12.00 pm
• Channel M 4pm News

It certainly sounds impressive. Yet the only reason they all wanted to interview me, was because 23 years ago, on my A level results day, I got 2 U’s (That’s unclassified)

I joked on the radio, “thanks for telling the world.” Yet in a funny sort of way I am quite proud of this achievement. It proves that we are all different. Academic exams are only recognising a certain type of intellect. In school and further education, we don’t seem to put much importance on common sense, practical skills, goal orientation.

All my truly finically successful friends failed dismally when it came to exams. The ability to sit still in a classroom is something great entrepreneurs seem to lack. Yet when they come out of school, they fly. Why is that?

Sadly, I don’t have the magic formula to explain what it is. I am confident it is NOT coincidence. Yet it may be related to the fact that a great many entrepreneurs are told, time after time, that they will be failures.

This gives you an easy starting point.

1. you want to prove that person wrong
2. you cant fail as there is nowhere lower to go!

So as I said during my 3 interviews. If you have failed yhour A levels, don’t worry. It is for a reason. there is something better for you out there. If you have not got your desire results to go to university, don’t worry. Get a job. Get trained up and if you are smart and you work hard, you will be light years ahead of your friends who go off to university.

They will come out with massive debt (£25,000 if you are lucky) you on the other hand, should have a house, car and serious lifestyle by then.

I remember back that far ago. I got my first house when I was still 19 years old. It was a goal I had set as a very young child, to beat my father who had got his first one when he was around 24.

When graduates come to UKFast, I do not look at their grades, I look for their sporting influences and their part time jobs. A 1st is the same as a 2:2 where I come from. It is now down to how hard you are going to graft.

So don’t be despondent. Pick up the phone and get a job. Find a company that offers comprehensive training or why not set up your own.

What have you go to loose. You are going to be £25,000 in debt anyway. Surely with that headstart you can build a business.

Good luck.

Lawrence Jones (the only letters after my name) UU
Managing Director
UKFast

I am not one for being dazzled by stars of any type. I grew up in my 20′s with some very famous friends and girlfriends, Ashley Paske from Neighbours, Craig Charles from Red Dwarf and it taught me that fame comes with a very expensive price tag. You loose all sense of privacy and there is literally no where to hide.

And the more famous you become, the bigger the price tag! Michael Jackson is a good example of this. A man who became so infamous he not only lost his personal life, he also lost all sense of reality and the fun that we take for granted of just being normal.

As Jacko found out, the media can flip you in minutes from fame to social famine. And if you are lucky, back-again; sadly a little late as he had already passed away.

Sitting next to Sarah, The Duchess of York at dinner last night discussing Michael Jackson I clearly struck a chord. She asked me my opinion on the funeral service / concert. I explained my point of view about how I feel the press dictate a great deal and that they are quick to forget how much damage they may do, yet they blow hot and cold whenever it suits. To me it was more concert than funeral. But that is what Jackson was a “showman” so why not go out on a positive note.

The dinner was in aid of a community project that the duchess is proactively supporting and she and her team (which includes locals from the Wythenshaw area) are doing a sterling job in Manchester helping to establish a community centre which houses a gym down stairs.

It struck a chord with me as I arrived in Manchester 24 years ago, with a few pounds in my pocket and no friends or real home to live in. I remember the loneliness of standing on your own two feet, too proud to consider returning to my little town in North Wales. My father had always told me I’d be a failure, and funnily enough this probably forced me in to a position where I had to survive.

But yesterday, meeting Simon, a young lad of 25 from the area where they are investing their energy, he is one of the team building the community centre project made me realised how lucky I’d been.

I was lucky, I had had a very good education (yet I managed to fail nearly every academic exam I sat!) and I also was taken in a after a year or so later by relatives who took pity on me; a then skin head in bedraggled clothes.
But not everyone is as lucky as that, how do you rise through the ranks when there is no one to show you the way. These days, I think it is even tougher for people leaving home. University actually puts you in debt so that is almost like a major set back when entering the grown up world. Personally skipping University did me know harm. As long as you keep learning keep striving to become better. I think the important thing is to keep away from trouble. As a young man it is easy to get sucked in with the wrong sort of people. It is almost uncool to hang around positive hardworking folk. Yet it is precisely these types you need as mentors to give you the direction you need.
Hats off to Sarah Ferguson. A megastar with her feet on the floor. A particularly likable one too. And to her team making the Duchess on the Estate documentary. It is refreshing to see others making a big difference, especially high profile ones as they are able to amplify their influence via TV with their relationship with the media.

For me, I wouldn’t swap anonymity for the world.

It is a difficult answer and to define one event as anyone in business will know it is a fast paced journey of peaks and troughs and no 2 days are alike. The most difficult challenge I face and continue to face is the pace I am required to develop.

10 years ago the skill set I had to set up a small business was very different to the one I now have running a multimillion pound organisation. That in itself presents challenges year after year.

I know if I’d walked into a business the size of UKFast 10 years ago, I could not have managed it. Yet I dont feel I have changed that much. However it is very easy to under estimate the experience you gain from being on hand day to day.

If I take a snap shot of me a decade ago and me now, along with the aging process on the outside, the inside is very different too. Eight years ago I was interviewed on Granada News by Lucy Meacock. Last night at the National Business Awards in the Hilton Hotel in Manchester Lucy Meacock was the presenter. We had a chat afterwards and she remembered Gail and I, however she could not believe how much we had changed over the years. It made me think, she is right, I just assume I am the same person. I often describe myself as a man with “no qualifications” and this may be true, however I now have experience, and that is priceless.

Jim Collins describes “great businesses” in Good To Great as having leaders who grow from  within. It makes perfect sense now. Experience out ranks qualifications.

So why then do some businesses grow faster than others? Is it safe to say people are gaining experience at different speeds. I think the answer is obvious. This then explains why businesses evolve at  different speeds. It is relative to the amount of learning and experience the entrepreneurs with in the business encounter.

One of the responsibilities Gail and I have at UKFast is to continue to learn and every year we regroup. We go off to the Maldives for a 3 week holiday. 2 weeks of family fun and 1 week of intense preparation for the year ahead. We write huge lists which fill books and we review the lists from previous years. And we tick off our accomplishments and those we miss we carry forward. Imagine a graph that is steadily rising. This upward curve represents everything we do in our lives. It is easy to peak and trough in life, so we then draw a horizontal line at the highest point we are at at present. This line now becomes the platform for continued growth. Anything below this line is considered an area of dissatisfaction, there is only one way to grow.

So if that means, if I had done 6 hours a week of exercise in 2008 and if we consider being in good shape important to maintaining our growth, I would set a goal to increase that to 7 or 8 hours.

We apply this principal to everything we do.

To be truly successful you have to be disciplined. On that journey to achieve whatever you set out in the early days, you will be tempted to ease off, take your eye off the ball, but I have never met a successful person who was not incredibly disciplined.

Take Lucy Meacock for example. She was employed to present the awards at the ceremony last night. Her schedule of responsibilities from her employers that night would involve arriving early for a rehearsal, and being ready to perform between the hours of 8 and 10 o’clock. During those hours she is on show. She will be required to perform her duties at the highest level. For that she will have received her fee and her rider.

Yet she is the consummate professional. Once the show had finished she took the trouble for the next 2 hours to walk around the entire room greeting and thanking everyone for coming. This is a discipline which not only made her successful but keeps her at this elevated level.

I will give you an example of a fallen star. Do you remember Victoria Wood? The comedian. In a previous life before hosting dedicated servers I had a small business that Granada aquired from me called MDC (The Music Design Company). I organised events. I was lucky enough to win the contract for a charity fund raiser, Christies for Cancer. I chose the venue, The Palace Hotel, Manchester (a place I later got married in).

I wanted Steve Coogan ( a then rising star) however Angela Rodden the MD insisted we went for Victoria Wood. Between her and my PA I was out voted. What a big mistake. Steve Coogan was a mega star by the time the event happened. They both commanded the same fee. £17,000 for the hour.

I should have known when I saw Victoria Woods rider. Her list of particulars was ridiculous. I had put on events for mega pop stars with smaller requirements.

We provided everything to the letter. The flowers (a particular length) were ready in her dressing room, the particular alcohol, the flesh coloured microphone that she taped to her forehead, the Steinway grand piano and the spot light that resembled a bomber tracking light from World War II, we did everything. 

I went to her dressing room and introduced myself. My God, what a rude woman! I politely explained that Angela (who had chosen her) was a massive fan, and would it be possible for her to have a photograph with her at some point before the end of the evening. It was a flat “no” “you have employed me to do a stage show, and that is what I am here to do!” or words to that effect.

We got the last laugh though, when she was doing her stand up, the sound engineers tripped over a wire and switched off the spot light mid act, which was being operated by Jonathan Bowers who is now UKFast’s communication director.

But this sort of attitude explains why Victoria Wood is no-longer on our screens. It is a great lesson, whatever your profession, always be professional. I have a rule that I only do business with people I admire or have the greatest respect for. If somebody’s standards slip in any way, ethically or performance wise , I will not want to do business with them. I have been known to turf suppliers out if they have not stuck to an agreement, either verbal or written. If you agree something, stick to it. Honour it at all costs.

I had a supplier who  cost me a great deal of embarrassment and stress not so long ago. When I confronted their acting MD on the matter, I was told to read the terms and conditions. He said “I think you will find we are doing everything we are contracted to do.”

Two weeks ago, I wrote a cheque for almost £3,000,000. That supplier who has had a monopoly in Manchester on the service he supplied is about to find he has a very passionate competitor in his midst. At a time when they are planning expansion, they are about to loose their biggest customer and find out they have an exodus of existing clients who we already have undertakings with that they are coming on board with our new venture.

Lack of professionalism isn’t a one off. People who are unprofessional are consistently unprofessional, day in day out. And, if you want to be successful, in whatever profession, stay alert and learn from everything that goes on around you. Be disciplined and be a great person. Follow these simple practices and you cant go far wrong. 

I’ll see you at the top! Or on that great journey.

Lawrence Jones @ UKFast

Last year we recruited 7 new graduates. A year on, 5 of them have worked out and are still with UKFast. The 5 that remain have been so successful, this year we are recruiting 20 more.

Regardless of the economic climate we need new recruits. The universities are the obvious choice. And although there are no specific courses (yet) for the sort of training we require, a university graduate comes to the table, keen to learn and enthusiastic.

Interestingly this years candidates are far more flexible and willing to take on just about anything. In previous years the graduates lean towards the sexier job titles like marketing and PR, even though often these in reality involve a huge amount of organisational and administrative skills. This year, with fewer jobs available  we didn’t offer job titles, simply the opportunity to join a great company and try all the departments and on that journey, we can see where their fortes lie.

It is too easy to pigeon hole candidates on how they interview, where they will eventually reside within the company, and although we have fun guessing, we are not so arrogant to assume that we know best. My job, is simply to get the correct people in the business. What they end up doing is almost irrelevant; we can worry about that later.

If you are a graduate looking for a career. Be persistent and if you cant get a job easily, offer yourself out for experience. Do it for free if necessary. Get a foot in the door and make yourself indispensable. 

Often you dont need the qualifications you have just earned, but you will need the desire and enthusiasm. Do not fear failure. If you are turned down, you are destined for something greater. Good luck and enjoy the hunt!

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!

Why is this? Is Google acknowledging that faster sites give the customer a better experience? Absolutely! Is traditional SEO as we know it dead or is it evolving at such a pace that it has caught a large proportion of the SEO enthusiasts and internet users by surprise? Could it be that speed has always been a major deciding factor in ranking and no one knew about it?

Or did we?

For the last 6 or 7 years we have been watching clients with faster machines and lean sites soar to the top of the rankings. Not only this we have witnessed that when sites have slowed down, through congestion at peak times or with network or routing failures, they loose traffic and consequently customers.

A fantastic example of this and believe me I have hundreds was a site called Cheapest Flights.co.uk. The entrepreneur, Andy Speight, who set this up, built one of the fastest growing travel web sites in just a couple of years. Its growth was so impressive it attracted attention from TravelCare who ended up buying the business for millions. We had extensive meetings with TravelCare over their change-management procedure, as they decided to move the site to their in-house datacentre as part of the cost savings after the acquisition.

What they underestimated was all of Speights reseach and the lengths he and UKFast engineers and R&D team had gone to with regards to the hosting environment Cheapestflights was on. Speight had truly pushed the boat out, he deduced that slow downs at certain times during the day had a direct effect to his business with reductions in sales. He instructed UKFast to build him the fastest solution we had, load balanced, clustered, it had everything.

The results were phenomenal, his traffic went through the roof and the customer experience improved dramatically resulting in higher customer numbers, leads and direct conversion rates. Each time he upgraded the solution, the results just kept getting better.

I received a telephone call first thing one Monday morning from a very angry director of Travel Care. I was very distressed to hear that there was something radically wrong with the cheapestflights web site and that orders from their website were down massively. We take great pride in providing the very best service at all times even when clients are moving away. We have an astonishing rate of customers who return after leaving so we are careful to never burn bridges. I called my IT director immediately.

Neil Lathwood was perplexed. He is a lot more pragmatic than me. He simply called me back and calmly explained the poor results were down to their own network, not ours. He showed me the speed difference, it was staggering. Travel Care had moved the site over the weekend and the speed difference alone had begun to decimate their business.

The site never recovered and it lost momentum and credibility with search engines and customers. It dropped out of the Alexa.com top 1000 to become a shadow of its former self at an embarrassing 1,799,379th place when I looked a few minutes ago.

So why is Google bothered by this? Surely Google is just interested in land grab and their PPC model. Absolutely not!

If you understand Google’s model and what motivates the Google team, you will understand and unlock the key to true online success.

Just like Bill Gates said, “how do we become the intelligence that runs all the computers in the world?” when he founded Microsoft, the young men in Google have similar aspirations.

“How do we become the definitive doorway to the internet?

When you ask a great question like that, you start to look for great answers. In this quest for the answer, Google realised that they need to provide the very best search results and the absolute best customer experience.

Google analysed their customers and their user experience and found that the most important factor was not the number of links on a page, or the meta information, or one of the countless SEO rules we hear about, but the speed. The speed determined whether or not customers got bored waiting for sites to load.

We have all done it haven’t we, where you click back because of a tiny delay? Well guess what, they are measuring that and in our opinion, they have been for some time.

So during the discussion I had about search engine optimisation, I was challenged to provide evidence of Google’s stance.

Firstly, Google posts on their own site that landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected if a keyword is graded ‘This page loads slowly’. The full details are presented by Google on the Adwords page below.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87144

I have also enclosed a UKFast pdf which summarises the Google stance. I am specifically referring to item 4 on the ‘Google load time advice’ PDF:

http://pdf.ukfast.net/google_load_time_advice.pdf

Secondly Google advises website owners to contact their hosting provider if they are experiencing slow load time.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93116

My third and final point is more emotive. Google like any corporate body take their revenues very seriously. Yet they are prepared to sacrifice some of this for fast sites with good quality scores. Why is this?

It is safe to assume that as they take speed seriously in the PPC model, they also view speed as equally important with their non paid for search.

Remember this, Google does not publish a list of what to do, like the top 100 things to make your site go up the search engines. SEO experts have simply deduced their findings from things that have happened to their sites. (Increases and decreases in traffic directly linked to recent changes they have made.)

The problem with this method of research is that they are comparing these to their own sites that they manage and not the Internet as a whole. How can this be accurate? They are not able to analyse all their changes in relation to the changes all other website owners are making. This would take an impossible coordinated effort.

However, at UKFast we are taking an active role in trying to speed up commerce and at the same time understand the search engines and what makes customers choose and leave sites. We have spent almost a decade with an R&D team always around 20% of our workforce splitting the Google atom.

With hundreds of thousands of domain names on our network and clever pieces of kit like our CISCO GUARD anomaly detector which funnily enough looks for anomalies and unusual spikes in traffic or our IDS and IPS which track and prevent unwanted intrusions, our unique CTM software (Capacity Threshold Monitoring) we are able to spot a change in a sites behaviour in an instant. Often it turns out to be a genuine increase in traffic. When this happens we all get excited, contact the site owner and put on our Google analysis hats.

Overwhelmingly the majority of increases in traffic to sites are directly linked to an increase in server or site speed. So a leaner web site on the same server is a great place to start.

Ironically if you look at a well SEO’d web site, they are text heavy with very little imagery. It is highly likely the leanness of the site is winning the great results. Imagine what is possible when you upgrade onto a faster network.

And this is where the fun begins.

I remember 7 or 8 years ago, sat at an ISPA event talking with some hosting company owners. Their businesses dwarfed UKFast at this point in time. They ridiculed the UKFast idea that speed was important. They thought I was missing a trick and they both proudly explained how they were maximing profit by reselling the same bandwidth (contending) over and over and over again. What frustrated me most was they were so pleased with themselves that their customers would never know!

And businesses are still doing it. Hosting companies who offer unlimited bandwidth or terabits of traffic can simply not be telling the truth if they promise an uncontended network. What happens when the internet users start to use the promised traffic.

Take the top hosting providers who make these large promises and you do the maths. If everyone of the 1000’s of businesses on their networks, all demanded the traffic promised in one month, in my opinion their networks would collapse. They probably would struggle if people require 25% of their allowance! It is a nice idea to be able to offer so much traffic, but it is simply not feasible because in the long run, as the internet grows, so does the need for bandwidth. Sadly, aggressive marketing often takes precedence over common sense.

The good news is, long before we knew that speed was fundamentally important, we realised that with a name like UKFast, we’d better live up to our name, and the result? UKFast customers are growing like wildfire.

So a decade on, although it is immensely rewarding to be larger and more profitable than the 2 businesses who scorned our honest approach to hosting and this is clearly one of those occasions where less is more, I have to attribute a lot of our success to good fortune and plain old fashioned luck that we find ourselves in this position now. Still fortune favours the brave and I am a big believer in karma, especially in business.

Finally if there are any SEO experts out there who still need convincing, just remember that your industry massive as it is, is built on supposition. If you are asked to name the top most important SEO ingredient I guarantee it will differ from expert to expert.

Speed is one ingredient which is easy to track. Try it, the results are awe inspiring.