A brief history
Thortful
CEO and co-founder
A year in the making, exciting things are happening in our latest start-up thortful.com.
We want to harness the power of modern design & technology to build the best online global destination to buy & sell greetings cards.
At thortful, it all starts with our creators, a selection of independent creatives from the UK and around the world.
Our technology connects the artists with customers looking for the simplest way to discover and buy beautiful and unique cards, which are perfect for every life occasion.
By learning about our customers card buying habits we can deliver content which is timely and relevant to their buying motivations, meaning they will always return to us whether to get inspiration, buy cards or build their card selling business.
thortful is launched in June 2016
Before thortful, came Powwownow
Back in 2003 I became a founding investor of Powwownow with CTO Paul Lees. As soon as I was released from my golden handcuff deal with Domestic & General, who had bought my successful business Inkfish call centre (for £12,000,000, in 2004) I joined the company as joint CEO and Marketing Director. At that time the company had a turnover of £80,000 and three employees.
We gradually built the business, making the strategic decision early on to spend 20% of the turnover annually on marketing. The business had 60 staff and was turning over £14,000,000 when we finally sold Powwownow in December 2013 to US listed company PGI for £37,500,000.
Prior to Powwownow, I founded Inkfish
In 1993 I Established Inkfish Call Centres, an outsourcing business.
Having worked in a small call centre during my late teens i recognised one key issue all call centres had, I like my co-workers were just bums on a seats!
With this in mind I decided to set about changing this. By caring about my employees, leading, training and motivating them, ensuring they were rewarded well and by giving them an good working environment, my belief was we'd win business.
and we did!
This attitude gave us success and within 7 years we very quickly grew to £26m T/O and 2,500 employees. Our Customers included O2, SKY, Renault, Tracker and many other household brand.
In the late 1990's there was a lot of talk about all call centres moving to India. So in 2001 I decided to sell Inkfish to Domestic and General Group PLC for £12,000,00 but this came with a 2.5 year tie in. well the least said about that the better
Exciting things are happening in our latest start-up thortful.com. We are building a market place for creatives from all background, Illustrations, graphic designers, typographers etc..... to design and to upload cards they have created onto our website where the good ones are made available for our customers to buy.
We soft launched at the beginning of 2016 and the response to thortful was amazing, the user feedback was something that I've never seen in any of the business I've previously run. but with so many new feature that both our customers were asking for and ones that we wanted to add we decided to focus on delivering what our customers want and delay our launch until June 2016.
Since our Launch we've had over 20,000 card designs uploaded, 105,000 customers have signed up for a thortful account and we've sold inexcess of 215,000 cards. Not bad for year one.
In 2003 I became a founding investor of Powwownow with CTO Paul Lees. As soon as I was released from my golden handcuff deal with Domestic & General in 2004, I joined the company as joint CEO and Marketing Director. At that time the company had a turnover of £30,000 and three employees, including me.
We had a great business model, the first of its kind in the UK. But our first challenge was how we went about changing SME's perception of conference calling, and teaching them how changing there working practices could make for a better working life.
Our Strategic decision back then was to Educate SME's about conference calling and build our brand so that Powwownow were the go to conference calling company for SMEs. Since then we've also become the go to company for many FTSE 500 companies as well.
Over the next 9 years we built the business to 60 staff with a £14m T/O with £5m+ Profits.
After 9 years Paul and Myself decided we needed a change and sold Powwownow in December 2013 to US listed company PGI for £37,500,000.
In 1993 I Established Inkfish Call Centres, an outsourcing business.
Having worked in a small call centre during my late teens i recognised one key issue all call centres had, I like my co-workers were just bums on a seats!
With this in mind I decided to set about changing this. By caring about my employees, leading, training and motivating them, ensuring they were rewarded well and by giving them an good working environment, my belief was we'd win business.
and we did!
This attitude gave us success and within 7 years we very quickly grew to £26m T/O and 2,500 employees. Our Customers included O2, SKY, Renault, Tracker and many other household brand.
In the late 1990's there was a lot of talk about all call centres moving to India. So in 2001 I decided to sell Inkfish to Domestic and General Group PLC for £12,000,00 but this came with a 2.5 year tie in. well the least said about that the better
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