Kunle: Hi 2xers, welcome to the 2X ecommerce podcast show. I’m your host Kunle Campbell and this is the podcast where I interview ecommerce entrepreneurs and online marketing experts who help uncover new ecommerce marketing tactics and strategies to help you, my fellow 2xers and listeners, double specific ecommerce metrics in your online store. If you’re looking to double metrics such as conversions, average order value, repeat customers, traffic, and ultimately sales, you’re in the right place.
Today’s show is quite special because I’ve been following this gentleman for quite some time now and, about nine months ago, I came across an article on an entrepreneurship website about some 16 year old prodigy who started out a growing business in quite a niche area and he sells Spas, hot tubs. He’s the founder of Danz Spas, he’s in his twenties. Award winning website, award winning business based up in Nottingham. He’s a gentleman by the name of Daniel Thomas. I’m going to hand it over to Daniel now. Could you please take a few minutes to tell us about yourself and your business Danz Spas?
Daniel: No worries. Thanks for the many accolades, I’ve not been quite described like that just yet, but that was good to hear. Danz Spas is an online brand of hot tubs. Essentially, we want to be the brand responsible for bringing the hot tubs to the masses. Traditionally in this industry, hot tubs will sell in the region of five to fifteen thousand, and we’ve made the hot tub affordable. That’s really what we do. We provide the hot tubs throughout the UK, we’ve done a few sales internationally. We started quite a few years ago, and it’s been growing ever since.
Kunle: I hear Danz was founded in 2006, and prior to Danz you actually started from quite humble beginnings, from your bedroom, which is what I like to hear from entrepreneurs and founders. Could you take us through that journey from selling from your bedroom through to running a company and an office and warehouse?
Daniel: The story is, when I was in college I worked for a company called Capital One, they sell credit cards and I was in all that sort of stuff. My task was to be on the phone selling people loans, and I think at that age, I decided that that probably wasn’t for me. We had restrictions on the toilet time and all that sort of stuff. I was in college at the time and I think I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and was just looking for a way to be a bit more entrepreneurial I guess, and I had one of those old school Windows PDA phones and it had a massive glass screen and I went online to try and find a screen protector for it, the biggest supplier, I can’t remember what they were called now, but they were selling the screen protectors for something like £12 a piece and I was like “I’m not paying that(!)”.
So we found some suppliers in China who effectively said “give us £50 and we’ll give you 200”, so that’s exactly what we did. I brought them over and sold them online. I think we brought them for about £0.30, sold them for £2.99 a piece, so we were undercutting our big supplier, and it sort of started from there. We turned the college library into a bit of a factory.
Kunle: Sorry to cut you, but you say “we”…?
Daniel: Well, I always say “we”, there was sort of “we’s”, it was really just me, but in the college library, I’d ask friends to lick the envelopes and pay them per envelope just to try and get the screen protectors out. So we did that. We went from screen protectors to projector screens, we sold golf trollies, we just kept changing and finding new products to add.
Kunle: Can I cut you short please? How did your venture, your entry into business affect your social life? Did you manage to still have a social life with friends or were you very keen and focused on building value as an entrepreneur?
Daniel: When this started, I was 16-17, I didn’t understand what it meant to build value. For me it was simply that I found something that sells, I can undercut someone else and I’m going to sell it for as long as I can sell it. I had no concept of business at that time. I thought I was the world’s greatest business person and I thought I was going to be the next Bill Gates, but I had no concept of what it really meant to build a business at that age. To me, this was just purely that I found a way to make some money, and I think I can grow it. That’s all it was at that stage.
Kunle: Did you put the money back into the business or did you have really nice Friday nights?
Daniel: A bit of both to be honest. I did sort of splash out, which I regret. At that age, being as silly as I was, I went out and brought myself a brand new Audi. I didn’t have any bills, I had no mortgages or anything, I was still living with my mum. That was just what you do when you come across a lot of money at that age. The concept of building something for the longer term just wasn’t in my head. But the money did go back in, so we did buy the screen protectors, make £200, put the £200 back into buying more products and that sort of thing.
Kunle: Ok, that’s very interesting. So at what age did Danz Spas start to emerge? Was it when you were 18? What did you sell last, before hot tubs?
Daniel: Basically what happened, was this was effectively an eBay business at the time. We got to the stage where everybody was jumping on the bandwagon. We’d bring over a new product, somebody else would bring over that same product and undercut us. We were like an online market, all the products we were selling were completely unrelated. We got to the stage where it was like, we’ve got to pick a single product to build this around. I picked hot tubs quite simply because, at that time, I thought, whereas the screen protectors and things like that would need so much different types of stock, we wouldn’t know what would sell and what wouldn’t. With hot tubs, it was just, you know, you need a big one, one in the middle and a small one, just to fill the sizes. So we brought in three models and we took it from there. But the last product we sold was steam showers and that’s how we met the hot tub suppliers, because the same manufacturers that make the hot showers also make the hot tubs.
Kunle: Did you test the market? Was the decision to go into hot tubs based on the average order value or was it based on the margins you were likely to make? Because sometimes you would say, I’ll spend the same amount of time selling something that’s worth, say £10, and I could still sell something worth £1000. Was it a way of leveraging your time?
Daniel: The other products we saw, there was so much attention for waste, if you get what I mean. So, with the screen protectors, the prime example as I mentioned earlier, we just wouldn’t know what products would sell the most. As I said, at that age, I didn’t really have a concept of testing the market. It was just pure gut instinct. Also, hot tubs, seemed like a pretty cool product to actually build a business around compared to screen protectors, or projector screens, they were quite boring. There was no innate love for hot tubs or anything, but it just seemed pretty cool.
Kunle: Because when you think about hot tubs, it’s all about pleasure, really, relaxation, that’s what comes to your subconscious.
Let’s deep a little deeper. Have you got any family members or friends, close family friends that you looked up to while growing up as an entrepreneur, that were entrepreneurs? Or did it just come from nowhere?
Daniel: Quite simply, no. My granddad was an entrepreneur of a type in his day, I think he ran a printing business down in the cellar, but that was by no means inspirational, that looked like hardcore grafting to me. All my family members have been in normal stable jobs. My mum’s an accountant, my dad’s a carpenter.
Kunle: So what was their reaction when they saw you do this in college? Did they say “focus on your studies” versus “become an entrepreneur”?
Daniel: At that age I was quite naïve to be honest. I was my mum’s first child, I would’ve been the first grandson to go to university, so I think she was pushing me down that road, and she wants me to go down that road. At first it was “you should probably go to university”, but in the end it was different. I was always quite a stubborn child, to be fair, having my way.
Kunle: What was her reaction when she saw the Audi parked in the driveway?
Daniel: To be honest, by then, when she saw the sort of numbers that we were working with, there were times, when I was 17, we were taking in a good couple of grand every week and I just thought that was going to last forever. I think she probably got something to the illusion as well. But at that age, to be doing that kind of turnover is crazy.
Kunle: Ok. Let’s look at turnovers now. So 2006, do you have any ideas or rough numbers of what you were turning over in your business?
Daniel: To be honest, I think we registered in 2006 as a business. I don’t think we actually started trading officially yet. It was still quite a small eBay business at that time. I don’t think we started trading officially until 2007. I think in our first year, we did something small, like fifty grand turnover, but it grew massively. That went from fifty to, I think it was a couple of hundred grand, and the year after that it was half a million. So we got to a million pounds within 3-4 years.
Kunle: And this year, you’re well over a million pounds?
Daniel: Just over, we’re about 1.1. It’s been at about 1 million for the past two years really. It’s sort of ripe for pushing ahead for some new ideas.
Kunle: For our listeners in America, we’re talking about 1.7 – 1.8 million US dollars. So how many people do you currently employ? Does the business employ?
Daniel: The team’s five strong at the moment. So we’ve got four people that I employ. Five if you include me.
Kunle: Fantastic, good stuff. What does a typical day look like for you, and then we’ll talk about the team shortly?
Daniel: For me, I’m up quite early, check a few emails and bits and bobs from home. When I get to the office, at 9am, I’m not one of those people that gets there at 6am unfortunately, I work quite late but I never get in that early. But I’m on the business early.
Kunle: The other thing is with technology we pretty much work all the time. Once you’ve got systems in place, I don’t think you necessarily need to be grafting early in the morning.
Daniel: Once I get there, I’ve got a special tab on Safari where I press that button and it opens 50 pages. And these are literally competitor’s pages, competitor’s blogs, competitor’s Facebooks, a few search results where we want to check our rankings and things like that. That’s the first thing every day. See what the competitors are doing and then feed anything to the team. If they’ve got a special offer on, we’ll try and see what we can do to match it or better it.
Kunle: What’s the space like in the hot tub market in the UK? Who are you competing against? You don’t need to mention brands, but if you feel like it, you can.
Daniel: I will. This is the great thing about this industry, there’s two types of businesses really. There’s the online guys like us, but before I talk about us, I’ll talk about the more traditional guys. These are the companies like Jacuzzi, Hydropool, the big massive brands. But they sell from showrooms, they don’t sell online. The internet isn’t a valid place for them. I don’t think they see it as a real place to sell hot tubs from. It’s very much like the car industry. If you want to buy an Audi, you go to an Audi showroom. If you go to the website, they will direct you to a showroom. That’s how they work. I think customers probably find that frustrating because they go online and they can’t find any prices, they’ve got no idea what it costs. And there are just a handful of people, like us, that will import and sell via the web. Almost nobody sells the bigger brands on the internet?
Kunle: Why’s that the case?
Daniel: I think it’s the way the brands want it. Because we’ve considered in the past bringing in a brand and selling their products, but the problem is that they won’t allow us to sell it at a lower price. Because we haven’t got the overheads, it makes sense.
Kunle: So do the big manufacturers tend to sell direct to the market or do they have select partners?
Daniel: Yes, they’ll work through a dealer. So I can open up a showroom here and start selling Jacuzzi hot tub, as long as there’s nobody else doing it in the area.
Kunle: Ok. It must be quite an affluent area if you want to sell at their price point.
Daniel: Yes, exactly. Which is probably there’s not one in Nottingham.
Kunle: Next, what’s your view on universities? Going to university to be an entrepreneur? Say a 15 year old comes to you “I’m about to go into college” and he’s really thinking after college “do I go to university or do I take some risk and become and entrepreneur and learn?”, perhaps go into an apprenticeship with entrepreneur to learn a trade and start to trade online.
Daniel: I don’t think university’s very wrong. But I do think if you want to run a business, although I haven’t, I think I’d probably advise someone hands down every day to go to university to be honest. You’ve got to a long time to build businesses, you’ve got a long time to be an entrepreneur and, to me, it makes sense to go and get the core education. Because there are a lot of things in business which have taken me 8 years for me to learn. I’ve learnt the hard way, if you like, I’ve make mistakes and from that perspective, that knowledge is engraved in my mind maybe in a way it wouldn’t have been in somebody who went to university. But, certainly, a lot of mistakes would’ve been avoided I feel. Also, there’s the whole network of people you meet and that kind of stuff, which is certainly useful. So I’d advise the university route first and there’s lots of time to be entrepreneurial.
Kunle: What are your thoughts about fees and the debt that people accrue over university?
Daniel: I know what you mean. That’s a slightly separate issue for me. I think there is a problem in that we push everybody down the university route, and I thing that there’s an issue particularly in the UK, in that people are forced to make decisions about whether they want to go to university or what they want to study as far back as GCSE level. At that stage they have no idea what it really means to go to university. A lot of people that I went to school with in my year took a business course for the sake of doing it or because their friends were doing it. They had no real desire. If you are genuinely interested in something, or if you’re genuinely interested in being an entrepreneur and you think business is your route, in that case certainly, go to university and study it. Maybe get a few years’ experience and try something. But if you’ve got no idea what you want to do, don’t feel compelled to go to university.
Kunle: I have two more questions to follow up on that. The first question has got to do with, do you see yourself going to university at some point, given the fact that you recommend university?
Daniel: I’d love to. I’ll tell you my story. When we started the business, we started a business in the second year of college, and by the time I got to the end of my A-levels, I just thought college made no sense. I did the final exams. I think I got an A in Business, a B in Computing, something like that. Anyway the moral of the story is, since then, I’ve been back and sat A-levels independently myself just to prepare for one day if I do want to do that, I’ve got the grades and all that sort of stuff ready to go. I wouldn’t study business, which is probably strange.
Kunle: Psychology?
Daniel: No, I think I’d go for History. I’m torn between History and Biology, but this is if one day we’ll be coming into an era and I’ve got nothing to do, it’s that sort of plan. It’s probably not something that I’ll be doing anytime soon.
Kunle: I’ve had friends who do the Open University, but you could go full time, true.
Daniel: The problem with me is I don’t think I’ve got the willpower to stick it out unless I’m forced to sit down and get it done.
Kunle: Interesting. Second question has got to do with your friends out in college. Those who made it to university, do you catch up with them sometimes now as a business owner managing a team of four turning over a million pounds? What’s their reaction when they see you and when you see them?
Daniel: I think a lot of friends are quite impressed, but to be fair to them, some of those guys are doing impressive things themselves and they have different routes. Some of those guys are employees within a business. I’ve got a friend, for example, whose business does something similar to what I do, but they’ve specialised in the commercial side of things and they’re going via the wholesale route, finding big suppliers, and he’s given me some fantastic advice in jumping into that market. So we’re all very useful to each other to be honest.
Kunle: Fantastic, I think we’ll move on to the next set of questions. These are the midstage set of questions. I’ve noticed, Dan, you did mention earlier about the fact that you decided to stock your own brand as against manufacturers. Is it challenging? Because I work with a couple of clients that stock their own brand and there are two things that come to mind. One is it’s quite price led, and the other is they have to invest a lot on customer experience and branding and continuous awareness of their product because they’re up against a lot of competition. They’re not a Tesco, who’s at that scale and could maybe cross sell their products when they’re stocking really big products, you’re just selling yours. SO how do you drive in quality customer service and the brand experience to potential customers?
Daniel: The first thing to say is that the hot tub industry is a very unique one. It’s unique because virtually nobody knows who the big hot tub brand is. I know because I’m in the business. But if you go and ask the average person “who makes hot tubs?”, no one can tell you. No one’s heard of Hotsprings or Hydropool unitl you actually go out and start looking for a hot tub. Or maybe if you’ve seen the showroom close by. And so, from that perspective, people think the brand is, based upon their first impressions of what they see online if that makes sense. People will go to the Jacuzzi website, they will come to our website and they will compare the two based on what they see. And a lot of customers think that we are the brand, because you’ve got Sophie Ellis-Bextor on there, you’ve got the press coverage and all that sort of stuff, and you won’t see any of that on the other guy’s websites and they don’t invest heavily in their website.
So the point that I’m making is being a new brand doesn’t make a difference in this industry because no one knows who THE brand is. If this was the TV industry, that would be much harder to bring in some important TVs and sell them against Sony and Panasonic. But no one’s heard of the incredible, reputable brand in the hot tub industry.
Kunle: That’s interesting. So they don’t really advertise their product.
Daniel: It just isn’t a big industry and they do advertise. I’ve never seen them advertise. They won’t take up TV ads, they won’t be on billboards anywhere, it’s very tough. They will go to the Ideal Home Show and places like that. We do surveys all the time and if you ask a customer, who is a hot tub brand, no one knows. People use the word Jacuzzi all the time, but people don’t realise that Jacuzzi is a brand name for hot tubs and they don’t realise that Jacuzzi is actually a brand, they just think it’s a Jacuzzi.
Kunle: I actually thought that Jacuzzi was another name. Right, that’s very interesting. Is this theory correct: If I was a big brand, I’m more akin to advertise to interior designers, that’s why I’ll be in trade shows like Ideal. However you’re marketing directly to consumers who are going to use your products. Is that close to the reality?
Daniel: I don’t know. The Ideal Home Show is a good place to go to. I think you want to capture people who are really about the outdoor living thing and are really about spending time in the garden, because that’s where the tubs are going to be. In terms of advertising, I think the way bigger brands try and do it is they sell to a local dealer, and that local dealer sets up a showroom on a big main road with a big car park, or close to a garden centre, a lot of them partner with garden centres. That’s how they get their work out. I don’t really see any direct advertising. When I say direct, I mean billboards, TV ads, even online social media, I don’t see a lot of them being active. It just isn’t a big industry. Whereas with cars, it’s a massive industry. I think the value the hot tub industry at something like 30 million a year, so in comparison, it’s really tiny. We’ve already got a 3% share of that market.
Kunle: I would’ve thought it was several hundreds of millions of pounds.
Daniel: I think in the UK it’s grown massively though, In France it’s more established and it’s probably 2 or 3 times the size. But in the UK, it’s quite a new thing to have a hot tub. Typically now the prices have come down.
Kunle: Interesting. I guess, like a car, when you own a hot tub, it would break down sometimes or you would need to add accessories to make it look more beautiful or different and I can see you sell accessories from tour website. So what’s the split like from a revenue stand point, from accessories as compared to hot tubs? How is that split?
Daniel: We’ve got a lot of work to do with that to be honest. I think last time we looked it was about 88% hot tubs and about 12% chemicals. It’s really small the chemical side of things. When I say “chemicals”, I group all accessories within that. We sell chlorine kits that they need for the hot tubs and we do all sorts really. But we do know that there’s a lot of products that we could sell alongside the hot tubs. There would be outdoor furniture equipment, surrounding, gazebos, that sort of thing. We’re not doing a lot of that at the moment. That is something we’re aware of and we’re going to start pushing more of.
Kunle: I’m going to ask you a question in regards to how I actually found you the last time, because I’ve come across articles about you 2 or 3 times in the past and the very last one was on the BBC and it was about the value of celebrity endorsement and seeing Sophie Ellis-Bextor. I actually watched a video on your website and your Facebook page and apparently she endorses the Danz Spas. Can you describe the before and after effect of her endorsement to the business? Have you seen the impact?
Daniel: Definitely. We can test it scientifically if you like by split testing. One thing we know is when you put Sophie on a page, the bounce rates go down, it’s as simple as that. To give you some context, when we started out we tried to get a credit card merchant account, which most online businesses can get quite easily. We couldn’t get one because the banks classed us as a high risk business. The way they saw it was, people will buy a hot tub from you, spend as much as five grand, and it could be as long as 12 weeks before they get their hot tub. Sometimes we deliver them straight away, but sometimes it can be as long as 12 weeks if it’s not in stock. The way the see it is that if you go bust during that time, we’re going to be responsible for tens of thousands of pounds of undelivered hot tubs.
Kunle: Because the money would be in your account.
Daniel: Exactly, so when we first started out, we had to ask people to make their payments by bank transfer. So not only were we asking people to spend five grand without seeing us, but we were asking them to send those payments via a method of payment which was totally unsecured. They’ve got no chance of claiming their money back or anything. And so when people see that Sophie’s got one of our hot tubs, it just takes away some questions, because before people would ask questions like “how long have you been in business”. Some people will even go as far as finding our company accounts online to see that we were actually making a profit before they bought the hot tubs from us. But once Sophie’s there it just takes away some of those away. It’s like “if she’s got one, then you guys must be alright”.
It’s the same with the PR. We’ve got a lot of articles in the BBC and pretty much every major newspaper. When people see those icons on our website, they just assume “you guys have been talked about in some pretty big places, you must be alright as a business”.
Kunle: For all our listeners wondering about Sophie Ellis-Bextor, she’s an English pop star. She’s a vocalist and a song writer, I’ll put a video of her on the blog post, on 2xecommerce.com.
Daniel: Of course, she’s our favourite.
Kunle: We love her music. Dan, I want to ask you a question. When did she start endorsing the brand?
Daniel: I can’t remember now. I think it was 2011, that sounds correct.
Kunle: Was it mid-2011 or the end of 2011?
Daniel: I think she got the Spa in from November.
Kunle: How did revenue look like in 2011 as compared to 2012?
Daniel: I think that 2011 was the first time we hit the 1 million pound mark. It’s difficult to attribute completely the revenue reason to her because, as I said, things were growing anyway. But I’m certain that in some way shape or form, and as I say we can test it and see the difference it makes.
Kunle: Ok, so when you’re speaking to potential customers, does she come up in the conversation sometimes?
Daniel: Yes. People want the same Spa that she’s had. A lot of people have said these very words to us: “If Sophie’s got one, you must be alright”. I literally am quoting. That’s the kind of impact it has, it just eases the sales process. At some stage during that process, if somebody’s going to spend five grand without seeing you in person, they’re going to ask questions, and It just takes away some of those questions.
Kunle: Good stuff. Interesting. The audience, if you’re listening, celebrity endorsement is quite important in this business and possibly yours.
Ok. Let’s got to the next round of questions. It’s mostly traffic and customer acquisition. What is your number on customer acquisition channel at the moment?
Daniel: At the moment, mainly, pay-per-click. That’s our area of speciality. We probably get 90% of our leads through pay-per-click alone. Literally that high. We don’t do SEO or content marketing or anything like that. We have just started to dibble and dabble with Facebook and that’s proven to be quite interesting actually because we’re getting a lot more through that than we thought we would.
Kunle: Sales or more engagement?
Daniel: Leads. We’re always interested in engagement but ultimately, we want to get a sale. We’ve always seen Facebook as a good way to communicate with existing customers. That’s always been the case but in terms of driving leads, one of the things we’ve tried recently is to not necessarily to plaster them with ads, but lifestyle shots of the hot tubs and some people ask the question, how would this sit in your garden? Then offering them the chance to request a brochure and things like that. It’s diving more leads than Google content marketing does. As you can imagine, with Facebook we can be much more specific about who we’re giving these ads to.
One of the things we’ve done recently is to ask a lot more questions to our customers about who they are, why they buy it and one of the things we’ve established is that 80% of our customers go away on holiday twice a year. So we know that we’re advertising to that sort of person, they’re living that sort of lifestyle.
Kunle: And geography-wise, are they spread out in the country?
Daniel: They are. They’re predominantly in the South, but it’s about 30-40% in the South and the rest are scattered everywhere.
Kunle: What about London?
Daniel: They’re not in London as such, but they’re around London. No one seems to have the space inside London. But around London, the Kents, the Surreys, not Central London. A few people do have them in Central London. We had a customer recently actually who had a penthouse and he had one craned on top. How he did that I do not know, but mainly on the outskirts of London.
Kunle: Interesting. So you know they holiday twice abroad.
Daniel: Yes. What’s interesting is that 80% of our customers go on holiday once or twice a year, and 70% of those people that go away more than twice a year have previously been in a hot tub while they were on a holiday. We get the feeling that they go away, experience the hot tub, come back and it’s like “I’d love one”. With Facebook, this is quite weird, we’ve not done it yet, but you can go as far as advertising to people who have just come back from holiday and say “would you like your holiday to last forever?”.
Kunle: That would be very clever.
Daniel: The other thing that you can do, and I think that Facebook’s got so much potential, I’ve just bought a few share in them to be honest.
Kunle: Do you do remarketing or retargeting with Facebook?
Daniel: Yes. We do it with both, Facebook and Google.
Kunle: So you’re building your audience, you’re building up your audience database with AdWords and Facebook.
Daniel: Yes, we do two things. We saw that when we interviewed our customers, we found out that the average customer takes between 3-9 months from thinking about buying a hot tub to actually buying it. So we want to keep in touch with those people via remarketing via Facebook, keeping them on email lists and all that sort of stuff. The other side of things with Facebook is that Facebook’s recently brought out that new feature where you can store a cookie on your website and store cookies of people who come to you on your website and then advertise to people who are like them, people who fit that mode. That’s an area for expanding out on who we can reach because we know that people who are going to be getting our ads are going to be just like the people who come to our website.
Kunle: Absolutely. You’re basically harvesting data on visits and then pushing that out into Google and Facebook. Very interesting. Am I right in saying that your top three customer acquisition channels will be paid, social and then…?
Daniel: After that, everything’s about the same. What we’re going to do next year is tie in our email and content marketing and probably some of our social together. So in terms of keeping in touch with those people who are going to take a while to buy, they’re going to be the means for which we constantly communicate with them. Not via hard sales email or special offers per say, but just genuinely telling them things that they might want to know, things that they might be interested in, things they should think about before buying a hot tub.
Kunle: I’m on your website now, on your blog, and I can see articles like “Dreaming of a hot tub? Here’s what you need to know”. Your blog splits into four straight categories. Buying advice, which is probably for potential customers, latest news, general news about stuff, or the industry, hot tub care for existing customers and troubleshooting. So you’re probably going to take a lot of this and put it up on social media and content marketing and make it interesting.
Daniel: Yes, we’ve got some really good content, we just don’t make enough use of it at the moment. We will be taking that and splashing it out on social media. Just making sure, because some of our online contact has been written by SEO companies that have worked with us in the past and we found some of it not to be exactly what the customer wants to see. So we’ll be careful about what we want to send out. Some of it was written for search engines, for keyword search. So we’ll repurpose it and give it some thought before we do.
Kunle: Ok, interesting. You could also work with some fantastic data from your questionnaires and talk into those people as personas, as potential customers. Good stuff.
Do you still sell on eBay?
Daniel: We just started recently again. I’ve not really got that much experience on it. It’s all changed since we used to do it a long time ago. The logo’s different, the layout’s different.
Kunle: Even the feedback system is different.
Daniel: Exactly. I’m not sure what I think of eBay, but I think it’s certainly a place to get the accessories out. Selling the hot tubs would be fine if we can. The problem is on eBay, there’s a lot more competition with sort of one man bands importing. If we’re going to compete on price alone, we won’t win. I think the person that buys a new hot tub from eBay, is different from the person who buys a hot tub online. I think there’s a slight difference in what they’re looking for. I do think they’re looking for price rather than quality. A lot of the guys you buy from, won’t have any after sales support, won’t cover the hot tubs for more than a year, that sort of thing.
Kunle: Which is key, which is important, because you’re buying a piece of machinery and you expect it to have that support over the lifetime of the product. What about Amazon, do you sell on Amazon?
Daniel: No, we don’t. Quite simply because their fees are quite high. For our particular product category, we couldn’t make it work. We are thinking of advertising through them though because they’ve recently brought out some Facebook and Google competing advertising tools where you can do remarketing through that as well. We’ve just set the templates up for that but we haven’t actually set them live yet. But it would be interesting to see how much traffic that can bring through to our website and whether those leads are serious.
Kunle: Yes, I’m actually on Amazon, where I can see a £5000 hot tub, but it’s one of many, all the others are really cheap hot tube, they’re all under £500, most of them.
So we know the average order value is £5000. Let’s talk about the customer journey. You did mention that the customer journey takes between 3-9 months. Could you explain a typical customer journey? How they would’ve found you, the several touch points that they’ve had before they actually let go of their cash to purchase a hot tub.
Daniel: I think, from the research we’ve done recently, it seems to me that our average customer has an experience in a hot tub somewhere, most of the time, that’s on holiday. Lots of people see hot tubs as a bit of a gimmick and I think until you go in it and experience how great you actually feel when you get out of it, it always seems like a bit of a gimmick. But once they’ve had that experience, it’s like “this is something that I want in my garden”. They probably then go online and search for it and find a few suppliers, maybe save them to bookmarks, add them on Facebook or whatever. I think at that stage, they’re really just trying to get an idea of how much it costs. I think there are still perceptions that a hot tub costs 15 grand and I think a lot of people won’t even look for that reason, they just assume that it’s going to be way too much.
Kunle: Am I right in saying that you will tend to get a lot of enquiries in August and September when the holiday season is over?
Daniel: Yes. And I’ve only just thought that that’s probably the reason why I haven’t really drawn that to holidays. That’s a good point. It’s mainly April through to September, the busiest period being July and August, or June through to August, and that is the time when probably everyone is going on holiday and experiencing a hot tub, that’s probably the reason. The weather obviously contributes massively as well. People want to do their outdoor living during the summer. Hot tubs in this country unfortunately aren’t seen as a winter product, even though they’re traditionally from places like Canada, Finland and Norway where they use them in freezing temperatures. So it’s during that time that we get most of our leads and enquiries.
Kunle: Interesting. I’m going to ask about social media influencers. Since you just started out on social media, are you reaching out to any influencers and, if yes, how’s that helping out in business?
Daniel: Not really to be honest. We’ve not really contacted anyone who’s influential on social media. The thing is, our customer base are predominantly on Facebook. They’re not really Twitter users, so there’s not really a lot we can do on Twitter. There are more Facebook guys on it, but I haven’t seen more product influencers and that sort of stuff on Facebook as there is on Twitter and on Instagram. As of yet, no.
Kunle: Ok. Let’s go back to the celebrity endorsement question. Can you break down the process for a typical listener of the show? Either a marketing manager of a multi-million pound business or a founder of an ecommerce business. Could you break down the process of how you go about getting celebrity endorsement for your consumer brand?
Daniel: I’m going to be really unhelpful and I’m going to say that I have no idea. This is the thing. We never ever went out seeking a celebrity. We’ve never done it. We’ve never tried to get in touch with anyone. It’s just randomly, they come to us from absolutely nowhere. I don’t know how they find us. They probably just go online and do a search and because we dominate the online searches, that’s probably how they find us. With Sophie, we didn’t do anything. We just got a call one day from Sophie’s agent who said “we’ve got big client who’s interested in buying a hot tub, would you be interested in doing a deal?”. I said who’s the client, they said Sophie Ellis-Bextor, I said “yeah, sure”.
It’s the same recently. Alexandra Burke’s about to have one of our hot tubs delivered. That’s the same thing. We never went out seeking for them. John Newman’s about to have one delivered. That was a referral from Sophie Ellis-Bextor and John Barnes had one delivered this year. With Spas, nobody buys a hot tub online without seeing us. One day we just got an email through saying somebody would spend X amount of money buying a hot tub and he just seems to be called John Barnes too. So we called and checked and it was THE John Barnes, the England footballer. We never go out seeking them. The one piece of advice I would say is, if you have a PR company, those guys do know how to get in touch with the agents and put the proposals to them. That would be your starting point. If worst comes to worst, you can attempt to find the guys yourself, but it’s just difficult because the guys who have come to us genuinely wanted a hot tub and they genuinely saw us as being the people to buy it from. They just questioned whether they could get a deal in the process.
Some guys never wanted a deal. With Sophie, we were just going to sell the hot tub she requested. With Alexandra Burke, they just wanted to buy one, so we turn that into a deal.
Kunle: So she’s going to be a face on the website?
Daniel: Yes, she will probably take the Sophie role for the next few years to be honest.
Kunle: What are your plans with John Barnes? Did he just buy it or did you get a deal with him?
Daniel: He just bought it over the internet, but he did give us permission to use his name and I think there’s a picture of him on social media.To be honest, he bought it the week before the world cup, and if I had more sense at the time, I should’ve utilised that, and try to do something more with that. But he just wanted a hot tub to watch the games in, it’s as simple as that. He had a TV installed and he watched it with his wife and kids and that was just for the world cup season.
Kunle: Turing to the audience now, I think I’m going to pick up three things here. One is being everywhere in terms of your visibility. So if you sell a product, you need to be visible. SO when these potential celebrities, or their agents are looking for what you stock, you’re found, and you give them that avenue to get in touch with you. The other is a PR agency who would help you knock at their doors and bridge potential relationships. The last which I’m seeing here is a snowball effect as a result of seeing Sophie, John Barnes, John Newman possibly. If Sophie owns one and has bought from you, then they could be customers too. Fascinating.
Let’s talk about your marketing. Is your marketing in house or is it outsourced? What part of your marketing is retained in-house? You do a lot of pay-per-click, do you do it in-house or do you outsource it?
Daniel: Pay-per-click is all me. SEO is outsourced. Social is all us as well. Image design and things like that is done by us. So it’s just the SEO really that we outsource, and the PR of course.
Kunle: Ok, and then your content marketing, going forward in 2015?
Daniel: Content marketing is a bit of a test for us because it’s not something we’ve done before. We want to tie it in with the email and the social marketing, but initially I think that’s going to be me. I think we are looking to take on, mid-next year, somebody to help with the content marketing because, at the moment, it literally is mostly me that does that.
Kunle: Are visuals going to play a key role in your content marketing?
Daniel: Yes definitely. We want to build some really engaging content that makes customers chuckle or really gets them talking.
Kunle: Absolutely. I think in the lifestyle business especially, images and aspiring or illustrative photographs really drive the message in seconds rather than have to prowl through the articles.
Let’s talk quickly about customer retention and loyalty. How important is customer service pre sale and post sale?
Daniel: It’s always important. Customer service I something that we take seriously. We want to sell hot tubs but we don’t want to hustle you down your throat or something like that. We always tell people “we’ll contact you from time to time, but we won’t push anything down your throats, we’ll just have a conversation with you”.
Before sale it’s obviously key. Very often, a customer won’t buy until they’ve resolved all of their problems or their questions. It’s questions like how it’s going to be installed, not only are they having a hot tub installed, but they’re also going to have to have somebody to put in an electrical supply in place which we don’t do. They need access, sometimes walls need to be taken down. Until all of those questions are sold, they’re not going to buy a hot tub. So we take it upon ourselves to do research, we’ll call engineers or electricians and sort that out for them if needs be.
We’ll look at the address on Google Maps and Street View and we’ll look and see what’s going to be taken down and all that sort of stuff. So we try and do that for them, and usually, by the time they buy, they’ve had a pretty comprehensive experience. Depending on what happens from thereon, some customers, if they order a hot tub where the colour they order isn’t in stock, they could be waiting for as long as 12 weeks, so we’ll keep in touch with them down the line. Customer service is key, particularly with everybody able to leave reviews online nowadays.
Kunle: Absolutely. And post sales, what happens post sale? How do you keep your customers happy when they need some maintenance or they need supplies?
Daniel: There’s a bit of process. We currently don’t do deliveries ourselves, it’s outsourced to a third party. We’ll give them a call on the day of deliver, just to make sure delivery has gone ok. We give them a call once they’ve had their electrician around, just to take them through using the chemicals and those sorts of things. The aim from thereon is to keep in touch with them through stages. It’s supposed to be 6 months, just to keep in touch until the end of their warranty. And at the end of the warranty, they’ll also get a call to see if they want to extend the warranty, or just to make sure that everything’s alright.
Kunle: How long is the typical warranty?
Daniel: It currently lasts for 2 years as standard. If they want to extend that, they can do for 5 years.
Kunle: Great. So my guess is you hardly ever get repeat customers for hot tubs, if you want them to last at least a decade. However, from experience and from good customer experience, they will refer customers or friends and family to you. Is this the case? Are there a lot of referrals?
Daniel: It’s not as big as you’d think really. We do get referrals. Often when we do get a referral, we might not even know about it because we assume all our leads have come from PPC. We have one of those call tracking telephone numbers. When you call in, it will relate that directly back to your IP session, so we know where you’ve come from.
With referrals, one of the things we know is that we probably spend £200-300 in advertising to get every sale. If somebody refers, that money doesn’t go out via Google or whatever. So there’s probably a big incentive we could give to make a proper and real referral scheme. We do think that, actually referrals should be our biggest source of sales. Now. We’ve got 2000 customers and they just need to know that there’s a scheme. People do tell us naturally, but I think that with a scheme in place, that will help to accelerate that too.
Kunle: Absolutely. There’s a platform called ReferralCandy. It’s well worth a check. It sort of helps you manage your referral marketing. There are a few courses which I’ll share with you after, I’ll send you a couple of links.
The final question in regards to customer service is: Is email marketing helping with the growth of the business?
Daniel: Yes. Well, I say yes, again it’s one of those things we haven’t taken seriously previously, but as I mentioned we want to tie it in with our content marketing and there’s two sorts of email campaigns we have. We have email addresses for prospective customers, we’ve got thousands of those now, all which we’ve collected quite well to be honest. We recently did a campaign where we gave away a hot tub on social media.
Kunle: I saw that on Facebook.
Daniel: That got thousands of email addresses all from people who are in our target demographic too. And what we do with that is we try and send out informative emails rather than sales emails. But from time to time, we will send out a special offer. We did a special offer about 2 weeks ago and we had a massive response to that where I think we sold about 12 hot tubs off the back of it. Bear in mind that in December, we only do about 10-15 hot tubs. It’s really our slowest month of the year. That really was a good return on that email.
Kunle: From a single email?
Daniel: Yes.
Kunle: My podcast previous did this, I give it to the fact that basically when you’re in business, especially ecommerce, the richer point of business evolution, where you’re more or less an email marketing company, not in the sense of selling emails, but in the sense of reaching out. Every time you send out emails, basically it’s your database, you will make money essentially. It is so important for ecommerce businesses. Initially you might be reliant on search and eventually your database will be so significant that you’re pretty much just marketing to that database and your sales engine and traffic is really driving traffic which converts to emails and you make the sales off the back of that.
Daniel: Yes, I’ve only known PPC as a way of marketing and this is the difference between somebody who’s been trained in marketing and somebody who’s just been making it up as they go.
Kunle: It’s trial and error really and testing. You guys being out there, you’re testing this and the more you test, the more you learn. Sometimes you get really theoretical when you’re learning marketing and sometimes you’re not given the opportunity to try and test it in your ways or your customers base.
Another big thing in technology that’s emerged in 2014 is exit intent pop ups, which I think would benefit your business immensely because you could have a buyer’s guide to hot tubs for traffic coming into your site. So if they want to get that guide, which is content marketing, in that sense you’re tying content marketing to email, they could put their email address and have emailed that copy and then they’re on your database.
Daniel: Definitely. Those exit pop ups are fantastic. I’ve seen a few of them working on me, on various websites and they I enquired as to how they work as so forth. But I think that’s something we’re going to set up quite soon actually.
Kunle: There are two articles on my blog about it and there are a few technology options out there which are very well worth using. So let’s talk about average order value. Do you have a customer review engine on your website, in your store?
Daniel: Sort of. Previously we just asked customers to leave reviews on third party websites, so if you Google “Danz Spas reviews”, there’s about 4 or 5 pages that show up. We’ve found that works quite well because they’re all external pages, they’re not on our website. I think people are sometimes mistrusting reviews that are on our actual website.
What we’ve done recently is we’ve seen TrustPilot and those sorts of things pop up recently. So we’ve been dibbling and dabbling with them. We tried them. I feel that was quite costly for what it does to be honest. So recently, we’ve tried Reviews.co.uk, we’ve literally set that up this morning. That seems to be working quite well, so we’re sending emails out to 250 customers. One customer seems to have had a bad experience so far, we’re going to have a chat later on today to try and turn him around, but everyone else is pretty happy. I think going forward, that will be fantastic, and I think they are because I use them all the time. If I want to buy something, the first thing I do is go and Google what the experience has been like. I wanted to buy some Bose headphones recently and I saw a website selling them at a price that seemed too good to be true and when I checked the reviews, it probably was too good to be true.
We did a survey recently, I’ve got the figured here. 71% of customers told us that online reviews are really important to them and were a really important factor as to why they decided to buy from us. If you Google any one of our competitors, their name and “reviews”, you won’t find anything. Even the biggest brand, Jacuzzi, they’ve got some reviews, but they’re all negative. That’s what I mean. When people are looking for a hot tub online, they’ve never heard of the brand. These things all just help to paint us as THE brand.
Kunle: Along with the celebrity endorsements and news articles. You connect the dots and you can see that this is a trustworthy company to deal with.
Daniel: That’s the key reason for buying from us they told us.
Kunle: That’s tweetable for sure. Let’s talk about sales and revenue. We understand business is seasonal, it about June to September, that’s a hot season so your busiest period is over summer. What do you do prior to that, say January through to May? How’s activity over the winter and spring? What’s business like prior to your busiest period?
Daniel: Sales sort of die down in October, November and they stay low until about February, March. They get really low in December, so we do something like a tenth of our normal monthly turnover in December. It picks back up again straight away from Boxing day because everybody’s looking for January sales offers and things like that. So we’re still quite active, we don’t need to let go of any staff or anything like that. What tends to happen in our business is we have a really great summer, sales start to slow down in the winter, I then get a bit miserable. Someone said to me, when you’re in your own business there’s never an in the middle, you always either feel like you’re about to go bankrupt or you feel like you’re going to become the next Bill Gates. I feel like that every single winter, I feel like there’s going to be no end to this low season. What happens is during the winter, we tend to be very innovative, we tend to come up with our best ideas for what we’re going to do next year and we start to put those in place. Because when sales get slow, you just want to try and find a million ways to try and boost things and a lot of the good ideas we’ve had this year, a lot of the work we’ve done through social media for example is a result of the slowdown in sales over the winter. Because we set that up in the winter, we reap the rewards of it the following summer and that’s cycle happens over and over again.
Kunle: Just like the email you said you sent with 12 sales. Interesting. Most retail businesses would have really fantastic Christmases, obviously because they’re in a consumer side and this is more lifestyle.
So, final set of questions. Your currently 1 million+. How do you intend to hit the 5 million pound milestone?
Daniel: It’s going to be tough, but I think we can still do a lot with the existing business as it is. The main plans for us are to grow internationally. We know that the French market’s bigger than ours, we know that the French market lacks competition online so we want to come in and do the same thing that we’ve been doing here. We’ll have to go out and try and find some celebrities and get some PR over there to endorse the brand.
Kunle: Are you going to have to have a French website?
Daniel: Yes, we’ll have a French website. Somebody have us some advice once and said that the French are probably the only guys in Europe where, if you want to sell to them, you’ve got to do everything their way. Whereas if you’re selling in Holland, they’re more than happy to buy from an English website. Somebody said, in fact, that the biggest ecommerce site in Denmark is Amazon.co.uk. That gives you an idea. So France, Holland, Germany, we want to slowly press into selling in those countries. That’s one side of things, we think that’s quite a big area for us. We did dibble and dabble with France a long time ago and it accounted for 20% of out turnover. We stopped doing it, I was very young at the time and sales started to slow down in both countries during the recession period, and I thought the best thing to do was to stop dealing with France, because I couldn’t listen to sales calls and understand what my French colleague was saying. I don’t know if it was her or just the general economic climate, I couldn’t tell. So we cut that off, focused on the UK, built it back up and we’re at a stage where we’ve decided it’s time to give it a go again.
The other side of growth is going to come from the wholesale side of things. We know that one of the main things that stops garden centres and organisations like that from selling the hot tubs themselves is, one they don’t want to have to stock it because it’s going to take up loads of space, two they don’t want to do the whole installation side of things, they just want to sell you something off a shelf ultimately, they don’t want to have to send people out and do the deliveries.
Kunle: After service…
Daniel: Yeah. So we’re proposing a side of the business that will store and stock the hot tubs, you have one or two in your warehouse as a sort of showroom or wherever you trade from and we’ll deliver and install. So far, we’ve seen some pretty decent success with that.
Kunle: Have you tested it with a couple of garden centres yet?
Daniel: Not with the garden centres. There’s a chap that sells awnings. He has a pretty good business selling awnings and gazebos, garden sheds and those sorts of things. And he’s getting asked for hot tubs all the time and often he’ll be providing those services to set over a hot tub. So he will sell the hot tubs himself. He’s going to create a showroom next year with three hot tubs and we’re going to be providing those for him. We want to go out and seek more people like that who don’t have to be garden centres, but organisations who are in that sort of business, because ultimately, I do think that 90% of people who buy hot tubs have actually been in one before. Unless you’ve been in a hot tub or seen one somewhere, you’re not going to think about buying one. So we’ve got to get in people’s faces, I think that’s going to be an area for growth.
Kunle: Right. I love the second growth. The cross border France/EU is a no brainer, definitely go for it. Previous guests have gone for it and they’ve seen success, and they’re growing and they’re achieving. Some of them moved to America. The second one is a fantastic idea in regards to expanding your tentacles, getting to the offline world and going for that omni-channel experience with your potential customers and looking for these people who have a footprint in the physical world to actually distribute and showcase your products. That has massive opportunity especially when you roll it out nationwide, because there would be a sale every other day.
Daniel: The guys we’re going to be working with in Essex think they’re probably going to be able to sell in the region of 5-10 a month. On a good month, we usually do about 30 hot tubs, so if we can do 10 more via one retailer, the potential of growth is massive.
Kunle: 30% growth for one retailer.
Daniel: Exactly. So if we can find a few of those throughout the country and work out something, which is probably going to be the case.
Kunle: What you probably find out is the fact that people are experiencing this face to face, they’re going to search more.
Daniel: Yeah. One thing I forgot to mention is that the reason we’re branching out into this is that our research shows that 75% of the people that come to our website say they will not buy a hot tub without seeing one in person. And at the moment, people aren’t seeing them in person. We don’t have a showroom or anything like that. We just started with a small warehouse here, where we’ve got a few tubs in, but most of our customers are too far to come and see us. Do getting in stores and getting in places where people can actually see these, even if it’s just for the sake of boosting those sales when people come to us online, will do good things for us I think.
Kunle: Fantastic. I love the numbers and the stats and the data, because you’re very data driver, which is fantastic. Going back to the international sales, I came across articles where you sold in Bulgaria, the Middle-East and eve Ghana. What other countries have you sold to?
Daniel: Yeah, we love Ghana at the moment. I went there early this year, not for hot tubs,. In 2010 somebody rang us randomly out of the blue, they were a British company working on a big tar project, I think they discovered oil in Ghana, and it’s growing and somebody wants to build a skyscraper with 12 floors and a hot tub on every floor and they said “can you supply the 12?”, and we said “of course we can”. In Jordan, we didn’t win his one, but it was a similar thing. Somebody was building a skyscraper, they wanted hot tubs and we sent them a proposal. I love that sort of stuff, I love getting involved in those kind of things. There’s probably also room for growth also in terms of going out and finding those big markets. Because the developing world, particularly the British nations, the Brazils, the Russias, the Indias, parts of Africa, there’s so much opportunity in places like that and at the moment I’m not really sure of how to tap into it. But they just come to us from nowhere. The other sales we’ve had have been in France, where as I said we used to sell there before. It’s probably got about 100 hot tubs scattered around France. And Bulgaria, was a British customer who wanted a hot tub but didn’t want to buy one from Bulgaria so they contacted us instead.
Kunle: Not bad. It just shows that the opportunity is there from an international standpoint. Final sets of questions, this is a fantastic interview by the way 1hr 10 mins, sorry for taking too much of your time. What does ecommerce success mean to you, Dan?
Daniel: I think it’s going to look different for everyone. For us, we are an ecommerce business, we just look at ourselves as a hot tub business though, and for us, success is selling our hot tubs. As I say, we want to be THE brand responsible to bring the hot tubs to the masses, so we want to be the brand out there. We want to be the brand that people think of when they want to buy a hot tub, because I don’t think that brand exists yet in the UK. Nobody knows who that is so we want to be that brand. That will be success for us when we get to that place when you want to buy a hot tub, the name you’ve got in your head is a Danz Spa.
Kunle: Top in mind, absolutely.
Daniel: Of course, there’s a financial element. We do want to make money, we want to grow, we want to have opportunities for staff and things like that so we’re at a stage where people can grow into new roles, and as an organisation, that will happen inevitably. We’re five strong at the moment, we’re probably going to double that over the course of the next year.
Kunle: Looks like interesting times ahead. I wish you the very best of luck with building your brand, I think that’s core.
So, to entrepreneurs and marketing experts listening to the show, what’s your one marketing channel you’d suggest or recommend to them to take really seriously?
Daniel: If you’re an ecommerce business and you’re selling actual products on the internet, then I think that you’ve got to take the BBC seriously. I didn’t in the early years, I just thought we’ve got to get up in the search engines, do SEO so we don’t have to spend as much on PPC. But PPC really is its own channel in itself which need to be dealt with completely separately. There’s that and I didn’t take social media seriously until recently and it’s really doing some good things for us. The only thing is with social, you really do need to understand who your customer is before you start to go out advertising, otherwise it’s no different from advertising anywhere else. You’ve got to know who you’re advertising to and speak on their level, exactly how they want to be spoken to.
Kunle: In an ecommerce context, there’s a lot of debate now as to how long Google is going to last as the major customer acquisition channel, first it’s Facebook. What’s your take on that?
Daniel: I think Google’s got a while, but the thing is, in terms of search marketing, until Facebook decide to make their own search engine, which they probably will do at some point, then Google’s going to remain the dominant force for that. But in terms of content marketing, I have no desire anymore to advertise on Google AdWords because Google’s guess about who you are as a person are flawed for many reasons. If you go online and Google’s got that thing where you can sign into your own account and look at the way they describe you. Apparently I’ve been to all sorts of wired things. I like Star Wars, I’ve been to Karachi, and that’s what Google thinks about you. Those assumptions are flawed whereas with Facebook, you know that what Facebook think about you is probably very true. From that perspective, as far as content marketing is concerned, or display marketing, the method of that is always going to be Facebook, because I know that for every penny I spend, that’s going to go to very probably my ideal customer. Whereas on Google, they’re just not. I definitely think it’s really important for ecommerce guys to be in tune with all of the new developments because if you do make Google your sole means of making your leads, when Google starts to slow down, you’re going to slow down. So take them all seriously.
Kunle: Absolutely, you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table if you don’t. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman now, said if there’s one mistake they made, they didn’t go to social earlier on, and it’s exactly what you said in regards to that Google doesn’t seem to have an accurate reflection of its users basically.
Daniel: I think the big decided will be how well Facebook implements search, they seem to be taking it seriously. They’ve brought out graph search.
Kunle: Apparently you can now search through your messages now.
Daniel: Really? The think is Facebook’s really got potential for more streams of revenue from people like me. I’m prepared to give them money to get to my target custom, and I’m just not prepared to do that with… So if somebody’s trping “hot tubs” on Google, I’ll pay Google for that, but in terms of advertising to random people around the web, no chance. We’re pulling back on that.
Kunle: Ok. Any books, tools or resources you’d recommend for online retailers?
Daniel: I read a bunch of business books. “The Lean Startup” is a fantastic book that I recommend everybody read. There’s a design book, I can’t remember what it’s called, but there’s a great design book that you really ought to read. I think it’s called “Simply Usable” or something like that. If you’re thinking of redesigning a website.
Kunle: Who’s it by?
Daniel: I can’t remember. On the whole, though, I tend to read a lot of non-business related books. I think it’s very important you do that as a business person, I read a lot of history. I don’t read many novels but a lot of history I do tend to read.
Kunle: What kind of history?
Daniel: I’m currently reading British history at the moment. It’s a book by Simon Schama, it’s a great story and he went it Cambridge and wrote a few books on British history. The book I’m reading at the moment covers the period from the Tudors up to when Britain had the Independence war in America. These are things I didn’t know about before and it puts a lot of things about the way we live now, into perspective. I think the more you know about people, what drives them and what motivates them, the better job you’ll do selling to them. That woks for them. So it’s always good to have that.
Kunle: History psychology. Build that profile and context. Ok, before you say goodbye, could you give listeners one parting piece of advice and let them know how they can find you and reach you the easiest way?
Daniel: Of course. I’m on Twiter, my handle is @DanielLJThomas. I’m on LinkedIn, just search for Daniel Thomas. And of course if you want to buy a hot tub, it’s Danz.co.uk. In terms of one piece of advice, my grandma said to me, very early on in my naïve days, she simply said “climb the ladder one step at a time”. I think that;s probably been one of the most useful things to remember that you are only one person, you can only do so many things at once, so take it easy. It literally is one step at a time, if you try to do everything at once, you probably will fail to be honest. But one step at the time is the way.
Kunle: Thank you so much Dan for being part of the show, it’s been an immense pleasure having you on.
Daniel: It’s been a pleasure.
Kunle: Best of luck going forward, thank you so much.
Daniel: Thank you. Bye.
Kunle: Bye.