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James Hyde is an engineering graduate from the University of Cambridge. After a spell as an angel investor’s apprentice, he spotted the chance to modernize eCommerce fulfillment, while working with an online honey seller. With friend and fellow Cambridge graduate, James Strachan, he founded James and James Fulfilment in 2010. The company provides outsourced fulfillment services to independent retailers, based on its unique technology and processes. With a love of pondering problems and improving things, James has led the company to become one of the UK’s fastest-growing organizations.
In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, James says:
It’s very easy to look at a global market and think that you can enter it as you did the domestic market. The time, costs, and effort required are generally higher than people think, and many businesses fail to make significant inroads before they run out of cash.
Focus on the people. When you have a small startup, almost everything falls to the founders to do, and you get used to making all the decisions. With a bigger business, you need to let go and empower the team to make those decisions for you.
Communicating a clear vision and creating a healthy culture become the new focus, to ensure that the business stays true to its roots.
Read on to know more about James Hyde and his journey.
James Hyde: Our story began in 2010 when I was working for an eCommerce business with my friend and fellow University of Cambridge graduate, James Strachan. We couldn’t find the right order fulfillment service for the company. Faced with messy warehouses running on out-dated systems, we decided to build our own.
Since then, we’ve dragged a traditional industry into the 21st century, with our award-winning, cloud-based order fulfillment software. Today, our mission is to challenge the industry, create change for the better, and deliver 100 million orders to happy customers.
James Hyde: We originally started the company to provide a SaaS solution to fulfillment companies and online retailers. To prove the concept, we rented a small area of a warehouse and built up a small client base. The more we tried to sell software purely, the more it became apparent that the market was mostly made up of smaller, free platforms, or large players such as SAP and Oracle. There was little demand for anything in the middle, but there was a strong demand for outsourcing the entire process, so our model became a technology-based operating business.
Only now, 10 years later, are we again looking at providing a SaaS platform for use in clients’ warehouses.
James Hyde: We’ve never raised capital – the company was grown organically and without debt for the first 10 years. Last month, we had our first investment from LDC for £11M.
James Hyde: 10 years ago, the fulfillment industry wasn’t very tech-savvy. We built a website ourselves and had it on page one of Google within a couple of months.
I would spend as much of every afternoon building lists and cold calling as I could cope with, and slowly we started to close some business. The majority of it was coming to us, though, and for the company’s entire history, inbound web leads have been the largest source of new business for us.
James Hyde: Online retailers seem to look online when they are buying services for themselves, so having a webpage and an online presence is all it’s really taken.
James Hyde: Messaging. This has evolved so many times for us, and I’m still not sure we have it right. Every month we find out something new about our potential clients, and global changes such as Covid-19 can throw all of that out of the window and leave you starting from scratch again with a new type of client.
James Hyde: We wanted to grow the company faster and recognized it had now got to the size where we needed additional expertise and experience to do that. The right investor wouldn’t only provide cash but would help build the right board, bring in expert consultants, and provide advice.
We started because of the above and were in no rush. We could have done this a year later, and it wouldn’t have made a huge difference – it wasn’t about a cash runway. We brought in a corporate finance advisor to run the process.
James Hyde: Several investors have approached us over the years, simply due to our financial performance. Still, when we wanted to start a process, we met with several corporate finance advisory firms and also with a handful of investors.
Once we’d chosen an advisor, we invited back the investors we liked most, plus a few others that were recommended to join a formal process.
James Hyde: The biggest challenge for me was the bureaucracy. You are dealing with a lot of advisors and due diligence processes, and they can often suck you into a vortex of the minutia because they don’t understand your business. You end up spending days on areas you know are not material to the deal.
While I’d like to say that, having had the experience of fund-raising, I’d do it differently next time. I suspect that the overbearing weight of advisors would mean I’d still have very little influence to make the process more efficient. I would try to get all of the lawyers in one room, though. That is an area where a lot of energy can be wasted.
James Hyde: We set out a five-year plan, and we aim to achieve as much of that as possible. We have some financial and strategic objectives to position the company for the next investor. However, they still need shaping, and I wouldn’t want to tell anyone external what they are anyway.
James Hyde: Our current focus is on our main existing sites in the UK and the USA. However, our strategy will include looking at new locations, territories, and partnerships internationally when we feel the time is right.
James Hyde: They are taking on too much. It’s very easy to look at a global market and think that you can enter it as you did the domestic market. The time, costs, and effort required are generally higher than people think, and many businesses fail to make significant inroads before they run out of cash.
James Hyde: We plan every day and every week to make the best of it that we can. Online retail, especially the delivery of essential products, saw a positive trend following the outbreak in China. We work heavily in the health, wellness, and organic foods sectors, so we’re more protected than many other industries. It would be a very different story if all of our business came from the fashion and leisure industries.
James Hyde: I can only really talk about the mistakes we made. Looking back, we didn’t invest enough in marketing, messaging, or sales (though that’s not to say that we weren’t lucky and grew regardless).
If we could do it again, we’d have outsourced more of the non-core parts of the business, such as maintenance, and would have spent more money on expertise.
James Hyde: Focus on the people. When you have a small startup, almost everything falls to the founders to do, and you get used to making all the decisions. With a bigger business, you need to let go and empower the team to make those decisions for you.
Communicating a clear vision and creating a healthy culture become the new focus, to ensure that the business stays true to its roots.
James Hyde: Some of the best life improvements I’ve made in the last year have been some of the smallest.
You can follow James Hyde here.
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