The company had come a long way since its first year and the next stage had begun with two new full-time staff.  The third stage of expansion now began in April 2001 when I hired an Internet team of three, this team included James Fryer as the technology manager and James Shepherd as head of design.  When this trio started work, there were sixty websites.  Covering content, design and technology, the team’s target was to roll out a total of 150 different B2B websites in a new design by the end of 2001.  We had developed a template toolkit for our B2B sites that contained all the general content in the regular design.  This could be populated with additional site-specific content and quickly rolled out.  I felt that I no longer had my arms tied behind my back and could now focus on the areas that had the most business potential - the B2B websites and publications, and the B2C content licensing.

The rationale behind my thinking was to raise the value of the company by increasing the number of visitors (or ‘eyeballs’) to our site network.  These eyeballs could be measured financially by the enhancements to the B2B site template that we made to support revolving banner advertisements, third-party banner advertisements sales and a prominently-featured publication for each site on the home zone.  We redesigned all our old sites according to the new style guide and began rolling out dozens of websites a week for the rest of 2001. 

     Over 100 corporate B2B websites were released.  Our customers were increasingly asking us to provide an easier way to access all Mobile Lifestreams’ information and analysis in one place.  We had used mobileThirst.com to aggregate consumer sites and I planned to use a site called mobileFirst.com to do the same job on the business side.  With such a site, we could provide a single and convenient starting point for mobile researchers and mobile professionals for the first time.  As well as the company’s own in-house research, the site also featured third-party news content edited by Mobile Lifestreams, and content customized for a variety of audiences including network operators, manufacturers, analysts and corporations.  The site also allowed for some personalization and had an interactive community element with its discussion forums.  When we launched mobileFirst.com on 3 July 2001, it was our 100^th different website for mobile communications professionals.  By the end of the year, over 1,600 users had registered with us using the site which had now become a major part of our corporate business.

    Websites such as Thirst and First took the look and feel of our websites to new heights. In James Fryer we now had a technical Internet manager who could build dynamic back-end databases and network connections and in James Shepherd, a design manager who could greatly improve the user interfaces of our websites.  We could now add branding and customize new sites easily.  Our newsletters and content creation processes also benefited from this new in-house design expertise and it was clear that with this capability we had significantly increased our ability to lead the mobile markets in which we were operating.  In the corporate world, information mattered more than design as I had always learned from the early days when badly-designed reports were being purchased in earnest from badly-designed websites.  Good interface design both in terms of graphics and navigation is critical for the next stage in the life of a successful website; design was also going to be especially important for us as we targeted the youth market.

    Our web team also did a great job when faced with developing and relaunching our two major web portals, ringtones.com and pictureMessaging.com, with a new design and new content in just ten days.  I don’t usually expect my people to work late into the evening to get jobs done (the policy is to launch when something is complete or seminal), but this was an exception because we had an external third-party deadline.  In the new version of the sites, we were responsible for every element of the solution, including the hosting, copyright, delivery and other tasks that had previously been handled by a technology partner.  Most importantly we now had control over the sites so that they could be updated at anytime.  We had established our own relationships with suppliers and would no longer be dependent on partnerships in the future. 

It was also clear within the first week that we were going to sell more content from the new sites because of their improved performance.  We also offered a premium-rate voice service (IVR) as an alternative way for customers to pay for the content, adding to the credit- and debit-card billing options we already provided.  In the first week, the two different ways of paying were equally popular.  It cost consumers twice as much to order the service using the premium call option, but we soon learned that people were dialing the expensive telephone numbers from their offices and it was their employers who were (unknowingly) paying for the calls.

Fame and Copyright Protection

One thing you soon learn about running your own business is that there is always an issue of some kind to be resolved.  I found that I was beginning to get anxious about the next problem in the back of my mind, just as the most recent issue had been resolved.  As we grew bigger, the number and seriousness of the issues increased. 

My star sign is Cancer and I am sure that this makes me a worrier.  I worry about an issue for a few days and then reach the point where I find a solution and move on.  In the early days, issues were mainly related to personnel as I sought to build and motivate the right team but by the middle of 2001 the fact that personnel issues had not been around for a while was almost a guarantee that they would soon arrive.  I found that these things tended to happen in cycles.  Legal issues especially were to become the bane of my life as I dealt with things like trademarks, copyright and contracts, among other matters.  I hoped that one day I would be able to hire a great administrator who would take on all these issues - someone who would help manage both the stability and the instability.  I finally calmed down, got used to handling crises in a calmer, more professional manner, and learned to take the rough with the smooth.  In short, I stopped overreacting. 

This was a good thing too because we seemed to be more on people’s radar screens as our profile grew.  The quality and quantity of the websites we owned and ran made us look much bigger than we really were - success builds on success.  Our business research division now had a much higher profile.  In September the Economist magazine had featured us twice, the BBC interviewed me and Wired magazine called wanting to quote the same statistics.  The same weekend, a communications magazine had called me ‘the unofficial global guru of the SMS world’.  Praise was pouring in from all over the world and I found that fame fed on itself, but it also needed to be nurtured.  The larger publications would come looking once we had been around for a while and had earned our dues.  Patience was all we needed.

    It was a shock to me that I was so well known within the mobile industry.  I think that there were few people who had not heard of me or whom I had not met at some event, somewhere.  I gave so many speeches around the world that wherever I went, especially at Asian mobile conferences, I was recognized and remembered.  It is never easy to understand fame if you have it – it’s just one of those things that happens if you have a high profile at conferences, on the Internet and in the media.

    Being well known was also helpful in securing information from large companies who would not have considered dealing with us in the early days.  In my opinion, Mobile Lifestreams certainly did change the entire mobile industry both directly and indirectly.  We changed it through the opinion pieces we published on the state of the industry, through our research and through our successful consumer services.  We not only practiced what we preached but also put our money where our mouth was.  It is difficult to say how much influence we had, but certainly the industry tended to dance to our tune. We would make a statement on something like multimedia messaging (MMS) and suddenly it would become accepted wisdom.  In the early days I became annoyed at things like the hyping of WAP as I watched the industry flock to the technology like lambs to the slaughter, but I soon got tired of trying to get the industry to change.  It would change - when it was forced to.

    Surprisingly, we were almost never wrong in our predictions and I cannot remember a single occasion where we published information that was later proved to have been inaccurate.  We did once get the name of a company wrong - but aside from that, I can’t remember any complaints.  In a fast-moving technical industry like mobile, this kind of record of achievement was pretty much unprecedented.  Just about everything we said about SMS, WAP, GPRS, MMS, 3G came true - the only time we misjudged something was with the Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) which we thought would become a significant ringtones format but which was never properly rolled out widely, uniformly or quickly enough by the handset vendors.

Over a few years, we were also first to report dozens of stories about the mobile market that few other observers even knew about.  I had a strong network of people in the industry who told me things and I also picked up news from conversations at conferences and other meetings. Whether it was new handset models yet to be announced, mergers, deals or layoffs, our website, wirelessClueless.com, which charted the mobile industry as companies laid people off or businesses went bust, was reporting things early and accurately.  The quality of our reports and the poorer quality of many competitor reports meant that our copyrighted work was regularly stolen from our B2B division.  Seldom did a month go by without me writing an email to someone telling them to stop using our material without attribution.  Websites went up around the world featuring our content including our whitepapers, which many people seemed to think were copyright free.  Market research companies copied our stuff; so too did lazy analysts at investment banks.

We also had to threaten a number of ringtone companies when we found that quite a few of them were reproducing our B2C content without our consent.  I suppose that these companies simply thought that they could get away with stealing our ringtones and did not want to or could not be bothered to improve on our original material.  They rarely even bothered to change section headers or song titles but simply used our naming conventions.  As creators of the content and owners of its copyright, it was annoying to find such abuse, but I suppose that is part and parcel of being a leading and innovative Internet company.  Online material can be so easily copied and being first with things like MMS meant that anyone who followed us only had our information to find and copy.

Second Cash Tightness

I always like to keep a few months’ revenue in the bank to provide some insurance for a rainy day or the next inevitable crisis.  We had been able to do this during 2001, mainly because of the success of the Insiders Program where most customers paid the whole year in advance for a cheaper subscription.  This meant that for most of 2001, I did not need to worry about cash reserves.  The advantage of having cash in the bank changed in early September when I had some large payments to make, all due at the same time.  We had to invest in the infrastructure for ringtones.com, and pay some partnership settlement fees as well as our lawyers’ fees for trademark registrations.  Nevertheless, these were also the right things to be investing in and were essential for our future expansion.

Aware of such imminent payments, I spent a couple of days chasing companies that owed us money and was able to collect enough to keep the cash flow moving, although I had to threaten some late payers with legal action.  It was usually the larger companies that delayed payments the longest; we delivered services in good faith and in good time, and they took several months to pay us.  This lack of funding was frustrating as I had to hold back on new projects and move forward at a much slower pace.  I started to sell heavily all the products we had recently launched, I stopped work on new services and also cut costs down to a minimum by delaying things like reordering the printing of reports.  Although I was keen to move ahead, we really did need to catch our breath, take stock and let some of the dust we had kicked up settle down.

    I was beginning to feel that the company had the basis for some serious profitability because of our investment in targeting the right markets and hiring some great people.   We never had much problem with making money (some of the publications were regular money earners) and, on the other hand, we didn’t have any problem spending it.  But, as I have always said, ‘It’s OK to spend money like water, as long as you make it like air!’   I had not always been so financially focused and in the early days of running the company I had been idealistic, giving out free reports left, right and center; three years on, this was something I would never do.  ‘Show me the money’ was now my motto.

    The belief that liquidity comes before profitability and that cash flow is the single biggest driver of all business is something I fundamentally believe.  Unfortunately my focus on money became almost obsessive at times.  But I gradually became more cynical and it was only in 2001 that I started serious and proactive selling - calling people and chasing them for their business.  We did not really have much choice because we had to keep the cash flow moving and I am still pleased with what we had achieved in such a short time.  We had managed through sound focus and careful resource investment to get the consumer side of the business producing proper revenue streams; we had learned from our mistakes and we had turned a corner.

     I eventually solved the cash squeeze by doing something quite simple.  I refused to pay a partnership settlement fee until this partner paid what it actually owed us for the previous few months of content licensing.  We now had a big payment going out but a large enough one coming in to help soften the blow.   We had usually paid invoices to companies and waited passively for them to pay the money they owed us, but I did not see why this situation should continue.

Adding Business Reports

I found some external authors to write business reports for us and we managed to double the number of reports that we produced in a matter of months over the summer of 2001.  Acting as a publisher as well as an author clearly enabled us to broaden our portfolio of work and our relationships with people.  It also enabled us to tap into other writers’ knowledge and energy.  We shared 50 per cent of net revenues with our external authors, and the reports they wrote remained their copyright.  We advertised for new writers in an ‘Author’s Zone’ on our main website.  We said that we published detailed reports and ‘briefings’ and that we would published a new report within ten days of the material being delivered according to our simple style guide.  The author could focus on writing while we handled the customer service, marketing, shipment and payment collection.  The writers could also contribute to one of Mobile Lifestreams’ three newsletters.

I was pretty tired having written several dozen reports over the previous three years, not including other articles and news stories, and I was happy to have additional help from the external authors so that I could concentrate on other things.  I gradually removed myself from more and more aspects of the business and delegated work to other people, but I still decided what was done and by whom at a more strategic level.  On one particularly busy day (probably the busiest ever) we launched two new newsletters, two new reports (about mobile gaming and enhanced messaging), and relaunched the ringtones.com and pictureMessaging.com websites.  Although I had a hand in all six projects, I got most involved as the author of the EMS report.  An external author had written on gaming, the web team had handled the consumer sites and our analyst had edited and designed the newsletters.

    We rarely worked to a deadline; instead reports and websites were launched when they were ready and when we thought that they would exceed the expectations of our customers.  One thing I emphasized to people in the company and our external authors was that we produced what I called ‘seminal works’.  By seminal I meant that the reports were category killers – they started a new thought process and set a new standard for others to follow.  The highest praise I could give to someone was that I thought something they had done was ‘seminal’.

    There certainly was a time after the company had been going for a year or so when the ‘seminal’ criteria had no longer been part of the process.  At that time we just had to roll products out quickly.  This had been part of the problem with a hostile and anonymous review of the WAP report which had been posted on amazon.com in 1999; our report on this technology had been written to meet a market demand but did not really do the company justice.  The majority of customers were usually pleased with how much information they could get from one of our reports or websites, and this fed word-of-mouth recommendation that got the buzz going.  We often delayed a report publication until some industry standards meetings had taken place or when we had feedback from a vendor; in this way we were able to give our customers the fullest and latest information.  You only get one chance with a customer so it is hugely important that the product they get satisfies their needs. 

Third-Year Scorecard

After the cash-tightness and liquidity crunch of October 2001, Mobile Lifestreams settled back down on an even keel and ended the year with much better accounts than the previous year.  Whereas the company had made a loss in 2000, we had made a small profit in 2001.  Our revenues had also increased by 12 per cent.

    I was happy that the company had much greater financial stability but was disappointed with the revenue growth which I thought was not good enough for a fast-moving young company.  Not only had we lost revenues, especially from consulting, but the research business had also been in recession for almost the entire year.  Consumer revenues had also only started to grow significantly after the September relaunch.

    I decided to make the following year a watershed for the company with the emphasis firmly placed on further expansion and revenue growth.  For the first time, I compiled a detailed strategic plan for the business and set out to execute it efficiently.  The plan was about six pages in length and I crossed off action points as they were achieved.  These days, I thought, you either executed or were executed, or you moved sideways.  I just wanted to grow the business.

Part 4: Consolidation, 2002

US Activity

During 2001 I had taken a break from constant trips abroad throughout 1999 and 2000.  Although Mobile Lifestreams had been represented by other staff, I had personally missed out on key mobile industry conferences like 3GSM in Europe and CTIA in the USA.  It was important to visit such key events, especially during a recession when the smaller events were quiet and the big annual get-togethers usually provided good value for money.  I had always had a superb time at such events, managing to meet with hundreds of people in a short time as I paced the floors.  I would avoid the dull corporate overviews given by most of the conference speakers and concentrate on the exhibition halls.  There is no substitute for gathering information and gaining insight into how a company is doing, what deals it is negotiating and how its strategy is going than a face-to-face conversation on a stand.  It’s amazing what you can find out if you ask the right questions. 

    For some reason, my consecutive appointments were always at opposite ends of the exhibition hall, and walking the length of the Orlando Convention Center many times a day during CTIA that year was certainly good exercise.  I came back from these events exhausted but with a huge stack of business cards and leads.  Constant conversations and business discussions deep into the night proved that the conference circuit was not an easy ride, but I also had time to think and so while back on the road again at CTIA in February 2002, I made the decision to incorporate a Mobile Lifestreams subsidiary in the US.  My exhibition conversations this time had clearly shown that the American market was poised to get mobile in a big way and that the timing for establishing a US company would be just right.

    After CTIA, I pushed forward the plan to set up a business operation in the US in earnest.  We hired a legal firm locally and created our first wholly-owned subsidiary, Mobile Lifestreams Inc., ‘a Delaware Corporation’.  I was named ‘President’ of the company, which I found amusing - I had come a long way from being a Vodafone ‘officer’ to having my own presidency!  We did not have any local staff at that time so I was the sole corporate representative of the company.  I also applied for various taxpayer and employer IDs for the business, opened a bank account, generated some employment and other contracts and amended a number of our existing UK contracts.  We also applied for ringtone licenses with the major US music companies.  But none of this was cheap - it cost me tens of thousands of dollars to set up this legal and administrative infrastructure.

   Hiring staff in America also proved more expensive than I had expected, while benefits in Europe, like medical insurance and retirement plans are provided in basic form by state, in the US this is not the case.  Salaries were relatively high there too, and the rule of thumb was to add about 35 per cent of the gross salary as equal to the cost of benefits.  But you cannot hire anyone in the US without a private medical plan, and this plan has to be established from the start of their employment.  I soon became an expert in terms like COBRA, 401K, IRA and IRS and my lawyers recommended some employment experts who helped provide advice and program for all such issues; I now had assurance for any future employees that they would be well covered.

We held our first US customer conference in June 2002.  Where you decide to hold an event is always important and we hired a room in the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta, Georgia.  While more than 60 people registered, only just over half that number actually attended.  Even so, the quality of the delegates was high and comprised a mix of people I already knew together with other executives I hadn’t yet met from large companies in the US mobile messaging industry.  Holding the event in such an up-market place was well worth the money; many people saw that we were holding such an event in the Ritz in Atlanta and were impressed, even if they could not actually attend.  Ivan flew in at his own expense, showing some very welcome non-executive support for our new business venture.  Nearly everyone who came to the customer event was keen to do business with Mobile Lifestreams.  We had a queue of people trying to work out the deals they could do and how they could get started. 

In April 2002, I sent over one of the UK staff to help kick start the US business.  I did this for two reasons: firstly, because I could not easily hire anyone locally and I was keen to get the right person on board (a task which was to take me nearly six months).  Secondly, we had many leads from the CTIA conference that would pass us by if we did not act quickly.  Unfortunately the secondment did not work out and I finally hired Shawn Barber from CMG, a large messaging vendor, as our new US country manager.  I had originally met Shawn on the island of Phuket in Thailand at a CMG Asia Executive Forum where I was speaking and we had hit it off immediately.  After keeping in touch and meeting again at 3GSM and our US Customer Conference, Shawn started working for Mobile Lifestreams in August 2002.  There is little point in having a company structure without any employees and I believe that you should have local people running the local business from a local office.  I had seen too many companies get caught out by having their US or UK divisions rely on transatlantic counterparts.  Shawn initially established a local sales and service office at his home in Midlothian, Virginia. 

    We were fortunate at this time that (unusually) the US market was behind Europe and Asia in terms of both mobile market numbers and mobile technology.  This meant that we could take our knowledge of SMS text messaging, ringtones and other mobile content and deploy it in the US with very little modification.  We also benefited from our strong Internet presence which gave us a high profile in the most Internet-savvy market in the world.  As we deployed new services like multimediaMessaging.com in Europe, we were also aware that we would be able to sell the same offerings in the US a few months later.  Having a local US presence allowed us to achieve a substantial return on our investment and we have performed well in this market, since our first day of business. 

MMS Strategy

I had started to think about our ‘Next-Messaging Strategy’ with a goal to extend Mobile Lifestreams’ success (or messaging ‘franchise’) beyond SMS as far back as late 2000.  We updated and offered a new report, Next Messaging: From SMS to EMS to MMS, which I had originally written in late 2000.  I was keen to associate our research division intimately and intrinsically with EMS and MMS in order to maximize the revenues we derived from next-messaging content. This next-messaging strategy had successfully positioned the company as the leader in multimedia-messaging research and industry advice.  Our websites, reports and newsletters were testimony to our market lead and many of our competitors were months and even years behind in their understanding of these future technologies and services.  This was a valuable franchise and also an essential one for us as we couldn’t afford to dwell on past SMS successes.  I had further planned a detailed and comprehensive strategy for our MMS consumer business in late 2001 and early 2002, and spent most of 2002 implementing it.  I handled the MMS strategy myself (as a labor of love!) - I knew more about it, believed in it more and had more time to work on it than anyone else in the company.  I always said that Mobile Lifestreams in 2002 would be driven by MMS and our presence in the US, which were the twin objectives that I set our staff to focus on for that year.

In implementing the MMS strategy we launched a range of partnerships, products and websites according to the strategic pattern I had established.  In April 2002 we launched multimediaMessaging.com, the world’s first MMS consumer portal dedicated to educating mobile phone users and raising their awareness of the potential for MMS.  Timed to coincide with the first commercial availability of MMS networks and phones, the site at launch contained information and advice, and also a range of free downloadable MMS screensavers, created in-house.

    In June 2002, as another part of our MMS strategy, and to ensure that we remained the leading MMS research company, we launched the fourth generation of mobileMMS.com.  There would not be much rest during that summer of 2002 as MMS phones and networks were being launched by other players the industry on a weekly basis.  We had to keep our eye on the ball and keep rolling out our own new services.  We had an early leadership position that I knew would be valuable but I also knew that we had to hold that position by continuing to build on it.  We even gave away some free content on multimediaMessaging.com to attract more visitors and build awareness.  I had seen other companies establish early leads and generate a large amount of interest, selling out to a bigger company that needed a kick start to enter a new market.  I was interested in gaining similar credibility by being thought of as a serious player but unlike them, I did not want to be a fly-by-night company that disappeared as soon as it failed to maintain its momentum.

Gaining Credibility

Businesses and people are fickle things and depend much on credibility.  I always thought this was unfortunate because I considered that what you knew would be enough, but after a few years of running my own company, I now realize that knowledge isn’t everything.  So many new businesses in the mobile industry were based around a business plan, premier VCs and a dream management team but had absolutely no mobile-industry market knowledge, no business model and no mobile industry contacts.  To be successful they also (usually) had to sponsor the right conferences, have plush offices, and attract (normally) the right investors.  It took a while to gain a reputation that was good enough to get the larger, more conservative companies to deal with you.  Some of the bigger companies were happy to be customers of Mobile Lifestreams from the beginning, but for us to expand the number of customers and to develop deeper partnerships and relationships with more of the players meant that we needed to have a much greater level of credibility.  Sometimes this credibility gap also meant that the conservative press would hardly ever quote us, no matter how much more we knew about a topic than anyone else.  The gap would only be closed in time – we just had to have been around for several years. 

Mobile Lifestreams had not done much business with network operators until 2002.  This was mainly because I had previously been employed by one, did not like them and regularly criticized them in the press and speeches, but these companies had a customer base and marketing revenues that would be lucrative for us.  In order to develop better network operator relations I considered hiring someone to be our director of carrier sales and one candidate I interviewed thought that this market could be penetrated but that it should not be attempted ‘on the basis of an ad hoc approach’.  He thought it would take much marketing effort to convince the carriers of our ‘credibility’.  We certainly had credibility as a research company but had much to do in gaining acceptance and getting the network companies to work with us in the consumer services space.  The time and effort this would have involved, coupled with the fact that the operators were in great difficulties anyway, meant that I decided not to invest in a specialist sales team or in sponsoring mobile network conferences at that time.  We had better opportunities for expanding our services and content into other areas which would bring the operators to us eventually.

    Many people asked me if it caused a conflict of interest being a business research company when we also invested in the provision of consumer mobile services.  I had to say that most of our business customers could not have cared less about our consumer division; they just wanted to get their hands on our research.  We were able to get serious partnerships and customers in the MMS space because of our position as the leading MMS research company, so one area of serious credibility enabled us to build another.  As the consumer division grew (and the research division stagnated during the recession), I was grateful for it.

Diversifying and Competing

Early in 2002 I implemented a new revenue earner - the ‘Messaging Insiders Program’. This was a program that only included our messaging reports and a messaging newsletter, rather than the full Insiders Program which provided access to all of our research.  We offered the Messaging Insiders Program for $3,500 - a huge discount for a one-year subscription to all our current and future reports.  We charged around $20,000 a year for the full Insiders Program and the subject of messaging comprised over 50 per cent of our research; we did not offer the messaging program publicly for fear that our full Insiders would select it.  About fifteen companies signed up for the new program and generated much-needed revenue for us during the recession.  I had a plan to go back to these customers a year later and charge $5,000, but we would have to wait and see how things turned out.  As for the full Insiders Program - most companies renewed for a second year and new companies also joined.  We would not receive payment from two companies for their 2002 renewal until July 2002, which goes to show you how the payment cycles had been extended in the recession as these companies struggled alongside many others.

    Business success is pretty simple if, like Microsoft, you have something that cannot be easily copied.  I also strongly believe in diversification of revenue streams derived from such ‘proprietary leverage’, or ‘unreplicable advantage’.  Certain advantages can be used to build up other advantages, in the same way that Microsoft uses its operating systems to sell software applications.  In the mobile industry there were segment leaders like Nokia, Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse that had achieved critical mass and traction in the part of the value chain they operated in - mobile phones, mobile networks and UK mobile retail respectively.  But they had not been able to use their proprietary leverage in one area to drive business in another. 

    By mid 2002 Mobile Lifestreams had a number of different but vertically interrelated revenue sources:

We had created several new revenue streams and re-launched existing ones, especially in the B2C business.  Some of these were now growing strongly.

    This was a good position to be in because I love to compete and nothing gets me going like the motivation to be the market leader and to beat the competition.  I never really worried about direct competition at Mobile Lifestreams because of our diversification - most competitors came and went in the different areas.  We also never scheduled anything or copied anyone.  Competition was always internal - for staff resources to further our strategies.

    The mobile industry was going through a big transformation from voice to nonvoice (data services) which coincided with our rise to lead the industry, and this period was characterized by poor competition.  I hardly ever came across a mobile company that I respected, and this was one of the reasons why we integrated across the value chain ourselves; we found we always did a better job.  External companies sometimes saw us as competition but we had a broad-enough range of activities which allowed us to compete with different companies in different sectors.  No direct competitor had the same business model and the greatest motivators for me were not competitors but other issues like hiring new staff, sorting out trademarks, or dealing with the annual banking crises.  These activities drove changes in Mobile Lifestreams more than any other external party.

    But they were also frustrating at times.  I paid my trademark lawyers upfront to register domain and brand names but did not see the results for several years.  There were a number of objections to the trademarks we were applying for from third parties which I felt should have been dealt with more quickly.  But this was just a long process we had to go through, as we provided more and more information to government departments.  We gradually made progress on all three of our trademarks which we had also applied to register globally.  I was sure that the trademarks would become valuable company and competitive assets once they were finally registered.  (Our first actual trademark for the ‘@ arrow’ was finally granted in early 2002 and was the first of our nine applications to be successful).

    It amuses me to read books about dotcom companies like Internet portals that benchmarked their sites against one other, routinely copying each others’ features.  We didn’t bother to do this but just continuously added new features and services to our key sites which made it harder and harder for competitors to keep up.  We raised the bar, and over time and as the industry shook out, we were left increasingly out in the open as the major player.  Some competitors did copy our concepts though.  One leading mobile conference company came to consider Mobile Lifestreams a major competitor.  They were frightened of us which was flattering and acquired a couple of companies that produced mobile newsletters and reports, ending up with a strong position in that market.  They were a major company with huge funds and human resources, yet it would be a year or two before they could offer online ordering.  It wasn’t until 2001 that they had developed a good enough website, but by then we already had a dominant position of our own, with the resources to respond.  Our Insiders Program and Mobile Messaging newsletter were also imitated but not until mid 2002.  Speed and lack of institutionalized dogma is the lasting advantage of all start-up companies over incumbents.

Delegating and Prioritizing

As Mobile Lifestreams has evolved, my role has changed from encompassing everything to handling only a few select projects like the MMS strategy and its implementation.  This was exactly as it should have been if I was going to grow a successful company as an entrepreneur; delegation was going to be critical.  I had not written any reports for a while although I read everything that we published and provided feedback to the authors.  I did write some news articles when I wanted to during 2002, but mostly left this to others.  I had delegated most of the administrative work except for the management of our ‘bank’ of website addresses which I knew better than anyone and which I kept in order myself.  I managed the relationships with our lawyers and accountants, although this also had begun to change over time.  I also signed all the company contracts and chased money until we hired a credit-control person.  My responsibility was now mainly divided between personnel management, strategy formulation, traveling and speaking at conferences.  I hoped gradually to delegate staff management to a personnel manager (although I was keen to keep a role in the hiring process), and to offload the many speaking engagements.  I couldn’t see myself ever withdrawing from the strategy work.

    In July 2002 I entered quite a strange phase personally.  I was exhausted as a result of all the deals done, strategies formulated, products launched, money chased and staff hired.  I had set the right people loose on implementing the right strategy.   Now I was forced to play a waiting game while they all worked hard.  I love launching things and think that the only real mark of progress is making things go live for public consumption.  We had launched a number of products less than a month previously, but to me this seemed like an eternity.  I was waiting to launch our daily MMS screensaver service, our mobile photos service, our polyphonic ringtones service, an MMS applications report and a couple of other things.  The technical team was snowed under with work and my launches had been delayed but eventually we managed to release most of these products. 

This role of product management as well as business administration and business development meant that I insisted on launching new services and at the same time emphasized the need to execute projects properly and deliver real results.  I am sure that the technical people would have liked some quieter days to catch their breath but I did not feel too bad because I knew that they were enjoying working on cool projects, creating great content websites and pioneering new technologies.  There was always a sense of satisfaction to be gained.  I also had a guilty feeling on dark days and wondered whether the effort and stress were all worth it.  When you start up a company you have no idea how many crises you will have to go through to achieve your vision. 

    I could not have done all this without support from some great people.  Recruitment policies make a strong contribution to personnel management; if you hire the right people and give them a long list of the right jobs to do, they generally manage themselves.  Over the years I have got better at managing people, although I was certainly insensitive to people’s feelings in the early days, being only ever interested in what they were going to achieve next.  We seldom had full team meetings and in 2002, I think we only had three or four meetings that everyone was able to attend. 

    All people in the company today have been regularly thanked for their contributions with a grateful email after a project has been delivered.  I also work out a list of priorities with key staff members who are particularly busy.  Helping set priorities is essential to get the important work done first and alleviates some of the pressure.  Prioritizing is very different from micro-managing; the latter is designed to stop people from getting work done and was not something I could afford to do.  Key staff received regular pay increases and promotions.  I awarded people on the basis of their contribution and we had nothing like pay scales.  Paying someone well and giving them a rise if their work warrants it, whatever the size of the company, has to be a good thing.  I also gave people the job titles they wanted; this made them happy and cost me nothing.

When I first hired staff for Mobile Lifestreams, I had introduced a policy of ‘employee reviews’ which were to be held after the first three, six and twelve months and annually thereafter.  These occasions were always useful for both employer and employee, but I found that they mainly became opportunities for the employees to ask for pay increases.  I had constantly reviewed staff and salaries, but something about someone’s role that I had not been previously aware of was often revealed during this review.  Although the necessary changes usually made sense, it was mainly because of the salary issues that I tended to avoid any future reviews.

    Interestingly, Mobile Lifestreams did not operate a stock or stock-options program at that time and I only paid the staff their salaries.  The main reason for this was that I had spent a small fortune with my lawyers trying to get such a scheme established.  Several different types of stock-option program were available and several more were being introduced by the government, but none of them were suitable for Mobile Lifestreams.  For example, some program types limited the number of people who could participate and gain tax-free benefits to ten staff who also had to be full-time workers; this was too narrow a definition for my liking.  After trying to find a way through the paperwork, our first cash crisis arrived and I had to put the stock idea on hold, although one day I am sure I will pick it up again.  My employees know that they would be looked after if the company was ever sold or floated; they also know that I value loyalty and am not greedy enough to keep all the money for myself.  But my commitment went no further than my word that I would like after them, which I liked to think was as a good a guarantee that they could take it to the bank.

Teleworking, Team Spirit and Customer Service

There was once a time at the start of Mobile Lifestreams when nearly all staff had teleworked.  This had been a way of working that I had long believed in.  Initially three management and administrative people shared the office and all the technical and content people worked from home.  Today I think we have the best of both worlds – a choice of working from home (using broadband connections and instant messaging) or from the new office.  Occasionally (especially in October 2001), I had had to ask people to cut down on their fixed home and mobile phone use to save costs during a period of cash tightness.  Although I knew that high telephone bills were a side effect of teleworking, our bills were extremely high and the calls were costing more per month than the salaries of two staff members; and I would rather have had the extra staff than the telephone calls.

    By mid 2002, the company had several teams of people doing a number of jobs.  I moved people between teams as work shifted, but did this less now than I had done before.  We now had a technical team, a content team, a sales team and a customer-service team; there were also two analysts, as well as Shawn and myself.  We still did not have any formal structure but informally the seniority was fairly well established.  All the teams functioned relatively autonomously, although we often spoke together and got on well with each other, socializing in person or chatting via instant messaging. You have to have strong teams in all areas as a result of interdependence; sales can’t sell unless they have good technology, the best technology won’t sell without great design and content, and sales people also need the support of some good customer service. 

    Over the last couple of years we had lost the focus on our original customer service excellence, mainly because of high workloads and low resource levels.  We had also never had any account management or proactive telephoning of our customers.  One person handled both the business-to-business and the consumer side of customer service but wasn’t able to do either well enough.  We had also employed a couple of part-time people to answer the consumer ringtones email but this was not giving high levels of consistent service.  Our credit card charge-backs from the bank- where people refuted that they had used their credit card- had also increased due to this poor customer service situation.  We needed better cross training in and among teams so that more than one person could perform any one task, but this was not happening by mid 2002; and it was a situation that I would have to improve.  Consistency is the key to customer service – customers had to be sure that they were going to receive additional reports of a similar quality and new ringtones in similar timeframes.

There was a period of about six months when I was answering most of the business customer service calls myself while I was looking to recruit someone to work in the office.  It was always a great feeling when a customer rang and requested that a ringtone be resent and then to send it out while they were still on the phone and ensure that they had received it.  In the UK, a new sales manager handled consumer customer service and another member of staff handled the Insiders account management.  In the US we also now had a local structure in place that had not previously been available. 

Anaemic Revenues and a Banking Crisis

In mid 2002, I returned from my travels after speaking at conferences in the US and on the island of Kos in Greece to find Mobile Lifestreams in a poor financial situation for the third time.  It seemed that we had gone through a money crisis every summer since we had started.  I received our May statements from the accountants and saw a large loss and I could also see from our order-tracking system that we were owed over $150,000 in unpaid invoices from 2002 alone.  We did not have any credit control and in many ways I was to blame.  The October crisis the year before had taught me that it was not necessarily a bad thing to have outstanding invoices because I thought you could call them in as soon as you needed to - they were so overdue that most customers would settle their bills quickly.  But in the middle of an unprecedented recession, people were reluctant to pay up, and by mid 2002 they would not pay their invoices quickly under any circumstances. 

    It turned out that we had been so busy trying to manage the corporate and consumer email loads that we had not been able to focus on invoicing people properly.  When I followed up on the unpaid invoices, I found out that many customers had not actually received one.  Those invoices that had been sent often did not include the right purchase order number and had been rejected.  It took me a couple of months to resolve the situation and for the invoices to get paid.

    As my accountant pointed out to me, this cash crisis had been caused by anaemic revenues rather than excessive costs.  The costs were relatively under control despite the new staff and investments, but the revenues from corporate research had fallen because of the recession and the extension of payment cycles.  Once again I was thankful for the diversification in revenue streams and grateful for the ringtone revenues derived from premium-rate telephone calls; these ringtone orders were generating nearly enough revenue to meet our payroll on their own.  The real issue was that although our consumer products had taken over from our business services in revenue terms, any extra money was always needed to cover running costs and this meant that the overall company revenues were static.  In 2002 the company was rushing ahead just to stand still, much as it had done during 2001.

To get the cash flow moving again, I ran a half-price report offer during July 2002, similar to the one I had organized in October 2001.  This sale was a great success and made an impact on revenues, showing again that our customers loved a bargain.  It was good to know that this sale tool still worked in such a turbulent market, but not all staff members agreed with my policy of selling off the reports cheaply.  One team member told me that he thought, ‘these half-price sales do us more harm than good sometimes’, and another thought that they devalued our product and annoyed existing customers, ‘Why not 25 per cent in future, it’s still a big saving?’  I could see the points being made but unfortunately it was not a perfect world and the funds would provide us with a much-needed boost.  The technology reports also had a shelf life and needed to be sold.  You have to be pragmatic as an entrepreneur and always keep a few tried and tested tricks up your sleeve to generate fast bucks when necessary.

    One Monday morning I received a letter from my bank asking me to contact them urgently.  It turned out that charge backs from credit cards for online ringtone purchases were running at 26 per cent - in other words, more than one in four people who had ordered a ringtone from our website were refusing to pay for it, resulting in the charge backs.  One reason for the charge backs was the confusion caused by the fact that ‘Mobile Lifestreams Limited’ was shown on the customer’s bill when they ordered from our ringtones.com website.  Customers had not recognized our company name and had queried and then refused the payment.  We changed the website to include more prominent wording about the company name that the customer would see on their bill and also added this to the emailed order confirmation.  I explained to the bank what we had done and told them that we were also working with a third party to incorporate the three-digit security numbers on the back of credit cards within our order forms. 

    Again, I could see that my own fly-by-night management style had contributed to the crisis.  We had few customer service staff to deal with customers whose order for a ringtone had failed.  Additionally, it had taken us several months to get the anti-fraud database populated with suspect card numbers because of resource constraints.  I simply did not have enough people or funds to hire more people to get these jobs done.  We were actually in a permanent financial crisis throughout 2002 as we embarked on massive simultaneous development in personnel; the US operations; application development; ringtone and other content creation, formatting and databasing; MMS service delivery; report publishing; and more marketing and sales.  The US office had especially meant a big cash outflow in the short term and many of the other developments would not see commercial returns until 2003.

The fourth quarter of 2002 was a tumultuous time, with even more frenetic activity.   The company was growing at breakneck speed and I was again faced with several financial challenges.  I felt I was driving the company by moving from first to fourth gears with no changes in between - and repeatedly.  This took a big toll on me and I was exhausted.  There was also heavy pressure on other staff because of my demanding requirements to deliver multiple projects almost simultaneously in the race to generate cash; the money came in and the money went out - immediately.  For the first time, bills were not getting paid.  I had always made it a principle that individuals and small companies got paid before the larger companies, but even this was not necessarily the case towards the end of this year.

At the same time, I cut back any expenditure in the US beyond what was needed to pay Shawn, and halted all marketing plans.  I also renegotiated some deals that I had done with MMS partners and started to delay payment of invoices considerably.  Finally in September 2002 we lost the revenue stream that had brought us a large amount of money and some profit that year - the ringtone service for a major portal - when the portal acquired a stake in another customer of ours.  Once again, we were running around in the same place, creating new revenue streams to replace others lost in the recession.

    In amidst the turmoil, the second Mobile Lifestreams UK Customer Conference took place at the Great Eastern Hotel in London on the 17 September.  All of our past, present and future customers were invited to attend the event.  There was no cost for attendance and again we had only 160 places, so it was first come, first served.  Topics covered were a review of the mobile data industry; advances in ringtones such as polyphonic ringtones; and a heavy focus on multimedia messaging.  We held two sessions - one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  Around 150 people turned up to the customer conference including a great many network operators, application developers and portals.  I have never run one of these events that has not paid for itself several times over; they are always great value for money.  This time we won four contracts as a result.

Board Meeting

In early December 2002, on the afternoon before our company Christmas dinner that evening, I held the third annual board meeting of the company with Ivan and Peter.  This was in many ways an enjoyable meeting lasting over five hours.  They questioned me carefully as I reviewed the year and we discussed the many different issues I had been faced with and had dealt with.  They had not been aware of most of the issues but they had been at our customer conference in June and had received quarterly accounts, so I was not withholding anything.  Their experience genuinely impressed me in all matters financial and strategic, and I was pleased that they both still wanted to be associated with my business.

    Ivan and Peter made many jokes at my expense during the meeting.  I was called ‘the last refuge from the dotcom boom-bust cycle’ and ‘the world’s poorest millionaire’; when describing the investment, they said that ‘they had gone out to shoot grouse and had come back with a duck’.  More seriously, a visit to our new website was described as similar to ‘visiting a public toilet - you just want to do your business as quickly as possible and get back out into the fresh air’.  When I said that ‘Good guys always win,’ Ivan replied, ‘No, they die young,’ and Peter added, ‘But they are remembered as heroes.’ This was not really what I wanted to hear.  At the end of the board meeting, they did acknowledge that we had done well to have grown revenues, personnel and company assets and also to have increased the overall value of the business.

It was clear to me that my financial expertise was lacking.  I could manage cash flow only too well out of absolute necessity, but when it came to depreciating assets and similar financial concepts, I was inexperienced.  Peter, a wily financial accountant, helped me out by sharing our accounts with a friend of his, also a professional accountant, whom he asked for some advice on a few Mobile Streams issues:

1. Depreciation: I think from the accounts not all hardware, software and set up costs (e.g. new America office) are being depreciated, some are being taken as an expense, what is your advice here?

2. Revenue recognition: to date Simon is only recognizing the revenue when he receives the money and not, say, when he invoices the service.  I think this is a very conservative way of reflecting the accounts but again what is your advice?  No, we don’t want an Enron!

3. Costs are being recognized when they are incurred and not in line with the payable terms or the revenue recognition, again what is best?

4. Assets: at present MLS buys and owns most of the assets, should they lease?

By taking the most conservative possible stance in accounting, and including only monies received and all known unpaid liabilities, the company financial position looked much bleaker than it actually was.  I had always insisted on keeping a spotlessly clean set of accounts and we had only recognized income once the cash had been collected.

Fourth-Year Scorecard

The year 2002 had been another big one, both for the business and for me personally.  The company had been totally transformed; the first generation of staff had mostly left and a whole new generation of employees and customers had been gained.  A new consumer content business had also been created almost entirely from scratch and this now increasingly accounted for most of our activity and growth.  The workload had been immense and the burden on the staff considerable; the expansion and transformation had not been an easy one, for anyone.  I had grown the business aggressively in the midst of an unprecedented downturn in the mobile industry.  I was excited that the company was still growing, expanding, learning, improving and, above all, succeeding.

    Mobile Streams had been named in the Top 50 Gross Profit Companies and the Top 50 Cash Rich Companies in UK Mobile Industry in a Plimsoll report issued on 3 July 2002.  Plimsoll had also named us as one of its ‘Winners’ with sales growth of 123 per cent and 0 per cent total debt as percentage of sales.  Around 500 companies had also been analyzed in the report, with 56 named as Winners in total.  These results showed some of our company’s key strengths - its debt-free, cash-flow funding, its low cost base, its Internet foundation, and its retail sale and wholesale supply of electronic purchases like ringtones.  I remembered the company that printed our reports calling me later at Christmas and asking me if there would be any point getting me a present or a bottle of wine.  I replied, ‘Don’t bother, I would rather you spent the money reinvesting in your business.’

    We had finished the year with revenue growth of around 20 per cent compared to 2001 which was a fair performance but still less impressive than I would have liked.  We had gone from a small profit in 2001 to a sizeable loss in 2002 which had been mainly caused by our US expansion.  These losses had also reduced our cash in the bank which made less opportunity for error than in previous years when we had always had a few cash reserves to fall back on.  The last quarter had seen a quickening pace in revenue, product releases and customer growth which would stand us in good stead for 2003.  I ended my board presentation by saying ‘the hard work has been done but the profit has not yet begun’.  Only time would tell whether this would indeed be the case.

Summary

Mobile Lifestreams the research company was an amazing lesson in extreme entrepreneurship. The company was very successful and influential in the mobile industry at the time and by and large had a good solid team of people working for it. The company also struggled in many ways as it tried to expand into new areas and as the company went from instant success in the dot com mobile bubble to the downturn of a severe recession. Some observers have said that I personally hit a ceiling with the research business and could not grow that company into a professional global research company, but the recession was severe. It is certainly true to say that I was personally quite bored with reporting the news rather than making it and wanted to get into digital content services.

Over time, the content side of the business that is mentioned in this book became more and more of the company’s focus and revenues. Conversely, the research side of the business kept on falling because of the recession. These days, Mobile Lifestreams the research company is pretty much dormant. All the company’s activities are now related to “Mobile Streams”, the Global Mobile Content Company. See www.mobileStreams.com. Mobile Streams was funded by and incubated within Mobile Lifestreams and by 2004 has grown to be a highly profitable global business employing more than 50 people and generating several million dollars in revenues. The story of Mobile Streams will be the subject of another, similar book.

Mobile Lifestreams Principles

I have implemented certain business principles at Mobile Lifestreams which have worked beyond my wildest dreams - what I believed to be true in theory has really shown itself to be true in practice.   These often inter-related principles include:

Teleworking.  All members of staff, apart from me and one person performing the task of office manager, worked from home until 2003.  Of all the things that contribute to employee loyalty at Mobile Lifestreams, I would cite teleworking as being one of the most important.  Quite simply, the lifestyle benefit of being able to choose to work from home and not have to commute was something that employees hold in the highest possible regard, so much so that some could not go back to an office environment after a period of home working. Productivity is often much higher and this was especially true for us once we started the US business and could extend the work day considerably.

Flexi-time.  I do not care what business hours people keep.  Some of our staff work better in the evenings and sleep in during the mornings.  Many prefer 9 to 5.  I don’t monitor this through time sheets as long as the work gets done.  People can come and go as they please.  I know that the staff all work hard, do a good job and contribute more than just the minimum of time and effort, so I think that they earn the right to set their own time.

High Salaries.  I pay my staff well because they are worth more to me within my company than they are on the general market and because they work and perform well enough to deserve to be better compensated.  People are paid according to their achievements, responsibilities and commitment to the business.  The sky is the limit in terms of what they could theoretically earn because within a small team each member would be very difficult to replace.  I routinely link pay increases to future events such as delivery of a new product or the achievement of an agreed goal.

Total Trust.  I completely rely on and trust key members of my team to do their best for the company.  I have no doubt that these people know what they are doing and know what is best for them and for the company.  There are no timesheets, work reports or other mechanisms for controlling and monitoring employees other than a daily call for me to catch up with what they are doing.

Flexible Job Titles.  We do have job titles at Mobile Lifestreams, although they are scarcely relevant in many cases since people tend to do more tasks than any title reflects.  Our Head of Design also runs content and our Internet Manager is also a project manager, for example.  I am always happy within reason to have employees select their preferred title - my attitude is that this costs me nothing and in many cases helps the business since external parties feel that they are dealing with someone senior who has decision-making ability.  A simple change in title from Country Manager USA to Chief Operating Officer increased our US business for no other reason than titles matter to other external parties.  You need flexible job titles if you are to employ people in a system of cross-functional job roles. 

Delegation.  I delegate responsibility and tasks actively and aggressively.  There are many projects and customers that I will have no contact with at all beyond the initial conversation or in times of trouble.  I do not want to be involved in everything or to have to keep an eye on all details - if you trust your people then why not make your life easier by delegating and getting them involved?

Constant Challenges.  The pace of work at Mobile Lifestreams is immense and we are constantly improving and expanding our services.  I regularly challenge people by ensuring that they learn new skills, even if they have been long-serving employees.  For example, when we needed a Java product, the technical team bought some books and set aside time to learn about the new technology and developed the software; and I gave them the time and resources they needed to make this happen.  They might not have worked with Java before but that was irrelevant - I knew that the right people could deliver a product that met or exceeded my expectations.

Communications.  In a teleworking environment it is essential that all team members, and especially new ones, don’t feel isolated, even if they are working from home, and in different towns and cities or even countries.  This is achieved through the installation of broadband communications in all employee homes and the use of instant messaging (IM), email and text messaging.  IM is the heart of the company.  I am not a member of the IM team since I think that this might involve too much monitoring of who was present and who was not.  I also keep away from it because also I am a challenging, energetic manager and in many ways a difficult person to be around; I think some staff would have a hard job dealing with my interrogations if we were always working from the same office or if I was in such constant communication.

The only prejudice is talent.  This is absolutely the case in Mobile Lifestreams.  I don’t care what the person looks like or what qualifications they have or how old they are or anything else.  If they are a heavy hitter with the hard to define, yet difficult to miss, element of a killer instinct, then they get hired.  And if they perform well they are looked after with fancy job titles and high salaries.  Performance not appearance is my mantra.  Another reason why the retention of staff is very high at Mobile Lifestreams is because having a degree or not is of no consequence whatsoever.  Sometimes it surprises me to learn that someone has a degree because I never remember hearing about it or thinking about it.   On the other hand, we have no-one with an MBA working for the company and also no-one from an elite university - and I couldn’t give a damn.  Nearly all of the people who work at Mobile Lifestreams are overqualified (including me) for the jobs we do, and all of us have far more talent and ability than a school certificate or qualification could ever hope to reflect.

Family First.  Business is just that and nothing more, although as an entrepreneur I naturally think more than most about my company.  But when it comes to a wedding, illness, a birth in the family or another significant life event, the normally important matter of business recedes to low or no priority.  I can’t imagine myself ever considering a ringtone to be as important as a child - I would rather shut my company down than be that stupid.  At such times, people set their own schedules and take as much time as they need.  By allowing them to decide how they want to handle things rather than having a company policy or following the letter of employment law or telling them what I expect, staff members have always done more, or have come back earlier, or have been more loyal upon their return, than I could ever have expected.

Low Overheads.  Our initial UK office was cheap and ugly.  Many visitors could not believe it when they entered the building and saw the unprofessional space that we occupied.  For a long time we kept the overheads low and we had been deliberately tight fisted, although now we have been able to move to a more acceptable office.  After so many years of checking and querying all incoming invoices, I could not imagine a culture of spending ever developing at Mobile Lifestreams.  When our US business started up, I was surprised at how cost conscious the new manager Shawn was; here we printed our own stationery and queried every cost, even of simple items like telephone lines and mail boxes.  I had to loosen spending to get some of these basics in place.

Spread Business Savvy.  Everyone in the company knows the business side of the business.  The technical people understand the cost of developing and launching a new service; the content people know how to price a customer proposal, and are aware of the work that would go into completing the task if we closed the deal.  I make sure I tell everyone which projects are successful and therefore paying their wages and which ones are not financially efficient.  When the business is going well, all people know about it, and they are made aware of the associated costs like taxes and royalties.  I insist that content or technical teams know the commercial terms of a deal as well as sales do and will often ask my technical team for commercial information when dealing with a customer myself.  If I get negative feedback from staff about a project, it usually turns out that this is because they have not been convinced of the commercial soundness of the deal.  I have to justify the work to get them to go ahead, which is exactly as it should be; people should not unthinkingly do what their boss tells them. 

Casual Dressing.  I don’t care whether it’s a dotcom boom or a deep recession I don’t change my clothing or expect my employees to just for these reasons.  Even so, smart-casual dress is our customary way for meetings.  The notion that dressing up implies a tidy mind is nonsense and if people’s minds are active, what they are wearing is irrelevant – it’s just that some conferences, functions and meetings require a suit to get the business done. 

No Politics.  I can genuinely say that there are no organizational politics in my company and there has only been one incident that I can ever remember arising where someone needed something doing which someone else would not do.  We did have a couple of examples where one of our customer contacts was a political animal and would try to renegotiate or score points over us.  But we soon made it clear to other contacts within the customer company that we did not appreciate this kind of behavior.  Honesty is the flip side of this; people are honest with me and I am honest with them and this is the only way I know how to be.

Few Meetings.  I used to meet with staff based close to the office on a daily or regular basis but as we got more business this was not always possible or even desirable because of client deadlines.  A daily call into each of my staff to ask how they were doing was the main way I kept in touch, and even these calls were

not always made every day.  We did have monthly team meetings when the company first started but these were curtailed and hardly ever happened.  I went months on end without actually seeing members of my senior management staff and this made no real difference to the work or our personal relationship.  A regular call to someone asking what they are working on and what they have done is ample accountability.

Quality Mantra.  Again the pursuit of quality is something that is frequently cited as something extra that should be achieved, but in Mobile Lifestreams, when we say quality we really mean it.  All the products we ship are of the highest possible quality and exceed the quality of any competing products.  This is down to the people who are creating those products rather than from any set of procedures.  The instruction is to do a job of the highest quality possible within realistic timescales; if report deadlines slip due to quality issues, I don’t mind.

Interview Procedure.  We always try to select high-quality people to do high-quality jobs through a procedure that varies.  Sometimes I know instinctively that someone is right for the company and at other times I will conduct several interviews including group interviews where other staff members attend and give feedback.  Sometimes they also have their own 15-minute interview alone with that person. 

Ethics.  Business ethics is something that is perhaps a little sullied by the behavior of some companies and managers.  At Mobile Lifestreams, we never cut corners.  Our accounts are produced on a cash-received basis and are highly conservative when it comes to incorporating liabilities and also depreciating and allocating assets.  I don’t take chances. We have suffered several pointless tax inspections by the government and have never paid any extra tax to them for the simple reason that we don’t cut corners there either, despite the different business activities and product types that we sell in many countries around the world.  Although we have had many offers to do so, we don’t touch pornography or other questionable content - not because it would not sell (it would) or because I oppose it personally (I don’t) but simply because I would rather do things properly and I don’t want people to be able to attribute my success to such activities.  We always pay royalties on our content to authors or publishers and we always pay small suppliers quickly wherever possible.  Our reports are as independent and unbiased as they can be.

Hire Geniuses.  All of the above principles and practices that we have adopted at Mobile Lifestreams would have lasted less than a few weeks if it were not for the absolute commitment to hiring geniuses. Every success that Mobile Lifestreams has and everything we have ever achieved, or overcome, is down to the people that I have hired.  The reason why so few people can do so much so well is due entirely to whom those people are, what they are capable of achieving and the freedom they are given to achieve their goals.  An average person would be unlikely to get hired and would not survive within my company because I doubt if they would be able to keep up the momentum of motivating themselves, learning fresh skills and achieving new goals. 

On the other hand, business at Mobile Lifestreams certainly does not mean:

No strategy.  Strategy is what I do for a living.  I could never contemplate a world in which the company just evolved and set its own direction towards an emergent future.  Unless you know what kind of business your company is in and what it does not do, you can never hope to move forward and expand it efficiently.

No departments.  People work with other people who are performing similar roles.  This is natural and preferable to all concerned.

No hierarchy or bosses.  There is one clear boss (me), there is an explicit senior management team in place and there are also reporting relationships.  Having said that, a ringtone creator can easily report formally to head of design, speak mostly to me, and liaise most regularly with another colleague doing the same job; this is just the best way to get the business done.

Short hours.  Working hours at Mobile Lifestreams are as long as the employee wants and needs them to be.  There is no set definition, but with a 24/7 business people sometimes have to work in the evenings and at weekends when technical problems arise or there are other issues to resolve.  However, I know that some companies have cultures where people are in the office until 8 at night or when weekends are used for project meetings.  These companies earn no respect from me; if they cannot arrange their work to fit within reasonable hours, there is something wrong with both the management and the employees.

No work pressure, deadlines, to do lists or priorities or accountability.  These things exist at Mobile Lifestreams in abundance.  I always set targets for my staff and help them to prioritize the various tasks they have to do.  This focuses minds and makes it clear to people what is expected of them when questioned about their work.   As an employee, I had complained about being asked such questions because I thought that it did not take into account what else I had been doing.  But I have since learnt that management sets priorities for a reason and there is now nothing I like less than asking for something to be done and having to keep asking for it.

No uninteresting tasks.  Where possible we try to give people challenging work and interesting projects. But all jobs have tasks that aren’t enjoyable all the time, like generating royalty reports or backing up laptops.  Such tasks are essential and cannot be avoided.

Jobs for life.   Like all sensible profitable businesses, people who work for me are looked after as long as they perform well and they are given benefits like flexible working hours and high salaries as a direct reward for their contribution to the business.  There is a sense of family at Mobile Lifestreams and employees who perform know they need not fear losing their jobs; nevertheless, the idea of jobs being for life does not apply.

No documentation.  Mobile Lifestreams is not disorganized.  There is no excuse for sloppiness when it comes to managing workloads and tasks.  When I asked my US accountant what I could do to maximize the value of our assets in the business his reply startled me, ‘Documentation,’ he said.  This rang true with me and made me less annoyed about the paperwork that, as CEO of the company, I spend half my life doing.  Everything is now filed, documented and arranged correctly.

    The balance must be right between the extremes of organization on the one hand and disorganization on the other; this is a delicate act that must be performed by managers.  I also think that it does take a certain kind of person who has enough confidence in themselves to realize that giving up power just gains them more in the long run.  And I manage my company without much interference or debate.  As the owner of the business, I make the executive decisions and the senior managers and non-executive directors know that they can only make recommendations.  I have however realized the need to have a broad range of people of different ages and experience working for me and with whom I can consult as the company evolves.  But there is equally no doubt in my mind that it is those companies that can find the right balance between organization and disorganization that will create prosperous leading-edge and long-term businesses full of employees that love their jobs.  This is a situation that few other management practices or case studies can claim.

Appendix 1: Ben Wood, former Director of Mobile Lifestreams

The Data on SMS book – I think Simon sent me a copy.  We had kept in touch from time to time.  I had left Vodafone to go to Lucent and I occasionally referred to his websites – they were a good reference point.  I started to look around for a job, it was the dotcom time and I thought a good time to become a multi-millionaire.  Simon seemed to have the right mix of technology – mobile and web approach.

One of the biggest attractions for me even at that time was ringtones.com – owning this web property was very important.  Simon was making a lot of money, although I didn’t realize till later that he wasn’t paying himself.  He managed to have enough to pay me a proper salary – this was around September 2001 when I agreed to come on board.  Victoria was also there.  Simon, Victoria and his mum and me and a few others – he would make up that he had 20 employees – and even included the postman to make up the numbers!

As a company Mobile Lifestreams has been good at pretending to be bigger than it was– pretended it was huge company with all this stuff behind it and we talked it up.  You have to take things Simon says with a pinch of salt.  We really pushed above our weight – we got quoted on the front page of the Wall St Journal – we were just a couple of lads under thirty in Newbury in a scummy office, but we were telling the world about mobile!

We had tiny little office on the London Road in Newbury, a front room – was just a nightmare for the three of us.  Ironically it was opposite the Vodafone office where we had first met. Then we moved to a bigger room, at the back – we actually had desks…  Duncan and a couple of IT guys.

Simon had the IT stuff done by some characters he knew in Reading…I felt I could professionalise the company and Simon could be the ideas man.  I could be out there helping to pull him into check where necessary…

I think I am one of the few people that he would listen to…although he may adjust his behavior or not!  I was the more traditional conservative business guy and was significantly more risk averse than he was.

It was a family, we used to laugh a lot and have fun, we seemed to have lots of money.

Going well, then things got more difficult.  Pressures on the reports business, doing deals with German company…Simon had done amazing deal with the head guy, who had bought into the idea and agreed to it…they paid for servers, everything… Simon and I went to Germany – in middle of meeting we had call from Linda – ‘We’ve been burgled, they’ve taken everything,’ she said.  ‘Everything’s gone, laptops, color monitors, printers, fax machine…everything.’  They had cleaned us out and everything on the computers had gone as well….Absolutely everything.  We had to stop the meeting briefly while we discussed what to do.  I felt like crying.  Simon was so strong, ‘Forget about it,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to do this deal now, and then we’ll fly home and sort it out.’  He was of course upset too, but coped with it as he always coped.

At this time I was also going through terrible bouts of euphoria and depression and said to Simon, ‘This is just drowning me.’  He told me, ‘You just have to flat line in the middle…’

He doesn’t always flat line himself – and gets very excited about stuff but he can also go nuts and can get extremely angry, can get very moody but there again how he coped with the pressure was amazing.

Then the accountant came in. Simon hadn’t let me get involved with the financial stuff – it was just him and his mum.  But it became clear he had an unrealistic view of cash flow – and thought all revenue was profit (though I don’t think he’ll agree with this!). 

We had massive financial difficulty – although no major debts as such – but had 25k in the bank and bills of 50k.  Accountant told us, ‘You’re going out of business…’  Simon said, ‘We won’t pay them yet…we’ll do this…we’ll sell our hearts out and give them special offers…’  And we did it!  Within 2 months the business was back on a level field.

As far as dealing with the accountant went – Simon lost interest – said to accountant I’m going to do 3 million this year and accountant said you’ve only done 3100k so far… Simon always had this big vision and by not paying himself he was investing in his future.

Going back to the beginning again – The first day I arrived at the office the fire alarm was going off – Simon came running out saying, ‘Mate, mate, the office is on fire!’  Someone had left a chair against the storage heater, and he had gone into the smoke filled room and carried the chair into the car park!

It wasn’t all plain sailing. I would sometimes throw up before going to work.  Simon was always either working or was on ebay bidding for Coca-Cola kit.  Very draining working for him.  Can be fantastic to be with him but he was also moody.  We almost had a punch up in the car park and ended up screaming and shouting at each other one day.

I also remember driving Simon around – he can drive, passed his test when he was about 25 I think, then he went to States, hired a car and crashed it.  He spilt Coke everywhere – or coffee. – so try not to let him eat or drink in a car!  Also he was shouting a lot on the phone – though sometimes we would have a sing a long together…

We had a guy called Ian who was the nicest guy – intrigued by Simon.  He had a heart murmur and because of the stress and not good at saying no, he resigned.  Then we had big crisis point when Victoria found out that Duncan was earning a lot more than her…had to deal with that.  Some employees held Simon to ransom a little I think.  I also had an attractive package but that was how I was brought in and we were up front about it.  Simon’s sense of loyalty made him put up salaries.

All this time Simon was taking nothing– his mother said this has got to stop – you have to pay yourself.  His mother does everything for him, banking, bills etc… He doesn’t have time for minutiae. She makes sure his bills are paid like rent etc.  He has a very simple existence and is not that materialistic, and not a big spender, although will spend money on strange things.

Why did I leave?  Apparently I took a pay cut but I don’t remember but it was clear that the business couldn’t afford me, hard decision but also very very positive could now pay for 2 content people…  I thought we should also split the business in two, build up the research and then sell it, and mothball the consumer content.  So we had a difference of opinion on this – I was conservative as usual, Simon was the risky one – Simon had bigger vision of the content business… Simon said there would also be a job there for me but we had a mutual understanding on my leaving…There were so many times when we could have fallen out but didn’t.  He and I left on good terms.  A lot of people thought we’d had a bust up.  But we had just come towards the end of the road and had done something amazing – we had survived.

Learnt about managing risk, managing cash flow and people and suppliers better, we learnt so much, we were so na've.  I will never ever regret any of the time I spent at Mobile Lifestreams.  I learnt how to do things although I probably wouldn’t ever take the risks he would.  I still have very small share which was part of the contract when I joined.  If Simon wasn’t Simon and a lesser man, he would have found some way of cheating me out of it.  I look on my share certificate as a lottery with slightly better odds.   I don’t take it for granted.  I didn’t remain as a director etc.

Would you do it again?  I went in with very very open eyes.  I knew Simon pretty well – in those days - blowing his nose on his hands and wiping them on his trousers, being really loud etc etc …and it was much much worse that I ever thought it would be but I also have very fond memories. Would I do it again-  if it was at that time, yes, but not now though with my family.  I left at the right time.

Simon’s best qualities are determination, unrelentless and unwavering desire to succeed, energy, work ethic and just incredibly driven.  On the other side he finds it difficult to understand why others won’t show same commitment, he can get quite introverted, is too honest sometimes – and tells people stuff he shouldn’t – I was always super sensitive about this and trying clear up the damage but I think people actually found it endearing and refreshing.  Investment bankers would come in, we’d run their gold amex credit cards through our machine, he’d ranted at them and bang the table.  We must get the drinks I thought and ran across the road for some Coke.  But the value they got was phenomenal, very objective and insightful view of the marketplace.

In terms of leadership he was a terrible manager of people – I hope he might have learnt a lot from me about managing people!  He left me to deal with the ‘HR’ stuff.  Simon would listen to me, I was a bit of a soft touch too and people come to me and I’d talk to Simon…Nothing wrong with Simon’s style but occasionally some behavior was a bit much.  Now he is calmer, feet more firmly on the ground, he has looked after himself more…at least he has some security with his house.

For him failure isn’t an option.  But if he did fail he would pick himself up and start again. His football steam stuff – Mobile Lifestreams team sponsorship – he loves The Simpsons and Football. When The Simpsons was on he would always be up and out of the office at five to 6.  Football sponsorship ensured his selection– although I’ve ever seen him do it. Sometimes appeared to be socially dysfunctional but here he was a hero.

Secrets of success perhaps is – ‘throw enough mud and it will stick’, keep trying and eventually you’ll get on to something, and sheer determination.  No-one knows how hard he works.  Except perhaps his mother…At Xmas he’d just come down from his room where he was writing his next book for Xmas lunch.

He was so intense.  Nokia’s industry analyst relations person had to stop dealing with Simon – she said she would have had to hire an extra person just to deal with his requests for information, he generated so much work. 

He has a great capacity to get people to deliver, it’s not fear, not like he’s an evil boss, but he has desire to success which was/is infectious.  We had to do it, we had no option – it was do it or die…!  We had to pick up the phone, sell stuff, write books…

Reputation we had was good – but there were some people would groan or sigh.  We were known and everyone knew Simon at that time.   All our Mobile Lifestreams reputation came from Simon writing books in the evenings and sold on the web.  There really wasn’t any competition – it was an enigma.  We/He were anti-marketing, guerrilla marketing, acquiring websites and making up names…writing lists of urls.  But don’t think it changed the industry, it was just part of that bubble.

Simon could have stayed just Simon with a couple of people and his mum and could have earned good money, 200-300k a year but that was not enough for him, wanted to build big business and chose to invest every penny.  It’s mind boggling.  Now reformed a little, calmer more grounded, but still some eccentricity – I’m stunned by the loyalty of his staff – most people have been there 2-3 years.  Some magic there.  But don’t think it would be as good if he wasn’t the boss.  He would have to be kept on as board member, advisor and blue sky person, exploit his knowledge and contacts etc. Very difficult to replace that. 

The crises I’ve talked about were the key moments of change. Professionalising the business (we had books professionally printed – a huge step forward – Victoria did it, very exciting to break open a box of books), learning how to run a business – Simon was the driving force but I hope I had a positive contribution.

What Simon too enhanced its success – he went round and grabbed web properties, doing deals, became content partner for some of the big players – amazed he managed to do some of the deals he has done… - especially pull off with people…

What makes a good entrepreneur – not sure… there is a human side to Simon – he has a big big heart – if I had a real disaster he would be one of the guys I would turn to for advice.

Appendix 2: Mobile Lifestreams Key Dates