Born on the 21st November 1964 in Essex, Charles Dunstone is most famously known as the co-founder and current CEO of the mobile phone giant, The Carphone Warehouse. In a familiar rags to riches story, Charles Dunstone grew his successful telecommunications empire from virtually nothing.

Indeed, The Carphone Warehouse had a modest start to life with a personal investment of £6,000 being used by Dunstone and his business partner, David Ross, to sell car phones from their London apartment. Whilst this venture would ultimately launch Dunstone into the upper echelons of business success, there would also be a number of disasters along the way.

The Carphone Warehouse was established in 1989. It was essentially a very small business at the outset. As with many of today’s high profile businesses, however, it enjoyed enormous growth, By 2007 the company had appeared in the FTSE 100, the share index of the top one hundred companies in the UK listed on the London Stock Exchange. By any measure, the FTSE 100 is an indicator of great success for any business able to break into its closely knit ranks, although maintaining a spot on the index is certainly not easy. Indeed, The Carphone Warehouse is no longer listed in the FTSE 100, which for Europe’s largest independent mobile phone retailer is not a positive.

At the beginning of 2006, business was going very well for Charles Dunstone, who had, several years earlier, expanded his empire to include telecommunications and broadband retailer, TalkTalk which also includes the subsidiary AOL Broadband. Listed in 64th position in the Sunday Times Rich List (UK) 2006, it was estimated that Dunstone had a fortune of more than £1 billion. However, a series of declines in the telecommunications markets, the ubiquitous credit crunch and a number of fundamental business errors have seen Dunstone’s financial worth dwindle over recent years. Indeed, subsequent Sunday Times Rich Lists have shown that Charles Dunstone’s fortune may have shrunk from as much as £904 million in 2008 (ranked 83rd) to “just” £300 million in 2009 (ranked 178th). Whilst many entrants on the most recent Sunday Times Rich List have seen a marked decline in net worth as a result of the global recession, one of the more significant causes of Charles Dunstone’s relative decline also happens to be the primary reason behind his success.

Having dropped out of a business degree at Liverpool University, Dunstone has several A-Levels and GCSE’s to his name. Notwithstanding this, the unbridled determination, ambition and business acuity that defines Charles Dunstone has made him a formidable business success. However, this very drive to succeed proved to be his undoing when it came to making TalkTalk a triumph in the internet service provider (ISP) industry. Invigorated by his success with The Carphone Warehouse, Dunstone adopted a very bullish business model for its TalkTalk subsidiary. In fact, bullish is perhaps an understatement.

The main selling point of TalkTalk was that it could offer customers high speed and reliable broadband connectivity absolutely free. That is to say, free in the sense that the broadband service was not charged for per se but customers were required to subscribe to TalkTalk’s telephone services, which were, however, very competitively priced. This was a daring plan that was met with wave after wave of new subscribers, who realised that a switch to TalkTalk would save them a fair amount of money each month. Furthermore, TalkTalk’s main competitors at the time, notably BT, Telewest and NTL, were unwilling to match this extremely aggressive business model – and for very good reason. As the floods of new customers continued their exodus to TalkTalk, Dunstone soon realised that the promise of unparallelled customer service was going to be unsustainable.

Soon after the TalkTalk service was announced, the firm’s website crashed under the weight of some 40,000 hits per minute. This was a sign of things to come. Indeed, whilst the promise of ‘free’ broadband remained financially viable due to cuts in BT wholesale prices, what Dunstone had not fully accounted for was the immense interest that the business would generate. Perversely, TalkTalk was simply too successful. As customers fell over themselves to get in on the free broadband action – an offer seemingly too good to pass on – the TalkTalk infrastructure was insufficient to cope with the demand.

In fact, many new customers would have to wait as long as three months before they could get online after signing up to the service, which in itself was a critical flaw in TalkTalk’s business model. Furthermore, the company’s call centre staff, which was necessarily small in order to keep costs under control, was overwhelmed by the sheer number of customer queries and complaints that followed. Indeed, TalkTalk rapidly developed a reputation for excessively long call queues, poor customer service and a host of technical glitches that would plague the service once it did get up and running. In short, the free broadband dream was brought to its knees by the sheer interest in the service and the failure of Dunstone to anticipate the ensuing logistical nightmare. Nevertheless, Charles Dunstone’s business acumen has driven TalkTalk’s long haul to recovery and he remains one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country.

Although perhaps a departure from other success stories we have seen here at Lammo.net in that earlier success was followed by recent challenges which are now being addressed, we see yet again the steely determination needed to overcome short term adversity in building a successful business in the longer term. There is little doubt that Charles Dunstone will prevail. Affiliates looking glumly at the overdraft take note!

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

How Charles Dunstone made his fortune

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Only a few years ago, few people from the south would have heard of the supermarket chain Morrisons. Southerners may have heard tales that the chaps in Yorkshire had got their own mini-Tesco but since there weren’t many down south they didn’t take that much of an interest.

However, since the 2004 takeover of the ailing Safeway stores group, Morrisons has really expanded and taken its place as a powerful nationwide retailer, complete with excruciating celebrity adverts on TV and moderately clever marketing slogans. It is now the fourth largest supermarket chain in the UK with hundreds of stores and a strong share of the market. As with most successful UK retailers, Morrisons come from a very humble family background. The man who nurtured it from a tiny sapling to a mighty business oak is Sir Ken Morrison. Sir Ken has had a rather interesting business career and was intimately involved in the running of Morrisons until just 4 years ago when he bowed out to take a well deserved break.

Sir Ken was born in 1931 into a Bradford-based family who owned a small chain of grocery shops which his father had started in 1899. To keep him busy during the school holidays as a Yorkshire lad, his father put him to work in one of his shops where his chief duty was checking the eggs for defects. Whilst this wasn’t the most stimulating introduction to retail it certainly left a lasting impression on young Ken. National service soon came and he was drafted into the Army Ordinance Corps but having served his time mustered out in 1952. This became a significant year for the then 21 year old Sir Ken as his father developed a severe illness which would lead to his death four years later. This meant that in 1956 Sir Ken was thrust headfirst into the world of retail, and at 26 was the Managing Director and the Chairman of the Morrisons chain. For some the pressure would have been too much, or Ken could have simply left things as they were and lived comfortably from the income of his small chain of shops. However, Sir Ken isn’t one to accept compromise and set about building his business empire.

Just two years after taking over Sir Ken opened the first Morrisons in Bradford city centre, a landmark opening by all accounts as the first self-service shop in the city’s history and had a whopping three checkouts. 1961 saw the first Morrisons supermarket opened just outside Bradford. By 1967 things were growing well, and William Morrisons Supermarket Group went public with a total of 80 thousand eager investors attempting to buy stock. 1975 saw a total of 12 stores join the Morrisons family and after taking over another small chain in 1978 that total was doubled. To keep things moving forward Sir Ken used his minute attention to detail and love of micro managing to build a small empire of identical shops, networked across Yorkshire and into Lancashire.

By the end of the 1980s Morrisons growth showed no signs of slowing, and Sir Ken controlled 46 stores. The 90s held even more good news for Sir Ken and the Morrison family and he received his knighthood and opened the 100th Morrisons store at the turn of the millennium. However, things haven’t been all plain sailing for Sir Ken, particularly within the last decade.

When Morrisons began their takeover of the Safeway group of supermarkets which would eventually lead to their nationwide presence and ownership of over 450 stores, Sir Ken voiced his doubts. He described Safeway stores themselves as ‘tacky and small’ and ruffled a few feathers amongst the new workforce by calling Safeway employees ‘lazy southerners’. It’s easy to see how these fairly risqué statements could cause some investor concern and the take over was far from smooth with some profit warnings issued. When it was finally completed in 2004 people were worried that perhaps Sir Ken wouldn’t be able to manage such a huge number of stores and still turn a profit.

By 2006 all the nay-sayers were silenced when Morrison announced 134.2 million in half-year profits, and his personal fortune of 1.3 billion is testament to the skill of this particular retailer.

So what can affiliates take away from this tale of one Yorkshire lad who made good? Well, Sir Ken started young and quickly established himself in the retail world, which is good news for those of you who perhaps feel that you don’t have the age or experience to succeed. If you’re willing to immerse yourself in the business world early you’ll learn fast. There’s also a lesson to be taken from the fact that Sir Ken and his Morrisons group has expanded the most in recent years, that it took a long time for him to build his business to the heights of today. Patience and persistence as well as attention to detail are key to success in any business, and should be nurtured by budding affiliates.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

How Sir Ken Morrison made his fortune

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Stories of rags-to-riches entrepreneurs are fairly common in a society that has, despite the current recession, been gripped by consumerism for many decades. Arguably one of the most remarkable of all such stories is that of 57 year old businessman, Chris Dawson. Growing up in his home town of Hooe in Plymouth, it became evident at an early stage that Dawson’s youth would not be spent following a traditional academic route. Indeed, Dawson left school at 15 without any qualifications in order to follow in his father’s footsteps as a market trader. Undoubtedly, the lack of formal qualifications did not hinder his early successes on the market stalls.

After several years as a street trader, Dawson was making in excess of £10,000 each week. These figures are fairly difficult to contemplate for the majority of the UK workforce. If the national median salary for graduates is somewhere in the region of £25,000 per annum, the fact that an unskilled and uneducated market trader from Plymouth could make around half a million pounds in the same period whilst still only in his early twenties raises an important point about successful entrepreneurs.

Indeed, the likes of Chris Dawson are not bound by conventional norms when it comes to making money. School leavers, college leavers and graduates can all expect to enjoy relatively successful careers, which will often consist of working their way up corporate ladders or educating themselves into lofty positions. However, even the CEO of a relatively successful company or the director of a national bank would struggle to match even a fraction of the wealth generated by the elite of our entrepreneurs. Such people are possessed by an inherent quality or trait that enables them to fully appreciate a market and where it could be heading. Moreover, entrepreneurs are able to influence the market rather than be swept along by it, which is a skill that many business owners simply do not possess. Whether these traits can be learned by others remains to be seen, but in the case of Chris Dawson they are undoubtedly innate.

Part of Dawson’s early success could be attributed to his innovative trading methods. In a recent interview, Dawson explained that whilst his fellow traders would be content to pack up their stalls on a miserable day, he would instead create a warm and inviting atmosphere that could continue to draw in the masses. As such, Dawson learned at an early age to think very much “outside of the box” – to do what everybody else was doing but in a different, more inventive way. Something that would stand out from the crowd in order to draw the attention and interest of potential customers.

Following his considerable success at market trading, Dawson organised the necessary funds to launch The Range in 1988. Featuring a superstore that comprised some 15,000 square feet of retail space, The Range quickly became a popular outlet for just about everything – DIY tools, toys and other household and gardening related items. Despite the decidedly shoddy surroundings of its first store, The Range hit a turnover of £1 million within just four months and managed to accrue a profit of £250,000 in its first full year of trading. Just a couple of months later, Dawson expanded his new business interest by opening up another The Range store in Exeter. Nowadays, there are 38 operational The Range stores across the UK and the company employees more than 2,300 nationwide and turns over £190 million each year. Chris Dawson, as founder and CEO, receives a generous annual income from the business that is thought to be in the region of 9% or £17 million.

The entrepreneurial acumen of Chris Dawson is such that his sights, although firmly set on steering The Range through a difficult recession, will often wander in the direction of other opportunities. Indeed, Dawson, true to his market trading roots, has recently purchased the entire stock of failed furniture retailer, MFI. Worth around £68 million at typical retail prices, Dawson no doubt snapped up the stock at a fraction of wholesale cost, although he has understandably proved unwilling to discuss precise numbers. Filling some 2,400 articulated lorries, the former MFI stock will be sold online via tradingbargains.co.uk, which may be seen as an attempt by Dawson to venture a little further into the world of e-commerce. Even if this website proves unsuccessful, in The Range Dawson has a perfect outlet for the stock, so this move can only be seen as a win.

Dawson also branched out into the finance sector towards the end of 2008 with the introduction of a prepaid MasterCard for The Range customers, which will not offer credit but can be used to purchase goods up to the value of money pre-loaded onto it. The idea behind this card service is to enable customers to keep track of their spending habits whilst providing a convenient method of payment. Furthermore, from Dawson’s point of view the card will be seen as a risk-free baby step into the complex and often treacherous world of finance, which will no doubt help pave the way for a future credit lending service should it be considered viable. Whilst he may be regarded as something of a “Del Boy” from Plymouth, Chris Dawson is a wheeler dealer with a difference – he is now conservatively estimated to be worth around £150 million.

Dawson’s story should inspire all of us as affiliates to look hard at our own market place and to consider how we can approach it “with a difference”. With mounting pressure in both PPC and natural search, affiliates who are able to deeply understand their target markets and to create the online equivalent of Dawson’s warm and inviting market stall will surely be among those to thrive over the next few years.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

How Chris Dawson made his fortune

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Another day, another successful entrepreneur who deserves our attention. One of the best ways to learn more about the business world and to pep up your spirits when you’re feeling blue is to examine the ways in which other business men and women have made their fortunes. These lessons are even easier to swallow if you learn that the person in question hasn’t simply been gifted their current success and has had to work to earn what they’ve achieved.

That’s why Sir Phillip Green is a prime example of this kind of entrepreneur. Although he is now worth nearly 4.5 billion pounds and ranks at the 9th richest person in the UK, things weren’t always so. Looking at the growth of his empire and the twists and turns of his career should help invigorate the desire to success in even the most jaded of business people.

Sir Philip was born in 1952 to a middle class London family who moved to Hampstead in the north of the city when he was a lad. He went to a now defunct boarding school when he was nine, but things took a turn for the worse in his personal life when his father died when he was just 12. It often seems that the earlier you are forced to fend for yourself the more success you’re able to achieve in business, and for Sir Phillip the death of his father left him as the head of the family business. By 15 he was working at importing shoes and this took him on travels around the world to various global business centres. He continued the import theme when he came back home and started his first business with a loan for £20 000 selling imported jeans to retailers in London. Using his experience in retail and knowledge of the markets in London and abroad he made a lot of money buying up the stock of designer outlets which were closing down. He spruced up the merchandise with a quick chemical clean, rented some space to sell them and got down to it.

He first came to the attention of retail bigwigs and made his first million in one fell swoop with the purchase and turn-around of a failing chain of Jeans shops. He walked away from the deal after an incredibly short amount of time, pocketing over £6 million for himself. This was to be the first of many impressive feats within the retail business, taking a company which everyone else had given up on and turning a failure into a notable success.

In 1988 Sir Phillip took on the role of managing a chain of discount clothing stores, but things didn’t work out too well for him in this instance as he was forced out in 1992 by shareholders who weren’t satisfied by the falling profit levels. This experience did however give him the chance to meet other entrepreneurs who shared his business ideals and who would prove to be powerful allies in his future ventures.

The 1990s saw further growth for Sir Phillip in his path towards moguldom. Firstly he bought up a department store chain and then spent many years selling off the locations to other retailers. He then used his entrepreneurial contacts to bankroll the takeover of the Olympus group of sporting equipment shops. In doing so, he took on the £30 million debt of the company, but just three years after the takeover in 1998 he sold the chain for £550 million to JJB sports. This brought him to the attention of the Barclay Brothers who would then go on to fund some of his most profitable deals.

The end of the 20th century saw the first of three takeover bids that Sir Phillip launched against Marks and Spencer. The initial hostility of the first bid caused M&S shareholders to block it. M&S has become an unattainable nemesis for Green ever since, and time will tell as to whether he’ll try and buy the group again. In the interim he bought another failing chain, British Home Stores, re-branded them as BHS and turned the business around to generate profits in excess of £200 million. In order to seal the deal he put up millions of his own money as well as huge loans, but clearly he knew he was backing a winner. 2002 saw his purchase of the Arcadia Group which gave him control of 12% of the UK clothes retail market and has since confirmed his place in the retail hall of fame.

It’s been reported that Sir Phillip was also chosen to be a part of The Apprentice before Alan Sugar, but his M&S bid and another takeover bid kept him too busy to get involved. Hopefully Sir Phillip’s story has provided a little bit of inspiration and a reminder to all of us that nothing in life is certain, particularly in the business world, but that the rewards ultimately come to those motivated enough to seek them!

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

How Sir Philip Green made his fortune

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Sir James Dyson was born in Norfolk on the 2nd May 1947 into a middle-class family who weren’t particularly wealthy. From an early age Dyson was interested in art and design. As a result, after leaving school he attended an art school in London, before going on to study furniture design and later interior design at the Royal College of Art. Whilst at the Royal College of Art in 1970, Dyson launched his first product, The Sea Truck. The next product he invented was the Ballbarrow, essentially a modified wheelbarrow that used a ball to replace the wheel. His brother had been the one who had first considered the idea of a ball to replace wheel functions in other products and James stuck with this idea with his next invention, the Trolleyball, a trolley that was able to launch boats. He then went onto design the Wheelboat, which was able to travel on both land and water at speeds of up to 64 km/h.

It was whilst he was vacuuming his home in 1978 that James Dyson made the observation that dust was constantly blocking the airflow of his bagged vacuum cleaner, leading to a rapid reduction in suction power. He began to work on a solution to this problem. 5,127 prototypes and 5 years later in 1983, supported by his wife’s salary as an art teacher, he had created the G-Force Dual Cyclone, the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner.

Dyson began to offer his new invention to major manufacturers, but none of them were willing to launch his product in the United Kingdom as they were all determined to continue selling bag vacuum cleaners, a market at the time worth over $500 million per year. However, Dyson was undeterred by what he considered to be a minor setback and launched his new vacuum cleaner in Japan instead through catalogue based sales. The selling price of the G-Force was roughly £2000 and it was made in bright pink. In 1991 Dyson’s invention won the International Fair prize in Japan.

Having failed to sell his invention to major manufacturers in the UK and Europe, he decided to start-up his own manufacturing company using income from the license for the G-Force in Japan and to create a new model himself in the UK. In June 1993, he opened a factory and research centre near his home in Malmesbury, Wiltshire and began to make his machine. The result was the Dyson Cyclone, which even collected the finest particles of dust and was the first vacuum cleaner ever produced that offered constant suction.

Within 2 years, Dyson was the biggest-selling vacuum cleaner in the UK. Other companies in the market tried to prevent Dyson showing how their vacuum cleaners would clog and lose suction whilst his wouldn’t. By this time, three in five people were buying a Dyson vacuum cleaner because it had been recommended to them. The Dyson cyclone became the fastest ever selling vacuum cleaner in the UK.

The initial team of three engineers working for Dyson grew to 350 scientists in a brand new research centre. Their role was to investigate ways in which to make Dyson products work ever more effectively. They were persistent in trying to create vacuums that had higher levels of suction and set about developing a completely new type of cyclone system. They made the discovery that if greater airflow was created through many cyclones, further suction power was generated. This led to the creation of the Root8CycloneT, which was when the US was first introduced to Dyson. In 2005, it was announced that Dyson cleaners had become the US market leader.

However, Dyson’s vacuum was very nearly never manufactured thanks to the cost of legal fees and patents that he incurred whilst trying to defend his invention against patent infringement suit by a giant corporation. This almost bankrupted him during the development years when he had no real income. Dyson risked everything he had and fortunately for him the risk he took paid off. In 1999, Hoover UK tried to imitate a Dyson vacuum and James was forced to protect his invention in the courts. After a case that lasted eighteen months, Dyson finally won a victory against Hoover UK, and the latter were forced to pay Dyson millions in damages for patent infringement.

In 2000, Dyson expanded his range of appliances to include a washing machine. The new technology was called the ContraRotatorT, the world’s first washing machine that contained 2 drums. The two rotating drums moved in opposite directions within the appliance and the machine was made available in Dyson’s signature bright range of colours. However, unlike his vacuum cleaner, the idea was never really embraced by the buying public and is no longer available.

Thanks to the savings in production costs Dyson achieved by moving production to Malaysia, he was able to invest in further research and development at Malmesbury. In 2005 Dyson added the concept of a wheel ball from one of his earlier inventions, the Ballbarrow, to a vacuum cleaner, thus creating the Dyson Ball which he claims makes the appliance more manoeuvrable.

In 2008, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated James Dyson’s fortune to be £1.1 billion.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

How Sir James Dyson made his fortune

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