Jamie Murray Wells: 'How to grow a business'

The founder of Glasses Direct, Jamie Murray Wells, talks exclusively to New Business about how he developed a business idea into a multi-million pound company, how his growing firm dealt with attacks from larger competitors and why he believes it is important for all entrepreneurs to have a mentor.

How did you get the idea for Glasses Direct?
I was finishing my English degree and trying to find something to get me out of a law conversion. I was desperately searching for something else and I was using the time and the resources of the university to look for ideas and to test them out. I think that's pretty important for entrepreneurs - the idea of testing ideas and learning. People think Glasses Direct was my first business, but actually it was my third. I hadn't put the other ideas into actual businesses yet but I had tried and tested the ideas. I didn't like them and they got bad feedback from the potential customers, so I was very happy to move on. And then, third time lucky, I bought a pair of glasses and thought ‘this is a bit expensive'. Entrepreneurs should always question things and see if they can come up with a better solution.

How did you proceed once you had the idea?
The first thing I did was to learn everything that I could about the market. I went to the library and looked up market research reports, because you have to be able to talk the talk and walk the walk if you are going to deal with clients. I then started talking to the people that actually made the glasses. Eventually I set my prescription up from home and they sent down a pair of glasses. On one hand I was holding a pair that cost £150 and in the other a pair that cost £10. I realised at the point that you could actually dispense a pair of glasses remotely.

How did you obtain funding?
I was using all of my own money to start with but through that I was able to employ a web designer I found through the university's job booker. I think that's a really good way to go; if you can get a working site for whatever it is that you're about to do, test the market and see what the customer feedback is. That's what I did with all my ideas: mock something up and see if people liked it. And with Glasses Direct, they really did like it. Even the guy that delivered a desk to my room at university bought a pair! I then took my business idea down a very common route, which is to go to your friends and family. I showed them my business plan and the results of my test, and I received a small amount of money to launch the business properly.

In the first year of trading the firm sold 22,000 glasses and had a turnover of £1m. Were you surprised the by speed of the success?
I always knew that it would be a very compelling consumer proposition because you're saving people money and there's nothing better that you can do. What did surprise me was the speed in which it took off - I knew we would get there eventually but I didn't know quite how quickly things would progress. At the start I was handing out fliers at the train station in Bristol and getting chased off by the ticket conductor at the station!

How did the dispute with Specsavers occur?
Whenever you are going to do something very disruptive in an industry you have to be prepared for people not to like it. Small businesses that are breaking the mould and changing people's behaviour are going to upset their bigger competitors. When we exposed the profits that the big high street chains were making and saved people a huge amount of money by operating online then the big guys weren't happy about it. We had legal letters from our competitors and pressure on our suppliers to stop doing business with us.

Big high street chains were saying, ‘if you trade with them then we're going to close our account'. At one point there was a witch-hunt in the industry. It was really quite a testing time, but we wanted to try and find the humour in the situation and turn it round to our benefit. We decided to do an advertising campaign where the message was ‘don't get fleeced by Specsavers' and the imagery was all about sheep. We were trying to turn a very negative situation into a positive one. We had lots of newspapers and bloggers covering the campaign, and we got a good message around our brand that customers related to.

When you established the business were you aware of the power of the internet?
I always had a good feel for the web, I knew that for our generation a lot of opportunities would come on the internet. So when I came to look at different businesses at the start I looked to the internet as being the natural channel of choice. From an entrepreneurs perspective, it gives you the ability to get to scale at a lower cost and set up a network of different stores, and it allows you to get to an international audience very fast if you want to. You couldn't do that as quickly with an offline business. It's interesting that the internet is now accepted as part of the industry. The internet is seen as being here to stay and I think that when the big chains look to the internet now they look to us to see what we're doing and how we are developing the online proposition.

How is the business doing now?
We sell a pair of glasses every few minutes around the clock, which adds up to hundreds of pairs every day. Last year we grew by 50% year on year, meaning that we've now grown into a multi-million pound business that has a good chance of dominating the optical market in the long term in the internet space.

What are your plans for the future of the company?
One of the really interesting things that we are working on at the moment is how people shop together. Internet shopping can very often be a very isolated process with people shopping on their own. We want to investigate how people can shop collaboratively for glasses. Glasses are something that you shop for with your partner and you take advice on, so social shopping is something that we are working hard on. I have always believed that Glasses Direct can be a household brand name and that's where we want to go.

You're a mentor for the Princes Trust and an ambassador for UK Enterprise. Why is mentoring so important to you?
I've benefited a lot from mentors as I've grown my business and I think that the UK benefits from new enterprise. The best way to engender that is if, as entrepreneurs, we collectively feel that we should help people up the ladder that we climbed. You don't have to be a retired accountant to be a mentor; I think that the best mentors are just a footstep away from the challenges that the mentee is going through, so they can relate back their practical experiences straight away.

What did it mean to you to win the Queen's Award for Enterprise Promotion?
It is one of the moments that really stand out in my life so far, it was a real honour. I was really staggered because I'm quite young and there are a lot of people out there that do a lot of good, and I probably thought that I didn't deserve it. But I also recognised that it's important to motivate the people that are motivating and the award will give me encouragement to do more of the same.

What traits must successful entrepreneurs possess?
One of them is having a complete determination, despite any technological or regulatory barriers and naysayers, to just keep going and to follow your vision. Entrepreneurs never back down if they feel that something is right, they go ahead and persevere through it. Another is the ability to be able to test and learn. You're not going to make it straight away so the ability to listen to customers, seeing what works and what doesn't, is very important.