As the founder of Moonpig, the online greeting card company that is dominating the online card market, Nick Jenkins knows how to start up and run a successful business. His company have 90% of the online card market, three million customers and once sold 99,000 cards on a single day. He talks exclusively to New Business about how to grow a firm sustainably, managing staff effectively and the importance of establishg a recognisable brand.

Raising money
"It helps if the person who is setting up the business is prepared to invest some of their own money, because what's not very exciting is when someone wants you to take all the risk for their idea but they're not prepared to take any of the pain themselves," Jenkins comments. "You accept that not all entrepreneurs starting out on their first business have very much money to invest and risk, but they need to be in a position where it really would hurt if it went wrong."

Growing a business
Moonpig started off with ten staff and now employs 65 people. This has led to some challenges, with Jenkins having to change both his own mindset, and that of the company.

"Managing growth and changes has been tricky, because you have to go from a mentality of trying to save every penny that you possibly can to changing round and starting to invest in growth," he admits.

Jenkins believes that knowing "when to put your foot on the pedal" is a critical issue for all growing businesses. "There were a few bold steps that we took. We invested quite heavily in 2004 in new printing equipment even though this was before we had actually made any money. It was a risk, but it paid off."

Managing your staff
Jenkins dislikes management styles that are aggressive and abrasive and believes that this is not the best way to encourage employees.

"Whatever business you're in, you need to get the best out of the people who are working for you, and you need to understand how to achieve that," he says. "There are lots of companies where people are not working at their optimum, and that is just a waste of resources. You want a roomful of people that are doing the very best that they can do, not sitting there stuffing envelopes when they could be running the marketing team."

Letting go
"Creating management structures is critical to growing your business. You must have a layer of people under you that can take decisions without you, otherwise if you try and keep control of all the key decisions then you only grow to the extent that you can take decisions," says Jenkins.

He is practising what he preaches, and now has a management team of five that oversee the running of the business on a day-to-day basis. This allows him to look at the bigger picture of where the company is going. "But a lot of people don't let go at that stage and that's the critical thing - knowing when to let go."

Branding
It is true that 'Moonpig' is the childhood nickname of its founder. While this is an oft-repeated snippet of information, it was not the reason that Jenkins chose the name - he chose it because it fitted perfectly into his business plan.

"I wanted a domain name that was simple, phonetic and engaging, and I wanted to find two words that would go well together but were not normally used with each other," he says. "If you put Moonpig into Google in 1999 nothing came up, there was no use of the word at all. Now there are lots of references, but they are all references to us. When I was going through a list of all the different words that I could have chosen Moonpig came up and was available."

The firm's logo also reflects the message that the business is pushing out about its brand. "It's fun and cheeky and a lot of what we do is making fun and cheeky cards," says Jenkins. "Having a little Moonpig character with his cheeky grin works very well, and having a character rather than an inanimate object works well as it injects some personality."

For more information visit www.moonpig.com [1]