Backing up the Basics
Freeserve completely revolutionised internet in the UK usage. Its founder Ajaz Ahmed is a living Yorkshire business legend and a genuine web pioneer. Born in Lahore raised in Huddersfield from 3 onwards In his words he failed everything at school. Ahmed left with no qualifications- although he admits he did receive a swimming certificate for breast stroke. Aged 16 in 1979 he started working for Dixon’s as a salesman. Serving his apprenticeship Ahmed confirms how early on he learned how to read people’s body language be they customers or staff. ‘Instead of hiding behind an office or behind the scenes I’d be on floor watching people. If a customer comes in and doesn’t put their bag down that means they’re not going to hang around. If they put a bag down that means they’re more likely to be want to be served and are there to make a purchase. If somebody is holding their bag up. They’re just quickly asking for something and they want to leave. That sort of thing, body language made a difference. That’s the way to sell.’ Later as a manager he stood in the middle of the shop floor directing the staff to the customer. ‘ It’s known as sales floor management. It worked very well. I was quite surprised how many of my managers simply didn’t understand the basics of sales floor management. They were following operations and that was it.
At Dixon’s Ajaz rose quickly. – He became assistant manager within three years.’ I learned a lot from looking at other people. They were making many mistakes and I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes. I became a manager fairly quickly.’ When he became a manager he became very successful. ‘A few months after he took over my first store in Halifax. I was on my way to the Caribbean. I’d won a competition because I was top store in the area. When I came back my area manager sent a message saying he wanted to see me. He said to me we think we gave you the wrong store. We should have given you a bigger store.’ It was working in a bigger store that his life changed when Dixon’s sent him on a course. ‘The course taught me that basically everyone has negative self-beliefs and it’s negative self-beliefs that hold people back. We did various exercises and probably because of my background the fact that I’d left school with no qualifications, my negative core beliefs were that I felt that I was not as good as other people. They gave me a card and on the card was written I am AJ Ahmed I am as good as everyone else and I don’t need to justify myself to anyone.’ Soon after that, the largest store in England which was Manchester Arndale Centre came up as an opportunity. Before the course Amed wouldn’t have dreamt of applying for it because he’d been a manager less than a year. Self –belief changed everything. ‘ Now that I’d been on the course I thought I was as good as anyone else. I applied for the store and I got the store. Within one year I was manager of one of the largest stores in the North of the country, in fact of England. I went on to PC world after that.
Ahmed often maintains the first secret of success is that there is no secret except common sense. It was at PC world he had his Eureka moment. I came up with an idea and the idea was Freeserve. Back in the mid-90s it was hard to get on the internet and Ahmed wasn’t entirely sure how to connect his new PC. His staff told him to contact Demon who immediately started to make things difficult by telling him he needed a browser and could download it by FTP. Ahmed thought if it was this difficult for him, how much more difficult it must be for the average customer buying their first home PC. They were already coming into the store to buy PCs so if he could make it easy for them to get on the internet then it was almost a captive market as they got to them first.
Great ideas are only obvious retrospectively. ‘At the time it was very difficult to get Dixon’s to listen to me. They didn’t want to know, they turned me away .They said it wasn’t going to work. They weren’t interested. It wasn’t something that they did. They didn’t understand the future of the internet. As we all know now the internet has gone on to change everybody’s lives. Freeserve went on to become a hugely successful internet company. It was the biggest internet company the UK has ever seen. We went from nothing – we floated the business on the Stock exchange and within nine months and soon after that the whole world had gone crazy for internet stocks It was absolutely amazing. On 22 Sep 1998 Freeserve launched. It was an immediate success and within three months beat AOL to become the UK’s biggest ISP Start-up costs were minimal as the only real cost for Freeserve was providing the free CD. Advertising was done by simply putting a tiny panel into adverts that Dixons was already running in the press. Up until that time it had only invested £240,000 and employed just three people.However, the bankers and financial whizz kids advised that it couldn’t float with a staff of just three as it wouldn’t be credible. They had to go out and employ people 16 even though nothing for them to do. The secret of Freeserve’s success was to make technology simple. It made money not by charging a lot (it was free) but by collecting a very small amount of money from a very large number of people. The profit came from a tiny percentage of the phone call cost that came back from the telecoms operator. We floated it on the stock exchange at1.6 billion £’s and at one point it was worth 9 billion pounds. We sold it to the French Orange Broadband for 1.6 billion. From scratch – the idea to sale we did that in just three years.
History has lots of examples of individuals or inventors who have struggled to be heard. Whilst Ahmed believes you should not dream it, do it. Freeserve very nearly didn’t happen As the quietly spoken, down to earth Ahmed explains with the timing of a top comedian. ,’In history, there have been lots of ordinary people doing extraordinary things because they can see the obvious before everyone else. But the problem for me was where I was coming from. I was a store manager; how was I going to get a managing director to listen to just a store manager? The reaction was a combination of what does he know or this isn’t the sort of thing people like you come up with. ‘ It took him two years to overcome this problem. He went to see the MD of PC world and then to see the Group CEO of Dixons (owners of PC World) before someone said, Actually this is a good idea. It even got further complicated because by this stage he had moved to Packard Bell who were a supplier to his former employer PC World in order to drive the idea forward. He couldn’t convince the Group CEO as an employee, but believed he could as a supplier. Packard Bell thought it was a good idea and that was his route into getting a meeting with the CEO of Dixons.
Ahmed’s success is testament to the fact that he carried on believing and also he adds ‘my friends carried on believing in me. My friends persuaded me to continue and to do something with my idea.’ Having said that he does warn, beware those with persistence and perseverance who just have a crap idea. That’s like those hopeful stars on the X Factor. Everyone knows that they can’t sing, but they are so desperate, they don’t listen. ‘I resolved this with a combination of persistence and perseverance. I almost gave up because; after a while, you start to doubt yourself. If an MD or A CEO said ‘No’, then you begin to think that maybe they are right.
Nonetheless Ahmed advises others to take a risk, everyone can have good ideas –indeed lots of people do –but entrepreneurs do something about it. Having said that success doesn’t come on a plate. Except when it comes to Yorkshire’s Finest Curry House’ as voted by Galaxy 105 listeners ‘My best friend is Abdul. We met when he joined Dixons at 16 as well. We became great friends very quickly. Later on he got made redundant. He said in hindsight it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He had a passion for food and set up a takeaway. In fact Abdul went on to represent Yorkshire in the National ‘CurryChef of the Year ’ I used to go visit him in his takeaway. We looked around and said we can do better than this. We’re professional retailers, we’ve been trained in the art of retailing. We can take this and do it better so why don’t we start our own business. We agreed that’s what we’d do. So the same year as Freeserve we launched our own takeaway. The first thing we needed to do was come up with a name He wanted to call it Chilliland. I said let’s call it Abduls. I want there to be a person behind the brand. We opened Abdul’s in March 1998 in Wakefield. We needed to get some PR, get ourselves know. We thought we needed to do something to attract the press. We need to get someone to come and open the takeaway. We considered the Mayor, sportsperson, politician. In the end we decide we ‘d get a racist So we hired the biggest racist in the country the; the late great Bernard Manning, historian AJP Taylor’s favourite comedian.
We did a press release and every single national newspaper turned up .They all came to have a go at Bernard Manning. They said Bernard what are you doing here. You’re a racist in an Indian takeaway. Bernard Manning turned around and said rubbish I’m not a racist . I went to a strip show the other night and the crowd were shouting show us your face. And we got into every single national newspaper with headlines like in the Sun a full page story who’s that cheeky chapatti. You couldn’t have bought that publicity. A year later Abdul phoned me up. He said it’s Valentine’s day soon why don’t we do a curry with Aphrodisiac in it, I said that’s not a bad idea. Can you find out what goes into aphrodisiac. I found a website called aphrodisia .com and it turns out the same ingredients that make up an aphrodisiac are the same spices that go up to make a curry which explains birthrate back home, he jokes.. We did a press release about this new hot curry with a warning don’t eat it on your own and a voucher and everything I decided to see how business was going that day. When got there on Valentine’s day people were queuing from the inside of the shop all the way round the block. .It was so successful we now do it every single year. It’s our busiest time of year and we have to do it for three days; the day before and the day after. In the ten or eleven years we’ve been doing it not a single person has been back and said it didn’t work. That’s an example of effective PR . What Ahmed doesn’t have time to explain because of time is that Abdul’s go’s the extra mile for its customers. The desire to get everything right for the customer, stretches to the packaging. Every dish ordered is served in plastic microwaveable containers labelled with the name of the dish with serviettes and cutlery, all placed neatly inside a strong brown paper carrier bag. “It stops the chance of any spillages and allows customers the option of taking their meals home and gently reheating in the microwave. They’ve even introduced call waiting and recorded answering messages, and food-ordering solutions to make it easier for customers so less writing means less likelihood that an order is mistaken.
Discussing his leadership style leadership report Ahmed harbours no illusions,’ I certainly know what my strengths and weaknesses are. I know that I am very good at generating and coming up with ideas. And I know that I don’t want to run that businesses necessarily. So Freeserve although it was my idea I was doing the fun job and that was business development so travelling the world – I was doing the deals .I was the one in the papers and so forth but there was somebody behind the scenes responsible for the operational side. So I don’t particularly enjoy doing the operational side I can come up with ideas. I still come up with ideas I look at things and say why can’t you do that. I challenge things. Currently I am working on a new venture which I hope to launch in the next couple of months which is going to attack a big sector just like Freeserve. It’s going to be accomplished by breaking all the rules. It’s going to upset the establishment – an awful lot of people in that sector . it’s the same as Freeserve, the only way to do it is by being a bit different. I will not be running that business, I’d rather be the Chairman of that business than be the CEO or MD running the day to day business. That’s the best use of my strengths. The strengths I have include innovation; I can see opportunities others might not be able to see. I think quicker than most people. I can find alternatives fairly quickly as well if someone comes up with one particular problem I can come up with an alternative solution which I think leaders need to be able to do. What I hate doing is the boring mundane day to day stuff. You don’t have to spend a fortune when it comes to marketing.’
As for PR Ahmed is clear in his advice,’ you’ve got to manipulate the press and lots of people have learned how to do that. Other people rely on boring stories and boring press releases. Just come up with something controversial. I gave a speech once. The headline in the press the following day was Venture Capitalists lambasted. The way you do it isn’;t just let them write about it. You phone the press the day before and you tell them what you’re going to say. You make sure you send the journalists there. It’s simple things like that. I haven’t actually got a PR agency. The headlines you get in the press are invaluable. People like Richard Branson I looked at and I thought I can see what he’s doing. That’s why he’s going up in the space ship. He just wants to get PR for his business.
Peter Saville describes Ahmed as a marketing genius, a great storyteller stories and one of the most flexible and tolerant of people he’s ever met. As for Ahmed he is modest ‘In describing himself as just a simple shopkeeper, and what he did wasn’t rocket science. People feel important if they are treated like people. Make the effort to make a customer feel special. Basically, my approach is to anticipate and resolve problems by putting myself into the customer’s shoes. This is another retail trick. I’m convinced that lots of people never do that. It’s not what you know but who you know. As for connections he doesn’t know about technology but finds good people who do – at Freeserve the actual technology was all outsourced You don’t need to be an expert at everything, but you need to know someone who does. Ajaz can’t read a balance sheet but neither can Richard Branson and Ajaz keeps his accountant on speed dial.
The biggest asset you have is you, and you should invest in yourself.’ He concludes
Too often people invest money in their house and car, they don’t spend any money helping themselves. The bright ones are the ones who go to a bookshop, or the Internet to get books that help them get ahead. That’s how I did it.You never get what you deserve, you get what you negotiateI would have made more money along the way if I had known that. Win : Win for both parties, that’s good. If you attempt to force a Win : Lose deal on someone then the other party resents it through time. The next time, the other party will try to recover or get even. Win : Win still means you can feel great, and get a bargain. It doesn’t have to be about money. The other person might be making less money in a deal, but they can feel good in other ways. For example, your deal can help them to get rid of unwanted stock or it could be about guaranteeing payment on time Life is one long learning experience. If you take time to read the right books, you’ll do well. These days it’s even easier with the Internet. There’s lots of stuff out there, and a true Yorkshireman he adds some of it is free.
Chrysalis Worldwide 