Delicious Ambitious - inspiration for girls who are going places

Vicky Reeves founder of ChameleonNet

Sep 25, 03:11 PM

TRANSCRIPT
Delicious Ambitious: In 1998 Vicky Reeves founded ChameleonNet, a web solutions company based in central London. After working in IT, Vicky realised that there was a need for a company that could deliver web projects from start to finish. Her achievements in this area have been recognised by a number of awards for entrepreneurship. We caught up with Vicky in her London offices and started by asking her to tell us a bit more about ChameleonNet.

Vicky Reeves: OK, well, ChameleonNet is a web solutions company, so that means that we do everything for website design through to development through hosting and support and emarketing. I started the company eight years ago and we now have twenty-five people and we are based in central London, in Smithfields. We work for a variety of corporate clients, so mainly companies like 3M, Hilton International, Amnesty International and UNICEF, for example.

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Well, my role is Managing Director, so that means on a day to day basis I get involved with strategy. I certainly help with the direction of the company and really set the way that we are going to grow the company, and also I look at our key clients and really evaluate what we’re doing there and get involved with key clients, but really it’s mainly the strategy of the business and the direction going forward.

DA: How did Vicky go about setting up the business?

VR: Setting up the business…I didn’t really have an awful lot of experience obviously. I was twenty-four when I started the business, so I didn’t really have a huge amount of commercial experience either. So, I didn’t really know where to turn to, so I started trying to talk to organisations like BusinessLink which were useful and I also spoke to a lot of my friends’ dads and colleagues and some people I knew in the industry and just sort of asked around as much as possible. And it was really there, just asking loads of questions of different people on how to set up a business that I really then did it on my own really, through my own research. So, it was slightly hit and miss and I think looking back it would have been great to have had much more… much better advice than what I necessarily got, but I seemed to get around it okay.

DA: Was it scary to leave a paid job and set up a business?

VR: Yeah, definitely scary, but what I did though was…whilst I was still working, in the background I started to get prepared for setting up a business. I didn’t sort of hand in my fully paid job and then just ended up with nothing and then thinking of starting from scratch. I very much managed to get my first client signed up before I actually left my old company which was £5000 to deliver one website and at the time I thought wow that’s fantastic so I started working on that site, but then, of course, two or three months later I realised I then needed to get my next client, because that first one was nearly over already. And, so, I learnt very quickly that I needed to sell and I needed to learn how to sell, because, of course, I didn’t come from a sales background; I came from an IT background. So, very much I learnt what I had to very quickly and had to go out there and contact as many people that I had met in the industry and really tried hard to get more business that way, really.

When I started up on my own it was very much things like cash flow. You know, at the time I was still paying off student loans so I certainly had to make money for myself. But there’s a big difference between a client actually giving you cash in the bank and actually you invoicing them, so, of course, you can invoice a client and go great, you know, I am going to have all this money, but they then take thirty days or forty-five days to pay you and you haven’t actually got that real money in the bank at that point. So, certainly, cash flow is really, really important in a business and it’s still important now with, you know, our overheads being over £100, 000 a month. We need to make sure that there’s always cash coming in, but…so there’s a constant, you know, battle to make sure that your clients pay you on time and the bigger the corporations normally the longer it takes them to pay, so you do have to budget that in. So, that’s certainly one of the key things.

Other challenges were to be able to focus on sales when you are also doing the work as well. So, once you sort of started getting business in, you’re concentrating on delivering that business and delivering that website or whatever it may be, but then in the background you’ve got to still keep getting that pipeline going and still get the next piece of business ready to start. And, so, that was quite a difficult thing earlier on and now it’s much better, because I’ve now got a dedicated sales team and so that’s all they do, is make business, and then operations is very much delivery of websites. So, they don’t need to worry about where the next deal is going to come from; they just get on doing what they need to do.

I think the best bits are, now, is working with my team here. I’ve got fantastic staff. They’re a really, really good bunch of people and we all get on well and we socialise together as well which is great, so that’s certainly a good positive. And, also being able to be in control of the direction of the company and the strategic direction of the company is really a great thing that I enjoy. And I also enjoy the sense of achievement as well when we’ve delivered a great website for a client and it really works for them, then there’s a massive sense of achievement so we, you know, do get to see those visible results of how well a website is working for a client, so that’s good.

DA: Have there been any particular highlights for Vicky?

VR: I think my best piece of work that I’m proud of is with UNICEF. We do all of the websites for UNICEF UK and we now also are working internationally with them doing their US website and also currently talking to Thailand and to Brazil about their websites. And, what was really successful for them…two things really…firstly, the UNICEF store that we built for them so that they could sell various, different, you know, anything from a baseball cap or whatever and we really worked hard at the whole way that the site works and the usability of it and the intuitive way of also getting donations. And, so, whilst you go through the site…the old sort of online shop used to be that at the very end of the purchase when you would go to buy your baseball hat or whatever, and at the end of it say would you also like to donate and then you just…if you wanted to donate you could put some money in. And so what we did we changed that so as you got to that page it said would you like to donate £12, because if you donate £12 that means that it will vaccinate, you know, one child against six killer diseases and it’s already filled out for you and all you have do is click that one button, rather than actually have to think about it. And we worked out that £12 was the right amount of money that UNICEF customers were quite happy to pay. And it increased their online donations as part of orders by 300 percent, literally just overnight which is fantastic. So, really I’m proud of that one.

And the other thing for UNICEF we did was when the Tsunami hit. All of the…whilst normally the UNICEF staff would update the website themselves, of course being Christmas time, nobody was around so they contacted my team here on Boxing Day and asked us to update the website so that they could take donations for the Tsunami. And so, my team worked really hard doing that and also sent out an email to UNICEF customers the next day saying please donate and within five days they had taken online a million pounds, so that was fantastic …

Obviously not all our clients are charities, but even the corporate sites that we work for, you know, we do get a real sense of achievement when their website does so well and it gets them more business.

DA: So, what advice would Vicky give other young, aspiring entrepreneurs?

VR: I think my advice would be networking is the most important thing that I’ve learnt over business since the start of the company, because it’s all about networking and who you know to be able to get business.

Certainly, now it’s different we’ve got, you know, a sales teams so they can do the ringing around, but in the early days especially and even now, you know, you never know where your next client is going to come from. You never know where your next employee is going to come from and same for supplier or just general good contacts.

And so you know you need to get out there and network with other people; go to seminars or events or get to know other people, whether it is in your industry or other industries.

And, the good thing about that is that once you’ve started to build relationships with them, when whatever business you’re doing when somebody is then talking to them about that business or type of thing that you do, then they go oh yeah, you know, “I know somebody that might be able to help you”, and so that’s how you end up getting a lot of work. You know, we’ve got huge amounts of customers and, you know, and staff through networking really, so it’s all about getting to know people and getting your name out there really.

DA: Vicky has also won a number of awards for her business. Why are these so important?

VR: The last one I won which I’m very proud of is the Best Woman in Technology Award last year, for…which is the Blackberry sponsored awards, for Small Business under 250 staff, which is a great privilege to win that award. And the purpose of awards like that are to help give inspirational, or inspiration rather, to young women out there, especially in IT – there aren’t enough women in IT and so, you know, those type of awards are really good.

And, I’ve also won other awards for entrepreneurship as well, like the European Woman of Achievement Award as well. So, I’ve been quite fortunate with that.

And the company is quite an award winning company some of our websites that we’ve delivered has been…have won awards from The Times and other places so that’s all good stuff. And it’s, you know, great for us as a company as well as in terms of PR. You can’t beat it really to get press coverage; it really helps with business.

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I would say, certainly, finance. I think I wasn’t really strong on the finance of a business before. It’s really, really important to understand what money is coming in and what money is going out and being able to forecast on that and what you might need in the future. So, certainly finance was an important thing for me.

DA: And, finally, we ask Vicky what advice she would give to other young women.

VR: The best advice I can offer is if you’re wanting to start a business then you’ve got to have loads and loads of passion and be really enthusiastic about it and you’ve got to have a lot of drive. You’ve got to be focused on it a 110% for it to work, but also you need to be really well prepared before you start giving up your day job, you know, because you still need cash. And, so, certainly get whatever you can prepared in advance, you know, if you can get clients signed up in advance or get some sort of steady income so that you’re not sort of six months into starting a new business and you still haven’t actually got a client yet. I think that’s really important, to be able to do things like that.

And, just make sure that you’re as stable and secure as you can be whilst taking the great risk of starting a business.

So, and really, you know, stay in touch with everybody; I mean I’ve never actually thrown a business card away in the eight years that I’ve been running the business, because you never know who you need to call on next as a supplier or whoever. So, certainly, you know, staying in contact with people is really important.