A Monumental Day

"There is so much talk of instant success and an almost celebrity-esque status to Entrepreneurship these days that I find it all pretty toxic."

Today marks a fairly monumental day for our business. Not only do we turn 23 but we also surpassed a million pounds turnover for the first time in our history. A very proud moment I’d like to reflect on with a very specific reason for doing so.

Lets take a step back in time.

1999 - James, Dave and I started Optix in a bedroom of Exeter University at a time that the Internet was considered a potential fad. We had no knowledge of business, or how to run a company let alone knowing what a profit and loss or cashflow was. The most we knew about that was how much money the student bars profited from our cashflow!

When we took the idea to our families they must have thought us crazy but they were good enough to back us. We raised a whopping £8000 from grandparents and parents. This was to keep the three of us going for enough time until the business could afford to pay us from its profits. Now I know it was a long time ago but even back then 8k for 3 people was not a lot of money! We had to make it last at least 3, maybe even 6 months before money started to trickle in from sales. There were a lot of times where we almost gave up and no one could have blamed us. Living off cup a soup and bread (no word of a lie) as it was the only thing we could afford was only sustainable for so long!

According to various sources, around 20% of businesses fail in their first year and 60% within 3. I’d say we came dangerously close on a number of occasions to becoming part of that statistic.

There is so much talk of instant success and an almost celebrity-esque status to Entrepreneurship these days that I find it all pretty toxic. This is my main purpose behind this article. Lets tell the truth and share how challenging the journey has really been.  

Yes its taken us a long time to reach a million but that’s completely unaided, no outside investment at all (apart from that original 8k) and completely organically. No doubt we could have got there faster if we’d gone those routes but James and I wanted to build a solid and sustainable business with an epic culture that people are proud to say they work for. I’ve not done the exact calculations but I reckon we’ve created at least 100 jobs in the last 23 years and of those ex-employees, over ten now run their own businesses and employ many more! I’m incredibly proud of that fact, much more than the money.  

At first I even wondered about writing this post. 1 million if you make products or have large costs you markup, may not really seem that amazing but we are a completely service based business which buys nothing in. We also don’t mark up our clients advertising budgets and inflate our turnover for vanity, this is something we’ve created completely from scratch. That’s almost 100k a month worth of business, every month from nothing.

I write this for all the wannabe entrepreneurs, the students with a great idea. Life goals are possible but please temper them against this culture of people living a fake life on Instagram in front of their rented super car or yacht. Maybe a few get lucky and good on them, but for the majority of us, hard graft and delivering a great service consistently is what’ll get you there.

I’m thankful to Evan Carmichael (one of the most successful Entreprenship/Business YouTubers out there) who recently shared his growth in numbers of subscribers publicly. It took him 5 years of creating content to get just over 2000 subscribers. He now has 3.5 million! He put in the graft consistently, something most people aren’t prepared to do.

In a world of instant gratification this narrative of ‘the instamillionaire’ is dangerous. I hope that by sharing my story it will go someway to showing what you need to put in to create a successful, sustainable business which will bring you a legacy.