Reaching for the stars
Article Date: Feb 02 2007He then heard an investment pitch from David Bestwick, an astrophysicist. ‘It wasn’t very good, but his core skills were fabulous,’ Williams recalls. Bestwick was running a small consultancy firm working with the space industry to develop operational applications of satellite technology. Instead of renting bandwidth, it soon became clear that it might be possible to acquire a government licence to design and launch your own satellite.
‘I decided to jump overboard, joined forces with David and started swimming,’ says Williams.
The first five years were tough times spent swimming against the tide. After raising £540,000 in seed capital in March 2000, the bottom fell out of the technology market and Avanti was turned down by a grand total of 234 venture capitalists for its next round of finance. ‘
We were trying to operate in new markets, we had a technology that hardly anyone understood or liked and we were in a capital market that was bombed out,’ says Williams.
To keep the business going, Williams remortgaged his house for £500,000 and used 12 different credit cards to pay the monthly bills. ‘When I proposed to my wife, I was an affluent banker,’ he says. ‘The day I married her, she took great delight in saying that I had become a bankrupt entrepreneur.’
Growing the business
The strategy that Williams and Bestwick pursued was to grow a business that could justify having its own satellite. Creating applications and renting bandwidth would be the first steps towards becoming an operator. ‘It was a lot harder than we ever imagined,’ Williams recalls.
The opportunity they identified was beaming television into shops to promote goods at the point of sale. In 2003, retailers finally began to accept that installing these plasma screens could lead to a sustainable increase in sales, and the business took off. As well as running networks, Avanti Screenmedia now sells advertising and makes content. This year, sales of £12 million are expected with profits of £3 million.
Williams never lost sight of his main objective of acquiring a satellite licence, and admits that Screenmedia was an accidental business. ‘I am not a media guy,’ he says. ‘We just stumbled across an opportunity on which we capitalised. I always felt a bit like a fish out of water.
‘What I learnt is that selling a new product to a new market is virtually impossible. Your success is utterly dependent on the quality of people you hire and how you lead them. To recruit them, I had to sell as hard as to any customer. Once here, you have to keep selling to them. You lead from the front, delivering a constant sense of passion and commitment.’
