Joining Virgin Wines

Just moving on, you went to work for Virgin Wines, I assume with Rowan. What was the big challenge there, at that business?

Virgin Wines was really interesting and the reason I ended up going to Virgin Wines is, before I went to Switzerland, the business that I was working on with Foster’s in London, had lost their contract to run the Telegraph Wine Club. It had been running the Telegraph Wine Club and then Rowan Gormley, who I knew nothing about, and Virgin Wines, had come in and put a ridiculous contract in front of them. When I saw it, I thought there was no way they could make money out of it and they won the contract.

How do those contracts work? Do you run the club for the Telegraph? Do they own the customers and the club and you just supply the wine?

Basically, what happens is, they will give you access to their database, to then try to sell wine to that database, on behalf of the Telegraph Wine Club and you pay a bounty back to the Telegraph. That’s the gist of it.

So a fee per customer or per year?

It depends on the contract. It can either be per customer or it could be per purchase. In essence, they are getting a bounty. At that time, everybody was looking at their databases and saying, we could make money with our database and wine is a great way to do it. What Virgin had done was come in and said, we’ll pay you a bigger bounty. We had seen the numbers and said, there’s just no way you can pay that bounty and make money yourself. But it’s Virgin; good luck.

As part of that, Rowan came and saw us about what we’d learned. Again, I was just this young guy and I sat with this guy called Rowan and he asked heaps of questions and I decided to answer them all. You need to do this; you need to do that. By the way, having an outbound sales team makes all the difference. Outbound calling worked a treat with the Telegraph Wine Club. We hit it off and he asked what I was doing. I explained I was going to Switzerland, to work with Foster’s, and we spoke, probably every month, after that. We’d just chat and he’d tell me how things were going with Virgin and I’d tell him the challenges I was facing. I found him intellectually stimulating; I never thought I would go and work for him. I suspect he was modelling me to come and work for him, whereas I thought he found me intellectually stimulating but maybe that wasn’t the case.

One day, I was flying to London and he invited me to come up and see Virgin. I had never been to Norwich, so I went up there and saw the office and sat with him. He had a company that was struggling to make a profit but had everything it needed to succeed. For some reason, I fell in love with the challenge and he rang me later that day and asked if I wanted to go and work for him. I accepted and went and worked at Virgin.