My name is Andrew Grant and I'm the Managing Director of Nation 1.
I was working for a local nightclub operator and was enjoying what I did, but didn't feel like I was em working to my full potential, so left, set up a business with a friend from university which was handing out flyers for local nightclubs, em, we quickly evolved that into a magazine, which was the same kind of idea, all the flyers were stapled together and we employed people to pay them out and sold the advertising space in the magazines
Then we were approached by Brylcreem on the back of the success of the magazines to do a repositioning campaign for them in Ibiza and at that point the budget they were bringing to the table was twice our annual turnover so we accepted the brief that was on the table and we won that account against a couple of big London agencies.
We ran the campaign and it was massively successful. They won several awards on the back of that, including FHM Best Hair Care Range, which they?d never won before. We won Best Advertising Campaign Large Consumer Category at the Scottish Advertising Awards, and really because of that, our profile was raised and em we found ourselves with a positioning in the market place as being a youth marketing company
And then we had clients like Pepsi, Subway the fast food guys, approaching us on the success on the back of the success of the Brylcreem campaign saying can you help us to talk to a young target audience, being kind of like twelve to twenty five years old, em, and really that was the turning point for us, and at the point we stopped being a small company handing our flyers and started being a medium sized marketing company with a serious positioning in the market place.
There's no point telling people how great you are until you know what you are. Until about eighteen months ago we didn't know what we were, because if you asked - if you took a cross section of our clients and asked them what we did, some would say websites, some would say handing out flyers, some would say guerrilla marketing, there was a total mis-match of answers, so everybody had heard of Nation 1 but nobody knew what we did, and therefore there was massive confusion in the market place.
So about eighteen months ago I decided that's it, we're not - if somebody asks us for a press release or if I'm asked to do something like this then we're going to refuse point blank to do it until we really sort out our positioning and what we stand for.
Because we were very guilty of selling stuff our customers weren't interested in, because we didn't understand the market place, we'd never taken the time to find out about that, so I think - find out who your customer is, and what they want to buy, and do they want to buy the stuff that you're selling.
Who's your competition and what are they selling, and how much are they charging for it?
I think research is, you can't underestimate the power of that.
The two most important things in our business are clients and staff. And I get on average at least three CVs a day of people wanting to work for us, through our website. From all over the world, we probably get on average at least one if not two clients a quarter through the website.
I initially went to the Prince's Trust and asked them for the five thousand pounds start up funding. And they said, on the basis of my experience and what we were planning on doing, er, we'd get the money from the bank, and I didn't realise this at the time that the Prince's Trust are only there to give you money if you can't get it from another source, so if you can get it from another source, they say well go there because we're a funder of last resort.
We've had quite a lot of support from Glasgow City Council because they have an Innovative Training Scheme where they will fund fifty per cent of any training, and I'm a big believer in training and developing your staff because it's a lot cheaper to bring somebody in at a basic level and train them up to be at a high level than it is to bring somebody in at a very high level.
Being a director of the company is exactly the same way as being em a musical director, you know, you've got - if you think of the conductor of an orchestra he's standing there and he's got all the different sections and they're all playing music off of the sheets in front of them em and it's that person's responsibility to make sure that each section plays em in complement to each other so that the end result is a beautiful tune.
Running a business is exactly the same as that, and some people relate it to being a football manager and it's the same kind of idea. You've got groups of people working for you, and they - and the larger you get, and we now employ erm fifteen people across two locations, and I've got em five directors in charge of different departments, and the thing I really enjoy nowadays is that I'm looking at strategies, I'm kind of conducting, er, conducting the team, and in their - they've got their sheet music which is essentially their business plan and their sales objectives, and operational objectives, so they're free to go away and interpret that sheet music in whatever way they see fit and it's my responsibility to make sure that ultimately what comes out of us is a good tune, or a profit.
And that's the thing; I enjoy developing the strategy and motivating the team and building the business. There's bits I don't enjoy, like chasing people for cash and when things go wrong, but em you do get a buzz, when something's going wrong, you turn it around and it turns right, there's a big buzz out of that as well.
I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned is don't be afraid of failure, erm and don't be afraid of making mistakes, er, because if you are afraid of failure, you're never going to take the risks and if you - and nine times out of ten you won't - there's very few people in this world that are bad, and there's very few people in this world that will stop you, deliberately, from trying to achieve what you want to achieve.
And I've been very fortunate, there's some great people out there who have really really helped me and given me free advice, some successful high profile entrepreneurs who have helped me, and you know they want to help people, they've been successful, they want to help people and hopefully one day I'll be in that position as well.
I think the best thing about running a business is the independence you get. You are your own boss, one hundred per cent, em, and again we're now in the fortunate position where we don't have one client, which we totally depend upon, so previously when you have one big client, they're your boss, whereas now we don't have any one big client. We've got three or four big ones and about half a dozen medium sized ones.
And so really, its the Madonna or the Robbie Williams syndrome is what I would call it and that is, Madonna believed that she was going to be, that she was the best singer ever since sliced bread, and she was the sexiest woman on the face of the planet, and if you say something enough times people start, you know, there's no smoke without fire, people start to believe you, so if you have belief in yourself and confidence, and you don't give up, you will succeed.
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