The path to building World First
Nick Robinson’s entrepreneurial journey
The creation of a thriving, successful and internationally recognised company is certainly not an easy path to forge. 11 years ago Nick and his co-founder, Jonathan Quin, began this journey and started the long road ahead to build World First. Now with over 300 employees across 5 global offices, the company is going from strength to strength (placing in the Real Business Hot 100 and in the top 30 of The Sunday Times ‘International Track 200’).
Surrounding themselves with nice, enthusiastic, interested and bright people meant Nick and Jonathan were able to propel World First to new heights. Continuous innovation, an unwavering belief and perhaps just a touch of serendipity all proved crucial in allowing World First to attain its impressive list of achievements. I sat down with Nick, who, as a recent investor in Ordable, was able to provide valuable insight and advice to those hoping to carve a career as an entrepreneur. Here’s what he has to say….
Just to give some context, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your career journey?
On graduation from University, I started on the graduate scheme in Capital Markets at Citibank. I ended up in foreign exchange sales, advising and transacting with FTSE 100 companies on their FX hedging and transactional needs. After 4 years there, I went to work for a dot com company and this gave me a grounding in how not to run a business — the firm raised 17 million euros, set up in 3 European capitals simultaneously and set about spending it without much thought for the bottom line! Following this, I joined Credit Agricole and worked in foreign exchange sales before co-founding World First.
Why the transition from a great corporate job to start your own company?
There were several reasons for wanting to leave the large City institutions and work for myself. Most importantly, I had always wanted to set up and run my own company and it was always a path I was going to go down at some point in my working life. When working for a large company, I never felt in control of my working day or destiny and large company politics are an acquired taste!
I also felt it was a good age to start up a company. I had had 8 years of work experience in foreign exchange and consequently understood the industry very well. At the same time, I didn’t have a family or mortgage so it was a risk to leave a steady salary but if it failed, it wouldn’t have had negative implications for anyone else’s life apart from my own.
The final reason for starting was that Jonathan and I had spotted significant shortcomings in the foreign exchange offering to SMEs by the incumbent providers (the High Street banks) and we knew we could make it better!
World First paved the way for the FX UK SME market in terms of adopting emerging technologies to win business, such as Google advertising. How important were these novel approaches and what advice would you give to innovative businesses today?
They were vitally important. In the first 6 months of World First’s life, we were the only FX company advertising on Google. At the time, our actual service offering was manual and clunky and not best-in-class as it is now. However, this (at the time innovative) way of marketing to clients meant we were top of the Google search page and allowed us to bring clients through the door in the early days even though our service wasn’t the best. Harnessing the latest technologies, whether in sales, marketing, production or delivery is the easiest way to differentiate your product or service and is therefore particularly apt for a start-up or young agile company.
World First is renowned for being a great company to work for, as awarded by the Sunday Times, this culture and work environment must have cascaded down from yourself and your management team. How did you achieve this?
Jonathan and I have always had a hiring policy where any interviewee has to be nice, enthusiastic, interested and bright if they are to get a job at World First. We have generally hired the right people and this has helped enormously. We do give employees perks such as free breakfast, but I don’t think it is perks that create a great working environment. I believe that:
- If people have autonomy and are in control of the way things are done
- If people enjoy the company of their colleagues and the atmosphere at work
- If people believe in what they are doing and know that their work is benefiting someone other than themselves
Then this combination results in a great company to work for.
How was it spending a couple of years Down-Under? and what was it like setting up yet another office internationally?
I loved my time down in Australia and our daughter was born out there 3 months after we arrived! The Aussies have a very good work life balance and you rarely see an Australian in the office after 6pm. They are incredibly professional people and not quite as relaxed as their caricatures depict. In terms of doing business, they are very relationship driven and they like the personal touch perhaps more than in the UK. Australia was World First’s first overseas office, so we proved the model there and have subsequently rolled it out to Hong Kong, Singapore and the US.
Having successfully obtained and managed investors and World First, and now turning to investing yourself, what insights can you share on this process?
My first thought is that seeking investment is not nearly as much fun as starting and building up a company. It can be incredibly time consuming and you spend a lot of time with lawyers and reading legal agreements! When we went through the sale process of a minority stake in World First, we decided on 3 key criteria for any investor we took on.
- First, the price had to be right.
- Second, we had to get on with the investors and want to sit round the table and work with them.
- And thirdly, it was important that any investor we took on was going to be able to add value to World First either through contacts, business knowledge or industry expertise.
I am interested in what’s your best short story or anecdote that you like to tell about your time at World First?
After World First had been going for 3 months, we decided to advertise for some University undergraduates to come and get work experience with us in sales. The first interviewee knocked on the front door of our first office wearing a black tracksuit, a black collarless T-shirt and white trainers. After some initial confusion as to what he wanted (I almost shut the door on him when we worked out he was there for the sales job), he came in and it turned out that he was into coding. Anyhow, this 19 year old maths undergraduate built us a back office system over the summer and this is still the backbone of the system today. You can never rule out the role serendipity plays in business! There are probably 5 or 6 really big breaks that we have benefitted from since we started.
Is there any more general wisdom you can give to entrepreneurial people like yourself?
Starting up a business is one of the most rewarding and challenging things you can do. In order to have the discipline to continue through the highs and lows of the early days, you need to really believe in your product or service and that it will make things better. On a more practical level, try and prove the concept as early as possible as that makes the start-up process a smidgeon less stressful!
Thank you Nick! Your journey and insights are very inspiring.
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