Decide what to buy: the Reevoo.com blog

Georgie Law is currently Reevoo’s Sales and Marketing intern. This week she’s taken some time away from her top-quality interning to interview Richard Anson, Reevoo’s CEO and co-founder, on the origins of Reevoo, his own background and what makes him tick.

Georgie: What was your first ever job?

Richard: Aside from the usual school holiday weeks here and there, my first job was selling burglar alarms in Hong Kong for six months during a gap year between school and university. It was a mixture of door-to-door selling and cold-calling from the Yellow Pages.

G: What sort of training did you get?

R: There was no training, no preparation. I was handed a telephone directory and told to get on with it.

G: Straight in at the deep end! What do you think the experience taught you?

R: [Smiles] I would say resilience foremost, self-starting, coping with rejection, learning how to influence people, to anticipate what they’re going to say and how to meet their needs. A good grounding for building a business.

G: So that was your career before uni. What about afterwards?

R: After university, I worked for 3i on the small deals team, making and managing investments. It was much more of a sales role than people think, out in the market looking for investments to make in the middle of the last recession in ‘90-‘91. Then I moved into engineering for 5 years. In this time I also gained my PhD, mostly produced during evenings and weekends.

After getting an MBA from the Cranfield School of Management, I went into management consulting and was a senior strategy consultant at KPMG with focus on the technology space. I was also interim Head of Group Planning at Orange, a role that involved planning and analysis across a network of over 22 countries. And then, in 2005, I founded Reevoo.

G: How did Reevoo come into being? Where did the concept come from?

R: The idea came from a combination of two things: I was trying to buy a digital camera and I couldn’t find a website that helped with product choice. There were price comparison websites but nothing that helped with the ‘what to buy?’ question. A few weeks earlier a friend who was in the hotel business had told me that hotels that had customer reviews on their sites were twice as likely to be booked than those without reviews.

That got me thinking, and the concept for Reevoo was born. Reevoo fills a big space that was missing in online shopping. You had (and still do have) Which?, which is very old school, and price comparison sites, which help you with the ‘where to buy at the lowest price’ but don’t really help you choose what product you need, so we came up with a business that would do both.

G: What’s the key principle behind Reevoo?

R: Reevoo’s unique selling point is its reviews. It offers genuine advice from other purchasers. All the reviews published on the Reevoo site, and the websites of its partners (which include retailers, manufacturers and publishers) are genuine user reviews from verified purchasers of the product.

We help retailers and manufacturers to sell more and get closer to their customers. Figures for high street sales in electronics have gone down or at best are static but, despite the downturn, the online market continues to increase by 13 or 14% year on year. Reevoo is principally an online business so we are taking real advantage of this. We want to help our partners better access that immense growth.

G: So the recession hasn’t been felt at Reevoo?

R: No, of course it has, but I think more in a positive way than a negative one. I think it has increased the focus of our team and office cohesion. We prioritise much more effectively than we ever did before and relationships between team members and our customers have really been strengthened.

G: Where does your drive come from?

R: I think it just comes from knowing that what we are building really helps shoppers and our partners. They value the service that we provide and our website.

G: So it’s a public service at the same time as making money?

R: [Wry smile] Something like that. And the business is constantly innovating – the speed and ability of Reevoo has still not been tested to the maximum. That is exciting to me: that there is still the potential for a lot more to come. Not just from the internet but also the mobile platform and other aspects that are still in development.

G: There’s still a lot of room for expansion at Reevoo, then?

R: Definitely. As far as I’m concerned, at Reevoo we can never stop growing. We now have the platform for European expansion, which is happening as we speak. In my mind, Reevoo will never be finished. There will always be another country to expand into and more innovation!

G: And the team you’ve put together is going to make that happen?

R: Absolutely. We have a great team. You always need a good combination of different personality types.

G: The mavericks as well as the cautious?

R: Exactly. You need different types of people in an office: those who bring a certain craziness to the table and make things happen, the innovators and the ideas people. And to balance it you also need more logical people who can analyse the potential outcomes… but people who have to have all the answers before they can do anything are a little too safe for me!

And then, you know, you have those who are focused on the shoppers and maintaining the brand’s identity. It is so important that someone keeps the consumer in mind at all times, because that is who we’re working for at the end of the day, even if the consumer is a customer of one of our retailer or manufacturer partners.

G: And then the engineers, the developers?

R: Absolutely. Developers are never acknowledged enough. I know that this is something I try to make sure happens at Reevoo: that the developers feel they are appreciated. You look at a company like Google: the company grew and grew but the two co-founders, who are developers, they’re still there, in a prominent position. That is right to me.

G: What‘s the greatest piece of business advice you’ve ever received?

R: I think my first boss in Hong Kong unintentionally gave me the best advice, or best lesson anyway, when he put a telephone directory on my desk on the first day: that inaction will get you nowhere.

But in terms of general business know-how, I think it comes to down to that age-old saying, that it’s about people (whether it’s the team, our partners or the consumer) and numbers – of course the product matters, but it’s the team that makes the product!

I think I would add in a third: it’s about people, numbers, and the brand, particularly the values associated with the brand. When you lose sight of them and what you set out to do, then you risk losing your way. That’s not to say that change is a bad thing, quite the opposite, but I think you always have to keep in mind what you set out to do that first day and stay true to it.

G: When you see Reevoo growing and the business expanding, is that when you’re at your happiest?

R: There are two sides to my happiness, I love being in the office and the exhilaration and buzz that comes with seeing company growth – that’s great – but I also love the soulfulness and the serenity that comes with windsurfing. I love just being on the water, being at the beach with my family. If I could move the Reevoo offices to somewhere beside the ocean, that would be great! [Laughs]

G: That would be the dream right there?

R: Yes. Work and the ocean in one place – that would be great!

Tags: interview, Reevoo origins, Richard Anson

Blog posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 10:31 am under News. Leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.