A small firm, on purpose

I started Plumbworld in 1999, when selling bathrooms online was a slightly odd thing to be doing and most of the traffic arrived from directories. Twenty-three years later it was one of the UK’s largest online bathroom retailers, with group online turnover across Plumbworld and Plumbnation approaching £150 million. In 2022 I sold it to the Highbourne Group.

For the first several years I did all of it myself. I built the Google Ads accounts, did the SEO, wrote the email programme and ran the tests on the checkout — not alongside the real job, but because there was no budget for anyone else and every pound of it was mine. That is a particular education. When you are spending your own money and there is not much of it, you find out quickly which activity moves the number and which is only activity.

Later, once the business could afford it, I hired agencies. I have been sold to badly. I have sat in quarterly reviews where the channel that had stopped working went unmentioned, and signed off budgets on the strength of a report I could not fully interrogate. So I have seen this from both ends — the person in the account at two in the morning, and the client wondering what he is paying for.

The sale means I am not looking for clients to pay a mortgage, and I would rather say that plainly than perform a scarcity I do not have. It is the most useful thing you can know about advice you are being given: there is nothing here that needs your account in order to survive.

What I do still want is the work. A retailer with real volume and a real problem is one of the more interesting things to be handed, and a lot of them are being advised by people who have never carried the risk themselves. That is the entire reason this firm exists, and the reason it is small.