About
Music, a badly-timed job offer, and a book I read on a train to London.
My Story
From a very young age I had visions of being successful and owning my own business. However, during my late teens I got distracted by the burgeoning rave scene in the south of England and spent many a Saturday night dancing the night away, often until dawn and beyond. Music is still my first love, but more on that later.
After getting rather mediocre A level results I went to the University of Portsmouth to study Electronic Engineering. I graduated in 1996 and, after a bit of job hunting, had to choose between going to work for Philips in Southampton as a PCB Engineer, or going travelling for a year with a mate to Australia and beyond. I didn't have enough funds in the bank to make Australia viable, so I took the job.
No regrets. Yeah, Australia may have been amazing and life changing, but I doubt I'd have met my amazing wife and had my two precious kids. No regrets.
Fast forward through jobs working for the man at IBM (two years) and Michael Page (eleven and a half years) and I end up leading a global team of around 35 staff as an IS department head at Robert Walters. Lots of travel and responsibility, but far too much politics for my liking.
I recall reading about The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss on a blog whilst on the train to London for the umpteenth time. I ordered the book on 15 February 2011 and, well, it changed my life. I devoured it faster than I have ever read any book, and within eight weeks I had handed in my notice.
I had a big mortgage. My wife was not working. I had two kids under three. I had very little in savings — though in the January I did get an okay-sized bonus that acted as a small financial cushion. But that alone would only have paid the bills for two, maybe three months at a stretch. So the pressure was on.
Before I made the decision to quit my job, I decided that I would only do it if I believed I could make a success of running my own business and generating my own income. After I took the plunge, there was no turning back. Failure, quite simply, was not an option.
I often hear about folks who want to start a business doing it in parallel to working a job, and I admire that. There are only a fixed number of hours in every week, and to work a job and build a business at the same time must be hard. But for me, the pressure of not having a job or any other income was a huge driver in ensuring my success. It had the added benefit, at the beginning, of time being on my side.
To kickstart Stafferton Consulting I held a launch party at my house. I invited around 60 people — friends old and new, and some ex-colleagues. It involved, among other things, a ping pong ball treasure hunt, a prize draw for a new Kindle, and copious amounts of booze. I think the pictures are still on Facebook somewhere! That party spawned my first few clients, and the business has grown organically since then, by word of mouth.
In the early days I would often start work before 6am and sometimes work until beyond midnight, determined to make the business a success and build a secure future for my family. I loved it. These days I like my sleep a bit too much, and tend to put in a much more palatable 35 to 40 hours a week.
Where I am now
Fifteen years on, Stafferton Consulting still exists - these days trading as Stafferton Digital, a boutique SEO and analytics consultancy working almost entirely with purpose-built student accommodation and build-to-rent operators.
The work itself is three things, mostly. Technical SEO for large property portfolios, where the crawling and indexing problems are structural rather than cosmetic. Analytics and tracking that actually reconciles, so the booking numbers match the booking system. And direct-booking conversion, because most operators lose bookings to their own websites long before a portal gets involved.
Most of my clients came through people I have worked with before, which is deliberate.
I would like to thank you for reading this far, and hope you found something interesting or inspiring in my story. Either way, feel free to leave a comment below!
Thanks Simon Stafferton