“Data is almost the new black isn’t it?” asks Mark Roy, chief executive and founder of data hygiene company REaD, at the end of our two hour interview. One thing is for certain: clean and accurate data is always going to be ‘à la mode’.
Any entrepreneur thinking it’s tough out there right now should spare a thought for Roy. At the age of 29 and with just £25,000 in the bank he launched his data hygiene business – in the middle of the recession spanning the late eighties to the early nineties.
“The first four or five years of our business was hell”, admits Roy. “1990 was the worst time to launch a business. It really was hand to mouth; we were just about managing to pay the wages and feed ourselves.”
While Roy’s ideas were innovative and set to shake-up the data hygiene industry, his timing was all wrong. “People would say to me ‘look Mark it’s quite an interesting idea, but we’ve just laid off all our consultants because, if you haven’t noticed, there’s a bloody recession going on’.”
Roy
’s past is not that of your typical entrepreneur. In fact, it is also as gregarious as the man sitting in front of me.
Having secured a coveted place at the National Youth Theatre as a result of a bet with his English teacher at school, he began his young adult life as an actor
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Several years and one too many rejection later, the dispirited young performer found himself perusing the classified section of the Telegraph where he spotted an ad posing the question ‘can you sell?’ “And I thought, well, acting and selling, it’s the same kind of bullshit really,” he says with a wry smile.
Just under a decade later, the idea for REaD was conceived. In his previous role as marketing director at Swiss firm Montana Strauss he conducted some research into churn rates among holiday makers. He coined the phrase ‘negative marketing’ and decided to set up a business based on a model of identifying the people who are unlikely to buy from companies advertising through direct mail.
Roy and his wife, Sarah, with whom he started the business, got their first contract within weeks of starting up. But the business reflected the state of the economy, and the couple didn’t realise the fruits of their labours until the late nineties. Then the unthinkable happened: Roy’s wife died from a brain tumour.
“It was an incredibly hard time but you get up, you dust yourself down and you get on with it,” Roy says. “It was just before I was forty and I was feeling pretty bloody immortal. The business is beginning to fly, all of a sudden you’ve got a nice car, you’ve got a nice house and you think nothing can touch you. Life has a horrible habit of coming and kicking you in the ass whenever you feel like that and that’s what it did for me.”