The Early Years
I knew from an young age that I wanted to run my own business. Before reaching secondary school I was buying popular products from the local shop with my pocket money and trying to sell them on to people who lived nearby for a small profit.
My work experience at secondary school taught me how to build a computer. Back then, it was less "plug and play" and more "plug wrong and fire" (if you didn't know what you were doing). Having gained that once specialist knowledge I took full advantage, building computers for friends and family, and making a modest profit in the process.
Lesson 1: People will pay for a service they perceive to be valuable.
Naïveteen
I started my first limited company aged 17. Obsessed at the time with online gaming, I was convinced that I could build a platform for teams of gamers to compete on. After teaching myself PHP, and 18 months of tireless software development work, the platform was complete, and it became moderately successful. Leagues were set up, teams competed, and some small prizes were won. Despite this, not a penny was made in revenue or profit.
Lesson 2: Children don't have disposable income.
A "LAN Party" was held at the Territorial Army barracks in Liverpool whilst I was studying for my Business Studies degree at the University of Liverpool. About 40 children and young adults brought their desktop computers to the party and competed for prizes I'd blagged from sponsors such as Crucial Memory (computer RAM) and CEX (gift vouchers).
After a full year of trading, countless hours invested, and lots of sleepless nights, the company made a grand total of around £100 profit, and HRMC took £19 of it in Corporation Tax. Two years later, I wound up the company after finally realising it wasn't a viable business.
Lesson 3: Hobbies don't automatically translate into viable businesses.
The Rat Race
After landing my first "real" job working as a Business Change Manager in the NHS, my entrepreneurship took a back seat for a few years whilst I helped to modernise various NHS services before moving to the private sector and working on complex software development projects and implementations in businesses and the NHS.
It was fun for a while. I learnt a lot, became a Certified PRINCE2 Project Manager, and had a lot of successes diligently implementing projects. But things moved too slowly in my opinion; needless red tape slowed down progress, and in the larger organisations, the lack of accountability was palpable.
Lesson 4: Working in large bureaucratic organisations isn't for everyone.
SIGMA is Born
Founded in 2011, SIGMA began its life primarily as an IT services company. It's fair to say that we did whatever was needed to ensure the bills were paid; a story I know is familiar to a lot of start-up businesses.
We branched out into website design and had some success building very creative websites for hair salons (not bad for a bald guy) and small businesses in Liverpool. As time went by, self-professed "web designers" popped up like meercats, churning out low quality, badly built websites with terrible SEO. But customers were not tech-savvy enough to know the difference.
Lesson 5: There's always someone willing to work from their mum's basement for 20p/hour who will undercut you.
To give the company a competitive edge, I had a grand vision to build a platform that would make it quick and easy to build a complex website with ease. Bear in mind, this was back in the day where WordPress was new, and your choices for eCommerce systems were - to put it politely - primitive.
Multiverse - our bespoke solution - was born in 2012. Starting off as a Content Management System (CMS), it grew to become an eCommerce solution shortly after. The addition of NHS England to our list of clients facilitated the building of Events Management capability into the platform, and then working with a local manufacturing company, Multiverse took a huge leap forward to become a comprehensive solution for light manufacturing, invoicing and inventory management.
Lesson 6: Building a complex system without a large development team is hard.
Multiverse (now at version 4) still works well to this day, and is widely adopted by businesses across the North West.
Xenpl Time
Technology moves rapidly - almost terrifyingly so - and it became apparent that the rapid progression of technology fuelled by the pandemic presented an opportunity for us to take the lessons we had learnt from years of bespoke software development and feedback from the usage of Multiverse to build something that would help businesses accelerate their efficiency efforts.
Xenpl was born; it was Multiverse version 5 really, but the time was right for a rebrand because it was being rebuilt from the ground up. Plus, Tony Blair's son decided to found a company called "Multiverse" so we decided we'd rather avoid any potential future legal battles!
Lesson 7: Trademark your brand! It costs less than you may think.
A grand vision was produced: Xenpl would become the solution for SME manufacturing firms in the UK and further afield, ensuring they could realise efficiencies they had only dreamt of, even when selling complex manufactured products.
The foundation was laid (in software development terms) and all was good. It was fast, flexible, beautiful. In preparation for the initial launch of the core product, which included a CMS, eCommerce functionality, and limitless integration potential, I began looking for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that would support our marketing, expansion plans and roll-out.
That's when I discovered a system called Odoo...
Lesson 8: Just because you built it, doesn't mean it's the best.
Odoo or Don't
We began evaluating Odoo as to whether it could help us to run our business more efficiently. Certainly, it could; with modules for CRM, Invoicing, Subscriptions, Project Management and Helpdesk.
But what is this I see? There are modules for:
- Manufacturing
- Shop Floor
- Warehousing
- Inventory
- Purchasing
- and many more!
"Well, that's fine, but I'm sure they won't be as comprehensive as what we have got planned for Xenpl", I thought to myself.
Lesson 9: Spend extensive time researching your competition before building anything!
To cut a very long and painful story short; Odoo's modules relating to manufacturing are not only comprehensive, but - to be frank - blew what we had planned out of the water.
We've built great things, and will continue to do so, but after some objective analysis and a healthy dose of self-reflection, it was time to admit that we didn't have the resources required to build something that would ever come close to where Odoo already were! They had hundreds of developers, we had a handful. No matter how hard we tried, they would realistically always be one step ahead of us.
Lesson 10: Know when you've been beaten.
Odoo is now fully embedded into our internal and external systems here at SIGMA, and we're loving how it's helped to streamline our sales processes, project management, and after sales services.
We were so impressed with the software that we became one of Odoo's UK Partners. We're implementing Odoo for other companies across the UK, Ireland, Germany, and the Middle East, with plenty more to come.
It's transformed our business, and we'd love to show you how it can transform your business too.
