The crunch point came when Dudderidge, by now 26, was on a business trip to
South America in 2003.
“I suddenly had this gut-wrenching realisation that I had to completely change
everything right now or I would miss the boat,” he said.
By the end of the 14-hour flight home he had decided to quit his job and spend
the next three months coming up with five business ideas.
Then he would choose the best one — no matter how risky or impossible it
seemed — incorporate the company and get on with it.
“I made the analogy that when you have a baby you don’t know anything about
it, yet you are committed to it from the first moment,” he said.
“That is the same with a company. In the past I would try to hack an idea
apart until inevitably I would find a good reason not to do it. But with
this one I completely committed to it even before I knew what it was, and I
think that’s a really important part of what drove me to do it.”
Armed with £23,000 borrowed from his father, his brother as a business partner
and enough money in his personal bank account to survive six months, he
followed his plan to the letter and in 2004 launched a consumer-electronics
business, deciding from the start to sell to other retailers rather than
direct to the public.
Then he went to a consumer- electronics exhibition and spent the entire
£23,000 on a car dock that would enable people to play their iPod in the
car. It was an instant succcess.
“It was phenomenal, we couldn’t make them fast enough,” he said. Six months
later he got a call from Boots, asking if he could supply it with a range of
iPod accessories.
It was an incredible opportunity and Dudderidge got to work, putting together
a range of cases, chargers and cables. Unfortunately, nobody had told him he
would need to barcode the products before selling them in Boots.
With just two days to get the order to the shops, he had to borrow his
father’s warehouse and unpack every single item from the order of 50,000
products and put a barcode sticker on them.
He said: “It took about 37 hours without stopping. Then we had to repack it
all, put it back on pallets, and sort out the warehouse so it was usable for
my father’s company by 9 o’clock Monday morning.”
The effort paid off. In the first year of trading Dudderidge took just over
£1m in sales. “All we had done was turn this £23,000 into product into cash
into product into cash,” he said. “I woke up after Christmas and realised
that we were really on to something.”
So he hired two employees to do sales and marketing and began developing new
products.
At the end of the second year sales were £1.8m, rising to £4.8m for year
three. Turnover this year is expected to be £18m. Gear4 products now sell in
40 countries and it employs 50 people.
Now 31 and married with four children, and with 87.5% of the business,
Dudderidge said the secret of his success had been to understand the nature
of risk.
He said: “People say I have taken enormous, impossible and incredible risks,
but you have to if you want to grow as fast as we have. You can’t draw up a
spreadsheet that says whether or not a product is going to be successful in
the market, as much as you try. You have just got to throw it all on the
line, and if it pays back you have got to throw it all on the line again.”
He has this advice for budding entrepreneurs: “Go with your gut instinct.
Don’t overanalyse it. The gut is an incredibly useful tool in business.”
