The desire to have his own business came early for the online dating entrepreneur Ross Williams. He did not excel academically at school in Reading but he proved his business sense by buying magazines in bulk at the local market and selling them at a big mark-up in the playground.

“I made a few hundred pounds doing that,” said Williams. “It may be my parents who set an example because they ran their own businesses. My mum ran a property management business and my dad was the sales director of an IT consultancy.”

While he was still a teenager Williams started a venture called Rawnet, which built websites. “In the mid-1990s anyone who knew about the internet was a guru. I got the opportunity to design a website for one of my father’s clients, which led to more work.”

This enabled Williams to pay his way through university, earning about £15,000 a year while he studied psychology and French at Plymouth. On graduating in 2002 he devoted all his time to Rawnet.

The business grew, yet he found himself working harder no matter how many new staff he took on or how much he increased sales. By the time Rawnet was employing 20 people, it had revenues of £2m but was still not making any profit. “I was working all the hours I had but getting no reward,” he said Williams started looking for new business ideas. After using a couple of dating websites he thought he could do better and in 2003 he set up a side venture, called Global Personals. With no profits from the other business to invest, Williams and his fellow directors loaded their credit cards to their limits, borrowing a total of £30,000.

It was a big gamble but not one Williams ever lost any sleep over. “Looking back it seems like quite good fun. I was 26 and living with mum and dad — I had nothing to lose. In a way it was not about the money — it was about winning and growing and getting to the next level.”

His gamble soon began paying off as subscriptions started trickling in and then turned into a flood. “It soon got to the stage that Rawnet would do £100,000 in revenue every month but made no profit, while Global Personals had grown to £250,000 a month and was making 20% profit.”

At this point Williams decided to concentrate on the dating business. His next big breakthrough came when he thought of a way to gain an advantage over rival dating sites. He decided to offer his dating website system to other businesses, allowing them to create their own dating brand while he took half the proceeds from sales.

This “white labelling” approach had several advantages over running and marketing a single conventional dating service, said Williams.

“Pretty much all the companies were doing the same thing. By taking the whitelabel approach I did not have to acquire customers myself. It was a way to get other people to do the hard work.

“There are many advantages in working like this. It spreads our risk and creates lots of sources of revenue. There is little brand loyalty in this market. White labelling meant we could have multiple brands and people would join three or four of the sites we ran.

“We did everything apart from the marketing. We provided customer support, the website, software, hosting, basically taking care of all the headaches involved in running an online business. The partners got customers to the site and we did everything else. We owned the database and the billing relationship with our consumers. It definitely pays to think about your distribution model.”

Last financial year the business — one of the main parts of which is Whitelabeldating.com — made a profit of £1.5m on sales of £12m, though Williams expects that by the end of this financial year the profit will have risen to £3m on sales of £20m. the company has its headquarters in Windsor and about 1,000 global partners.

The only thing white labelling does not do is build a visible brand, said Williams. He is thinking about creating one as he plans an eventual sale of the business, in which he has a 70% stake.

Having learnt how hard it is to run a business that isn’t scaleable, Williams, 31, advises others to think big from the start. “When I started Global Personals, I started it with an exit in mind. A lot of people don’t think about an exit and how to build value in the business and most of them will spend the rest of their lives working really hard and having little to show for it.

“I have sports cars, a mansion, I’m learning to fly helicopters and I have a great lifestyle but I will make the real money when we sell the firm for £50m to £60m once I’ve created a business with real value. It’s important to look at the end in this way and work backwards.”

Money has not been the only benefit of starting the firm. Williams also met his fiancée through Global Personals. “I didn’t tell her I owned the website until after the first few dates.” He also admits to bending the rules to ensure his success in love. “I may have been slightly naughty in deleting a couple of messages to her from other guys.”

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