Scaling Up

Richard and Kimon speak with James Hyde, non-executive director of James and James Fulfilment, in addition to founding and formerly running the company. Initially unemployed out of college, James and his eventual co-founder, took minimum wage jobs. They were working at a shipping and fulfillment facility, and were frustrated by the lack of efficiency they encountered.

Starting in 2010, James Hyde and James Strachan, began working on their fulfillment company. One of the first customers they ever had wanted James and James to help them sell home brew coffee equipment. They implemented a fulfillment software and management system, effectively allowing the owners of the home brew equipment to retire. Initially, James and the company adjusted to this model, even though, at first, they only wanted to create a software company, not a software and fulfillment operation.

Part of what makes James’ story as an entrepreneur especially compelling is that he started with almost no outside capital. By the time that James and James Fulfilment had their fourth customer, they were able to support minimum wage salaries for themselves. James talks about how they deliberately turned downed certain jobs and tasks at this time so they could focus on a scalable, core fulfillment solution.

It was at this time that James and his co-founder realized that expanding the service side of the business would allow them to sell more software. The expanded services would be the proof-of-concept that fed the other sales.

James also discusses how and why James and James was able to and continues to expand, even when the service they offer, on its face, resembles that provided by the behemoth, Amazon. James and James focuses on direct-to-consumer, i.e. they work with companies that want their own branding and a “direct” relationship with the buyer. Amazon uses it’s own branding and doesn’t allow their sellers the same access to their end consumers.

When James and James first began, they had a significant first-mover advantage as their were very few fulfillment companies of any kind offering cloud-based solutions. James ponders a road not taken where they would have taken more outside capital to scale, instead of the more conservative approach they took instead. He compares his company to the commonly found Silicon Valley-style SaaS company. As James remarks, these companies’ software is often far less complicated than the software necessary for accurate shipping and fulfillment.

Since the founding and initial success of the company, James retains a position and is an owner. James and James has matured from a start-up into a fully-fledged company with many shareholders. The transformation of the company has changed the culture slightly according to James, especially in its treatment of external threats such as cybersecurity attacks.

Towards the end of the interview, James talks about how he sought out advice from seasoned businesspeople with “gray hair.” He offered them a tiny bit of equity in exchange for a nominal amount of capital so that he could comfortably seek their counsel.

Nowadays, James works at James and James one day out of the week. His next move is to look for small companies that are looking to scale up.

Find James Hyde's profile here

James and James Fulfilment

Richard Lucas is a business and social entrepreneur who founded, led and/or invested in more than 30 businesses.

Kimon Fountoukidis is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here.