When Mark Rose started his business, Boosh 365, he wanted to achieve exciting things – to Mark, the sky was the limit. And, thanks to steady implementation, innovative marketing campaigns and Mark’s dedication to creating the right culture within his business, he succeeded.
Mark made the brave decision to split his previous company after realising that he and his partner held completely different views about the future of their business. He left the company with half of his previous customers and began building Boosh 365. Then he found the EC. “The EC encouraged me to be different, which was so refreshing. It’s something that I still tell my staff to do today – always think outside the box,” Mark says.
Mark employed more people, and investing in his team is something that Mark continues to believe in. “Initially, it enabled me to get out of the office more to network, which in turn brought in new customers for the business,” says Mark. Mark’s team of twelve people work in two departments: Technical and Marketing, so that he can now offer his customers much more value.
“One thing I do is ensure that I employ the best people for the job. I don’t go solely for people who have 10 A*s on their CV – most of the time people are recommended to me,” Mark explains. “I ask them to come into the office to see how we work and whether they think they’d fit in. Another way of recruiting which works well for us is apprenticeships. We currently have two people who have completed their NVQs and who are now full-time members of staff and another three who are all on track to complete shortly. They love the fact that they can earn whilst they learn!” Mark tells us.
A partnership with Vodafone helped in part to fund the recruitment of Mark’s expanding team. The partnership involved a tiered system, in which if Mark achieved set targets then he was rewarded with a larger percentage of commission. The Boosh 365 team smashed their targets with Vodafone and were made a ‘Vodafone Pioneer’. “Of all 459 Vodafone partners in the country only four of us were lucky enough to have this status. It was a huge milestone for us and was something that had been my goal from the start of the partnership,” Mark explains.
One of the biggest areas for development was the ease with which customers could contact the Boosh 365 team, as well as the team’s response times to resolve issues. “Since we’re a telecoms company everything we do is time critical. Very often we don’t hear from customers unless there is an issue and it’s then that they need us to be as time efficient as possible,” Mark tells us. He implemented a ticketing system allowing the team to see the nature of the enquiry and assign it to the correct department.
“The customer receives a bounce-back email to let them know that their enquiry is being dealt with and then we work through them in order of priority,” says Mark. “The ticketing system has become a vital part of the daily workload and we can boast that 90% of our tickets are dealt with within the working day.”
“I suppose the biggest compliment has been that we have taken on board so many new clients through recommendations from existing customers. They’ve told others about our friendly staff, informal attitude and non-pushy ways of working,” says Mark.
Mark exercised his favourite mantra “think outside of the box” when it came to his marketing campaigns to attract local business. “Unfortunately, telecoms and IT has a very tired, stale image. Most people think everyone in our industry is a geek who likes to talk numbers – we wanted to prove that we were different,” explains Mark.
Mark launched a lumpy mail campaign to the local businesses that he wanted to work with, sending out a branded calculator, a bar of chocolate and a letter explaining that using Boosh 365 could save them, on average, £700 per employee, per year. It asked them to use the calculator to calculate their own potential savings. “Because we know how many employees they had before we sent them the box, we already knew that this figure was going to be high,” Mark says.
The campaign worked perfectly and resulted in Mark landing a contract with a huge restaurant chain.
The second part of the campaign was to tackle the prospects who wouldn’t return Mark’s calls. Mark couriered a working Pay-As-You-Go phone, and, once confirming that they’d received the delivery, he gave them a call. It was through this campaign that Mark secured one of Boosh 365’s largest customers – a sales and technical support provider to customers in the mobile radio, radio communication and TV broadcast company.
“Boosh 365 has seen a meteoric rise. We saw our customer base double and we have an increase of 45% in turnover, going from £450,000 to £652,000,” Mark tells us. “The business is set to grow even further in the future.”
