ImagesMagUK-Sep18

DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 30 images SEPTEMBER 2018 Images travelled to Bognor Regis to talk to Mark Ponsford, managing director of Krowmark and serial entrepreneur, about his business strategy, the importance of ‘trust’ and how digital printing is moving his company forward M ark Ponsford‘s route into the garment decoration business is relatively unorthodox. In 1992, after training in electronic engineering, he decided to set up an industrial computer business with a colleague. They started with no orders, “a bit of a plan“ and an ambition to sell the company within five years. They quickly grew to be one of the biggest operations in the industry, reaching a turnover of £5.5 million before getting an offer for the business five years after setting it up. Mark then moved to San Diego, US, and worked as a VP of worldwide sales and marketing before moving back to the UK where he got into buying and selling endowment policies. The recession hit hard, as did Standard Life when it cut the surrender value of its endowment policies. “I went into that and came out of that with pretty much the same amount of money, but I learned more about marketing, so it helped,“ he says. He set up Blast Off Marketing with the aim of selling people monthly marketing packages, but found that people, when hearing about his experiences, wanted him to consult for them instead. “I class business as my hobby, I have an intuition for it. I like the business of business.“ Consulting was, he admits, good for the ego, but not the basis of a scalable company. He then met Kevin Byrne, founder of Checkatrade, an online directory of tradespeople. “I saw an opportunity to work with them, because they had, at that point, about 1,500 members. They‘ve got tens of thousands nowadays; this was back in 2004. I said, ‘Why don‘t we set up a company that sells to your members? Stationery, business cards, telephones, that sort of stuff.‘ Pretty much everything that wasn‘t tools of the trade, we sold to them. It was a joint venture for about a year, but it just didn‘t work out selling purely to tradesmen because as difficult as they are to get hold of to do a job, they‘re even more difficult to get hold of if you‘re trying to get them to spend money.“ It was clear after a year that Trade Service Direct, as it was known, required a new approach. They agreed that Mark would take control of the company, and move it in a different direction. In April 2006, he transformed it into a workwear company, which he eventually renamed Krowmark. Fax marketing “We had no orders. Literally nothing. We started marketing and just grew it from there, and it‘s grown each year.“ His approach to acquiring clients involved a surprising, yet very successful, method: fax marketing. “We only stopped about two years ago – it was so unbelievably successful, and so cheap. We were sending out 25,000 faxes a day for a couple of hundred quid. A lot of them would tell us to stop sending them faxes because we were wasting their ink, but we also got people saying ‘Just got your fax. I hate getting these, Making a mark Krowmark now has two Kornit Avalanche HD6 printers, which have replaced its screen printing operation Mark classes business as his hobby