Why you shouldn't be an entrepreneur - Vorboss CEO and Founder Timothy Creswick

0:05In everything I'm good at, I can also name someone who's written the book on it, who's just better at it. But there was a moment in 2020 when I looked at this and what I actually understood was for that period, and arguably still now, I was actually the world expert on the business fibre market in London. Now that's a real niche, but once I realised that, that gave me a lot of confidence to then say, yeah, actually, I don't need validation on this, I just need funding. That's Timothy Krezik, the CEO and founder of Vorbos. They're an internet service provider for businesses, which might not sound that interesting at first, but just wait till you hear the story of how it came together and what they're actually doing.

0:43Timothy saw a gaping opportunity that the market had missed due to the distractions caused by COVID, and he seized upon it. It's a story of how the right knowledge combined with perseverance can sometimes allow you to create your own luck. Thanks to Timothy's niche expertise in fibre optics, Vorbos was able to secure£250 million of investment. Their plan is to turn that into a billion by deploying the UK's only dedicated fibre network for businesses throughout central London. They've discreetly laid over 500km of fibre optics since 2020 without many people noticing and that has been part of their master plan.

1:22There's a lot to learn from here. Timothy tells us about several business ventures and all of them, even the lawn mowing business he founded at school, played a very clear role in setting him on the path to where he is today. Whilst I was out buying skittles as a kid, Timothy was out hustling from when he first got pocket money. Living in Switzerland, my brother and I never had any pocket money because there's no need, because you would never go out on your own. There was nowhere to go. When we moved to the UK, that sort of question came up and our parents didn't know what appropriate pocket money was.

1:54And they essentially decided the smallest possible amount was appropriate in order that we didn't seem spoiled. My brother figured out how to work within those parameters. I felt extremely constrained and started devising ways to make money. You know, my parents probably felt like that backfired a bit because in the end, as a teenager, I probably ended up making more money than anyone else at school. I think one of the characteristics that came out of that was like, you very quickly stop caring what people think, right? So I think even for a young age, I just didn't care what people thought. And I've never really felt the need to justify myself to others, I think, as part of that.

2:25So, you know, I was doing very well. I had a couple of little business things on the side that were quite lucrative. I used that to kind of fuel my own interests and hobbies. And I suspect kids at school had no idea what I was up to. What incarnations did they take? Take us through some of the ideas and some of the executions. Were they successful? Were they not? Yeah. So I mean, the first time, really the first thing and the first time I think I ever got paid by someone other than my parents, right? Like the first time I ever got money was mowing lawns. I basically had started mowing a handful of the neighbor's lawns in our neighborhood.

2:58It's funny when you look back, a lot of people probably then would have just gone, cool, I was just, I mow our lawn and I mow two other people's lawns and I make six quid a week and that's fine. There was something in me where I was like, aha, how many lawns can I mow? I don't know where that comes from. I don't know what it is. But anyway, there I was. So off I went. Short story there is within a couple of years, I was mowing every lawn in the neighborhood. And in fact, the part of the story that always makes people laugh is that as an addressable market, it's quite fixed in terms of when you're a kid and you don't have access to a vehicle, how far you can push a lawnmower to get to your clients.

3:32So your addressable market is fixed, but your desire to make revenue is sort of uncapped. And I'd figured out that you could convince people that they needed their lawnmowering twice a week. And so this really doubled the market. And the fun part of that story, the thing that got me onto it was when you think about how a blade of grass grows the longer it is the more of it is exposed to sunlight and so it then proceeds to grow faster so if you cut a short blade of grass the clippings you know it's there's very little to cut and it will take quite a while it'll initially grow quite slowly and so so it's this kind of fun thing which is if you can mow someone's lawn twice a week the total amount of clippings that you take away is substantially less than if you only mow it once a week and so the amount of work you put in is way less and you can get the job done way quicker.

4:16And because I ran a sort of fixed fee basis, it was three pounds a lawn, if you can believe it. This was a really, really effective way of making money. Yeah, I was every day after school coming home, doing a couple of lawns, then going and doing my homework. And that sort of then started to get me into software. Of course, naturally, naturally. How could a lawnmower not take you to software? To me, that seems obvious. Yeah, no. So what happened was people just wouldn't pay. So they would build up months worth of debt, you know, and you'd be standing there and you'd be like, well you owe me 18 pounds now months worth of debt 18 pounds it's absolutely you know it's just so funny and what i sort of i don't remember sort of where this how it came about but i suppose i intuited that i should write this down so um ultimately uh i just built a little bit of billing software in microsoft basic it was on you know on dos and i basically had i had a system where i had all my lawman customers in there and it was really because i've been fiddling around with like starting to code you need a project to do to kind of put it in context and so my project was let's build a system to print out bills for the lawn mowing print out invoices so i would get home from school go turn on the computer press a few keys and it would run off the invoices for the lawns i was going to go mow then i would go off mow the lawn fold this up stick it through the letterbox and wander off and and the business lesson there was as soon as you put it in writing and as soon as it was printed and not sort of handwritten like a taxi receipt people took it really seriously and even though the numbers were irrelevant and small suddenly all my payments started coming in or almost all my payments started coming in on time and this this sort of debt issue I'd been dealing with almost entirely went away.

5:48So where did your coding career take you? Then you get into this sort of slightly weird part where some of the people I mowed lawns for also needed IT support so this kind of then made me understand there was a market for that and then this was around 98, 99 and it's so funny when I think about it now but I always used to find christmas got a stressful time i'm quite introverted i don't enjoy you know when the whole family's there and it's just a lot and i decided i wanted to learn how to build web pages and you know i'd gone to waterstones and with with my earnings i'd bought the 40 pound book on on html and it was like one of those things where like i remember at the time was like i coveted this thing because like that was a lot of lawns i had to mow to be able to buy this book and you know you really do think about the opportunity cost of like what else could i have done with the money.

6:31And I spent Christmas just reading the book, learning to build websites. And then from there, that started to become, that was the weird situation in the late 90s was you could be like a 16-year-old who actually knew how to do it, who knew how to build websites for small businesses, and people would pay you a few hundred quid to do it. Now you can probably be a five-year-old with chat GPT, but hey. Exactly. So that kind of sent me in that direction. And then I had a few other things going on so around that time i i also had a i was trading sim free mobile phones um i'd sort of figured out that there was a bit of a loophole in in the way that was all working it was back in the days of the kind of car phone warehouse model where you couldn't get sim free phones you always had to have a contract i basically managed to make friends with a with a chap somewhere on the south coast about 100 miles away who owned an independent phone shop and so he could buy sim free phones and then i would buy them off him and then i would sell them through Yahoo Auctions, which later got acquired by eBay.

7:30And I would predominantly be selling them to bankers in London who wanted to have the latest phone. And so they didn't care about the contract. That wasn't the issue. The issue was they were happy to pay as long as they could get their hands on the phone. And so I had this like weird trade going where every time a new phone came out, there in mine was like a 16 year old, like walking between lessons. And I would get a call and it would be some banker in London being like, can you get me the latest Ericsson T39M or something? And it's like, yes, I can. And then they would send me checks and I'd deposit the check.

7:56And then, you know, because we didn't have like PayPal, we didn't have any of that stuff. So and then I had that thing going on the side as well, which was, again, another like interesting lesson in understanding where there was a bit of arbitrage in the system and where there was a bit of a gap. There were people that were price insensitive that just wanted to have the latest thing. And the market just didn't cater for that. It sounds to me like what you're learning is, you know, some of the actual really early crucial business lessons, invoicing, how to get people to pay on time, where arbitrage opportunities lie.

8:23So where is a space for you to make money? You're actually inadvertently exploring different business models by just being curious, by just listening to the market, right? And just sort of toying. It doesn't necessarily sound like you're sitting like we sort of imagine sometimes with an entrepreneur with a grand master plan and a big whiteboard and all the different things you can do. You're kind of sort of going with the flow and seeing where these ideas and lessons take you. Definitely. And I think that was always my thing was, you know, I always smile when you get people that sort of say, go build it or do it as a paper process, do it by hand 100 times or, you know, get someone to pay you for it.

8:54And it's like, yeah, 100%. I agree with that. You know, that was if there was money in the bank, like if you were getting paid for it, then then that was the that was the evidence that was the proof point that I needed. So it was always do a thing, see if I can get paid for it, like, let's see if I can get paid to do whatever it might be. And then derive from that what the lesson was, I suppose. I think because of the way the startup boom has essentially unfolded and because there's so many, you know, the internet has allowed an expression of so many different business models as well. The idea of focusing back to the very core metric of business being something that is a service you provide that someone literally pays for, that's kind of been lost in the ether for quite some time.

9:31Like, you know, it's almost become a dirty word, a dirty idea that if I provide a service, you will pay for it. And that is essentially the sum of what entrepreneurship is. But in reality, if you look at the definition of entrepreneurship, it pretty much specifically explains that it is providing a service that someone will pay you for that adds value to them. So if you can't find a way to do that and there isn't actually money exchanged for it, you don't have a business. Fundamentally, at some point, you still have to be able to ask that question. Otherwise, there's a much better question to ask, which is, does my business need to exist?

10:03Absolutely. It's one of the reasons why I've always really enjoyed B2B space, because I think B2B gives you a much more rational, pure sense of value. That's not to say, you know, I think it's a myth, and often I get into arguments internally here about is, well, they're, you know, they're basically just consumers too. They're prone to the same kind of tricks that work with marketing and advertising and everything else. It's like, well, kind of, but eventually like someone in procurement goes and checks it or someone, you know, there is still a bit more sophistication to a B2B buyer. In general, they are more likely to fire up a spreadsheet and actually figure out which one is the most cost effective.

10:37And I like that because it also means if the product's good, and if you position it well, you can punch through with very little marketing as well. And that was the other thing that I found fascinating. So until the last three years, for context, I ran this business for 15 years before fundraising, and it was profitable. In those 15 years, we spent, and I'm not joking, absolutely zero on marketing. We went to the odd conference, and would obviously that, you know, that would expense that. But we never ever did any marketing. And in B2B, you can get away with that. I think in B2C, that's a very, very difficult.

11:11There are some examples, but it's pretty rare. So tell me, Tim, after all of this messing around with different explorations and different business models, where did you land up? Where did you decide to hang your hat? I was the kid that I didn't really try at school. All the teachers thought I was a bit of an idiot. And then I got the highest GCSE results in my school, very you know some of the highest uh final results a level results as well and and all of a sudden that you know you kind of get a very different focus a different attitude so after my gcse suddenly the school zeroed in on me and was like we want you to apply to oxford or cambridge so whether or not it was the right thing um that's where i ended up and then i i worked my way through university so i was building software i was always in the holidays like going and doing work placements you know i've had so many weird jobs doing different things so when i was in in high school i i was delivering rental cars for avis um every time i had a bit of spare time that was just like one of those things you could turn up do a shift make 50 quid and then move on and again taught me a lot of stuff right because i i've stood in a you know in a scratchy avis uniform on on so many people's doorsteps holding a clipboard delivering a hire car and just been like just treated like a nobody it's really valuable experience i then i then did all sorts of like internships generally in like the software space and then and i built a lot of software through university i built like an e-commerce site for a photography company.

12:29So they were doing like event photography and it was a way to go online and essentially order prints. All the stuff that now is like really easy to do, like the sort of Shopify straight off the shelf, have it up and running in an hour was actually like really complicated. You know, like you were building the whole thing. You're having to do all the payments integration because you didn't have the payment services. You were having to do all of the back end. So you're doing everything from integrating with a credit card merchant account to doing the image resizing and the dispatch to the printers who, by the way, didn't have an API.

12:57So you literally had a bit of backend that would like pull the resized files, automate an email with an attachment and in the body of the email, the instructions of like where to ship the print to and like, just like kind of weird stuff. I did all of that. I had a miserable time at Oxford and it's a real paradox because I think I learned a lot almost every day. There's things that, you know, are valuable, but at the same time, it didn't make me happy. I did a lot of rowing competitively. And that was kind of like my safe space. And then ultimately, I left after three years, and I never graduated.

13:27A key element of that was I'd had a summer job as a software contractor at a very large law firm. And they were very forward thinking and were using software to essentially make the business more efficient. You know, they'd understood that if they could extract more billable hours, that that was on a global scale with 3000 fee earners globally, that was going to be huge. And that was a real eye-opener for me. So that was really the genesis of then what went on to be Vorbos and this business. Where does the name come from, I have to ask? Yeah, I get this a lot. I'm afraid the answer is just really, really engineering.

14:01I'd wanted a name that was unique, that you could look at and immediately pronounce it. Having been brought up in a non-English speaking country as well, I sort of had this idea that it generally ought to be pronounceable to sort of in any language and where the domains were all available, the.com, the.net,.co.uk, and where it wasn't really something that was in use. So I spent a good chunk of 2005 wandering around with a bit of paper in my back pocket, just writing down, I'm sure you've done this, like you write down ideas and then you cross them out and you write down. And of course, I always love telling the story to some of the young people in the business now, you know, where they're 22 years old and can't imagine a world without the internet.

14:39And I was like, and then I would get home and I would Google them because you had no idea, right? You didn't have internet on the go then. So go home, get this like scrap bit of paper out, Google this. And you're like, oh, no, that's a dry cleaners in Singapore. Can't use it. Oh, I've done this. I've done this journey so many times. It's so tedious, isn't it? And so, but the name was engineered to fit a specification. The specification was a short, pronounceable word, had to sound kind of reliable, not mean anything in any language and something that no one's ever used. And eventually you try enough combinations of things, you hit on it.

15:09and um i don't wish i had some of the bits of paper i kind of wish there was a there was a eureka moment with that one where and this was back when you could google i don't know if you ever if you remember this in sort of early 2000s but there were things you could google whether whether there would just be a blank page like now the algorithm doesn't let you do that they always manage to bring some advertising or do something or whatever but but yeah i remember just googling that and it was just just nothing and you're like well that'll do and the cool thing is like to this day no one's ever used that word for anything else ever so if you google warboss like the only stuff that comes up is is us it's almost like a impressive thing you should be proud of and also extremely embarrassed and insulted yeah exactly it's interesting because hearing you sort of share the the snapshot of a journey in a sentence or two it doesn't make it sound like when you started off you had a grand vision about where you're going to end up today 15 years later but educate us like how did it start like did you have a grand vision i know you bootstrapped the company for a long period of time take us through your journey that job i had at the law firm taught me a really valuable lesson so you now kind of see all these lessons stacking up and like what that how i was starting to piece it piece it together and sort of figure out how to make capitalism work right like i'd figured out how to get paid for stuff i'd figured out the billing like you said i'd figured out the importance of the contractual agreements and whatever else.

16:32The key lesson I learned there, and it's embarrassing to admit, was it wasn't what my time was worth or what my time cost. It's what my work was worth to someone else. So I worked on a couple of projects. I mean, they paid me extraordinarily well, like really, really well. I mean, it was absurd for a 21-year-old, 20-year-old to be earning the kind of money I was earning. The key was the problems I was solving for that business were worth millions to them. And they had some really interesting problems. It's like, you know, you could do two, six weeks worth of software development and theoretically be saving them half a million, million pounds globally over the year.

17:06That was a huge eye opener to me was the fact that they were broadly indifferent to what I cost. Because as long as I was solving these problems, you know, it was like they were getting like a 10 to 1 minimum order of magnitude ROI on the work. So that was a huge moment for me. I think prior to that, I'd always agonized over my hourly rate. I'd always done all the software projects I did through university. And I think it was always about quoting based on how many hours it would take me to build it. And then having to have an argument to justify why my hourly rate was, I don't even remember what it was, but I don't know, 50 quid an hour or 20 quid an hour or whatever it might have been.

17:40Yeah, that was game changing to basically sort of think, well, actually, I could devise a software project for somebody, whether it's building an e-commerce site or whatever, and price it based on what it's worth to you as a product. Even if it's a totally bespoke product, what's it worth to you as a product, regardless of how much time it would take me to build it. It's interesting. Do you think that there's a lesson there that you've learned that is still really relevant now? Or do you think that sort of lesson has become so obvious and there's another lesson to extrapolate for people that are listening today and trying to work out how to price things and where value lies?

18:09I think for a lot of people, it is obvious. For me, at that point, that was the missing piece, right? I'd learned all these other things. I'd figured so many other things out. And that was the gap. That was the bit that somehow in all of it I'd missed I'd never really thought you know when I was mowing lawns or building software or whatever like what's this worth to them you know I'd never thought to differentially price lawn mowing based on the income of the person who was who was paying me if you see what I mean you know a lawyer is saving a hundred pounds an hour by by having someone else mow their lawn compared with someone who's retired right and and whether or not that's valid it just hadn't even crossed my mind and so I think there was a degree of like when that penny dropped of like oh shit and that and that really led me down to the original business plan to build software so to build like line of business software or like mini what we would now think of as like erp and enterprise resource planning or but but software that you use to manage your core business there's just a plethora of sas software now but that wasn't a thing in 2006 like just absolutely wasn't a thing and the only businesses building software themselves were huge businesses not not sort of small or medium businesses.

19:14So my thesis was actually all the same really clever techniques we use to build software in these large companies, this kind of middleware or whatever you want to call it, like would absolutely translate to small companies. But you also had to do a little bit of kind of management consulting almost to help them understand what the problem was. But companies in the sort of 10 to 20 million revenue bracket absolutely would have very good ROI on this and weren't and it wasn't a space that they were looking. And so that was my original kind of, I don't want to call it a business plan because it was certainly never written down.

19:44That was my thesis. You built a proposition, clearly. You said you bootstrapped it. How many of you at the time of building this? So I started, it was just me. Like originally the idea was I would build software and sell it. And I started that literally from my old bedroom in my parents' house. Within about three months, I sort of realized that I needed a small office. So I kind of really stretched myself to having a tiny one person, 120 square foot or whatever it was office, just so I had this sense that I was actually going to a place of work. And also because it was kind of embarrassing when you would meet people at an event and sort of, oh, where are you based?

20:22Oh, my parents' house. So there's been a theme throughout all of this, which is like I always sort of almost deliberately financially distressed myself. For these things to work, you also have to have the cost base to cover, right? Like, because that then gives you the hunger to be like, I need to do the thing that gets me paid. Yeah, it was a bit of cart before the horse because I took on this office rent that I had no way of paying. And that really forced me to be like, I need to get some paying customers. Probably less than six months, I had about six employees. So I'd then suddenly taken on more work than I could really do.

20:50And that had sort of escalated quite quickly. That was a total failure, obviously. The key moment I recall was probably nine months into that being unable to make payroll. and we banked with at the time Alliance Leicester Commercial Bank which was the old post office bank so they didn't really have branches the branches were in post offices and I'd done that because they were the only bank with no transaction fees so that was like you know it was a terrible banking decision. Yeah I remember going to a cash machine taking cash out on my credit card and then walking across the road to the post office and depositing the cash in the company account and then walking back to my desk and getting the checkbook out because paychecks were literally paychecks and signing a bunch of paychecks and handing them out.

21:32And that was a real like, oh, fuck moment. Like I can do that once. And now I have a load of credit card debt. I also have to service on top of everything else. So then I remember that was a real, that was an unpleasant time because you also knew now the clock was ticking as to how you were going to make the next one. I've had to do that as well. I was reading your notes before the call. And as I I saw that and I was like, I literally remember doing this myself. Very scary. Kind of like you said, though, there is an interesting thing, to be honest, where you are the reality is so night and day of making something work as opposed to in a funded startup.

22:05You've got a lot of, you know, you've got millions in the bank and things cannot work for a long time. It is a different perspective. It's a different kind of thing. You know, I'm unique-ish in the sense that I run a bootstrap business, Kindling Media, make secret leaders and other podcasts and around like you know a venture-backed company that had millions in the bank with uh with silicon valley bank like you did over the weekend and they create very different stresses very different kind of scenarios you are always acutely aware in the bootstrapped company you're always acutely aware of how real every single decision is and and i guess the question back to you is you know which which do you enjoy more it's a great question um you know sort of reflecting on this with with ruth uh our producer before we were speaking you know the honest the honest truth is that um i don't know how you feel about this as well but the high i feel today from banking unbelievably is because so much was at stake uh millions of other people's money and a whole business that i'd uh you know a lot of companies that are funded stuck a a jet fuel under to go fast the that is fair to say that the highs and lows in a backed startup, a high growth startup, you know, which tends to be the type that's funded because that's just a function of speed, right?

23:18The money is to help you go faster. The highs and lows there are far, far more extreme. And therefore emotionally, when you reflect on it, I think it feels much more rewarding. And it's because there's a lot more risk mitigation with Bootstrapped. And there just is. There are some bets you make, but like a lot of them are great ideas that you just can't make the bets on. You just have to be patient. There is no real strategy other than patients in bootstrapped companies. So it's not the high and low journey at all. It's the calm and steady. My personality is much more geared towards the high risk, high reward, full gamut of emotions as a human being, seeing how it all unfolds.

23:53But for a lot of people, you know, I can totally understand like the bootstrapped side is this is a very rewarding journey, isn't it? Because you really get out what you put in, but you do that at real increments. Yeah. And I think, you it certainly builds a lot of resilience. Like I'm very, very calm about potentially existential events, right? Because when you build a business over this period of time, you know, you face down these kinds of issues. And I think there is something about sort of earning your stripes doing that. For me, though, I also just somehow derive a bit of pleasure from bringing kind of order to chaos.

24:23But you know, I live two to five years in the future in terms of that's how far I can play the sort of think ahead a bit like, you know, a bit like playing chess, how many moves ahead I can think and and I sort of working with my mental model and I and I love that and I think it's what makes me quite good at my job so for me it's actually quite fun as a mental exercise when when the whole board gets tipped you know when when there's then some unforeseen totally strange event whether you know covid for us was a time where it was it was awful but it was also like genuinely like adrenaline exciting for me because I'm like I you know I got to spend time considering so you know suddenly blowing up all of these assumptions and having to like really quickly recompute.

25:01And it was one of those opportunities to the people that could think the fastest were going to win. They were going to survive. They were going to have the best outcomes. And I love those moments where you can kind of take all of that experience and then really test it. It's similar to my sins. I do a lot of motor racing and a lot of guys really hate the start of a race because it's chaotic. And it's literally my favorite thing. It's like a happy place because Because your job in that situation is to get through those first few corners, that first lap in one piece, whilst there is just so much going on and it's really hard to take in.

25:37And it's a true test of your ability to be able to watch everything that's unfolding in front of you, very quickly make decisions that you're committed to. And those decisions can be very expensive if you get them wrong. And I get a huge rush out of it. I love it. The chaos is just this opportunity to test yourself. Even with the sailing, I had a bit of a bad habit of seeking out storms to go and sail in just because your friend and I used to do that. If the weather was particularly bad, we'd go sailing because it was a test of your ability. What are some of the more challenging experiences you've had in your life where that has really been tested?

26:09Do they tend to manifest because you go and seek them out? Or have you experienced really tough moments in personal life or business that have really, really pushed you? I mean, I have, but I think it's a different kind of a different kind of stress, right? I think I'm very good at disassociating the kind of emotional response when it's when it is just a problem you can solve. But I think that's very different to, you know, I don't know if you suddenly have a friend in need, and it really is quite an emotional point. It's not a it's like the classic, you know, just telling someone how to solve their problem isn't isn't necessarily what they want in a time of need.