MicroScope – HEADS AND TALES

Most teenagers would have been happy to play football and dream of older girls at the age of 15, but CEO of Virtual Internet, Jason Drummond, was busy earning himself some serious pocket money through his first major business venture. He set up MicroMax at the tender age of 15, buying in wholesale stocks of ageing titles for the Spectrum and Commodore 64 and then selling them for £1.99 through a chain of local newsagents with whom he had set up exclusive supply deals with, as well as promoting his business through school friends. Despite his age, Drummond was able to convince the newsagents- an odd and suspicious bunch of people at the best of times that he was a serious player and offered sale or return contracts. He provided the dis- play material and regularly monitored stocks as part of his routine of maintaining the business. “For the retailer, it was a no-brainer, and it was a deal they couldn’t argue with and I learnt a lot about business. It is started as an opportunity for buying hardware and software for myself and my friends.” Talking about the business takes Drummond back to the days of his youth when home computers-primarily designed for games had started to appear. He talks happily of the days of the ZX80 machines, followed by the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC 464 on the way.

According to the accountants, he is worth £30m and his company managed to gain over £100m in cash from going public

His extracurricular lessons in the art of business negotiation and games retailing were not apparent to his teachers and, despite his adverts for products on school noticeboards, very few twigged to the scale of his operation and ambitions. They probably did approve, however, of his decision to wind down MicroMax and put his efforts into his A-Levels. “I had always liked the idea of being in business and had wanted to be a shopkeeper,” he recalls. It was quite a departure for someone who had parents routed in more design-led careers. After his A-levels, he had the chance to go back into the games side of the business, but decided to go in a slightly different direction. He found the games distribution business had moved on and that the powerful distribution companies were cornering most of the market. He moved in the direction of sales and joined Reed regional newspapers in telesales. The advantage of joining the organisation was the existence of a training scheme which quickly got him up to speed. He managed to get some canvassing and sales experience behind him and eventually built up a sales team under his command. He claims that he never planned to stay in sales, but was waiting for the right opportunity and he saw his chance with the introduction of the fax machine. “I thought someone could make a fortune selling these, so I set up IDL and focused on selling faxes to companies,” he claims. The experience he gained in canvassing came into play and he managed to get some business with major corporates. He stayed in the fax market for nearly three years, then left because he wanted to travel. He packed his bags and headed off around the world : “Because I had always been working, I couldn’t take time off and I felt that I had missed out.” He took his wife with him and visited Australia, Singapore and Europe. His wife – a British Airways flight attendant – already had an inkling of what was out there, but Drummond wanted to see for himself. He came back after a year, but felt that he still hadn’t got the travel bug out of his system and decided to look for a business venture which would combine making money with seeing the world. His first stop was Moscow, where he stayed for seven months. The death of one of his colleagues put an end to the experiment, which was running into trouble anyway because it was doubtful that he was going to get paid for any of the work he had done. Deciding that even if the UK was in recession there must be somewhere else where the economy was healthy, he jetted out to South Africa working in a business dealing with GSM phones and the Internet. He spent nearly three years there and came- back to England when it was time to start a family. The interest he had in the Internet in South Africa exploded when he got back to the UK and he decided to go with a dedicated Internet business and Virtual Internet was born. He started selling domain names and working with corporate customers to protect their Internet addresses.

“I thought someone could make a fortune selling these, so I set up IDL and started selling faxes to companies” Drummond/Virtual Internet

The battle for protecting domain names arrived in the courts and that helped Drummond to promote his business as puritans of the industry, protecting, rather than ripping off, corporates. He has managed to set up a business which is rapidly expanding into Europe with offices in France, Germany and, recently, New York. He still enjoys travelling, but a young family, including a two-and-a-half-year-old boy and an eight-month-old daughter, keep him at home when he can get the time. According to the accountants he is worth £30m and his company managed to gain over £100m in cash from going public. He admits he does not have the time to do anything with the money. But with two children wanting the latest toys, the opportunity to spend his money is likely to be taken up by the rest of his family. It is worth noting that those who might have thought of Drummond as a bit of an odd teenager as he went from newsagent to newsagent with his games, are probably now regretting that they let the friendship lapse. Knowing someone worth £30m definitely does have its advantages.