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A British guy says he is self-taught when it comes to the internet and attributes his success with Valueflora to noticing a gap in the market.

Valueflora
http://www.valueflora.com

Russell Hirst was just 21-years-old when he set up his online flower delivery service from a bedroom at his parents’ home in Manchester. Hirst’s ‘one room, one computer’ company is now selling flowers to 120 countries.

“I worked on a few projects before Valueflora,” says Hirst. “I started off with car boot sales straight from school, and had a café for a couple of years. But then I decided to concentrate on the internet.”

Hirst says he is self-taught when it comes to the internet and attributes his success with Valueflora to noticing a gap in the market. By putting customers in touch with the farms that grew the flowers, he could cut out the middle man (high street florists).

Customers choose their flowers from the website, their order is sent directly to the flower farms, where they are packaged and sent. There are no call centres – everything is done online, and Valueflora has just six members of staff.

The flowers come from all over the world, from the UK to Thailand and Cost Rica, while Valueflora’s customers are also global. Amazingly, Hirst claims his global enterprise cost under £10 to start.

“It was done on a shoestring,” says Hirst. “I paid £8 for the domain name and it was pretty much just me for the first 18 months, cold calling people and getting in touch with the farmers.”

Living at home kept overheads low. “I was fortunate in that respect,” says Hirst, “because it’s not easy living without a wage for two years.”

Hirst says the biggest obstacle to overcome was cashflow. Because virtually no money was spent on starting-up the company, every penny of profit was invested back into the business to ensure its growth.

Hirst also dedicated a great deal of time to search engine optimisation (SEO), spending up to 60 hours a week looking to establish Valueflora’s search ranking.

“A hell of a lot of our traffic comes from SEO, so a lot of our time and budget has to go into it,” he says. “It took a couple of years to get high Google results on keywords such as ‘flowers’, because around 25 million pages come up when you type that in.”

Valuable publicity for Valueflora has also come in the form of winning awards, including one from the IOD and, of course, the 2006 Startups International Business of the Year trophy, which Hirst insists has been a real catalyst for growth.

Valueflora plans to stay in Manchester, but moved to a new head office in January 2007. Hirst is planning to branch out into providing flowers for events, and remains keen to extend the Value brand further. With a current annual growth rate of 700% and a 2006 turnover of £1.2m, who can blame him?

Filed under: Success stories - online biz