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Founder@ Interview
Interview with Euan Davies
“Get to know your customer, the language they use, where they hang out, the media they consume, what they’re interested in, what their problem is. Be completely obsessive with this part. Once you know this you can begin to tailor something to these people. .” – Euan Davies
Today we feature Euan Davies, the founder at Sliderfy ltd. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
I’m a 25-year-old founder and am currently working with my business partner Jes to build a global company that creates incredible custom footwear for customers all over the world.
I’m passionate about sport & creativity and have put these 2 pillars at the core of my business. Being a keen sportsman meant that from an early age I learned to be competitive and this has bled into my professional life, every day we work to improve our product offering, customer experience & develop our business.
As a founder of an SME, I definitely wear a lot of different “hats”. My focus is on business development, taking a lead on the sales & marketing side of the business.
On a daily basis, I am on the frontline with my other sales executives working with customers in the UK & Ireland to create their own branded sliders.
On a weekly basis, I am overseeing our advertising strategy and ensuring we are generating enough leads to keep feeding the beast. On a monthly basis, I am making sure that we are hitting our targets in line with our growth plan and ensuring that our staff is happy and all inline working towards the same shared goal.
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
In 2019 I founded Sliderfy with my business partner Jes at the age of 23. At the time I was working as a digital marketing executive and was not satisfied with the type of work or the money I was earning.
I found the work mind-numbing and I didn’t enjoy the fact that no matter how hard I worked (after hours, on weekends etc.) none of this effort resulted in an increase in what I would take home each month.
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Ultimately, I disliked lining other people’s pockets as they seemed to sit back. It was this dissatisfaction that drove me to bet on myself and start Sliderfy. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic I was made redundant from my digital marketing role. This was the catalyst for me to pursue Sliderfy full time and double down.
The skills I learned whilst working in digital marketing were incredibly useful when it came to starting Sliderfy. We were able to build our website & manage our own social media ads without needing to use an expensive website agency or freelancer. The total set-up costs of the business came to under £600.00 which meant that within 1 order we had broken even. Launching Sliderfy has been the most rewarding & challenging experience.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
We create custom slider for businesses & sports clubs. Our focus is on creating truly bespoke strap designs that are tailored to our customers existing branding and merchandise.
As a company we have adopted the mantra that “the strap is a canvas” and it’s our job to create designs that are so good our customers don’t want to wear them.
We pride ourselves on how niche we are, and it’s this niching down that has allowed us to dominate this space & expand so quickly into France & Australia without securing any funding.
We are the go-to custom slider supplier for businesses & sports teams in the UK, Ireland, France & Australia.
We have no interest in diluting our brand and aim only to continue to innovate the Slider space, we have begun doing this with our own sustainable slider which has a sole that is made from the tire wall of recycled tires.
Our head office is in Bristol, UK. We also have staff living in Lyon, France & the Gold Coast of Australia.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
Primarily, our success has been built from knowing who our customers are and not trying to be everything to everyone.
Also, having the digital marketing skillset has allowed us to generate large volume of leads at little cost compared to the size of our average deal.
As a team we hate the thought of being known as just another boring custom kit company that tries to offer everything to their customers in pursuit of upselling. So we focus on becoming the best at creating custom sliders.
When you think like this it makes marketing & selling the product so much easier. We know exactly what our strengths are, what we are offering & who we want to target.
We only want to create custom sliders, and because this is always our focus we can really refine our offering and truly offer an expert custom service without the noise & distraction of other products.
Having a co-founder has been a huge help in scaling our business and it’s one of the biggest assets we have against sole founders.
We have also sought help from government bodies like the department of international trade to fuel our expansion and these have been invaluable when growing internationally.
Our approach to growing Sliderfy has been simple, we aim to solve as many problems as possible until there are no more problems (or as little as possible), if we do this on a daily, weekly, monthly basis we will build a business that works.
This solution focused mindset has provided us with the resilience to grow during Brexit, COVID amd the now precarious economic situation we’re facing post COVID.
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
The biggest lesson I have learned so far is that when you’re in doubt zoom out. We have had really hard months, but I think it’s crucial to remember how far you have come and also where you want to go.
Coupling this with the solution-based mindset you can really overcome most of the challenges you face. We have had orders that have not gone to plan & customers that have been super challenging but you learn the most in these situations and your business gets stronger with every one of these adversities.
We operate in a competitive space and due to our designs being the best on the market we often get customers try and take our custom design work to competitors to ask them if they can quote for this and then drive our pricing down.
This is one of the more challenging situations we have to deal with and I tell my sales staff that we need to value our product and what we are offering, and that it’s okay to walk away from these negotiations.
We fixed the problem of customers trying to take our design work to our competitors by creating watertight, terms of business with our lawyers that protect our custom designs as our IP which means they legally cannot be taken and used with other companies without our consent.
I wish I had known the phrase “nail it before you scale it”, right at the beginning as it would have meant avoiding a lot of problems in the beginning. Despite this, our aggressive approach to expansion probably wouldn’t have occurred had we been obsessed with perfecting everything in the beginning.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
I was never really encouraged to be an entrepreneur from an early age, my father has always worked for himself which I thought was pretty cool as he could define his own working hours. As far as being interested in business, it really wasn’t something that I had an obsession with when I was younger or even as a young adult.
I would say I was motivated by necessity, I tried working for someone else and didn’t enjoy it. I disliked the vulnerability that comes with being an employee. My favourite thing about being a young entrepreneur is the learning curve that comes with it, you learn so much so quickly.
I wouldn’t have much to say to people that doubted me, especially because I am only getting started & have so much more I want to achieve with Sliderfy.
So I’ll keep on working & building this brand as big as I can. I practice self-talk a lot and If it ever gets hard I just hit myself with the sentence “when in doubt zoom out” and remember how far we have come and that helps keep me grounded.
In terms of regretting becoming an entrepreneur, It’s really not a feeling I get very often. I hated the alternative of being an entrepreneur and I feel fortunate that I have been able to build something successful as quickly as I have been able to.
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
We use Google suites whole repertoire, Gmail, Google Hangouts, Google sheets, Google documents, Google drive.
We use Facebook & Instagram advertising to help with our lead generation & Zapier to organise our leads generated by these ads.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to be almost completely remote as a team, so we use Whatsapp business is our main communication tool as well as Google hangouts.
The next step for us is to integrate a CRM, but honestly, we haven’t been overly impressed with the SAAS available.
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
I wish I had known the phrase “nail it before you scale it”, right at the beginning as it would have meant avoiding a lot of problems in the beginning. Despite this, our aggressive approach to expansion probably wouldn’t have occurred had we been obsessed with perfecting everything in the beginning.
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
My proudest achievement has been building a company in a global pandemic & recession with absolutely no funding. Also, being able to hire staff and pay them well due to the fact the company is consistently profitable month-on-month.
Or hitting our 2020 year revenue by April 2021.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
Future life goals would be to be involved in politics, particularly focusing on improving the education system to make it fit for purpose. It’s something that I find incredibly interesting.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
Get to know your customer, the language they use, where they hang out, the media they consume, what they’re interested in, what their problem is. Be completely obsessive with this part.
Once you know this you can begin to tailor something to these people.
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and Sliderfy ltd”
To learn more about Sliderfy ltd Visit www.sliderfy.co.uk
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