WHEN Richard Wharton and his friends Colin Batt and David Floyd realised they worked well together, they packed in their jobs to start something on their own. The problem was . . . they didn’t know what.
“None of us was independently wealthy when we resigned,” said Wharton, who was working with Batt and Floyd at a consumer electronics company. “We all had children. A year-and-a-half in, our houses were at risk. We couldn’t pay mortgages or rent. There were times when I would go to a cash machine and wonder if it would let me withdraw money.”
Wharton and his co-founders had to come up with something — and fast. After a short stint consulting for a technology company, they had an idea — branded mobile phones for big-name firms.
In 2009 they set up Bullitt, based in Reading. Later they expanded to make speakers and headphones.
Today, the company of 143 staff pays for licences to make products branded with names such as Caterpillar, JCB, Kodak, Ted Baker and Ministry of Sound. “We went from staring into the abyss to sales worth £5m at the end of 2010,” said Wharton. Revenues have almost doubled year-on-year since then.
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Last year Bullitt notched up sales of £60.9m, of which £58m came from abroad. The company has offices in China, Taiwan, America and Britain and sells to more than 60 countries.
Despite the success of the business, Wharton insists there is much more to be done before he and his co-founders consider an exit. “None of us has any plans of going anywhere until we get the business to a valuation of half a billion. We’re hanging around for that.”
Wharton was born and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. His mother was a researcher and his stepfather an architect. He went to Durham School, an independent boarding school, and worked on building sites in the summer holidays.
His “reasonably privileged” upbringing did create some awkwardness. “My stepfather used to drop me off in a Range Rover, which wasn’t a great start,” said Wharton, who has five siblings.
After graduating from Newcastle University in 1993 — he read agriculture — Wharton started selling advertisements in the local newspapers. Three years later he got a sales job at the Daily Mirror in London. He was group head in the advertising department across all five Trinity Mirror titles.
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“The ad sales was like a trading floor. Everyone was sitting there loud and brash,” he said. “I hit a glass ceiling after six years, so I started to look around for something new.”
He moved to a job as a commercial director handling ads for British Airways, but soon quit.“I was fed up with working inside organisations. I was always going the extra mile to make somebody else wealthy. I thought, surely I can create some wealth for myself.”
In 2003, Wharton and a friend spotted a business opportunity in manufacturing digital radios. They launched Genus, a brand that quickly made its way into retailers such as John Lewis and Argos. First-year revenues hit £3m, but the glory did not last. “We ended up overtrading: we had orders we couldn’t fulfil.”
In search of funds, Wharton began talks with Freeplay Energy, a consumer electronics company that expressed interest in buying the Genus brand. It came to nothing and Wharton closed the business in 2007.
But some good came of it. Wharton was offered a senior sales job at Freeplay, where he met Batt and Floyd. “When we were there it had cumulative losses of about £24m. We set about putting a strategy together to reverse the fortunes at Freeplay, and within two years we got it to break even,” he said.
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When Freeplay was eventually sold, Wharton found he was unhappy with the new owners and their strategy.
“We decided to get out. We made a conscious decision that enough was enough and we were going to do something ourselves,” he said.
Today, all Bullitt’s products are manufactured in China and Taiwan. It’s 50% cheaper than having production in Britain. “Production costs are going up in China and people are getting paid more, but there is still an enormous gap.”
Bullitt’s growth convinced the Business Growth Fund to invest £3.5m in return for a 36% stake in the company, with the aim of helping accelerate overseas expansion.
Wharton, 43, divides his time between Notting Hill, west London, where he lives with his wife Julia, 33, and Marlborough in Wiltshire, where his two children from a previous relationship, Freia, 13, and Jack, 9, live.
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His advice to budding entrepreneurs is to find co-founders. “You need people to lean on every now and again. We could not have done this had it not been the three of us,” he said. “It’s a much more powerful proposition if there are more of you with the same goals and objectives.”