Dabs.com founder and IT entrepreneur Dave Atherton is a surprising renaissance man. When the rest of the world gave up on e-commerce, he built a profitable business.
Inside the strange mind of Dave Atherton
Dabs.com founder and IT entrepreneur Dave Atherton is a surprising renaissance man. When the rest of the world gave up on e-commerce, he built a profitable business. An enigmatic presence and serial award winner. Rachel Bristowe attempts to discover what makes him tick
To compare Dave Atherton, a self- confessed party animal and the luminous figure behind the multi million pound electrical online retailer, Dabs.com, to Sir Thomas More, a prolific writer, statesman, lawyer and catholic martyr, would seem a little absurd if you'd never met him - Atherton that is.
More is described in literary reviews as one of the most scintillating and contradictory examples of the Renaissance man. After meeting Atherton for a marathon lunch on a sweltering hot day at De Vere White's Hotel, part of the Reebok stadium, just outside Bolton (he's a Leigh lad himself), I come away with those two adjectives swimming around my head.
During the days that follow an enlightened, cold Tagliatelli, beer and fag bonanza (which nearly didn't happen because Atherton got the days mixed up), my brain attempts to sift through the numerous topics discussed and I realise I'm indeed blessed not to have been stuck with someone only interested in the art of ABC conversation. His volubility makes my job a breeze.
While Thomas More (an expert orator himself) excelled in politics, Atherton was never really a political activist yet his insights into Marxism would leave you speechless.
As a humanist, More displayed a real concern for humankind as responsible and intellectual beings. Atherton undoubtedly does the same, claiming he treats all his Dabs employees with the utmost respect. It must be a bizarre place to work. Atherton obviously loves his team and keeps close to the shop floor: he enthusiastically tells stories about workplace characters, even about two women known in the company as "the exercise bikes" due to their enthusiastic and numerous sexual antics.
In his own words, arrogance and snobbery disgust him, and although he acknowledges his own abilities, he insists there are hundreds of "streetwise yet academically rigorous" people just like him.
Despite his own free-thinking, More was a passionate advocate of Catholicism. Similarly, Atherton is a Catholic boy who attended a single sex Catholic school and goes to mass now and again, "when my mum wants me to," he says with a cheeky grin. He also tells me his brother was a priest for a time but left the priesthood because of "all the hypocrisy".
Throughout lunch, he peppers the conversation with direct quotes from the scriptures. Flabbergasted at such knowledge I try for redemption by reciting Latin hymns, but there's no contest.
So why Sir Thomas More? He's Atherton's inspiration - along with Ghandi (of course). And he thinks Esther Rantzen is the most intelligent person he's ever met and should have been director-general of the BBC, but that's a story for another time. Another Atherton tangent, another of his powerfully held opinions.
The comparison falls down when I get to More as an ascetic. Abstinence is certainly not Atherton's bag. Anyone who's met him at the numerous events he attends throughout the North West will know he's a man who can let his hair down on occasion.
I ask why he feels the need to be ubiquitous in his ambassadorial role for Dabs. "It's all part of the PR machine and essentially I'm the actor with the script who just turns up.
"I am influenced by the Richa rd Branson approach to business. I don't need to sell Dabs. I'm only here because of Dabs.com and Dabs.com is not all me. But it's the nature of capitalism that number one gets all the profit.
"I have no agenda. I don't do business-to-business selling. I'm not one of these rather sad Dale Carnegie readers who have their business cards ready to thrust in your face.
"The people at these events are the best class of people. It's much better when you can talk to people on your wavelength. There are other places I go where it's wall-to-wall drop dead gorgeous 19-year-old models but they're just part of the scenery," he wafts.
The fact his award cabinet is full to bursting is evidence others think the same. The first ever award (and the one that meant the most) was won in 1995 for Bolton Business of the Year and every year since, despite the organisers persuading him not to enter any more. Undoubtedly to give others a chance.
These days Atherton is mixing in the higher echelons of society, having been personally invited to enter his company for the Queen's Award for Innovation. "Clearly the mutual backslapping £3140 a seat black tie dinner award ceremonies are a game with the ultimate project being to make money from the event.
And as he slurps another spoonful of pasta down his chin he jabs an important point at me: "I'm a nice guy but I'm also not naove. The Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award is quite rigorous and the other players are pretty good - there's no rubbish in the contestants."
Before reaching the heady heights of electronic existence, Atherton left school with a handful of GCSEs then went straight to the Inland Revenue. He admits he had no real desire to move on. Even then he was a canny individual, fast-tracking his way to the top of the civil service.
Despite the pay never being enough he is convinced the management training he received helped him make Dabs the successful business it is today.
And the figures speak for themselves. Founded in 1990, Dabs now employs 210 people and recently released its end of year figures which showed an increase of 30.2 per cent in sales to £3152m (2002: £3117m). As the High Street retailers wobble, Dabs continues to bring in the customers, which Atherton says are coming in thick and fast at 2,000 a day (and that's without advertising).
"Did I imagine it would be massive? No, I imagined it would have six staff and a turnover of £3100,000 for me. But it's not an achievement to sell billions of stuff on the internet when you're in the right sector and other people just don't get it. When I built the mail order business, Dixons and Comet were still very strong so why didn't they take the market completely?
"One of the problems is your pricing model if you're a retailer. If you've got a high street store, your prices would be laughable on the web. Our canvassing returns are miles better than average. We're cheap, reliable and we never put my prices up. Amazon also has this philosophy.
"Everyone I meet ends up being a Dabs customer. We can't be crap because we've got so many customers. Do we make mistakes? Yeh, we make millions of mistakes but why pay more on a deluxe carrier? I can't do deluxe."
Dabs hasn't always had the .com attached. Atherton uses the example of Napoleon and his relationship with his generals to explain how he turned the company from straight mail order to internet empire.
"It's not like saying shall we move into services in another country. What you couldn't measure was something brand new called e-business. Retailing computers was very much about detailed information and the web will give you a full spec sheet. You can't just have a quick one-line listing. We've got much more data online than we ever did on the shelves.
"Talking to consumers was a problem. We were open when they were at work. To me computers were just a £350 margin discount item - to the customers they're an important purchase."
The 1990s were heady days for Dabs. It was constantly in the top ten of consumer dealers in the UK and through e-business was able to sell around the clock as opposed to nine-to-five which had previously been a restriction.
Setting up when the market was in its first throes of activity was the key for Atherton and when the company shifted to a transactional website, 25 per cent of its business was already in the bag. That's when he stopped printing a catalogue showcasing all Dabs' 20,000 products.
"I believed the internet was better than telephone, the same way that a word processor is better than a typewriter and CDs are better than vinyl. Nobody ever went back. People who say that are deliberately archaic - they hang onto some romantic notion.
"You have to believe that all your custom ers have net access. Why should you do that? The kind of people who buy a lot of books buy computers. Once you've got an internet connection you never go back. There are just so may genuinally good things on the net - stuff for your Granny (all ages, all demographics). It worked," he enthuses.
But it's not all been plain sailing for this man of many talents (he also plays piano proficiently and has been known to tinkle the ivories in various pubs in Didsbury where he plans to move with his fiance later this year).
He greatest achievement came in 2001 when he turned the company around after it made a loss. Getting rid of the small firms of accountants and lawyers he had working for him and replacing them with big guns PWC and Addleshaw Goddard was the first step to recovery.
Atherton had faced tougher challenges earlier on in his career. A job at the BBC in software publishing helped him develop a knowledge of the production process, which he used to his advantage by setting up book publishing company Dabs Press with journalist chum Bruce Smith, hence the origin of the Dabs name.
Money was becoming more important to Atherton and his interest in computers began to thwart his business relationship with Smith who wanted to concentrate on sports books. The company eventually wound down and although they remain friends Smith is no longer involved in Dabs in its current form.
So why has the Dabs formula worked? Atherton believes it's down to good, old-fashioned honesty, highlighted by the appearance of his personal email address on the website. "I'm obsessed with honesty and transparency. I had a double delivery about three or four years ago - an employee booked it in and didn't tell the supplier. I sacked him for it. I sacked him because he couldn't see why.
"If you saw an old lady drop £3100 in the street, would you give it back? If a rich manager told you to get stuffed and then dropped £3100 and your landlord is going to chuck you out on the street because you can't afford the rent, do you give it back? Would you take pain rather than breach those morals? If you can't say yes then you're not in the right mindset."
According to Atherton, Dabs' future firmly rests in Europe. He's already bought a place in France and is trying to break out of the "computer geek" market, but he doesn't think Dabs is good enough to be taken to the States just yet.
He's also sponsoring Fulham FC for two seasons, which has left him £3500,000 out of pocket. Why a West London club? "We're a national firm - there's nothing northern about us. We're Dabs.com, we're based up here but I've no more business here than anywhere else. In fact I'm slightly underrepresented in this area," he answers with a hint of annoyance.
He does go on to inform me that he has a "box and boards and that" at Bolton Wanderers in an attempt to appease his Northern customers I guess. Then he hits me with another one of his rhetorical questions, which I was going to ask him, but I was picking my moment.
"Will I sell out? I'll have to sell out at some point. I'd rather do it sooner rather than later. Large corporations have trouble doing it because of corporate inertia but there are plenty of smart entrepreneurs around.
"Everything that will sell on the net we'll sell if it matches with our product. I'm not interested in forcing it - with clothes we're never gonna get there," he says.
As he sparks up one last Marlboro Light I reflect on the rollercoaster ride I've just experienced. The nervous, edgy person that greeted me three hours ago is not the same confident man that now sits (third beer in hand) before me.
Atherton is nothing short of fascinating. Although I lose the thread numerous times in our conversation as he rambles off on one of his many tangents. Just as I'm about to give up on him as yet another egotistical sociopathic entrepreneur too fond of his own opinions - he comes back with yet another wise observation that confirms my belief that he's actually a flawed genius.
"What next?" he quips unexpectedly. "I'll write a Jilly Cooper type book," he says. "I could write an autobiography and get millions but I'd piss people off. I'll write a book on e-business and throw in some homespun moral philosophy." I know I'd read it.
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