STEVE MATTHEWS INTERVIEWS DARREN JAMES

Welcome to another edition of Up Close & Personal! We’re in my kitchen, where we are surrounded by tea, coffee and homemade Welsh cakes. This month I have a great friend, Darren James with me, who’s a founding member of Renegades, but more personally to me, he’s a member of my Mastermind Group. He’s been able to pour his years of knowledge and experience into me and for that, I’m eternally grateful. I guess we’re all at different stages in our business development and I think I can say that Darren is in the latter stages of his personal development. He still believes in the journey and that there is much to give back to other business owners, hence why he is one of the Renegades. He has managed to extract himself from the day to day running of his business interests, but that wasn’t without incident which I’m sure he’ll elaborate on further. Darren’s business interests are varied, with a Print company, a Risk Management company, Direct Response Marketing, App Development, a Business Club and a diverse property portfolio to help keep him out of trouble. Without further ado, Dar, tell us a little bit about Darren James and your background. I know you’ve been working since the age of 16, so tell us a bit more.

DJ: I was destined for University but my parents spilt up when I was 14 so I was pretty much left to my own means. When the opportunity came to do, what was called a YTS in those days, I just jumped at the opportunity and ended up becoming a lab technician in a Metalergy Lab and I was convinced that was my destiny and I was going to end up there for the rest of my life.

That lasted a year and after that I did a small stint then in a trimmings factory, driving forklifts and loading lorries, picking orders for Woolworths. That was a seasonal job and finished about the November and basically that was it. I then went on the dole and I was on the dole until about March the following year when I received a phone call from

the local careers office asking me if I was interested in a position that involved some camera work; and being someone that would have a go at anything, I said yes of course. I suppose that’s really where the journey started. I was offered a position in a company called Applied Screen Print, which was one of the leading screen-print companies in the UK at the time, employing 75 or more people, producing fruit machine glasses. JMP being one of their biggest customers. I think we were doing about 10,000 glasses a week for machines… unbelievable at the time.

SM: JMP used to produce the fruit machines for Las Vegas didn’t they?

DJ: Yeah, they were huge! An international company. I spent a few years there and ended up learning a lot more than the other people working there. I made it my business to learn and then one member of staff basically left overnight and I ended up doing their job and my job and there was no real recognition. I thought, I’m not going to get anywhere here, so I then noticed there was an opportunity in a new business that was starting down the road. I think there was 21 of them that went for the interview and I was their first employee and I was the Origination Supervisor. So, I was quite bolstered by that!

SM: Where do they get these job titles from Dar? … Origination Supervisor.

DJ: I have no idea, it was basically graphics. Doing all the graphics for print. Now, my boss at the time was a gentleman called Harry Palmer, who actually works for us now. After a series of events, his business failed and we took him and his staff on. I worked for him from 1987 to 1993 and it was 1991 that my father passed away. I was 23 then and I had about £18,000 as a death in service payment. I was a bit disillusioned again, the owners kept telling me that I was good at this and I was better than other people but there was no real financial reward for what I was doing. My friend, who ended up being my business partner was a printer, and so I literally handed my notice in and started a business from my 13 x 15 foot garage in my garden. That’s basically when it all started!

SM: You’re like the Steve Jobs of the Valleys in Wales, is that about right? Because he started from a garage as well.

DJ: I used to do the artwork in my bedroom on the computer and the printing then was done in the garage. I ended up being the graphics guy, delivery guy, the sales guy. I’d made it my business throughout my career up until then to learn all out purchasing, computers, estimating… I was always looking for something else. So after 1 year of that, basically I couldn’t work from home anymore. I was in work 24/7, so we were lucky enough to get a little unit down the road and I think after another year, we had the unit next door, 1000 square foot units, and that went on for the next 6 years, growing every year. We were up to a few hundred thousand pound turnover and there were 3 of us I think and towards the end of that 6 years is where myself and Dave Dean started talking. Dave had a print finishing business, we were doing some work for him and to cut a long story short, Dave started a fresh business and I agreed to join forces. We tried it out and after 1 year of basically managing the account side of the business and the paperwork, we had a substantial amount of money in the bank and I said “ok Dave I’m ready to join”. What helped that decision was, my partner at the time was a raving alcoholic, I think my blood pressure was through the roof, as he’d go for lunch and decide not to come back some days when we had orders to fulfil. That was when Dave and I got together in January 1998.

SM: What an education up to there though, I did have a smile when you talked about the career office contacting you and asking if you’d be interested in a job with some camera work. Well, there’s a couple of takes on that Dar isn’t there! First of all, there’s a model and the other one is an industry that perhaps you wouldn’t want to enter.

DJ: I would have had a go anyway!

SM: Obviously though, you mentioned a couple of things, your willingness to learn, but what an education, and I’m sure everybody can associate with you saying you were the delivery driver, the graphics man, the printer… everything! You were touching every part of the business at one stage.

DJ: I just made it my business to learn… Hungry to learn really!

SM: When you start a business as you said, you literally end up doing everything.

DJ: Unbeknown to me, I was preparing myself to start a business just by learning all the different aspects of what goes on in a business, or most of them, not all of them. I don’t think you ever learn all of them, there are so many facets to business nowadays.

SM: So you joined Dave and decided that your business partner was a raving alcoholic…

DJ: Yea, I said to him “I’m merging the businesses now, you’re either with me or you’re not”, he didn’t really have a choice but I didn’t want to do the dirty on him, so we joined on the Christmas time of January 1999 and by the August he was gone. After disappearing for 2 weeks without telling anybody.

SM: I’m glad you confirmed he’d gone, rather than checked out and gone to the pub in the sky.

DJ: Disappeared out of the country, so when he came back we basically sacked him. What happened then?… Dave and myself have what we call a symbiotic relationship. We complement each other. We’ve been business partners now for 20 years.. We get a thousand ideas, Dave will explain stuff and we go through it and it all sounds really good and then I’ll say ‘yea, but what about that Dave’ and it’ll be ‘ah’, so that one will be shelved, but some used to slip through the net. At one point we ended up with a staffing agency in Oregon turning over $2 million. In the end the person that was running it that we put in charge had this attitude that because she owned a business that she could use it to buy anything and everything she wanted to. So we ended up in a meeting with the IRS. That was a little bit unnerving. We sorted all that out but we wrapped that business up then. We were probably a little bit inexperienced I guess, in running a business in America. But Screentec, every single year since 1998 we’ve grown, there was one year when there was a slight dip in turn over and one year when we might not have made any money. Lots of ups and downs. We had venture capitalists in with the Risk Management company at one stage. I think our first order was £500k plus with HSBC …

Listen to the rest of the interview at 729Renegades.com/podcast