Sam Gibson - Managing Director of Enjovia. Before starting at Enjovia Sam was part of the management team at the Alacrity Foundation, an Entrepreneurship Charity set up as a collaboration between Welsh Government and a number of private philanthropists including Sir Terry Matthews. Sam graduated from Swansea University with a 1st in Business Management and lives with wife and daughter in Caerphilly.
Enjovia is a Welsh technology company based in Newport. Enjovia provide an easy to use gift voucher system that allows businesses to sell and manage their gift experiences and tickets online. We are based out of the Wesley Clover Innovation Centre and currently have 4 employees with 11 contractors. Enjovia is a profitable company experiencing high growth, our customer base has doubled in the last year and the rate of growth is increasing. We have added 30% of our customer base in the last 3 months.
Enjovia is planning a major international expansion in 2019 focusing on the European and North American market where we have had some success already. We target Hotels, Restaurants, Leisure, Attractions Spas or any business with a focus on providing experiences. Gift Vouchers can be a sizable revenue stream for any business, our biggest client the Celtic Manor Resort does over £2.4 million in annual gift voucher sales.
Enjovia graduated from the Alacrity programme which is a joint collaboration between Welsh Government, The Waterloo Foundation, Wesley Clover and Andrew Probert. Alacrity is an educational charity which gives mentoring and funding to young graduates so that they have the opportunity to start their own welsh based technology companies. Enjovia has worked with a number of organisations externally, we were part of the Natwest Bizspark Acceleration programme, and we regularly work with the Prince's Trust and Codez Academy to provide work experience and mentoring for young people.
What would they do differently?
Think about flexibility and accessibility. We have re-launched our platform so that people can create their own store in seconds, our previous platform required us to set our customers up, sometimes taking days. I wish we would have made our platform flexible from the start.
We also took a traditional route to growth, emails, trade shows and cold calling. We have recently combined this with a data driven approach, using Google Ads, SEO and inbound marketing, it has been transformative for the business. Before we were limited by our time, there are only so many people you can call in a day! With online marketing we can reach thousands of people, globally, every day.
Their proudest moment in business: Becoming a profitable company!
Do they use Welsh in their business? We have done our best to support Welsh Speaking businesses, our new platform will have total bilingual functionality.
For their first support package with the Accelerated Growth Programme coach, Lee Woodman was brought in to support the business and explore the Competitor and Sector landscape. The aim of this piece of work was to gain deep insights into their sector and understand where and why competitors were focusing their digital marketing efforts. This work highlighted key competitors and presented opportunities that competitors had not capitalised on in their own platforms which Enjovia could better. This insight not only helped Enjovia identify channels to target but helped the business gain a clear understanding of their audience to shape their new Software as a Service platform launching in early 2019.
Visit Digital presented Enjovia with a road map of what needed to be done to take market share from competitors and opportunities to increase sales for existing clients. Lee also supported the technical development team so they could include digital marketing best practice throughout their new SaaS platform.
Tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console provided insights to help Enjovia focus on the opportunities and the addition of Webchat on their marketing website allowed website visitors to quickly turn into prospective buyers.
Lee wanted to get to a position where the business could confidently focus on growing safe in the knowledge that the new marketing website and SaaS platform will be doing all they can to generate leads 24/7. Having been a coder and digital marketing consultant for brands including The Lad Bible Group and Chelsea Magazines he brought a deep understanding of the digital media landscape to show Enjovia the path they should take to grow the business in the respective digital media channels.
In terms of business performance, having been receiving 2 leads a month from digital channels before Accelerated Growth Programme intervention Enjovia are now receiving 3-4 leads a week from digital media channels and their traffic and business continues to grow. Lee has been totally transformative for our business and we look forward to working with him in the future.
Top Tips:
- Listen to what your customers want and make it the way they asked.
- Focus on sales, if you have good sales, everything else will work itself out.
- Ask for advice and help, there are a wide variety of programmes (Business Wales) and individuals that would love to help a local business grow. If you don’t ask you don’t get!
Further information on the Business Wales Accelerated Growth Programme.