Just before Christmas 2014 Mark Wright was announced the winner of the apprentice and picked up £250000 backing from Lord Alan Sugar for his business proposal for a digital marketing agency. His plan centres on digital marketing and search engine optimisation to help push businesses up towards the top in online searches.
Marks Company was to be called Climb Online;
As is to be expected the web sphere went into overdrive with criticisms of his idea and credibility.
His company from day one even though registered with companies’ house it would appear in June 2014 had no website. In fact the domain names for climbonline dot com and climbonline dot co dot uk were already taken. Both if not surprisingly by rock climbing companies. Marks Climb Online domain was to be climb-online.co.uk which was registered on the 16 Jun 2014, along it looks like .uk, .com. as both redirect to the .co.uk domain. Much criticism is to be found on twitter around the fact he has a hyphen in his domain name as it is seen as a kiss of death.
The domains .co, .org, .eu, .org.uk look to have all been registered during the night of the apprentice final by at least one or two individuals, only the ,org.uk has a website behind it.
.agency also has been registered again with a website behind it though as a form of parody.
The twitter account was registered on the 23rd December 2014 with initial tweets indicating a marketing launch for climb online on 5th January 2015, during this time all enquiries should be directed to a PR agency presumably while the legalities etc. were sorted out; It was not until 2 Jan 2015 did a climb online email account become known, surely this could have been announced along with a site holding page as soon as the winner was announced. His true site did not get launched until 10 March 2015.
Mark Wright it would appear only launched his personal twitter account on the 8th December 2014 which seems surprising given the nature of his work though perhaps previous accounts have been removed. With other candidates quite often they have personal websites and twitter accounts, facebook accounts etc. that are used as holding pages whilst the show is being broadcast and don’t seem to become active until when they have been fired.
Marks proposal was to provide services to SMEs during the Apprentice final he was pitching the service at £3000 a month and that there would be a personal touch/approach with someone who would come and site with the business to work out the stratefy, it appears his minimum charge was reported just after the final to be around £400 a month, presumably that would be for the services of his agency and not include any costings for developing any recommended changes to a companies actual website structure and any recommended online advertising.
Roll forward to April 2015 and interviews with Mark started popping up examples being https://econsultancy.com/blog/66270-apprentice-winner-mark-wright-on-seo-algorithms-revolutionising-the-industry/ , http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/smallbusiness/article-3021370/Apprentice-winner-Mark-Wright-turns-profit-Climb-Online-two-months.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490 and http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s108/the-apprentice/interviews/a639378/the-apprentices-mark-wright-my-critics-are-jealous-of-me.html#~p9dbBMnpOfknk6
It appears that in the 3 months of operation Climb Online has turned a small profit, has signed up between 80 and 100 clients and has 10 hired staff and 4 freelancers. He states that his target market are companies with a turnover of around £1.5 million and 10-20 staff so not exactly the small business he initially spoke of. He fully admits that the level of clients he has on board has been helped by his time on the apprentice and that if he was going it alone he would have nowhere near that number so quickly. It would be interesting to know how many of his staff are actively working for his clients and how many are sales people gaining the business. If I recall he pitched that he could hirer seo staff for around £25K a year, I would imagine his sales staff are primarily commission based. Even if we take the lower figure of 80 clients at £300 a month he is turning over £24K a month in fees which currently would put his turnover to staff ratio less than the companies he is targeting his business at and would appear quite tight if things started to unravel. It will be good to see exact figures once he posts his full year accounts and also see how many clients he has then and whether there is any indication of client churn levels.
To support his business he indicates his company is also developing an in-house seo platform presumably funding for this is from the investment he received on winning the apprentice, it would take a while for his in-house product to be fully implemented and used for his current client list. He describes the platform as between Majestic SEO and SEOmozboth of which are chargeable products and probably not aimed at the small company.
Again this article has drawn criticism of his company and there seems to be a consensus in this criticism that he contradicts himself, displays lack of knowledge, his website is poorly designed, lacking in content, he does not practice what he preaches. Its been discovered he is the director of another company wrighton digital ltd which was incorporated only 4 months prior to the end of the apprentice. Whether the criticism of his business is right or wrong I will stay on the middle of the fence you can see both sides. Time will tell I am sure there is room for him and all the others to operate.
He fully acknowledges the criticism thrown at him and readily admits his company has been subject to negative seo attacks and has had to resort to employing someone for four hours a day to combat these attacks. It’s a shame that people who have the guts to put their head above the parapet are open to such attacks by all and sundry as he is only trying to make a living for him and his employees, also it hurts companies that have taken a leap of faith with his company.
