Own your Own Customers (and protect this valuable data with your life !)

I'm pleased to say that It's Not Rocket Science has been released for sale in the UK this morning after more than five years since I first started writing down a few ideas during the Covid pandemic, at which point I had no idea if I would ever be able to even write a book, let alone publish it.

I would like to start by thanking all my family, friends and colleagues who helped with the early proofreading that went on for months and months, as I made hundreds of changes and corrections. Then also a big thanks to Advantage Media Group and Forbes, who have been great partners in helping me turn this raw manuscript into the finished article you see today. You may have noticed from the image above that the book has already achieved "Amazon Best Seller" status in the US across multiple categories, which is a nice accolade to have after just a few weeks since the release there on 14 July.

I've learnt loads during the whole process, as well as enjoying bringing back some of the great memories from the early days of Radius, where the pressures were very different from the ones that tend to dominate today's working week. I have always wanted the book to be easy and enjoyable to read, as well as hopefully provide a few tips to people at the other end of their careers to me. Hopefully, if you do buy it, you will be able to relate to some of the stories from our history and therefore not find it too boring and dry.

I'm having a book signing in Manchester on 10 September to formally mark the launch, where I will be having a few drinks with some of my old and new friends, as well as having the Sharpie in hand to sign a few copies, so I'm looking forward to that.

My publisher is keen for me to get some good Amazon reviews, so if you do like it, any comments would be much appreciated!

Anyway, back to the title of this blog (Own Your Own Customers), which is also the 19th lesson of the 25 that feature in It's Not Rocket Science. You can find the whole lesson at BillHolmes.me, but I am sure from the following extract you will get the gist of how seriously we have taken protecting our data.

As you build this base of valuable customer data, you also have to continually improve the way you protect it. This might be from either external cyberattacks, which are now almost a daily occurrence, or something much more old-school, such as when a devious employee leaves you to join a competitor with a list of your customers. This particular issue has been a constant challenge since the early days, and I thought it might be useful to give you a taste of just one incident that happened over twenty years ago, when one of our employees left and then sought to profit from selling our data to a competitor.

For a little background, one of the advantages of our original JV structure in the UK was that customers often moved between our different brands without necessarily realising that the companies were part of our wider group. As we operated these JVs in a very hands-off way, even most of the sales employees were sometimes unaware of our group structure, and we just let them compete freely with each other in the marketplace.

Well, one morning I received a call from the MD of our JV in Burnley, saying he had been contacted by a salesperson who had recently left our UK Fuels team in Crewe. The guy was offering to sell a spreadsheet containing the full contact data of several thousand customers that he had downloaded onto his laptop just before he left. He said he was offering it to them first and, if they weren't interested in it, to just let him know so that he could then try one of the other fuel card companies in the area.

Once I heard about it, I definitely didn't want the risk of this happening and was desperate to try to get our data back as fast as possible. I immediately contacted the local police in Burnley to tell them about the theft and said that if they thought it was useful, I could arrange for someone to meet this person and pretend to be from our JV so that they could potentially arrest him and retrieve his laptop.

This was definitely out of the ordinary for the local constabulary. However, I eventually persuaded the station chief to take me seriously and told him I would drive up there immediately and meet him to agree an exact plan for the sting. At the same time, I contacted an old friend of mine who lived locally, who agreed to play the part of the willing buyer, given that we did not want any chance of anyone he knew being recognised.

The MD from Burnley got back in touch with the fraudster and agreed a meeting at two in the afternoon at Banny's, a famous fish and chip restaurant at the end of the M65. After I explained my plan to the police chief, he agreed to send a van with three officers to wait round the corner until the guy arrived and showed my friend the data on his laptop.

I waited in the car park to watch from a distance as the trap was sprung. At about a quarter to two, the officers stormed into the restaurant, and the fraudster was arrested, read his rights, cuffed and put in the back of the van.

I then went inside and met up with my mate for some well-deserved fish and chips to thank him for helping before heading home after what had been a pretty tiring day.

After a night in the cells, the guy was eventually released and, although he only ended up receiving a caution for his crime, we got our data back and knew that he wouldn't be doing anything like that again anytime soon!

The moral of the story is to own your customers and protect this very valuable data with your life!