How We Developed A Portable Wi-Fi Product And Are Now Generating $30K/Month Revenue

Ashley Smith

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Published: March 30th, 2023

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Ashley Smith

Founder, Fli-Fi

$30K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Fli-Fi

fli-fi.co.uk

from Northampton, UK

started August 2016

$30,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

I’m Ashley Smith and I’m part of a team who started Fli-fi, a temporary internet connectivity and WiFi company in August of 2016.

We provide temporary internet connectivity and WiFi to events and locations so they can connect themselves and their equipment to the internet for a short-term period of time, from 15 minutes up to 18 months. From small traders with a stand at a trade show to the whole of the trade show, a music festival, a film shoot, a construction site, or even a business that is just moving from one place to another.

Our core markets are events and construction, with them both representing the largest shares of our current turnover.

Over the last 6 years, we have grown each year by more than triple digits with our biggest year of growth coming during the COVID restriction year when we gained a large portion of our construction clients.

Retaining customers comes naturally if you have a great product and a level of service that is at the top end of your industry.

Watch an overview of Fli-Fi’s services:

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Interestingly the business is not my idea. When I was operating as an IT support consultant I stumbled across the idea whilst searching for a solution for one of my clients at the time who had a photo booth they needed to connect to the internet at a music festival and with it being a critical part of their activation it meant they could not proceed with it, if they didn’t have internet connectivity, in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere.

After hiring some equipment I saw advertised online, I opened up the conversation with the business owner, Will Skewes who had founded Fli-Fi and was doing it in his spare time just as a hobby. I felt the business had opportunities to grow and so after meeting and forming some plans, we both agreed to establish the business formally, go looking for business and see where it could go.

I knew it had a potential market as I had just been a client and I also knew from research that various fledgling businesses were doing the same so it stood a chance. Also, Will had some extra special technical expertise which allowed the solution we were providing to stand above the crowd a little. Something akin to the colonel's secret recipe, if we were comparing it to fried chicken!

Having worked in senior IT roles in the corporate environment for over 20 years at this point, I felt that the time was right to throw my all at it and see where it might lead. Having recently been made redundant from a large bank, I had enough money in my pocket to protect me for a few months at least, which was important at this early stage.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

The product itself had already been put together by the time I was involved but bringing in a different perspective, ethos, and skillset meant the business could thrive now.

Co-founding the business was great and I’d recommend strongly that two people pulling together in the same direction is a very powerful thing, although I would recommend that if you are going to start a business with other(s) then you MUST ensure you get a legally prepared shareholders agreement signed by all of you as you never know what the future might bring and this will give you protection.

Will had another business where he was providing coffee to businesses in a camper van and felt it would be really useful to allow his customers to be able to connect to the internet whilst queuing but also to allow the payment devices to work - particularly in environments where internet access was limited or mobile signals were poor.

We decided to give this product a name, the PaW (Portable access WiFi). The beauty of the PaW is that it could be sent to the site, plugged in, and - hey presto - you could instantly connect to the WiFi unit, as you do your home WiFi. It was really simple and intuitive.

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Our next step was to define some service brands which we used to define the applications for the PaW in different use cases and make it easy for customers to identify, explore and buy the service they required.

We knew that we wanted to work in different sectors to de-risk the business and spread the workload for better resourcing capabilities, and ultimately, better service for our customers.

Acquiring customers by online search has proven to be an efficient method, particularly with such a high rate of return or repeat business from our clients. We were lucky enough to have the SEO expertise of one of the founder's partners, right from the start it meant we were ahead of the competition. It’s all well and good having a go at everything, which is what you must do when starting a small business but nothing beats putting something specialist and important, into the hands of a specialist in that field.

We developed:

Gap Connect - designed for businesses experiencing a gap in internet service, to deliver a temporary business connectivity solution
Event Connect - for event connectivity
Site Connect - for building sites and construction connectivity
Assure Connect - for where a permanent solution is required in a business environment

We re-invested all of the business earnings in the first 12 months to purchase more equipment that we could hire out or use to grow organically. Admittedly, this was a very fortunate position and this was because both of us at the time were able to use personal funds or short-term contracting work to supplement our incomes. We were able to come up with low-cost ideas and invest in them immediately and try them out straight away at low or no risk at all.

Describe the process of launching the business.

We didn’t launch with a bang but we did take on every single opportunity which came our way. Big or small, we decided to take it all on.

During this process, we worked hard to build a reputation for getting our service right and being a business that could be depended on. The industry we are in is plagued with stories of suppliers who have failed or who have not been able to deliver at the last minute and so by being known by our reputation for great service, we started to win more and more business at a low cost per acquisition.

Also, our clients at this stage, and still today, are businesses and events that have multiple needs or repeat requirements - so if you get it right the first time and are priced fairly, they always come back. I still believe we have grown successfully to where we are today based on making sure that the client experience is second to none.

One day, a potential client asked us for a quote - Instead of just giving them some numbers based on what we thought we knew, we decided to both go and meet them onsite with some test equipment to prove what we could do. This was out of sync with what the industry, in general, was doing and so the client was very impressed. We won that job and off the back of it, a further 30 jobs with that client over the next two years. You should never look at a client or job as a one-off, you never know how big it could become.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

As mentioned, retaining customers comes naturally if you have a great product and a level of service that is at the top end of your industry. Pretty much along the lines of the old quote, “if you build it they will come”, and it’s also fair to say “if you do it well, they will come back”.

We have worked on attracting new clients and industries via our website. By focusing on producing regular content, and by optimizing our website around our main keyword searches, we have appeared well on the search engines and generated a lot of our leads from this channel. Using social channels helps to demonstrate our capabilities and reinforce confidence levels with customers using us for the first time.

Acquiring customers by online search has proven to be an efficient method, particularly with such a high rate of return or repeat business from our clients. On the flip side, we do find that we get a fair few inquiries from consumers which isn’t a market that we want to enter.

We’ve used some clever branding and focused our blogs towards demonstrating our quality and in addition, supported this with paid advertising via Google ads and some industry-specific journals to raise brand awareness further and reach new markets.

We are a service-led business, and the product is a personally delivered one. This gives us the benefit of being able to build relationships with clients and contacts during the delivery stages, leading to more referral work through recommendations. It’s more about quality than quantity for us, and we’ve infiltrated our markets quite well - although there’s always more to be done!

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We are supporting our current construction and event clients through an exciting looking 2023 and, at the same time, investigating different services and different markets. We are continuing with the customer acquisition activities that are already working, and trying new marketing activities too this year - this is all in an attempt to match 2022’s turnover.

The expectations are that consumer spending will reduce and as a result, investment in construction, as well as event production, is expected to drop off a little.

But the business has just invested in a brand new website on wordpress which took a couple of months to get just right. We devised our copywriting and used a specialist web design firm to pull it all together. We’re working hard to stay ahead of the competition with our marketing presence and quality of service.

Over the next 5 years,s we expect to grow all of the services that we are currently supplying. We expect our team to grow and in turn, this will mean that we can expand on the services so that we can become both a permanent connectivity specialist as well as a temporary one.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

It’s really hard to put a price on your time! It’s no surprise that people who aren’t used to invoicing for their time find it hard to tell someone what they are worth or what their time is worth.

I’ve learned how important it is to get to know what you are good at. I mean what you are an expert in. The corporate world makes people so rounded they are okay at lots of things but have lost knowing what they are good at.

I think that once you know this, you are now at a distinct advantage against those around you.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

We use Hubspot to manage our client information. It’s at the core of our customer data and offers great collaboration between all of our departments.

Microsoft Teams is used for all our meetings, Xero for invoicing, Mailchimp for emails (although we don’t tend to do much by way of mass email sending) and Dux-Soup to help build our LinkedIn network.

As the business grows we’ll probably need to add to this but for now, we’re a close-knit team and it’s working well.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Sadly, I don’t have anything to offer here. I have only taken inspiration from those around me, and I’m fairly sure you won’t have access to my family and friends, although I am an advocate of taking counsel from the wide variety of people available to you - you’d be surprised at the advice and guidance they can give you.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

You cannot escape the need for some good luck along the way, but as many people seem to say, the harder you train or the harder you work, the luckier you get.

There is no doubt that business success requires hard work, but you should also keep perspective and stay focused on the areas that are going to improve or progress your business, rather than get distracted.

If you are thinking of creating a physical product then we think there is no substitute for getting something out there in the wild and being used. In your early days, you are fortunate not to have a reputation yet and so use that to your advantage - obviously once you know in your test lab that it works.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

At this moment, we are considering what options to take for recruitment, and whilst we don’t normally have adverts out there, we would always be willing to hear from people with the right technical background as well as people with a passion for finding and developing new clients.