Simon Dolan: how to make it as a racing driver
Entrepreneur Simon Dolan used his experience of setting up a business to take his motor racing hobby professional.
In 1992 Simon Dolan, then aged 22, tired of his job with an accountancy firm and left to find other work. But finding a new role in the struggling UK economy was tougher than he'd expected. Finding himself "out of work and with no money", Dolan (who is now 46) rapidly realised that "the only thing that I knew was how to produce a set of accounts".
Out of "pure desperation", he put an advertisement in the local paper, offering his services for £99. Three weeks later, a lady called him and paid him to do her books. Securing his first customer helped pay for more advertisements, which brought in more clients for his firm, SJD Accountancy.
Increased advertising and word of mouth from satisfied customers meant that SJD quickly gained a following from "one-man companies" mainly self-employed contractors, such as IT workers and business consultants.
Subscribe to MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE
Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Dolan admits that he didn't realise it at the time, but he had carved out a niche for himself, which in turn enabled him to target his marketing much more effectively to the sorts of customers who would hire him. He was also an early adopter of online advertising while a few of his rivals also had a website, Dolan's marketing efforts on the SJD site were "far and away better than anyone else's in the sector", he reckons.
The business grew rapidly and by the time SJD was sold to a private-equity group in 2014 it had 14,500 clients on its books and a turnover of around £20m. By then Dolan had already spotted his second business opportunity Jota Sport. It all began when his wife bought him a lesson with a racing car driver as a present.
To this day, says Dolan, he doesn't know why she chose racing, but he quickly fell in love with the new hobby, to the extent that he wanted to take part in professional competitions. After talking things over with his tutor, he learned that Team Jota had a spare driving slot. Dolan quickly became the team's main driver and took it over, rebranding it Jota Sport.
As many people have found out the hard way, racing is an expensive sport, one that requires constant infusions of capital from wealthy patrons in order to remain at the cutting-edge of technology. Dolan wanted to ensure his team could continue to compete, but without it becoming a huge drain on his own resources, so he spent a lot of time getting sponsorship from various companies notably from Russian gas giant Gazprom.
All his effort paid off spectacularly two years ago when Dolan and the team's other two drivers came first in class in the 24 hours of Le Mans endurance race, one of racing's oldest, most prestigious contests.
When Dolan took it over, Team Jota had just a handful of full-time employees. Now it has more than 40, working across three divisions: the racing team, an engineering company that sells its services to carmakers, and Jota Aviation. This latter division was started when Dolan learned that one of his partners owned a tiny aircraft that was used to ferry mail.
Dolan invested in buying some bigger planes that the company could lease out when they were not being used to ferry team members and parts around the world. These include aircraft such as the 95-seater British Aerospace 146-200. Clients include other airlines and even football teams.
Given his success, it's perhaps not surprising that there are few decisions that Dolan would have made differently, even given the benefit of hindsight. In fact, he believes that too much experience can be a hindrance, not a help: "the more you know, the more likely you are to convince yourself that something is impossible".
Indeed, he credits his success to the fact that his youthful inexperience made him take risks that wiser people would have been too afraid to embrace. However, there's one piece of advice that he'd suggest any young entrepreneur bears in mind: "don't borrow too much".
Sign up to Money Morning
Our team, led by award winning editors, is dedicated to delivering you the top news, analysis, and guides to help you manage your money, grow your investments and build wealth.
Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.
He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.
Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.
As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.
Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri
-
Tycoon Truong My Lan on death row over world’s biggest bank fraud
Property tycoon Truong My Lan has been found guilty of a corruption scandal that dwarfs Malaysia’s 1MDB fraud and Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto scam
By Jane Lewis Published
-
Why undersea cables are under threat – and how to protect them
Undersea cables power the internet and are vital to modern economies. They are now vulnerable
By Simon Wilson Published