5AM <strong>Magazine</strong>.indd 4 11/03/2019 13:58:45 4
Self-made millionaire at 22 Left penniless after losing £8,000 on a failed business at just 18 years old, Ben Jeffries now owns 57 percent of a £10million company By Thomas Mackie Dressed in jeans, trainers, and a blue and white untucked checked shirt, the social media pioneer greets me a little redfaced. “Sorry I’m pushing it fine for time,” he says as he walks into the meeting room at his swanky Holborn office, which he insists “is discounted”. “I’ve been in a board meeting with investors and it ran a little longer than I expected.” Ben is the founder and CEO of Influencer, the first ever social media marketing agency for influencers. “If I could describe what we do in one sentence, we connect brands with influential content creators on social media.” In return for sharing and advertising content for a brand, a creator will get paid a campaign fee, which varies on a case-by-case basis. One of the first Influencers Ben worked with was footballer Ronaldinho. “It was complete luck of the Google click,” he says. “Because we have such a good name we come up number one on Google for influencer marketing platform and number two for influencer marketing agency.” Influencer helped connect the Brazilian with a dating app called Happn. “I’m sure the brand alignment there wasn’t ideal, but it worked,” he adds. In early 2017, Ben re-launched Influencer with Youtube sensation Caspar Lee. “It’s funny how we met actually,” he says. “One of my close friends matched him on Tinder and started dating him. “I was like ‘you have to introduce me to Caspar, the business is growing but I need to do something more than just raise money.’ “We met over coffee. The meeting should have lasted no longer than 30 minutes but we ended up talking for about 3 hours, just bouncing ideas off each other.” Influencer embarked on a whole new journey after Caspar joined. “The business accelerated into a whole new direction. We have raised more money, taken on board a whole new array of clients, and employed over 20 members of staff.” Since then they have worked with the likes of DoYouTravel, Jack Maynard, GypseaLust, Joe Sugg, and other high profile Influencers. “We have come along way since we started,” he says. At the age of just 16, Ben founded his first business, a clothing line called Breeze, which was his first inspiration for Influencer. “Celebrities were always what people thought essentially made a clothing brand cool, but obviously at the age of 16 I didn’t have enough money to use them.” So he attempted to advertise the brand through ‘micro-influencers’, who had a loyal fan base and had influence over people who followed them but weren’t expensive to use. “I am a massive Chelsea fan, so I thought it would be cool to use reserve players,” who at the time had around 10,000 followers on Instagram. “But finding influencers to work with ended up taking a lot of my time, so I tried to find an agency out there to help, but there wasn’t one.” So Ben launched Influencer. When he was setting up his business, he was working 15 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week. “You have to work those hours to get to where you want to be,” he says. But Ben’s journey hasn’t been without setbacks. He ploughed through around £8,000, which he had made during his gap year, into setting up a platform for his company with a development firm in India. “The developers ended up running off with my money. I got in touch with lawyers but they said it would cost a lot more than £8,000 to get my money back,” he says. “If I could give one piece of advice to young entrepreneurs it would be to make sure you have that continuous drive to succeed. You will have multiple failures but it’s whether you see them as failures or as stepping stones to success.” In 2015, after taking a gap year and having nothing to show for it, he started studying Business Administration at the University of Bath. “Influencer was really starting to build traction at this phase,” he says. After starting a 6-month placement with Shell in his second year, he decided to put his business onto Crowdcube to help fund his venture. Within the first 24 hours, he had more than £100,000 in investments and within three days he had secured £152,000 from 139 investors. Ben decided to drop out of university. “I spoke to Ajaz Ahmed [the founder of creative agency AKQA] who had studied the same course as me at Bath. He told me not to drop out, but after I did he said it was the right decision, he just didn’t want my parents ringing him.” Ben has since recruited 25 members of staff and almost tripled the value of his company to just over £10million since December 2017. “There are one million and one things I would have done differently,” he says. “I probably haven’t taken the most sensible route but it’s got me to where I wanted to be. “What really motivates me is seeing where Influencer can go because it’s all or nothing right now, everything about me is Influencer. I wouldn’t say it’s the fear of failure, but it’s how big I can see the business growing and the determination to get there no matter what which keeps me going.” 5 5AM <strong>Magazine</strong>.indd 5 11/03/2019 13:58:46