Chief Executive Officer
Reevoo

Dr Richard A

00:01 My name is Richard A, I’m founder and CO of a business called Reevoo.com.

00:07 Reevoo is a shopping advisory web business that takes the power of customer reviews, so user generated reviews and turns that into advice to help people purchase electrical products.

00:20 A good friend of mine founded a business called Active Hotels which is an online hotel booking, booking engine, and they were an early innovator in the customer review space. And what they saw was, there was an increase in, in booking rates for the hotels.

00:32 I’d been a, a strategy consultant in the technology space, so I’d spent a lot of time working with businesses like Vodafone, like Orange, like BT, before that I did an MBA at a place called Cranfield, Cranfield school of management, I did a full time MBA there, so I’d really spent the last 5 years very much in technology and media.

00:51 I did a degree in geology originally, and when I finished geology I thought I wanted to go into business so at that point I actually became an engineer, and it was then that I did a period of research. And I was then, I did research and I was, did a PhD in engineering geology and then went and work as an engineer, engineering consultant for about 5 years before going off to do an MBA.

01:20 For A level I did Physics, Maths, Chemistry and statistics and I actually wanted to do biology instead of physics and was kind of recommended by, I don’t know somebody at the time a teacher, that I should do physics because it would keep more options, more options open. And I think if I’d have had my choice again I would have done biology instead of physics. And, so it was very science, very logical, very, very logical based and then at the end of doing, doing, finishing school I was looking for, well wanted to continue in sciences but didn’t, didn’t want to do a pure science, and actually at the time it turned out that our next door neighbour was in oil and he was in, he was relatively senior in the commercial side of oil, had a long chat with him and then I started looking, explored geology which is something I hadn’t done at, at school and then yeah chose to do geology as a degree.

02:17 Neither of my parents went to University. My father started work when he was 18 and stayed with the same firm for 30 years. It was probably a foregone conclusion in my mind that I was gonna go but it was no, there was no parental pressure or no, family pressure, I think they had quite low expectations academically really.

02:33 He was in sort of shipping, buying services, import, export business, mostly abroad in the Far East.

02:38 I was born in Hong Kong and then they spent time moving between Hong Kong and Tokyo so I spent quite a lot of time out there. Being at school, I look back on it with pretty fond memories actually, you know a good mix of sport and study and fun and play, yeah.

02:52 I took a year off betw, after school and I spent 6 months learning Japanese and teaching English in Japan but I can’t remember much of it, so I, I have more of a science, than, yeah I’d loved to have been a linguist so.

03:05 I’ve had, I’ve had periods unemployed etc when I’ve decided to make a change and then it then takes time for you to find the next, find the next role. When I finished the sort of PhD to get a job in engineering consulting, having a PhD didn’t open many doors, it was more I wrote countless letters off to firms to stay, you know will you employ me and they’d say well, you’ve got no experience and so I had to bang on a lot of doors and that was, yeah, some time ago now.

03:32 You know I now I have to consider what’s the next stage of growth for the, next stage of growth for the business, how do we take it from where we are now, where we look after about 90 retailers and manufacturers, there’s some very big names like the Sony’s of the world, Dixon’s and Curry’s and Orange, a number of them across Europe and where do we, where do we take it next.

03:52