Tony McDonough meets DAVE SOLOMON,MD of DS Telecom

WHEN entrepreneurs quit their jobs to start their own business they usually find the are exchanging shorter, regular hours for working around the clock to make their venture a success.

However, Dave Solomon has managed to achieve the opposite.

His Wirral-based firm, DS Telecom (DST) is proving to be a big success and yet, Solomon, 46, has not had to burn the midnight oil to make it so.

“In my previous job I was earning a six-figure salary but I was also up at 6am every morning and driving all over the country.

“I must have driven around 50,000 miles a year and spent a lot of my time in hotel rooms.”

Now, he makes a five minute journey to his Bromborough headquarters and most days is on his way home by 4.30pm.

DST sells telecoms equipment to both domestic and business customers, mainly online, through Amazon, eBay and its own site. It boasts the top user rating for telecoms sellers on Amazon.

It employs 10 staff at its 4,000 sq ft warehouse, selling everything from single cordless phones to small office telephone systems, headsets, signal boosters, Skype and IP phones.

As well as being a Panasonic main dealer, it also specialises in harder-to-find products such as spare handsets for an existing phone system, retro and vintage style phones and walkie talkies.

From the beginning Solomon wanted to stay focused on customer care. Unlike many online retailers, DST has a local phone number that customers can call.

“With a range like ours, it’s vital that anyone visiting our website can quickly find what they’re looking for and understand what it can do,” said Solomon.

“The price must be clearly visible and the ordering process secure, quick and easy, but we try to go one better than that. One of the first things you’ll notice on our website is our local rate telephone number in red letters at the top of the page.

“Some online retailers like to hide their real contact details away.

“They seem to think that all correspondence should only take place by email, but as customers ourselves, we all know we want more choices.

“If someone has a query about a product or just wants a bit of advice, they want it there and then, not from some robot but from a real human being that knows what they’re talking about and will listen to them.

“They don’t want an automatically generated email reply, they don’t want a string of recorded messages that takes them all round the houses and neither do they want to spend half an hour trawling around the website’s frequently asked questions section, which always has the answers to everything but the question you wanted to ask.”

Solomon has ensured that every one of his staff can answer the phone and deal directly with queries.

“I’ve come from a service-led background. I always believe in answering the phone and we hardly ever use the automated switchboard. All our staff are empowered to deal with customers,” he added.

Solomon was brought up in Liverpool and attended King David School in Childwall.

During his teenage years his ambition was to work in electronics and at 16 he left school to work for his older brother’s already successful burglar alarm installation business.

“I realised that wasn’t for me and so after two years I left and ended up working in a toy shop in London Road in Liverpool,” he said.

“That ended up going bust just after Christmas but one of the last customers I served was impressed with me and told me to give him a call. He ran an electrical wholesalers and so I went to work for him.”

Four years later Solomon was back working for his brother who by this time was manufacturing components for burglar alarms.

“We came up with all kinds of different things for burglar alarms,” he said. “My brother was the first to come up with the plastic burglar alarm box for outside of houses. Until then, they were made of metal.”

When he was 35, Solomon went to work for another firm in Aintree and two months after he joined, it was sold to a large corporate outfit and relocated to Essex.

“I was made national sales director,” he said. “I carried on living in Merseyside and was driving all over the country.

“I was then headhunted by another firm based in Slough. It was the same kind of thing, driving around the country, staying in hotels, doing Powerpoint presentations and in the end I thought, ‘who cares?’.”

By this point Solomon had already started DST but had hired a couple of other people to run it. However, in 2005 Solomon finally took the plunge and quite his job.

He added: “It was hard to leave a six-figure salary. I suppose I had a good life but it felt artificial.

“The final straw came when I had to miss Liverpool playing in the Champions League final in Istanbul because I had to go and give a 10-minute presentation in France.

“When I did finally leave the feeling of relief was incredible.”

When he first joined the business full-time, Solomon found the growth path was pretty smooth as the competition was minimal.

“We were cooking on gas and that gave me a high level of confidence,” he said. However in recent years other players have come into the market, pushing down prices and making good margins harder to come by.

He added: “A lot of businesses are in survival mode. They are settling for margins of less than 5% and that does not cover your overheads.”

Rather than cut back, DST has successfully sought out new markets.

Solomon said: “A year ago the question was one of survival.

“However, we have now discovered a massive ex-pat market. There is a big demand for Skype equipment (a service allowing phone calls to made through the internet) for people wanting to keep in touch with family in the UK.

“That is how we are looking to grow by expanding more into exports and looking at any other opportunities that may come our way.”

Solomon, who lives in Wirral with his fiancee, Anna-Maria, a fundraiser at Claire House hospice, says he has full confidence in himself and his team to continue growing DST.

He added: “When we were still working from my flat we used to take bags of phones to the Post Office.

“Both the girls who worked there at the time ended up working for me and one is still here.

“I like to think I deal with people with a good degree of empathy. We have a proper structure in place here and we all want to do well.”