Meet the founder of Instaloft
Founder and sole director of the UK’s largest installer of loft storage solutions, Instaloft. Rob’s rags to riches journey saw him go from selling his belongings at car boot sales to feed his 9 children, to scaling his business into a £14 million turnover empire in just 7 years. Rob is on track to double the revenue to £30 million in the next 3 years. With his wealth of experience in business development and people management strategies, Rob is now on a mission to help other aspiring entrepreneurs on their own journeys to success.
In September 2014, Rob Stone had hit rock bottom following the failure of his business. Having temporarily separated from his wife, he had no income, was struggling to feed his 9 children and debt was spiralling around him. Sitting on his living room floor, he started to think about how life had gone so wrong and – in hoping to give business one more try – he searched for franchise opportunities until he stumbled across the one that would change his life.
Rob is an incredibly driven, persistent, and diligent individual and as well as being a husband and a father of 9 children, Rob was determined to make a success of himself, and that is exactly what he did with his business, Instaloft.
There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was that moment for you?
I think there were really two moments. Having spent a little time working with loft insulation prior to starting Instaloft, I knew that a common objection to having insulation was not being able to use the loft for storage afterwards. I realised the Loftzone raised floor system solved this problem so we could insulate properties effectively while maintaining their energy efficiency.
The second time was after managing to save £30,000 in the business during one quarter and thinking I had it made. I lost the £30k during the next quarter largely because I didn’t understand the numbers, and I had to take a long hard look at what I was doing and why I had lost that money when in theory, I should have made it. This period meant I learned how to understand the figures behind the business and was no longer working day by day but instead planning the cash flow and jobs in a much more methodical way to ensure the business had cash coming in and would continue to do so.
How do you prepare for all the unknown obstacles when running your business?
The truth is I don’t think anyone really can. Instead you have to be able to adapt quickly and be willing to make rapid decisions. What I do is write down my ideas and plans for the next quarter, year etc and then calculate my perfect result. This shows what we get from this plan if all goes according to plan!
Then I look at what could go wrong. I don’t do this on my own, but I get my team to look and tell me what they think could go wrong. We then come away with a list of “what ifs.” Some of those may never happen - like a pandemic?? But some are quite possible.
I call this my risk mitigation strategy. We take each possibility and decide what we would do if that event occurred and how would we handle it. What are the contingencies? How can we turn it around? And last of all, how do we prevent it from happening at all.
Tell us about your experience prior to launching your business?
Over the years I’ve done all sorts of things to try and make the magic happen, some were more successful than others, some made me great money for a short space of time and some I should have avoided.
My first experience was gathering petals as a child and putting hundreds of them into boiling water to make perfumed water. We would then sell this to unsuspecting women as they walked past us in the street. It sounds silly to even mention this but I was around 7-8 yrs old and it’s amazing how many people will pay you 10p for something they most likely threw away when they went around the corner.
More serious things later included setting up a dry hydrotherapy clinic, importing and selling handbags from China, making moulds of children’s hands and feet, setting up a market stall to sell graded electrical goods, door to door sales, a marketing company and even an ice cream van…
Knowing what I now know, I could probably make most of these work really well but those mistakes gave me the grounding to make a future.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?
That we don’t know what we don’t know, but we often think that we do. I believe many of us in business get to a point where we think we really know what we are doing but more often than not we don’t. That’s because the things that we aren’t doing but should be doing, we don’t even know about. This means we have to reach a point where we suddenly understand that weknow very little and have to pretty much re-educate ourselves, in my case by reading, listening to others stories, podcasts, courses and more, and then you start again.
What are your thoughts on failure?
First Attempt In Learning- it’s a cliché but we have to get it wrong sometimes to learn how to get it right. You cant drive a car very well the first time you get in it, but if you keep trying you get better and one day you realise you can actually drive pretty well. Failure is only failure if you let it beat you or if you keep doing it over and over without learning.
If something goes wrong, breathe deeply, sit back and brainstorm what went wrong, what could you have done differently and how can you try it again? There’s no point in fighting it.
If you could be in a room with 4 entrepreneurs, who would they be and why?
Elon Musk- I know little about him or how his mind works but I’d love to spend a few minutes with him and gain some insight into how he thinks and what he is thinking when he does some of his more offbeat and unexpected things. I doubt very much they are done on a whim.
Grant Cardone- He’s not to everyone’s taste but his sheer energy is infectious, and he has a way of making you want to take massive action there and then.
How well versed were you in the planning and strategic growth of your business? Did this come easy to you?
The what?
My first year or two I was really just winging it. I had an idea, I had people interested and it seemed to be working it. I’d said I was determined to be the biggest and best when I realised I actually had a viable and scaleable business, but I hadn’t got a clue what a business strategy was or how to plan one. That required me joining mastermind groups and mixing more with likeminded people on similar journeys. I would highly recommend every business person to get a coach or mentor in some form.
How did you fund the business in the early stages?
This was a really tough one for me because I literally hadn’t got enough money to buy food and my wife and I had started living separately due to the stress of it all. I started doing car boots sales to sell off my DVD collections and other things for £1 a time and any money I was making was going to my wife for the kids and to buy a little food. My debts were piling up and I had no reserves left.
When I first had my business idea, I applied for a credit card for people with “poor Credit.” I was accepted for a £200 limit and used that to buy a few very basic tools and some materials. I persuaded suppliers to lend me the materials to do the jobs. I would borrow money off my dad or my wife to buy materials for a job that day and give them the money back later when the customer had paid me.
I got around needing a website by creating a facebook page and promoting on the buy/sell/swap groups, before sitting for hours at night learning how to build one myself on 1&1 internet. This cost very little but worked to give us at least a small presence.
With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?
When we started, the Loftzone system had won quite a few awards but was really not well heard of at all. We promoted it very heavily across social media and got great results.
We promoted the problem rather than the product and that raised interest. We coupled that with a free lifetime guarantee that no one else was offering at the time and the promise that we would work hard to always get it right. We also led, and I believe continue to lead the way in terms of review generation across multiple platforms
How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?
It’s really important and often hard to get right. You have to really know what your core values are, and you have to hire and fire by those values. It’s very easy to keep a troublemaker just because they are good at their core job, but we don’t always see the damage that someone can cause when they don’t fit the culture until it’s too late.
You have to get people on board with the culture and the vision and try to inspire them and not beat yourself up if some people just don’t fit or don’t grow with the business.
What’s the single most important decision that you made, that contributed to your business?
Opening our first new depot was certainly a huge decision to make as I had no clue how to manage two depots, especially when I wasn’t present in one of them. That gave us some huge learning curves to get through, but it also gave us a road map to do more.
