You'd expect a man from an accountancy background and a passion for analysing facts and figures to drive a 'sensible' car: A diesel estate, perhaps, in navy blue or some similarly conservative colour. Keith Milsom's choice is anything but predictable. He drives a flamboyant red 1994 Dodge Viper convertible with an 8 litre V10 engine producing no less than 400bhp.

"Five out of the last seven years I have taken it to Le Mans to show it off with three of my friends who are also enthusiasts" says 44-year old Milsom. Seemingly, the only thing he has in common with such a car is that they are both left-handers.
The reason why some people are left-handed is not fully understood, though genetic links appear likely. For most left-handed people the fact is an irrelevance or a minor frustration. But for Keith Milsom and his wife Lauren, left-handedness equals opportunity. For Milsom has owned Anything Left-Handed (ALH) - a specialist provider of products and information for left-handers - for the last 15 years.

The Surrey-based business currently sells products to specialist retailers, via conventional mail order, through a central London shop and via the web. Online sales increased rapidly in 2002 and accounted for 25% of business when ALH was a regional winner in the e-Commerce Awards. Sales via the website are on track to increase almost three-fold in 2003 while the other sales channels remain stable or decline. But Milsom is not yet ready to take the plunge and focus his attention completely on the growth sector of the business.

WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM?

Milsom worked for a city firm as a business consultant for many years. In 1994 an opportunity arose to invest in a leisure management business that had previously been a client. With a 40% stake and a position as Commercial Director of CCL Leisure, Milsom helped to secure a total of 35 sports centre contracts over a period of four years. Turnover increased from £1 million to £20 million by 1998.

This gave Milsom the confidence to sell the business on an earn-out deal and walk away with 40% of the proceeds, leaving him in a position to explore other investment opportunities.

He decided to concentrate on Anything Left Handed - a retail business he had purchased with his father Reginald in 1986 with a modest investment of £20,000. It was a small leased shop in London's Soho that had originally been established in 1968.

The business had been drifting along for almost two decades when the father and son team decided take it over. Reg had been a supplier of left-handed catering products to the shop so when it came up for sale it seemed logical for the pair to take a 50-50 share in it.

To begin with, Reg ran the business with Keith tinkering with it occasionally as little more than a hobby. ALH was turning over £50,000 a year including mail order sales that accounted for about 25% of the total turnover.

With small amounts of PR and advertising driving a steady increase in mail order it was decided in 1991 for the two parts of the business to be separated. The shop moved to its present location on Brewer Street, Soho and the mail order warehouse was set up in Keith's garage in Surrey.

With staff running the shop, Reg found he could concentrate on mail order and spend time with his grandson Tom, who is also has left-handed. "Tom got so used to having his granddad around," says Milsom, "that on a visit to a friend's house he looked into the garage asked 'where has your granddad gone?'"

The head office moved to Belmont, Surrey in 1996 but business was still drifting along with no serious marketing. After the sale of the sports centre management business, Milsom decided he now had the time and money to help Anything Left-Handed live up to its potential. At long last it had the management attention the business demanded.

"Between 10% and 15% of the world's population of 6.2bn are left-handed and all could benefit from the company's products" says Milsom. "This gives us a potential total market of £1.2bn per annum." As yet, the company has only scratched the surface...

WHAT SORT OF BUSINESS IS IT?

Operating from the two premises, ALH has a total staff of nine including three directors and four part-timers. It is a tightly run ship with all business activity taken in-house. Limited funding meant running the business from a low cost base and the team have done everything themselves from developing new channels to running it on a day-to-day basis.

Milsom says "this gives absolute control, lots of flexibility, low cost and low risk." It is easy to understand his caution. Since taking the decision to concentrate on ALH, Milsom and his wife have gone without salaries and invested £200,000 or their own money. 2003 is the year when they will learn whether their gamble has paid off.

One of the most worthwhile investments came in December 1999 when Milsom spent £2300 on the internal creation of the website www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk. It quickly proved to be a viable marketing and sales tool and was soon returning a 58% margin on sales.

Recognising an opportunity to expand online sales, Milsom has since spent another £3,000 to further develop the website. By doing almost everything in-house, ALH has saved an estimated £45,000 and still managed to make two major changes. The first was the introduction of an e-commerce facility in 2001 to cope with increasing volumes of sales and the second was the creation of www.anythingleft-handed.com for US customers buying in dollars.

"Americans are major online buyers and make up 30% of our total sales, but are less inclined to buy from sites that have .co.uk address. Also we were having major problems with customers that pay one price in dollars on the website and pay another price when their credit card bill came through" says Milsom. Using a dot com address has made Americans feel more at home and incorporates a facility whereby currency is converted at pre-set levels.

CANNOT LET GO

Milsom and his team - all of whom are left-handed - are faced by a dilemma. Financial pressures mean they cannot afford to turn their backs on the retail, mail order and wholesale aspects of the business, all of which are attaining respectable profit margins.

But this leaves them with precious little time to focus their attention on internet activity. It is already the biggest part of the business, accounting for 25% of sales in 2002 and 56% in 2003. It is also growing fast - but ALH does not have the resources to capitalise on its full growth potential.

Milsom recognises the opportunity to dominate this niche sector of the global online marketplace, but cannot afford to let go of existing sales channels.

Traditional mail order, for example, accounted for 18% of sales in 2002. With a database of 20,000 active buyers, production, printing and mailing costs are high. The sales pattern is 'peaky' too. Sixty percent of orders come within the first month of distribution, with 35% filtering through in months two and three.

Twenty percent of mail order brochures result in sales over the three-month period. Conversion rates are much higher for the average 20 people who request copies of the brochure every day - many of them having first viewed the website.

Milsom justifies the continuation of mail order activity by pointing to the 58% sales margin and the fact that orders are processed and despatched in the same way as online sales.

Press harder, however, and he admits there is much more effort involved producing and mailing catalogues as well as taking and processing orders. There are only enough catalogues to last until Christmas and Milsom is unsure whether to have them re-printed.

"It is a declining area for us," he says, "mainly due to the lack of time and effort we put in to it. Lauren sees to it that it ticks along by promoting it in supplements of Sunday newspapers and national magazines.

"We are considering linking up with a mail order specialist on a profit share basis to take over the running of it. In short, someone who is willing to put their money where their mouth is," Milsom adds. "It is the only thing that will justify keeping this side of the business."

Similar concerns about the amount of time available have led Milsom to put the wholesale operation on the back burner. Although it has lower margins of 30-40%, it was initially a useful way of increasing overseas sales and giving ALH more buying power. ALH currently has wholesale customers in 30 different countries, which combined to account for 15% of total turnover.

"When somebody with whom you have had a trading relationship is prepared to pay upfront for an order worth an average of £1000," says Milsom, "it is very hard to turn them away." But he has learned the cost of not being firm. "As the shops we supplied struggled for sales, more and more of them developed e-commerce capabilities. We are, in effect, supplying to people who are competing directly against us on the internet."

"We have now tried to scale it down and expect it to account for just 10% of sales in 2003" says wife and business partner Lauren "but people still want it and it allows us to reduce our buying costs. Maybe we're too soft - but it's hard to be ruthless to people who rely on us for their business."

After so many years running a shop in London, Milsom is reluctant to make changes. Indeed, in 2002 he even tested a new style retail operation in a major shopping centre that generated £60,000 of extra sales but only just covered costs. Total sales this year are likely to be only £111,000 and the overheads of staff and premises mean the margins are far lower. But Milsom believes the shop lends a credibility that is vital to the online business.

ONLINE SALES ARE THE FUTURE, BUT...

Without the online activity the business would have carried on drifting along. But the website, while effective and comprehensive, is not easy to maintain and develop further. Custom systems written internally to handle web order processing and linked systems are operational but time-consuming. There is an urgent need for integrated off-line and on-line computer systems to handle the basic business processes and web-site maintenance.

Milsom believes it needs another £40 000 investment over the next year to improve marketing of the site and improve the online shopping experience. The investment will also allow better tracking of customers which in turn lead to marketing the customer base more effectively.

"We need to increase the traffic to the site and this means better exposure on search engines by getting higher listings on more of them. However, what we really need is expertise and guidance from a big player in web operations; someone like Amazon who could take us under its wing and show us how it's done," he says.

"It would be quite easy to spend lots of money on online activity. But we need to have the confidence to get someone in to show the best way to spend and maximise the results from the money invested."

Milsom has the contacts to do this but unfortunately it requires more time than anyone at ALH can spare. They are too busy spinning the other plates. Maintaining the basic business processes and dealing with the administrative issues arising from developing new areas of business has meant the senior team is increasingly unable to find the time to focus on further business development. As a result, they cannot tackle the long list of marketing and development tasks that have been planned.

Milsom is also aware that in many areas they do not really have the in-depth expertise needed. They have been able to prove the various ideas can work, but cannot really roll them out worldwide as required. Quite simply, the company is not big enough or profitable enough to employ the specialist staff required or outsource the work to experts. Milsom concedes that his biggest mistake is trying to do everything themselves - but argues the present situation just doesn't allow extra bodies or outsourcing.

WHERE NEXT?

ALH has been a moderately successful niche business operating at a low level. The Internet has opened up a huge worldwide market and initial testing using a website developed and marketed internally has shown that sales can be generated and rapid growth can be achieved. All it needs now is for someone to take it under its wing.

Milsom is now in the second year of a five-year plan that sees turnover rising from £510,000 in 2002 to over £3 million with pre-tax profits of £1.2 million - after which he plans to sell all or part of the business to a trade buyer.

He believes a potential turnover of £5-10 million a year is easily achievable by a big, established player in the e-commerce sector. Ideally he would sell up and take a minority stake in ALH now, but a valuation of the business at the current stage of development is difficult.

This year will be critical to see whether the money invested so far has been justified in creating the growth that ALH is expecting. As Milsom's personal capital gets smaller he is more averse to spending it - and it becomes ever more difficult to persuade him that attention should be focused exclusively on e-commerce. Besides, there's still the matter of running the Dodge Viper.

www.anythingleft-handed.com

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