Jamie Murray Wells, 24, Old Harrovian friend of Prince William and Kate Middleton, sells glasses on the internet at one-tenth of the price they retail in the High Street.

So successful has his business become that he has attracted £3million ($6m) of venture capital funding. His next plan is to take on the lucrative American market

Jamie started out with only his student loan, and some help from his father, who is also an entrepreneur. Simon is an investment analyst, while his mother, Alison, buys up cottages for holiday renting and, for good measure, imports local products from Morocco. His maternal grandfather, Wendall Clough, helped bring Ford and Chrysler to Britain.

In the past few years, Jamie has gone head-to-head with High Street giants like Specsavers and Vision Express for dominance of Britain’s multi-billion-pound glasses market.

He says, “We currently sell 300 to 400 pairs a day. This injection of cash means we could be selling thousands.”

Enterprising he may be, cheeky he certainly is. He recently bombarded Newcastle city centre with men in sheep costumes implying the High Street was “fleecing” consumers. “I love the fact that this business is causing trouble,” he says. “At school I used to behave terribly. Even at university I’d do things like make the campus Christmas tree disappear, watch the uproar and then mysteriously return it.”

Glasses Direct was conceived while he was reading for his final exams at the University of the West of England in Bristol. He set up the website after he discovered the huge cost of spectacles on the High Street, although they cost as little as £7 to make.

He remarks, “I would walk out of the examination room and go straight to the library to use the computers for my business. What gives me kicks is bringing something new into the world. I’m not into starting up just another optician. I want a market-changing business.”

Jamie employs 30 staff in Wiltshire, England and is recruiting for a new London office. Turnover is predicted to rise to £10million by 2008.

Location, location, location is said to be the mantra of real estate salesmen. Does the same apply to starting a business? Of course, but there are exceptions to every rule and sometimes the flipside becomes the upside.

How, for example, could you start a business in the middle of nowhere, miles from what we now call civilization?

It’s not easy, but something with computers and the Internet springs to mind, doesn’t it? But what if you’re a technophobe and hopeless with computers?

Well, all is not lost. Take the amazing story of John Fanuzzi who moved from Philadelphia to Montana in 1980 with everything he owned in the back of a pickup, including his two children of five and two years of age. He was a single father and had a lot on his plate.

He’d done a bit of project managing in the past and was a skilled carpenter. His business idea was to build a company in the unlikely field of massage tables.

Fanuzzi was in this situation because he had injured his back and a doctor said it couldn’t be treated. He was cured, however, by a single visit to a massage therapist. Who says alternative treatments don’t work?

The therapist had told him that it was impossible for him to source a portable massage table for the patients who couldn’t come to him. John was so grateful for his cure, he replied without thinking, “No problem, I’ll make you one.”

He began building it in his driveway, having spent $100 on materials and costs. It was so successful, the news got out and soon orders came flooding in. The problem was, John didn’t have enough to fork out $100 for each table while it was being made. He bridged the gap by asking for a deposit of $100 for each table, then charged $185 for the completed item. Classic bootstrapping methodology. Fanuzzi was in an ideal situation. He had no overheads and lots of customers.

After the move to Montana, he persuaded local teenagers to assemble his products for piece-rate wages and even shipped them on Greyhound buses.

Later, in the 1990s, Golden Ratio Woodworks, based in Emigrant, Montana, became an established and going concern. He was doing $200,000 of business a year. His debts were almost zero and customers paid in cash.

Then it took off in more sophisticated areas of the U.S, like California and the East coast, where buyers thought it “kinda folksy” to order from Montana.

In just a few years, John Fanuzzi had built a national business employing dozens of workers. He had done it with no capital and used basic cash-flow techniques to accomplish his personal American Dream.

When Syntagma Media was a startup business, bookkeeping and accountancy were problematical. We bought a couple of software packages — Quickbooks and Sage — but both were far too complex for a simple content business selling only ad space online and with no employees.

Nowadays we rely on professional services, but for bootstrapping startups a quick, easy and FREE small business accountancy package would be a blessing.

Microsoft has helpfully provided such a package as part of its Office 2007 suite and is offering it as a standalone product for small businesses.

Download Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 here.

A New Series on Business Startups — Part 3

Now that you have established your venture concept and fleshed out some details, it’s time to look at the initial engine of business growth : finance.

We’ll look at debt and venture finance later, but first a few words about using your own money to get started.

I’ve long been an advocate of self-dependence in business, particularly at the startup and early stages. This is sometimes called “bootstrapping” in the sense of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”.

Many successful business folk prefer “self-resourcing” — using own-resources for the seed funding stage. Thereafter, in an ideal situation, income will fund growth and the business will be self-financing. All other sources of spending muscle introduced into the pot should be treated like fissile material — with great caution.

There are many things you can do without spending money you haven’t got. The principal method is cash-flow management — essentially, keeping costs to a minimum and collecting cash payments as deposits or complete fees upfront. This is not as difficult as it seems, but depends on the type of business you are in. If the industry standard is a “cantango” period of three months or so, after which a buyer pays you, be aware that this is not a suitable enterprise for a bootstrapper.

Other ways of collecting cash early from customers include, deposits to cover the cost of materials, stage payments — monthly fees paid over the life of a long project — or just plain cheek : asking customers to pay upfront. Any that refuse could be shown testimonials from satisfied customers or simply sent on their way. You won’t need everyone to sign up, just enough to get the business going, so don’t be disheartened at first.

The power of own-resources can vary, of course, but every time you use the resources of others, whether debt or by share sale, you reduce your power to control the business. Indeed, once the venture capitalists move in you’ve set yourself up for eventual sale or an IPO (Initial Public Offering on the stock market).

Either way, you can no longer look forward to building a business that can be handed down the generations. Unless, of course, you do what Evan Williams did with Odeo and buy back the shares from investors.

Another own-resource you’ll need to use early on is your brain. Many of the tasks in even a simple business are expensive to outsource. Building any business is painstakingly complex, so you’ll need to be up to much of the technical side, like setting up websites, bookkeeping, and designing your own literature and stationery. Add to that, the ability to write your own publicity, and it comes down to an intimidating package of learning curves to master.

That takes time, and you just have to grin and bear it. Later, you’ll have the cash to induct new personnel and outsource much of the work, but not at first.

If it’s just making money you’re after, you may think the VC route is no bad thing. But if, like me, you build a business for the sheer challenge and exhilaration of it, you may not wish to sell chunks of it to often fixed-tracked minds with very different aims from your own.

Bootstrapping, though, is not for someone looking for very quick results. If you really are a business farmer looking for a big buyout, go the venture route by all means. Be aware though, the pitching period is gruelling and long, maybe up to four months even for a relatively small sum. This is because the VCs are already anticipating further rounds of funding. First they put masking tape on your mouth, then they start cutting lengths of twine to restrain your hands, followed by thick ropes to thoroughly encase the rest of your body.

I’m told some people enjoy being trussed up like a turkey, but you may have other ideas.

Bootstrapping a business is for the buccaneers. Or else they’re so cashstrapped, there’s no alternative to penny-pinching their way to the top.

So it all comes down to those old antagonists : Time and Money.

If you’re time-rich but cash-poor, bootstrapping is made for you — make sure you have a decent limit on your credit card, though. If you’re cash-rich but time-poor why on earth would you want to start a business in the first place?

Go to Part 4.