Entrepreneurs: Security expert firing the marketing bullets for Britain’s biggest brands

Ed Bussey has a mysterious past. Recalling his earlier career, the former Navy officer-turned-entrepreneur refers to a stint in the “security field”.

He declines to elaborate, saying only that the work is not listed on his LinkedIn profile, but luckily we have plenty more to talk about.

The now silver-haired Cambridge graduate went from the Navy to the Foreign Office, then on to that job in “counter-terrorism policy or whatever it was”, before joining online retail trailblazer Figleaves at the height of the dot-com boom. After that, he flogged a fledgling app business to Vodafone.

Today, he’s running Quill, a company he founded in 2011 to help brands turbocharge sales through content such as “how-to” videos.

He says: “I could see that all businesses in the e-commerce sector were going to have to embrace content in a way they never had before. There were some companies doing this very well, like Net-a-Porter, but 99% of the rest were a million miles from that.

"In parallel, I had a series of conversations with publishers who were really struggling with the monetisation of content.”

Bussey’s solution was to create a network of vetted specialists, covering lots of languages and across thousands of topics, who can together handle the volume of content businesses needed to create. They work remotely, connecting to a central team via a platform, bringing down costs.

Google, Very owner Shop Direct, Virgin Holidays, Travelex, John Lewis, House of Fraser, Arsenal and Mothercare are among clients.

Quill can do the so-called “hero content” — the glossy mags and flashy ad materials — but its speciality is “primary content”, in other words product and category descriptions and destination guides.

In the politest way I can, I ask if, compared with his previous roles, this seems a little less sexy?

“We are at the unsexy end of the funnel,” Bussey, a father of two, admits. “One of my frustrations has been that a marketing department will spend an awful lot of money, tens of millions of pounds, further up the funnel on awareness, but drive people to pages of product that are badly written, contain spelling mistakes and HTML code, and wonder why it doesn’t convert.

“But what we see is a meaningful impact of what we do on the revenues of our clients.”

And, to be fair, I can imagine the stats Quill boasts would be enough to get your typical boss excited. It claims to produce content 75% faster and 40% more cheaply than can be done in-house or through a traditional agency. The results include a fifth more web traffic and a more than doubling in sales.

Bussey’s entrepreneurialism dates back around three decades to his university days when he founded a small publishing business and sold it to a fellow undergraduate before embarking on his naval career.

The buyer, Mike Ross, was the person who brought Bussey to lingerie and swimwear retailer Figleaves.

“It was a massive career transition but it was possible to do that in 1999 and 2000 because no one else knew anything about the internet either,” Bussey, 49, laughs.

Despite his lack of knowledge, he ended up as business development and marketing chief in a team that clocked up a lot of firsts, including being the first non-North American vendor to go live on Amazon Marketplace.

There were a few mis-steps, though. “We got massively distracted by going into the States. We should have done what Asos did and expand into more ranges first.”

With that experience, the yoga and mountain-climbing enthusiast opted to spread his wings beyond retail and joined mobile app company ZYB, which Vodafone snapped up 18 months later in 2008.

He was dead set on founding his next venture and when he wasn’t consulting for the likes of Charles Tyrwhitt and trekking across the North Pole (“I’m really glad I did it… but I wouldn’t do it twice”), he developed the concept behind Quill.

Now Bussey and backers, including angel investor and Toptable founder Karen Hanton and venture-capital firm Smedvig, are planning to expand into new markets. Germany, France, Scandinavia and the US are likely to be first on the list.

There is also a big opportunity to work with more fast-growing fintech firms and banks and to create more video, such as product reviews and “shoppable” or interactive clips for customers.

“We want to create a world leader in our space, and we’ve got the chance to do that.”

Looks like Bussey has exchanged that mysterious past for an interesting future.