The View from Manchester: The Rapid Rise of Redline

Less than two years after first joining, he moved to London and opened his own business there. His numbers were great and he added three more branches before he got headhunted to become the National Sales Director for a Google programme. So he moved away from the direct-selling industry for three years, but in 2019 he realised that he missed it.

"The reason I came back was that although I had this really good job there was a limit to my growth in this employed position. I didn’t feel like I could progress and I didn’t feel like I had control of my future. I really wanted that back. I also missed the environment and the people. I missed the energy and the positivity.”

On 1st April 2019, Phil left Google and returned to the company. Things moved quickly again and he opened up an office in Bristol, then two branches in Canary Wharf, and a fourth branch in North Devon. All of this in the 24 months since returning, and with a global pandemic in the middle.

“We’re opening our fifth location down in Exeter in about six weeks. I’d like to see if by the end of the year we can get to seven or eight, with the goal being 15 locations by the end of next year. In the long term, over the next ten years, the goal is to open 50 locations with 1000 people and a turnover of 50 million pounds.”

So you must be looking for many new recruits, with all this expansion?

“Yes, we’re looking for two types of people: some who want to come in for a six to twelve month skill-injection to help their careers and give them experience in coaching that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. And the second type of person who is more interested in a career. Because, ultimately, if I go back to the ten year goal, those 50 locations will be made up of people who join at the entry level and work their way through in the same way I did when I first started.”

"A lot of people that we take on don’t have a huge amount of experience and the options end up being either hospitality or retail. Here they get free coaching, a great atmosphere and working environment, with an office that is full of like-minded fun people. And they get to be in control of their future and how quickly they progress in the company. In the direct-sales industry there is no limit to how big your organisation can be.”

A lot of people that we take on don’t have a huge amount of experience and the options end up being either hospitality or retail. Here they get free coaching, a great atmosphere and working environment, with an office that is full of like-minded fun people. And they get to be in control of their future and how quickly they progress in the company. In the direct-sales industry there is no limit to how big your organisation can be.

f you stand in the Redline

Ioffice in Ancoats, the first thing your eye is drawn to is a large graffiti bee on the wall. “It’s the symbol of Manchester”, explains Office and Recruitment Manager, Niamh, “It’s the worker bee.” The office has been refurbished over lockdown, with an artist specifically bought in to create the symbol. The aim of the refurb was to provide a relaxed atmosphere that was still conducive to work, but also one that was supportive to the general well-being of the closeknit team.

“I have a great relationship with the guys”, says Chance Cowie. “We’ve spent a lot of quality time together both in and out the office. We’re really following all the systems that we keep here and that includes treating it as a whole team. I think it’s so important to build those personal relationships up. You know, from my perspective it’s about actually wanting them to succeed and doing everything in my power to get everyone where they need to be.”

Redline opened their office in Manchester in October of 2018. Chance moved with five leaders to a small spot in Didsbury. The business took off quickly and, a couple of months later, the team had surpassed the size of 20 until the point where RedLine had outgrown the Didsbury office and Chance and Niamh began to search for a new home for the company.

“We actually needed new offices in order to continue to work”, Niamh explains. “We’d reached the point where we had all these people wanting to come on board with us but we physically couldn’t fit them in the building.”

They moved to the ‘up-and-coming’ area of Ancoats in October 2019 and "by the end of November we had over 40 people in the office. We were doing over 300 sales a week, 40 to 50 sales a day, and we just built up this incredible momentum really quickly.”

“Then”, Niamh says, “lockdown hit.” Not taking the global pandemic lying down, Redline moved everything online and focussed their dayto-day work on the up-skilling of the core members they’d recruited over the previous months. In the meantime, they temporarily paused their work in the events sector—which had been all but shut down anyway—and instead focused on residential work.

“We had built up so much momentum and we’d been so successful so quickly, that we weren’t worried, because we knew it would be the same afterwards. Doing residential was a moment where we were able to learn new things, new ways of working, and we did learn a lot. But events is our strong point - that’s where we’re the real market experts.”, she says.

- CHANCE COWIE -

After re-opening in April, in their newly renovated office, the work picked up immediately. “In only a matter of weeks, we were doing 200 sales a week. And we didn’t have the forty people that we had before, either, we were sitting in and around the 25 mark.”

They also noticed that a few of the team members had really taken on board the training they’d been given over the numerous lockdown periods. Crew Leader, Mike Harrison, who will have been with Redline for two years this summer, is a good example of the rapidity that seems to come naturally to the Ancoats office.

“Before I started in the industry”, Mike says, “I would job-hop a lot. I would work really hard for a couple of months just as a way of saving to travel. I’d usually quit the job, go travel, come back, get a new job somewhere else. I used to hate most of my jobs to be honest, whether it was retail, hospitality, or wherever, it was all just a way to get money to travel.”

Immediately before joining Redline, Mike was holding down three jobs. He was working as a personal trainer, in a retail store, and as a bar supervisor. “I would work 18 hour shifts across those three jobs and at the end of it I was on very little money. I was looking to cash up for a trip to South Korea, when I found this job by pure luck really. I saw that is was commission based and I had the idea that if I was already working this hard for minimum wage, then surely if I could work the same amount but for myself then I could make more money. When I started, I saw very quickly that was the case."

“I hit the ground running. I was doing well over 30 sales in my first three weeks in the industry. I was making a hell of a lot more money than I was in the other three jobs that I was working previously.”

After a meeting with one of the leaders about how building a team can get you to ownership, Mike began thinking he might stay. “When that was laid out for me—how you can get from starting in the industry to becoming a business owner—I realised what was possible. After three months, I’d built a team very quickly and I realised that this was something that I had got a bit of a knack for.

So I put all of my travel plans on hold and decided to give this a proper go. I wanted to see where it might take me.”

He had only been in the industry for six months when we went into the first lockdown. It was the first time in his life he didn’t have anything to channel his energy into, which turned out to be blessing. “It allowed me to take a step back and assess things: what I’d done right, what I done wrong, how I’d got to where I’d got and what my goals were. After doing that, it hit me that we can use this time to massively up-skill not just myself but my team, so when we do come back we’re better than ever.”

By the time we re-emerged in April, Mike knew exactly what he wanted, exactly what his goals were and exactly how he was going to get there. “And what I planned to happen, happened. I set a blistering pace in the field, better than I’d ever done before, not just on the sales board but in the recruitment too. I went from having one person on my team going into lockdown to 16 now. We set a new team PB of 65 last week and we’re looking at doing over a hundred this week. I got promoted to Assisant Ownership 2 weeks ago, andv I’ve got my eye on setting up in Liverpool. We’ve just got so much momentum at the moment, and I’m really looking forward to the future."

This is a sentiment both Chance and Niamh agree with. “We have come back even bigger. It’s an opportunity to make up the time that we’ve lost in lockdown.”, they tell me. “We’ve got over thirty people now and they’re doing 200 to 250 sales a week. The plan is that by the start of July we’ll be doing three or four hundred sales a week and we’ll have the team doing sixty to seventy sales a day. We want to open up at least three offices by the end of this year and at least 5 or 6 offices by the end of next year. We want to give as much opportunity to as many people as possible. The office is full of fantastic, hardworking people so we definitely trust that to happen.”