THE CLEAREST SIGNAL

YOU COULD say business is in Mark Trowbridge’s blood. “Even at school, I was kind of an entrepreneur, working through the holidays,” he recalls. “Not even to make money, really. It’s more because I’d get bored.”

His estate agent dad and accountant mum had a lot to do with that. “They worked really hard, were very sociable and were heavily involved in Round Table and Rotary. So, I was brought up around business people from a very young age and that rubbed off, I think.”

His ensuing career, full of startling achievements, also contains a devastating setback. At 17, he was running his first business, a four-office estate agency in Hertfordshire. Preinternet, a 200-office agency bought the related multi-terminal software solution he’d built. He then sold the underlying business to Hambro, who made him a director at the age of 21.

As the property sector boomed, so did his fortunes – first as Hambro’s resident troubleshooter, looking after struggling offices, then as founder of a multi-milliondollar land-finding agency, and finally as a pioneer of the self-build industry. “Then we had the recession of 1989, when interest rates went from 3% to 17.5% overnight,” he says. “I had nine businesses at the time, all in property.”

His knowledge of software and talent for business consulting helped him to bounce back. His next step, after emigrating to Spain, came in 2003 when he launched Business Network International Spain (BNI), the world’s largest business referral organisation.

In all, he has worked for major corporations three times, at very senior levels. “Big business is great and the money’s really good, but I’ll be honest with you, it’s really boring,” he says. “Small business is a lot more fun, a lot more dangerous, a lot harder and very insecure. But that’s where I’ll always be.”

It’s the cut and thrust that attracts him: “Finding that product or business that can scale and grow, and you can have fun with.” BNI, he points out, is “geared towards supporting and helping small businesses grow. So yeah, I’ve always been there trying to fight for the smaller guy.”

With conXhub, Mark is challenging the traditional telecommunications market. In essence, it’s a flexible successor technology to VoIP – to internet calls –that eschews broadband for the vastly more reliable mobile cellular networks that criss-cross the world. Annoyingly, the Skype call he’s answered from Spain for the sake of this interview is littered with split-second cut-outs, as if to prove his point that VoIP is inferior. Connectivity is just the start, however. Sign up to a conXhub package and you can add as many phone numbers – including overseas ones – to your smartphone as you like. As well as existing landline business numbers, that might include departmental numbers, personal direct dial numbers or connections to new virtual offices.

In a sense, the business started accidentally. “We’d launched an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) in Spain and had the ability to push our international calls from the mobile carrier across our network. This reduced costs dramatically and allowed us to give much cheaper pricing to our customers,” Mark explains.

“One day, I got a message from my secretary to call one of those clients that you really don’t want to talk to. I said, ‘Fine, I’ll give him a ring,’ and she said, ‘No, he wants to talk to you at eight o’clock tonight.’

“I’d either have to stay in the office and call him using the company’s phone number, or we’d have to give him my mobile number. That got me thinking: can we add additional phone numbers to our primary service? Three weeks later, I’d worked out how we could do it.”

Built as a standalone product, the system subsequently evolved into a standalone company. To understand why, it’s worth considering VoIP’s shortcomings. When telecoms professionals discuss the start and endpoint of a call, they refer to the first and last mile. At both of those points, strong broadband connections are crucial for VoIP to work well.

“All of the business clients that we had at the time were using VoIP solutions,” Mark adds. “We moved them over to our new conXhub solution, and calls to customer support stopped overnight because we were going over the mobile network.

“All of a sudden, the quality issues went away. What’s more, our clients could easily call from different phone numbers on the fly. If they were making international calls, they could use a number from where their customer was based, which was just a eureka moment for everybody.” conXhub’s development roadmap took an even more unexpected turn during the pandemic. “As soon as we walked into lockdown, there was a huge need for additional services and features. For example, you’re monitoring people remotely – who’s on the phone, who are they calling and how long have they been on the phone for? A lot of our competitors had massive issues dealing with this, but in our case, people were just picking up their mobile phones and walking home with them.”

Take-up of conXhub’s services have been “literally across the board”, says Mark. “Accountants, solicitors, plumbers, engineers, call centres… We have clients in every sector.” To date, the company’s strategy has been to develop useful products and sell them on its website. This year, however, the emphasis will be on tailoring products to different audiences.

“A really good example we’ve come across is that a lot of females in particular are struggling with safety and security and communications. So, we’re taking our product, rebranding it and redelivering it for that market, calling it VIP Safety First. A lot of women want to evangelise this product because it’s a major issue, so that’s going to have its own website, its own branding.

“Moving forward, what we’re effectively doing is building a lot of micro-product websites that are very specific to the audience. We can support the issues and the problems of the plumber right through to government call centres, and we’ve got a product for everyone. What we’re doing now is boiling that down to ‘who is the audience and what do they actually need?’ We’re finding the product that fits them to a tee.”

Certain products have soared in popularity, in ways the company didn’t expect. “Our verification service suddenly became number one in the world as far as Google were concerned,” says Mark. “A lot of clients just want a phone number to verify against a particular website for a day, and they want to what we call ‘burn’ the number. Not many companies like doing verification services, but that just took off. I mean, thousands and thousands of numbers for us.”

SMS2Email – again, developed to meet client demand – forwards texts to customers’ email accounts. “It was very surprising how quickly it became a number-one product in the world after launch, and we’re hoping to emulate that with our other products by being more tailored and more bespoke.”

Adding extra phone numbers to your mobile is one of conXhub’s principal selling points, so we asked Mark to spell out the practical advantages.

Let’s say you were planning to make lengthy calls to the United States. Should you add an American number to your British phone? Financially, would it be worth your while?

The answer is a firm yes, he says.

“Firstly, we don’t charge for calls. There’s no additional cost. You’re also using your mobile phone, so you can wander out of your office and continue the call.

“If you’re calling people you don’t know, they’re more likely to pick up if they see a USA number. They’re definitely not going to pick up a UK number,” he adds.

“Another benefit is that the people in the USA will be calling you less expensively. It will cost them whatever the local call rate is. Sometimes it’s free.

“There are lots of advantages. But basically, we charge an all-inclusive monthly fee for those services.”