An interview with the managing director of dabs.com

This article was written for IT Training magazine.

Word count: 2000 words

“I can't get the IT training I want.”

David Atherton, managing director of dabs.com, leant forward and held eye contact to emphasise his point. “IT training companies just don't provide exactly what we need. And we can't be the only company to find this.”

Oh dear. Up until now, everything had gone so well. I felt distinctly uncomfortable. I thought that I'd run into an ill-informed, anti-training bigot - but, as I dug a little deeper, I found that wasn't the case.

“Most IT training is pretty much product-focused not process-focused,” Atherton told me. “To use a product, you don't need to know all of that product - but you do need to know all the underlying processes. And courses are too long - we don't need five-day technical courses. Quite often we only need the last three days - maybe not even that. When people had no IT skills, the 5-day full course model worked, because people needed teaching from scratch. These days people already know much more about PCs and software, but frequently courses don't recognise that prior knowledge.”

“Also, most courses teach technology without context. We're an e-business. We apply technology; we don't want to learn it for its own sake. IT training companies seem to think they are actually IT companies - they're excited by technology and therefore teach technology - but they don't teach it in a business context.”

Although you may not have heard of David Atherton, you probably know of (and use) dabs.com. One of the UK's most successful IT resellers, dabs.com ships a staggering 100,000 orders a month. And dabs.com's success is not just about volume - the company is clearly getting a lot of other things right. When you walk into its reception, you're faced with a wall of awards that any business would kill for: 'e-business of the year', 'best B2B project', 'fastest growing technology company', 'best use of e-business', 'best use of e-commerce', 'most innovative Web site' - crikey, Haley's Comet could come round again before I've listed them all.

dabs.com is visited by a breathtaking 830,000 visitors per month. Many Web servers would simply turn to custard when hammered by that many visitors. Every month, that's almost enough people to fill the NEC arena - seventy times over.

Impressive for sure, but dabs.com didn't get where it is without the drive and enthusiasm of its managing director, David Atherton.
In his mid-40s, Atherton is sharp as nails, business-like and articulate. Well, possibly more fast-talking than articulate: he makes Ben Elton seem hesitant.

About as far from the geeky stereotypical dot-com entrepreneur as you can get, Atherton is a solid (and possibly hard-nosed) businessman.

Atherton wasn't always a dot-com business leader. “I've never been employed by someone else, at least in private industry,” he told me - and he seemed to be proud of the fact. By his own admission, he was “lacklustre” at school and “didn't work very hard, but did okay in my grades”. He studied briefly in sixth-form, but left because he “hated discipline and wanted money”. His first job was hardly an auspicious start to his career: shelf-filler at Tesco in Bolton. He lasted two weeks - and left for what his parents called a “proper job, with some security” in the Civil Service.

He worked for ten years at the Inland Revenue. Atherton started as a filing clerk and quickly rose through the ranks to become an Inspector of Taxes. But when the intellectual stimulation left the job, so did Atherton.

As he talks, shifting restlessly in his seat, his body language open and energetic, I can imagine that Atherton doesn't take kindly to treading water. But he left the Inland Revenue with a great gift. During his ten-year tenure, Atherton had taken as much management training as he could - a move which laid the foundation for his later success: “I got management training at exactly the right time. Without it, I'd never have been able to grow dabs.com”.

Atherton moved to the BBC, right at the start of the microcomputer boom. At that time, the BBC was pushing the BBC Micro and its curriculum through the ready channel of the UK's schools. Between 1984 and 1987, Atherton worked in the department which produced training materials for the BBC Micro.

Atherton realised that not only was there a future in PCs, but there was also one in teaching people how to use them. “I knew that computers represented a massive opportunity, and that, in some way, I could make a career out of them. Since the BBC Micro was far more popular than was expected, it wasn't difficult to predict the coming boom.”

Successful though the BBC Micro was, there was little enthusiasm within the BBC for attacking the computer learning market in a bigger way.

Atherton isn't one to let someone else hold him back. He left the BBC and established Dabs Press, with a partner, Bruce Smith. Dabs Press produced 'Dab Hand Guides'. As you might expect, Dabs Press initially focussed on producing BBC Micro training books, but, when the IBM PC arrived, Atherton shifted focus to that area, with great success. But he quickly realised that Dabs couldn't keep pace with the rate of knots that software vendors produced new versions of software. “On the same day that we launched our WordPerfect 5.1 book, WordPerfect 6 arrived on the market! I decided to get out.”

For some time, fuelled by Dabs Press's expertise in the PC arena, customers had been asking for advice on which printers, consumables and peripherals to buy. Atherton, recognising the opportunity, had simply started to sell these items alongside his books. When he decided to get out of publishing, he knew exactly where to go.

Starting with just a handful of people, Dabs Direct grew quickly, focusing on keen prices, high availability and quick delivery.
When the Internet arrived, Atherton transformed Dab's direct mail and telesales business model into that of an on-line reseller - and renamed the company dabs.com. Atherton was, it's true, in the right place at the right time, but dabs.com had painstakingly laid its foundations in the 'real world' - the Web simply provided a different cost model and scale to the operation.

On the face of it, you would expect Atherton to be an IT training advocate. His background at the BBC, the success of Dabs Press and now being at the leading edge of e-tailing all pointed to someone who believes in the value of IT skills. I was surprised by his unmasked cynicism about what IT training could do for his business.

Despite Atherton's scepticism, and the fact that dabs.com doesn't have a formal training strategy, the company does invest in (and believe in) training. The IT team takes whatever training is required - and has used a mixture of classroom, self-paced and on-line learning. The team has recently used The Informatics Group for some quite extensive training, to gear up for the .NET platform - topics such as XML/XSL, Microsoft .NET and VB.NET - and they're currently looking at training for Windows 2003 Server. They've also undertaken some more theoretical stuff - such as Software Quality Assurance (provided by Learning Tree) which was rated “very highly” by dabs.com's delegates.

The technical team also has a structured approach to regular internal training (often cross-skills development) and has built up an impressive library of over fifty self-paced learning and reference books on a wide range of topics, from SSADM to Web design. So while Atherton might not be satisfied with the IT training industry, his teams do seem to get whatever IT training they need.
So it's not IT training itself that Atherton feels isn't relevant to his business, but the mainstream IT training courses and services. For example, Atherton favours learning which can be broken down into smaller chunks and taken when required - at the time of need. “There's no point learning something you 'might' need.”

Atherton contends that, for his business, a fixed IT training strategy is pretty pointless, because technology changes too quickly and dabs.com is at the front of the new frontier. “When you're treading new ground, there aren't many courses to help you. If the book doesn't exist, you have to write it. That's what we've done. We don't need a training strategy - if we have a skills gap, we fill it. We train when we need it, not when we don't.”

Clearly, Atherton sees training at a practical level. He doesn't see any reason to make training more important an issue than meeting an immediate business need.

And it's not just IT training that Atherton has a problem with: it's the IT training industry itself. “The marketing from most training companies is too corporate and there's far too much hard-sell. Institutions like the Open University manage to position the gravitas of what they do without being arrogant, lofty and unapproachable. I want training that adds definite value and I want proof of that. I don't see training companies communicating that message in a practical way. I think the IT training industry is out of step with the world: industry is moving fast, people are changing, but the approach from most IT training companies hasn't altered for years. Their approach is out of date.”

Skills are clearly important to dabs.com - and to Atherton. Therefore it's sad to see him so cynical about how IT training is offered.
All of which is indicative of Atherton's down-to-earth approach to life and business. He's a Lancashire lad who calls a spade a shovel. He simplifies things and keeps them that way. “Most smart people get defocused, because it excites them to brainstorm different opportunities. But however smart you are, physically you can only do so much. What seem like opportunities can actually be distractions.”
And the role of training? “Okay, I'm a cynic. And I guess we could do more training than we do - but who couldn't? But it's hard to see how it would have made us any more successful than we are.” It's a point well-made.

It's hard not to like David Atherton. Okay, he was direct, fast-talking, opinionated - but always frank and approachable. But I'll tell you what. I wouldn't like to try to sell him some IT training.

Company overview
dabs.com is one of the few real Internet success stories. Founded in 1990 as Dabs Direct, the company used to operate the traditional mail order and telesales model of IT sales. When the Internet arrived, the company's focus shifted rapidly to the Web - and to building what has now become the UK's leading Internet retailer of IT and technology products.

As well as being number one on the Web, with sales of around £120 million per year, dabs.com is easily in the top twenty computer dealers (out of around 12,000 companies).

The company retails pretty much anything that is computer-related: PCs, software, peripherals, and components - you name it, dabs.com probably sells it. It almost certainly has one of the widest ranges of IT products available on the Web in the UK. Recently the company has been diversifying into related lines, such as mobile telephones and home entertainment - leveraging off its vast and established customer base to enter new markets with relatively little effort.

dabs.com is passionate about quality and has attracted more awards than we can list without adding so many pages to the magazine we'd be endangering entire rain forests. These include FutureNet's E-Company of the Year and PC Pro's On-line Reseller of the Year. Many of the company's awards are won again and again, year after year.

The company employs around 200 people (a headcount that has remained stable throughout its change from off-the-page to off-the-Web selling) and is based in Westhoughton, near Bolton - bang on the M61, not far from the M60, M56 and M6.

The company is fully UK-owned and the managing director, David Atherton, is one of few CEOs of large organisations to openly publish his e-mail address.

dabs.com is a member of trade bodies such as the Personal Computer Association and the Confederation of British Industry.