In the right place at the right time

Mar 23 2009 By Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

IT took years for one North East entrepreneur’s company to become an overnight success. Alastair Gilmour talks to Graham Wylie.

IT'S highly unlikely that the North East’s most successful businessman has exotic emblems or heroes’ names tattooed on his forearms. If he did, however, there’s a good chance they would read Amstrad on one and PCW8256 on the other.

The big break that catapulted Graham Wylie and his Sage business into the public consciousness came in 1984 and was inspired by Alan Sugar’s word processors. The revolutionary machine flooded television advertising breaks, forcing customers to queue in Dixons and the Wylie team to move fast.

"The Amstrad PCW8256 was a cheap computer to replace the typewriter," says Graham. "We decided it could also be used as a business machine to do accounting. We dropped the price of our Sage product dramatically to £99 because we couldn’t sell what was effectively £1,000 software for a £300 machine. That was our lucky break."

Sage sales bounced from 30 a month to 300 a month; the PC Revolution had erupted and the Newcastle company was on the front line.

"Most accounting companies at the time used software that ran off a big mainframe or used accounting machines," he says. "We were in at the beginning, so we were well placed, but we faced a lot of hard work."

Earlier this month – and 25 years after PCW8256 – Graham Wylie has revealed plans for an impressive golf complex that will be moulded out of the Northumberland landscape at Close House in Heddon-on-the-Wall. The development, which will create more than 100 construction jobs and employ 30 full-time staff once finished, was granted planning permission for a championship-standard golf course, a golf academy, state-of-the-art clubhouse and a driving range, all of which is expected to attract enthusiasts from around the world.

Graham bought the 18th Century, 179-acre Close House estate from Newcastle University in 2004. It had been used as a sports centre with the house hosting occasional conferences and research projects but was drifting into neglect. He invested £14m turning it into a top class hotel and spent another £1m on the golf course.

"It’s all exciting stuff now," he says. "I bought Close House because I wanted to give something back to Newcastle University where I got my degree. That’s where I actually wrote what became Sage Accounts, so you can say the origins of Sage go back to those days.

"We started by upgrading the house, which is now a great venue for conferences and weddings – with an award-winning restaurant. The golf course was also used for football, so you can imagine what it was like. We moved the pitches and designed it better.

"We thought it would be great to build something special. I acquired another 200 acres of land, which gives us enough to build – in quotes – a championship course and we brought in Scott MacPherson, a designer from Scotland. The business plan assumes that 95% of the income is going to come from the local area, but we think there will be a lot more from outside. We’ve got permission to build a new clubhouse with all the modern facilities; club shop, restaurant and a big area for parties and conferences. We’ve also got permission to convert the stable block into another 17 bedrooms, so we’ll end up with a 40-bedroom hotel, an award-winning restaurant and two golf courses – one of which will be very special. I think that’ll be a very attractive site, not only for the local community but for people coming into the area."

Exciting stuff indeed for the Whitley Bay-born entrepreneur who, while at university, needed to earn money, so he took a summer job with a local company as a programmer.

"One of my first assignments was to write some software for an accountant," he says. "I then met David Goldman, who was a printer on Newcastle Quayside and he said if you added a customer file and a supplier file, we could have an accounts package for a business. I was doing all this while still at university studying computer sciences and statistics, and carried on because I was enjoying it. It ended up being Sage Accounts.

"That was 1980 so I’d have been 21. It was one of those situations where, right place, right time, with a lot of hard work afterwards."

He and David Goldman set up Sage in 1981, developing the integrated hardware and software package, at first for estimating and invoicing at the Campbell Graphics print operation. The print works was closed following a labour dispute and David Goldman threw all his energies into Sage, developing the financial accounting system for small businesses with the young Wylie, first as its main technologist, then as managing director. Then came the Amstrad PCW8256, the queues in Dixons – right place, right time.

Graham seems to have absorbed the basics of honest graft from both of his parents in equal measure. His father was a Scottish miner who moved to Nottingham then to Backworth in North Tyneside, where he met Graham’s mother, who was running a boarding house in Whitley Bay. There were no stern warnings about working in dark holes in the ground and no forcing along career paths, but one of Wylie senior’s leisure activities obviously planted a seed.

"My mother was the one who made sure I had decent books and pushed me through school so I could go to university," he says. "My father helped her out when he wasn’t cutting coal. He had been a miner since he was 14 and was very interested in horse racing. He never went racing but he had a bet every day and would watch it on television every Saturday.

"To be honest, there was no forethought to any of this, it all just happened. I could sit here for hours and bore you with the history of Sage software and you would say at the end of it, ‘There is no way you could have planned that’. It just evolved, we ran with it and had a great time. As you mature you get to have clearer strategies, but in the early days you knew you had a good idea, you knew you had the potential to be successful and that was the reason we just went with the flow. We had to adapt to different things that were happening in the industry, but it all takes time; Sage didn’t happen overnight, it was 1986 before it was successful.

"We were having to work all hours God sends just to keep going – until we got that lucky break."