Like so many companies of its kind, Motorsport World was started by the owner, Colin Stewart, working from his back bedroom. 'Back bedroom company' has become a rather unkind phrase in the trade but Colin has developed Motorsport World from its launch in November 2000 into one of the largest, and probably the fastest-growing, mail order performance parts companies in the UK. Now operating from two industrial units in Scotland and employing three staff, including Colin's wife, Motorsport World is now firmly on the map.

The business is very much an 'internet company' in as much as the main advertising is the website - www.motorsportworld.co.uk - and the majority of new customers find the website through the Search Engines on the Web. There is an online shop on the site but, Colin says, it only accounts for 10-20% of sales with most people still prefering to phone and discuss their requirements as well as prefering not to provide credit card details online. The online shop is fully secure, but Colin expects it will still be a couple of years until real confidence develops throughout the entire marketplace in buying online.

And what does Colin reckon is the secret of his success? Well it almost goes without saying that single minded determination and working long hours are mandatory in setting up your own business, but, Colin explains, it was his ability to do everything himself that kept overheads low and therefore allowed him to offer great discounts on everything he sold. The original website cost him £300 back in 1999 but he then taught himself website design and has done everything himself since, including the search engine optimisation work. He says that in the first couple of years he really struggled with the search engines and got quotes from various companies to do this work which varied from £250 - £5,000! In the end he got one of the cheaper companies to do some work but they didn't finish the job, so Colin had a look at what they had done and finished it off. You will now find Motorsport World up the top of the main search engines for most of the performance parts that you will require.

The other ingredient that makes the business work, Colin believes, is the personal touch. Everybody knows that a marvellous website can hide the fact that a business is one man working from his shed or bedroom, but Colin has never believed that this pretence works long term. In the early days he always made it clear he was a 'one man band' and found that many people respected this and were happy to support someone who was willing to 'give it a go'. He has always made his a personal business and you are still greeted by him on the homepage of the website introducing you to his site and his business. He has also taken care to employ lads who are 'into cars' and modifications, and above all are keen to help customers buy what they want.

But was it that easy - a good idea and hard work? No way, says Colin! An online shop was always part of the general plan but not a fully blown mail order business using a six line phone system. The original website was designed to be an on-line motorsport magazine with listings of events from around the world, cars for sale, project cars, downloadable video clips from various motorsport events, etc. The idea was to generate a large amount of 'traffic' to the site, especially from the video clips, and to then sell advertising space to the big names in the tuning market just as 'normal' magazines do. Colin visited events such as the Goodwood Festival of Speed, the Scottish Rally and various hillclimb events and spent many hours digitising and uploading video clips to the website but, he says, these high-traffic advertising ideas never really took off on the net. So, he was left with large bandwidth costs to pay for people downloading the video clips but with no advertising revenue.

However, in order to attract advertisers, Colin had uploaded many pages on the website promoting products from all the big brand names in the tuning market to make it look like lots of companies were already paying for advertising! This only resulted in one advertiser, but emails started coming in asking for prices of brakes, suspension and tuning parts. So after nearly two years plodding away trying to turn the website into a business, Colin decided mail order was the way to go and at the grand old age of 40 quit his job as an engineering consultant to give it a go.

He took a job driving a delivery van for a friend and spent every spare minute on his mobile phone setting up accounts with all the main names in the market and landed his first sales while 'on the move'. To promote the business he wrote an article for CCC (Cars and Car Conversions) and is seen here being welcomed onboard as the Scottish correspondent for CCC at the Autosport Show in January 2001. That article about a track day at Knockhill turned out to be the only one he did but he had so many more ideas. He was also lined up with Race Tech magazine to do an article on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics - one of his previous specialisms) with one of the F1 teams, and an article on signal analysis with another team but by the time they came off later in 2001 the mail order business had taken off and the payment for magazine articles was not very good........

Around the same time as the CCC article, Colin was also contacted by the Top Gear website to provide prizes for their online competitions and he negotiated with both Recaro and Red Dot Racing to provide prizes with the agreement that both their name and the Motorsport World name would be promoted at the same time. He also negotiating similar deals with Piper, Kent, Spax, Compomotive and TSW until Top Gear took cold feet, considering these products too risky to deal with! So, instead, he ran a competition on the Motorsport World website during January 2001 for a cam kit courtesy of Piper Cams.

Meanwhile, Colin had lost the van job because of 'differences' between the company directors and he entered 2001 with no means of income other than the occasional sale. With a family and a mortgage to support, difficult times were ahead......

So, when he attended the Autosport Show in January 2001, it was with a certain urgency to get more suppliers onboard, to get companies to advertise on the website and to land web related work in order to support the development of the mail order business. It was at this show that he met Koolart, the caricature company, and within a month had landed the contract to host and manage their website. At that time the Koolart site, www.koolart.co.uk, had 30,000 visitors a month and now, over two years down the line, it has gone up to 140,000 a month. Not bad!

The Koolart website was the break that Colin needed. It provided a means of income while he developed sales in Motorsport World; the main benefit being that he could answer phone enquiries and respond immediately whilst also working on the PC. However sales were slow and Colin continued to seek further web site work, almost landing the Knockhill Racing Circuit web site contract in the process.

Then in the summer of 2001 the Mitsubishi FTO Owners Club approached him asking what discounts he could offer and he soon found that he could easily beat the best discounts already available and still make a profit. This, and feedback from other enquiries, soon showed just how much discounting would be necessary in order to win sales in the highly competitive internet marketplace. So, after further market research with the help of his early customers, Colin managed to home in on what discounts he would need to apply to each brand in order to win sales and these discounts pretty much survive to this day - much to his competitors' annoyance!

To Colin's great relief this led to a very rapid increase in sales through the latter half of 2001 and he took on his first full-time member of staff, Simon Harkness, in March 2002. He'd had his eye on an industrial unit 2 minutes from his house for a few months by this time and as soon as he was sure that everything was running smoothly he took the plunge and moved into the unit in April 2002. Sales continued to increase steadily but the increasing paperwork was distracting Colin from developing the business further, so he then took the final leap of faith - he asked his wife, Alexa, to quit her job and come to work for him full time as his book-keeper/administrator. This she did in July 2002 and they haven't looked back since. In March 2003, Neil Samson joined Simon in sales and Colin rented the unit next door which now houses a showroom for all the products that they sell.

The original unit has been retained and ramps will soon (Jan 2004) be installed to launch a fitting service in February 2004. The main emphasis of this launch will be a build-and-fit exhaust operation in partnership with Zaust who are are the main rivals to Powerflow in the UK.

Motorsport World are also entering 2004 by exhibiting at the prestigious Autosport Show at the NEC, UK, in January and will be attending all the major shows throughout the year. This, combined with continued investment in the online shop, says....watch this space!