Monty George says he was always something of an entrepreneur. “When I was 12 I’d save up my pocket money to buy small things from Poundland like sushi-makers and laptop lights and then I’d list them online and make a small profit,” he says.
“From there I tried selling everything from watches to electronics. When I was 15 I bought a load of mini dirt bikes from China to sell, but I realised that if anything went wrong with them I wouldn’t know how to fix them. I’d heard that furniture was one of the biggest growing markets online, so I ordered a couple of shipping containers of coffee tables and dining tables and it all went from there.”
But being a budding eBay entrepreneur set him apart from his classmates. “I’d use my lunch breaks to answer messages from customers. I remember one Christmas selling touchscreen tablets that had a really high fault rate and I came back from school to over 100 messages to reply to, which was pretty soul destroying,” he says. “And then of course it was hard seeing friends all go off to university, but I remember the night before I got my A-level results my total eBay sales ticked over £1m. It was quite poetic really.”
Three years later and his company Furniture Box has outgrown his parents’ shed and moved into a warehouse and office space in Wiltshire, with a team of six and growing. In 2016 the company turned over £1.06m. “The best thing for me is the customer feedback,” says George. “I get a real buzz when someone gives a product a good review or is happy with something that I’ve put a lot of time and effort into choosing.”
Of course, things don’t always go right. “I remember an elderly gentleman recently purchased a chair from us and he left negative feedback, saying it was difficult to put together because he had Parkinson’s disease,” says George. “So I decided to travel to Surrey where he lives and help him put it up.”
George says that building a successful business at such a young age has come with sacrifices. “When my friends were out partying at uni, I was putting the graft into the business, often working from 7am until 9pm, seven days a week,” he says.
“I did have moments where I thought: ‘Have I made the right call here?’ I remember over one Christmas and new year period, while all my mates were having fun or relaxing, me and my business partner Dan were in our freezing cold warehouse putting up industrial storage racking. But I just knew that the business wasn’t going to grow without us putting in the time and effort.”
Now his friends are graduating university, George says the tables have turned. “They’re struggling to start at the bottom, and have a lot of debt,” he says. “In a way I feel ahead of the curve because I’ve spent the last few years knuckling down. I actually think that being young is a great time to start a business. I had no overheads when I was living at my parents’ house and no real outgoings. It would’ve been much harder to do this if I’d had a mortgage and a family to feed. I also think that when you’re young you’re more willing to take risks, and obviously growing up online I had a really good understanding of how the technology worked.
“I’ve picked up a lot of advice from family and friends over the years,” he adds. “One thing that particularly sticks out is not to over expand and get carried away, which is easy to do when stock is selling well.” But, he says, he’s still made “every mistake under the sun”.
“In 2014 I got a huge tax bill because I hadn’t realised I had to pay VAT, so I had to sell some of my belongings to raise the money.”
His advice to other young people who want to start a business is to get to know the market, and not feel daunted by what’s already out there. “Find your niche and offer something unique,” says George. “And if it’s going well, don’t stay still because other people will catch up with you. See what you can do better.”
George says he’d like to see Furniture Box become as big as Ikea or Furniture Village. “We’d like to not just be doing furniture, but to expand into other areas of homeware and maybe start selling packs of furniture for new-builds,” he says. “There’s a lot of untapped potential out there that I can’t wait to get my teeth into.”
Millions of people are using eBay to start a side hustle, make more of a hobby or carve out a career. Find out how here
