Entrepreneurs: Online innovator The Marque puts stamp on polishing high-fliers’ profiles

On form: Andrew Wessels had a spell as a professional cricketer in his native South Africa

18 February 2019

Google ‘Andrew Wessels’ and the first page of hits includes the bio of Andrew Wessels, the author of novel A Turkish Dictionary; Andrew Wessels, director of the film Blitzpatrollie; and Andrew Wessels, founder of The Marque, which is an internet directory that aims to help corporate high-fliers to beat Wikipedia and social media, by controlling their online image.

It’s the last Wessels that I’m interviewing, and the online cacophony of personal data is what inspired him to set up the company.

“I was looking up successful people, trying to track their career paths to see how they’d reached the top, but all the information was so disparate. Most CEOs and people with portfolio careers weren’t on LinkedIn.

“Wikipedia just wasn’t reliable, there was no single source of information you could trust. That’s what sparked my idea for The Marque.”

Inspiration struck after a varied career: Wessels had a spell as a professional cricketer in his native South Africa, was an investment manager at JP Morgan and then worked for Charles Dunstone at Carphone Warehouse’s investment arm.

“After that, I wanted to do a business myself. I gave myself a six-month deadline to come up with something new,” the 44-year-old explains.

“But I found it very difficult. I first tried a sports business, but none of the ideas I came up with were scalable. I looked to buy a recruitment business but I couldn’t find anything. My six-month deadline was approaching, and I was thinking, ‘I’ll have to go and get a job’, which was a very scary prospect: I’d not worked for anyone for years.

“I was clutching at straws, feeling desperate, and decided to pick a few business people I really admired, and research them to track their career since they had left school, to see if anything would inspire me.”

The Marque

Founded: 2015

Revenues: £1.5m (2019 forecast)

Business idol: “Charles Dunstone and David Ross — they taught me an incredible amount.”

Best moment: “The real euphoria when the first payments from clients came through — it showed they believed in the product.”

Worst moment: “The stress associated with The Marque taking longer to grow than I anticipated.”

Wessels’ first target was Lord Rose, who had left the helm of Marks & Spencer, and become the new chair of Ocado. “Despite his high profile, I had to go through about 13 different websites to work out what was the correct information about him, and what wasn’t. I thought, ‘He should come up at the top of Google with a coherent, extensive profile.’ That was the kernel of the idea.”

Wessels took his plan to 20 corporate high-fliers and asked if they’d pay for an online profiling service; their positive responses saw him plunge ahead.

He personally invested £250,000 in building the site and the service: “I’d worked as a tech investor but had no idea how to build a website, so I found developers based in Serbia who impressed me, and they still run the tech side.”

It took four months to build The Marque, whose headquarters are in Berkeley Square, and which uses complex search engine optimisation methods to get its professionally-written profiles to the top of Google rankings.

Growth was slower than Wessels expected: “When I launched in May 2015, if you searched for someone and there was nothing online, that was seen as a good thing. Now, it’s a red flag, you wonder, ‘What are they hiding?’ That shift has helped a lot; everyone has their offline image of how they portray themselves, but, before every meeting, people take a view of who you are via your online profile. Senior executives know that they need a digital twin that matches how they present themselves offline.”

Wessels has signed up 350 clients, who pay £1,500 a year for The Marque’s copywriters to write their profile and keep it updated with their latest business deals and appointments.

Users include Wessels’ former boss, Dunstone, as well as New Look founder Tom Singh, former Kleinwort boss Sally Tennant, ad guru Johnny Hornby and Cobra Beer founder Karan Bilimoria.

Backers, who include Boots dealmaker Dominic Murphy, private equity executive Larry Guffey and a wealthy Hong Kong family office, have put The Marque’s total investment at almost £1 million. “They also bring in crucial clients,” Wessels adds.

He’s expanding to the US, spending two weeks every month there “which is really tough to combine with my family”, the father-of-three says, “but the global opportunities are just too great to ignore.”

The difference between British and American profiles, he has found, “is that the first thing British clients say is, ‘I don’t want to be seen to be promoting myself’ but that’s not an issue in the US.”

Wessels has just signed a deal with a large American charity where The Marque will manage the online profiles of 40 of its trustees. “The idea is, outsourcing the online work will save charity workers time to do other things,” Wessels explains.

“And with the prospect of more large contracts on the horizon, the coming year is going to be incredibly exciting.”

And you’ll be able to read all about it on his The Marque profile.

Entrepreneurs: Online innovator The Marque puts stamp on polishing high-fliers’ profiles

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