Jim Brigden

Jim Brigden is concerned that he might be becoming the “grizzled old man of search” but perhaps he’s better described as the guru of rapid growth.

He’s experienced and managed incredible growth at Airmiles, Search Works, Technology Works and Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) and now hopes to do the same at I Spy, the latest home for a serial entrepreneur.

Brigden admits that he’s had a lot of luck in the past, notably at Search Works and Technology Works, I’m really proud of what we did  there, from zero turnover to £100m in 4 years and we built a great team along the way” he says. “We had so many fantastically lucky things help us along the way, a lot of things that could have gone wrong didn’t.”

However not all his experience has been a quite such a roller coaster ride. The roll-out of Overture across Europe was a, slightly, more considered affair.

“That was a well managed, solid, fantastically fast expansion that created a great business,” he says. “I’ve been in four very fast-growing companies and have experience of growing businesses, that’s very exciting.”

The core to success for him is a unified management. “I think for a company to grow quickly, you’ve got to have the right ingredients. You’ve got to have a very integrated management team, united around a central vision; any fast-growing business has to have that.”

At I Spy he’s hoping it’ll be third time lucky in the digital sector, a business model he first encountered in 1999 at an online royalty-free photography business, called Image100. “I built the website and had to market it. I spent quite a lot of money with DM and catalogues then put £50 into a paid search engine and got thousands of sales,” he recalls.

It was also a connection to his time at Airmiles – where he sold incentive packages to blue chip clients such as Dixons and Co-op and was part of a team that expanded from 400 to 1,500 during his time – that actually brought him into the business.

Recruited by the former IT director, he became their second employee outside the US.  He arrived at Overture in 2000 when online advertising was a dirty word and Brigden confesses that he’s now been in search longer than anyone else in the UK.

And while the scale of the business has changed dramatically he’s also adamant that the reasons for its appeal are the same as ever.

“It works for the consumer, they click on ads in massive numbers, works for the advertisers, they pay the price they want and it works for the search engines. The fundamentals haven’t changed in 10 years.”