Feature writer Fiona Scott talks to Jon White of RWB Auctions about his eclectic career and his investment of £3million in his own High Street.
Where Did Life Start For You?
I was born in Solihull in the midlands. My father was an engineer at the BBC and he worked at Pebble Mill, but when I was eight years old, he relocated to regional television and we moved to Norfolk so most of my childhood was growing up in Norfolk.
Mum was a PE teacher who took time out for the family and went back and became a supply teacher for some 
years.
How Was School For You?
I did not do well at school and I was unhappy. I left at 16 with next to no qualifications. I managed to scrape a woodwork O level and just managed to get maths, physics and biology. I failed my English and everything else. SI got out of formal education as quickly as I could.
What Did You Love?
Dancing. It was my passion and I went into full time professional dance training. I’d been dance training since I was four years old and it was an important part of my life as a young person.
I left home and moved up to Chester to a very well-known dance school called The Hammond. I managed to get a grant to cover some of the costs.
Mum and dad did not have a lot of money at the time, but I moved away from home and went into full time dance training, which was a bit mad and it was exceptionally hard. It’s always alluded to that dance training is brutal and it is. The number of students over the course of an academic year who gradually sort of fade away through injury is quite high.
Unfortunately, I was one of those that went by the wayside. One day I came out of a jump with my weight a little bit too far back, which resulted in me landing on my heel rather than the ball of my foot and the impact, caused my tibia to shatter just below my knee. Everyone in the class heard it break. I was terrified at the time that I’d dislocated my knee as for a dancer that’s a more serious injury with long-term consequences.
I was put into plaster from the tips of my toes all the way up to my hip for eight weeks and was told, don’t worry, bone breaks heal stronger than original bone, you’ll be fine. Two weeks after coming out of physiotherapy and obviously out of the plaster, going back into training, I rebroke my bone again. That brought my dancing dreams to an abrupt and sudden end.
How Did You Move On From That?
I knew I had to get a job and the biggest employer in the area was an insurance company called Norwich Union, who later became Aviva. At the time, Norwich Union famously put out an advertisement at they were able to employ every school leaver in the catchment area. And true to their word, they employed me.
However as I didn’t have the obligatory five O levels, I wasn’t given any sort of decent job. I was a filing clerk. To help me, my mum was teaching at a private girls school, so I ended up going to this school to redo my English, which was interesting.
How Did You Progress?
It was in the early years of data input and I worked on a computer terminal, keying in data on behalf of other staff members, and I worked out a way of acquiring all the other staffs’ login details, which was immensely useful for me because it just made my job a lot easier and more efficient.
But my supervisor didn’t see it that way and when he found out that I had a list of everybody’s passwords, I got disciplined.
I think this was the first sign though that I was strong with tech and a problem solver, I just like things to be efficient and I like to avoid time-wasting.
They had a staff suggestion scheme whereby if a member of staff put in a suggestion to improve the IT system, and if that idea was adopted, the staff member would be awarded 50% of the money saved over the first 12 months. Frankly the IT system was rubbish so I just kept on putting in suggestions, never hearing anything back.
But eventually, out of the blue, this group of people from the IT department just appeared whilst I was working at my desk one day and they presented me with a cheque and there was a photographer there. They presented me with a cheque. I think it was for about £3,500 which was my salary at the time!
I was absolutely amazed. And they then seconded me into the IT department and I became a tester for their systems, which was great.
What Happened Next?
This got me into the area that I was interested in and I stayed there for a few years and then, Norwich Union made 2,500 employees redundant all on the same day. We knew this was going to happen. We had about nine months lead in time to this mass redundancy. I was one of the people being laid off, as it turned out.
But on top of my IT work, I was also side gigging as a kids’ entertainer, at children’s parties. And I was getting quite successful with quite big bookings and I was traveling around. For this reason, I had already been planning for the future. I was offered a job as an entertainment manager at a holiday park – my dream job back then.
How Was The Job?
Well, I didn’t end up taking it! Life threw me in a different direction. A day or two after my official redundancy an IT contract came my way which was paying me in a week what I would earn in a month as an entertainment manager. I had a real crisis of conscience and I’m afraid the, the IT job won.
I then became an IT contractor which paid well but, of course, it’s feast and famine. You can be working for 18 months and then all of a sudden you’re three months or six months looking for the next job.
I ended up working in Essex, commuting, living away from home and working on a project over there, and thoroughly disliked it, and I was getting a little bit depressed about it. The truth is I ended up with a bit of a heart scare and ended up in hospital. It turned out I had an irregular heart rhythm. I had by this time moved to Swindon in Wiltshire because it had such transport links to other places, eventually I moved to nearby Royal Wootton Bassett.
What Was The Impact Of That Health Scare?
I made the decision to change how I worked. I would somehow come up with something that meant that I could work from home. By this time, I’d taught myself how to build websites and write code.
As well as doing the IT contracting, I was also building websites so I started producing websites. I started to work on websites that would generate me an income as they were monetised in one way or another, either through Google Ads or selling advertising space. My target was to have ten websites, each earning £10,000 a yuear and it worked and for a number of years it was going very, very well.
What Changed?
I then got involved in a little entrepreneurial group of like-minded IT people and we attended a conference over in San Diego and it was there that I spotted tv adverts for cash for gold.
This was before ‘cash for gold’ had really sort of hit over in the UK. I was just struck by the fact that you could advertise for somebody to stick their gold into an envelope and just post it to a random company who would then possibly pay you something for it.
These adverts were very, very scammy. At the time, they were paying out somewhere in the region of 20% of the actual value of the gold. So the customer really did get a dog end of a deal. But of course, that side of things was never publicised.
I came back with my interest piqued. I knocked up a very quick website and thus Gold Traders was born. I stuck £10,000 into a new bank account and I effectively ran that gold business from my garage for ten years.
What Did You Know About Gold?
Absolutely nothing. I went onto the internet and I bought a book. I then acquired all of the necessary acids for testing the gold. This is at a time when X Ray testing was not a thing and not accessible to people like me. Even now it’s exceptionally expensive, but at that point, it was prohibitively expensive.
I learned on the job and I knew I wanted to behave ethically. I wanted to be open and transparent to customers, to allow them to make an informed decision prior to them proceeding with a transaction. At the time, I was very cautious about it. I operated under a pseudonym, as I didn’t want anyone to know what it was that I did because I didn’t want someone bashing in my door as all this stuff was being stored at home.
I was very fortunate within a very, very short space of time, I managed to get some exceptional press coverage, which included front page of Guardian Money, which resulted in an absolute avalanche of business. All of a sudden it went from very, very little to many parcels coming in on a daily basis.
Testing was very manual and you had to use very caustic acids to determine the purity of gold. My fingers were continually acid burned. However I stuck with it, it worked and it was just me in the business for over ten years.
Did That Become Unsustainable?
It got to the point where it was untenable to continue with a manual process. I bought my first piece of X-Ray kit, which allowed me to speed up substantially and be able to pay much more accurate prices. If something turns out to be 82.5% gold, then that’s what I would pay out on. It set me apart from my competitors.
By this time all of our ‘rip off’ cash for gold envelope companies had jumped on board. This is where they were overtaking me, because they were piling in big budget advertising onto the press yet they are often not transparent about what percentage they would be paying their customers.
Today I consistently offer well in excess of 90%, so my operation relies on volume and turnover. I have to turn over the material quickly and I’m looking for a margin of about 6%. I can run on a 6% margin, I can give excellent value for money and I’m making enough of a profit for it to be worthwhile. But of course, that doesn’t give me the huge budgets for advertising.
How Did You Become Visible Then?
I had to come up with other innovative ways of getting the message out and getting people to notice me. I struck on the idea of launching a parody website, which, funnily enough, is now being resurrected and in a few months, time is going to be relaunched.
I registered the domain Cats4Gold. The angle being that if you’re dull enough to post your gold to an unknown company without any upfront idea as to what you’re going to be paid, then you might as well post your gold to me and we’ll post you a cat!
And that’s the whole frame of the website, cats4gold.com. Swap your shabby tat for a tabby cat is the strap line. This website took months to produce and ultimately it produced a valuation of your gold. You put in how much gold you’ve got and that would be converted into, say, your gold is worth 2.4 cats.
Cats4gold.com got absolute tons of social media attention. Everyone knows that the internet was invented for cat stuff, cat videos, so it went absolutely viral all over the world and got a huge amount of traction. (No cats were harmed in the making of this website then or in the future!)
How Do You Prove Your Credibility?
It can be difficult in the world of gold to prove you are credible and ethical in your dealings. However a few years ago the UK trading standards introduced a national accreditation scheme called ‘buy with confidence’.
It was something I’d been aware of for some time, and I actually did something about it just over two years ago. This involved quite a rigorous inspection scheme. You have to agree to trading standards mediating should any complaints come in, you get thoroughly inspected. Your whole business process gets checked.
They came and oversaw my whole process from start to finish, from the customer filling out a claim form on the website, seeing the email trail that they’re presented with to how a package comes in to the counter, how it’s checked prior to opening weighed, and then the testing process, to the valuation, and ultimately the email going out to the customer with their quote for them to then authorize for payment, and then finally the closing email confirming that they’ve received their payment on the day that we’ve received the parcel. We turn everything around same day.
Subject to receiving timely authorisation from a customer, funds are in a customer’s bank account generally by 06:00 p.m the same working day. Wiltshire trading standards were happy. I’m proud to say we were the first precious metals dealer in the UK to obtain ‘buy with confidence’ accreditation.
When Did You Spot An Opportunity With Coins?
When you work with precious metals it’s inevitable you will become involved in the coin market. Coins made from precious metals have an intrinsic value, or can often have an intrinsic value over and above their precious metal content.
I knew very little about this, and I realised over time I needed to get up to speed. I needed to learn all about ‘numismatics’ ie. The study of coins, banknotes and medals. So I started attending coin events, which was a way of me selling coins within the trade to dealers who knew more than I did. As long I made my margin, then, I was happy however I knew that I was losing out in some instances, that there were certain coins that were worth a lot more than others.
And it was at that point that I became aware of a particular coin dealer who I started getting very friendly with and I knew I had to have him ‘in my corner’. Ultimately we struck a deal and he came into the company. I gave up 50% of my business for him to come on board and we acquired what used to be HSBC bank on Royal Bassett High Street.
I knew that I wanted to move my business out of my house. I knew that I wanted to build the business up and I knew that the business had good potential, but I had barriers in the way to do that. A former bank was the perfect solution. The HSBC building was unloved. It had failed to sell on a number of occasions, and there was a deal to be done. So the deal was struck and Old Bank Antiques came about.
At the time, I was adamant that I did not want a ‘cash for gold’ operation operating on my high street. It was not the location for a tacky shop, whereas an antique shop was a much better fit. That’s when we met and started working together ready for its opening.
It’s A Big Leap From A Small Antiques Shop To A Large Auction House:
It was a huge leap though there was a transition. Old Bank Antiques opened and then Covid19 happened and the shop shut. However the postal gold operation continued and we pretty much managed to continue to operate uninterrupted.
The majority of my small team staff continued to come in and we effectively operated in our little bubble, which 
we were allowed to do under the rules and we gradually came up with ideas for the evolution of the business – separating out the gold, from the coins, from the antiques.
We did a bit of brainstorming as to what would be a memorable name for a coin business. One of the most iconic UK coins is a coin called the Britannia, which has the image of a seated Britannia looking very regal and grand on the reverse of face of the coin. We decided to call ourselves the Britannia Coin company of Royal Wootton Bassett, which we felt has a good ring to it. So during lockdown, the website was put into production and it went live, and it started to gain traction very, very quickly.
With my background with web development, my main focus has always been on search engine optimisation. It’s all very well having a website however if you’re not getting visitors to your website, it’s useless. I worked on that.
We also managed to secure some fantastic exclusives in brand new coin issues, one of which came from the Royal Mint. This meant the Britannia Coin Company all of a sudden was catapulted into the coin market and from nowhere, became a key buyer and seller of some very, very high numismatic pieces.
Even then it became clear that with the business growth we needed more space. As the pandemic began to subside, we had way too many staff shoehorned into insufficient space. We had storage problems. We had too much stock.
We ended up taking on another business premises further down the high street. In other words we suffered from the typical growing pains of a new business. We were short staffed. We had a monumental, uphill struggle to get content onto the website. We were getting material from sellers in faster than we could process it, but it was a great position to be in.
We got wind that Lloyd’s Bank was likely to be closing. So an approach was made to the freeholder of the building, and it turned out that he owned a number of bank buildings and was looking to dispose of his property portfolio because of all the bank closures that were going on. We pitched what we wanted to do with the building, and he liked the idea and we bought the building. We did try to keep a banking hub within the building but unfortunately that was not a ‘goer’. This solved the problem of space for the coin business – but not the rest of the business.
We then heard a whisper that the Co-op supermarket was likely to close. We reached out to the freeholder and we met him and had a discussion and did a deal to purchase this property. It was the intention to secure this building, to set up an auction house, which sounded like a bit of fun.
What Was The Price Tag Of That Bit Of Fun?
It went from an estimate of just over £2 million pounds to over £3 million. And it’s another part to our jigsaw that we’ve created in Royal Wootton Bassett. The businesses work together. The auction market has been ripe for a shake up for some years now. Commission payments always used to sit at 10% – and remember I’d always worked on a six per cent margin in my gold business.
It’s only in relative recent times that buyer’s premiums have gradually crept up and seller’s commission has also crept up. If you’re now a buyer, you’ve got to expect to pay well over 20% premium on the hammer, often 24% or thereabouts. Well, that’s a huge amount, which inevitably means that the seller, the vendor, is going to get less money because bidders are reluctant to bid to the true value of an item because they’ve got to factor in that extra 20%.
Our attitude has been well, let’s drop the premiums back to traditional levels. That’s going to encourage sellers. Our vendors only pay 10%, so they’re happier, and then our buyers are only paying 10% so they can afford to bid more, which means that the vendors get more as well.
Your Auction House Is Not Just An Auction House Is It?
Auction houses today are typically will be located in the middle of nowhere, very often in old farm buildings or on an industrial site. Not a particularly exciting place to visit from a customer experience point of view. What we very much wanted to do was to create a full experience for a visitor on the High Street. We hear so often how town centre high streets are struggling and I will often push back on that. There are ways to do things, you just have to do things a little bit different.
Our auction rooms are heated and air conditioned and they are clean. If you want to eat or drink at many auction houses, it’s often a few limp sarnies and a drink in a plastic cup served through a hatch. Not only have we got nice, pleasant surroundings for the actual auction experience, we’ve also got coming on stream a quality cafe bistro where you can eat a decent meal that is more than just a bacon roll or a cup of coffee out of a plastic cup.
We’ve got a very experienced chef who will be operating an evening service as well as the things on offer during the day. We’ve got an exceptional wine list procured so that even if you’re not eating in the bistro, you can pop in for your wine. We’ve also got our art gallery upstairs with its own rooftop terrace, specifically created as an entertainment area.
We’re going to be going after some very high end lots in 2024 and beyond which require a certain level of interaction, both with our vendors, but also our potential buyers. We wanted to have a space that will give them the experience that they need and deserve.
