Blackcircles’ first year sales totalled $5,000 and in its final year sales reached $80,000,000. Mike was awarded Entrepreneurial Scotland’s Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year 2014 and in 2015, Blackcircles.com was acquired by Michelin for £50m plus a £40m earn out over 3 years.In 2016, Mike has launched several new projects including: The Welch Group providing private equity, with a focus on internet retail and property investment opportunities. Michael Welch OBE founded Blackcircles.com, the world’s first 'click to fit' online tyre retailer, in 2002, managing to build a market leading profitable business on less than $1m funding. “My role is very much to help develop new business opportunities and to guide the existing management team in the UK.”However, he has been handing over some duties, which “has meant that I’ve spent less time doing the things that I was doing but that I can devote more time to the future”.His other activities include The Welch Trust, which provides grants to support children and young people, with a focus on adoption and fostering.There is also work with The Prince’s Trust, funding the programme that gave Blackcircles crucial initial funding of £500, to help “people like me trying to start up and not able to find any funding”.Welch was even credited by Prince Charles in a speech at a Prince’s Trust event, noting its role in getting Blackcircles off the ground and its sale to Michelin. “If anything, the business has just got better and more capable of doing more things because we’ve got more capacity.”Michelin is looking to “take digital to the next level” and in his opinion, Blackcircles “would be better-placed hitching a ride on their spaceship than trying to chart that route ourselves, because of the infrastructure, the support and just the bandwidth and everything that they have. If you kick up a bit of a stink then it’s always a bit of fun.”Staying current is crucial. Picture: Jane Barlow.
Michael Welch founded online tire retailer BlackCircles in the United Kingdom in 2001. “It was personally quite difficult but it was the right thing,” he says.Did it change perceptions of Welch? “To start the business in Peebles with no money and to exit it to the world’s largest tyre manufacturer at the time in the way we did and everything that happened in between… as a single experience it’s going to be hard to beat”.Welch admits that the decision to sell was the hardest he’s ever faced due to the implications for the business and its people. What is exactly the same, though, is the big focus that we must have on getting it right for the customers.”He says such a concentration on customers is behind the success of Blackcircles, which he founded after moving to Edinburgh, having been recruited by Sir Tom Farmer to develop a website for Kwik Fit.Welch had left school at 16, working as a tyre fitter, and had set up his first tyre business in his teens before his move to Scotland.Once Blackcircles was up and running, a string of accolades for his entrepreneurial skills followed, and he gained support from other high-profile names including former Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy and Kwik Fit finance director Graeme Bissett, who later became Blackcircles’ chairman.“I had a really tight group of people who were very supportive and who educated me,” he says.Customers of the “click & fit” retailer pick their tyres from its website, which are then delivered to a local garage (with more than 2,000 across the UK signed up) to be fitted at a time of the buyer’s choosing.The acquisition of Blackcircles by Michelin was a landmark moment, with Welch saying at the time that the French group’s “strength… will allow us to underpin the multi-brand offering that we deploy in each garage, on every street corner”.Looking back, the deal is understandably a career highlight for the Liverpudlian. Born in Liverpool, England, Welch left school aged 16 and began working as a tyre fitter. A quarter of sales are coming from the US, a market where he sees particularly strong growth potential, and 15 per cent from the Middle East.“Really very quickly we’ve managed to develop a truly international sales spread, which is not what we achieved at Blackcircles at this stage, so it’s been really interesting to measure against the progress we had there.”As for the transition from selling treads to threads, from practical to more emotional purchases, he admits that many factors are different, from the proposition and customer to shipping and logistics – people don’t wait 18 months to buy clothes as they do tyres, he says, laughing.But he adds that if Atterley can offer the right proposition and price point, “and fundamentally if our customers buy into the fact they’re supporting the local boutiques… I’m pretty sure we can encourage people to use us more than once a year”.Also on board as chief operating officer is Kenny Baillie, who was at Blackcircles in its early stages as finance and commercial director, and who also spent a spell heading up Scottish clothing brand Ness.As for a return to working on a business in its earlier stages as opposed to the more developed Blackcircles, Welch recognises that technology has “definitely moved on, so we’re able to do things quicker and cheaper now than we could then.
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