Doing a number on the modern business of work on your phone

George Lineker, by contrast, takes the opposite approach. He sounds almost sheepish about the success of his telecoms start-up. “It’s embarrassing how simple it is,” he laughs.

Lineker (yes, he is former England football captain Gary’s son) is the co-founder of YourBusinessNumber, where customers pay £4.99 a month for a virtual phone number used to contact clients via WhatsApp Business, without the need for a second phone line.

“It works because it’s so easy,” he explains. “Customers put in their personal number on our website, receive WhatsApp Business verification messages 30 seconds later, then have a second number, which forwards all messages onto their existing number.

“We’ve stripped everything out of a traditional phone number offering — data, minutes, texts, apps. Our customers can then use their new number for WhatsApp business during set hours, not be tied to their phone — they can take control of when they’re working, not being bombarded all the time.”

Lineker, 31, started the business two years ago with tech entrepreneur Sebastian Lewis, 37 — they met over burgers and beer in the garden of former Manchester United chief executive Ed Woodward.

“I knew there was a market for second lines — you’d see people walking around with two phones; back in 2014 there were 14 million people with two phones — and I’d already tried building a business around a phone app that installed a second number on your phone,” Lineker explains.

“That idea didn’t work — too complicated. But then Meta launched WhatsApp business — meaning we’d have no need for serious tech, all privacy concerns would be dealt with by WhatsApp. We just had to provide an instant, cheap, second number that would be so useful to small firms and sole traders running their businesses on their phones.”

The duo pooled £5000 to build their website, then raised £150,000 on the SEIS scheme in January 2021; angel investors (including father Gary, and Woodward) plus institutional backers have since injected almost £800,000 in the business, giving it a £5.5 million valuation.

The firm now has 7000 customers: initially they were mostly personal trainers, hairdressers, electricians and other sole-traders, but larger firms are now buying as many as 500 numbers. “A lot of restaurant chains (who want every front-of-house manager to have a private number to deal with bookings), estate agencies — including Winkworth — and recruiters,” Lewis adds.

“We’re also getting nurses and doctors, who use WhatsApp to send scans and patient updates to colleagues and want to get it off their personal chat. We tried lobbying the NHS to admit the problem and start to use us, but they’ve spent huge amounts of money on their internal system and don’t want to admit no one is using it.”

WhatsApp is now the UK’s most-used messaging system: “Nobody wants to speak on the phone any more,” Lineker asserts. “I recently bought a house in London entirely on WhatsApp — the estate agent and solicitor both used WhatsApp business.”

The pair run their firm with a handful of staff and WeWork headquarters. “We’re the antithesis of the usual unicorn story,” Lineker asserts, “a small team and highly profitable business. The ideal exit would be someone like Vodafone being so sick of customers quitting their £60/month business phone contract and switching to us, that they come to us and buy their customers back [via acquisition]. That’s the dream.”

The duo are closely watching WhatsApp’s owner’s plans for their own expansion. YourBusinessNumber already works worldwide, with the US its second-biggest market; the founders are now plotting local pushes into Germany, Brazil and India.

Currently the firm’s churn — or number of customers leaving the business — is a respectable 3%. “And most customers are locked in for as long as their business is running — they don’t want to have to start again with a new number,” Lewis adds. That’s helped revenues grow by a fifth month-on-month for the past year.

Marketing efforts have been helped by a certain Match of the Day presenter speaking about his son’s business on social media — but George Lineker hits out at nepo-baby talk. “Sure, my dad having eight million followers on Twitter helps, but I believe you’ve got to take advantage of what you can.

“He wouldn’t invest if he didn’t believe in YourBusinessNumber. It might be a simple idea, but it really works.”