Edgar Thoemmes has co-founded a virtual office business with 15,000 customers, a tea company he’s now exiting, an insurance business he built to get his brother out of a corporate burnout spiral, and a project applying AI to his dad’s antiquarian book trade. He doesn’t work longer hours than anyone else in the room. Here’s what founders can take from how he actually splits his time.

Interview by Ash Phillips, Rebellious Co | Feature for TechSPARK

There’s a version of the multi-business founder story that gets told a lot: the serial entrepreneur running on four hours’ sleep, five phones, and pure adrenaline. Edgar Thoemmes, founder or co-founder of Virtually There, Canton Tea, and a growing stable of other Bristol businesses, doesn’t fit it. He sleeps well. He doesn’t work especially long hours. At the Rebel Meetup fireside chat, he explained why running five businesses at once isn’t actually harder than running one, if you’re honest about what you’re not going to do.

Edgar started young, cleaning cars with his best friend for pocket money as a kid, then building a web design business on evenings and weekends while working as a bank data analyst. Twenty-odd years and several businesses later, the pattern that got him from one to five has stayed exactly the same.

Every business started with a person, not an idea

A supportive boss let Edgar drop hours as the web design side hustle grew, and within two or three years he’d made the jump properly. It’s a route he thinks more founders should consider before quitting outright.

“There’s a certain level of privilege in there, but you might be able to drop hours, turn your original employer into your first client even.”

Around the same time, a family friend roped him into a new tea company. That became Canton Tea, co-founded with his business partner Jen, who’d learned her trade working alongside Anita Roddick in the early days of The Body Shop. The company started with a single tea, sourced from a professor in Taiwan who turned out to have been gifting the family tea worth £2,000 a kilo for years without anyone realising.

The pattern repeats across every business Edgar has built. Virtually There, his virtual office company, started with his best friend Jack as a way of staying in touch while both were building other things. The insurance business came from watching his brother Alex burn out in corporate construction and deciding to build him a way out. Even the antiquarian book project is really about supporting his dad.

“Every single one of them has been because of someone that I’ve respected or had an opportunity to work with. It’s about partnering with people, and yes, I’ve got lots of businesses, but what I do have is good people around me.”

Ten years too early, and the cost of building a market that doesn’t exist yet

Canton Tea launched roughly a decade before the UK’s premiumisation wave caught up with tea the way it had already caught up with coffee, beer and sourdough. Being early meant spending years and real money convincing customers that tea could be worth £20 or £50 a serve, not just a teabag dunked in a mug.

“We probably spent 80% of our time and capital on convincing people in the UK to stop drinking English breakfast tea from one bag. It’s a lot easier to sell into an existing market than one you’re creating.”

That education process built the Canton brand, but it also meant eighteen years in, the rocket-ship growth never quite arrived. Edgar and Jen are now working through a management buyout, handing the business to an MD with a decade in coffee rather than selling to private equity or a trade buyer. It’s a deliberately simpler, cleaner exit than either of those routes, even if it means leaving some money on the table. “We wanted to find someone who could continue what we were doing, but also have a simple transaction,” he says.

Virtually There: the unglamorous business of other people’s mail

Virtually There provides virtual office addresses to small businesses, now across 18 UK cities, with 15,000 customers and around 1,000 signing up every month. Most are early-stage founders who don’t want their home address on Companies House.

The compliance side is heavier than it looks. Every customer needs an anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer check, and with a low average revenue per user, the business can’t afford assisted sign-ups. So Edgar’s team built a self-service onboarding platform, and a scanning operation in Bristol that opens, digitises and forwards every piece of post that arrives.

The next step is an AI inbox that reads each letter and tells the customer what to actually do with it.

“We might receive a letter from HMRC. We’ll analyse it and tell you what to do with that letter. Maybe it’s an authentication code, maybe it’s a bill you really need to pay.”

For neurodivergent founders in particular, that’s more than a nice-to-have: a two-page HMRC letter that reads as noise becomes a single, clear instruction. The business has also struck a partnership that lets new customers open a business bank account within five seconds of signing up, with more embedded services planned.

The rule behind all of it: alignment over equity

Asked what he’d tell someone starting out, Edgar comes back to people again, and specifically to alignment. He’s seen founders assume equity is the best way to motivate a team, but believes understanding what really matters to each person is far more important.

“If they cared about equity, they probably would have started the company.”

For Edgar, the lesson is simple: great teams aren’t built by offering everyone the same reward. They’re built by understanding what motivates people and making sure everyone is working towards the same goal.

Ambition is not geo located

On expansion, Edgar’s advice is to start local and small, deliver well, then look for genuine pull before rolling out anywhere else. Rebel Meetups itself is the example sitting in the room: it started in Bristol, then someone from Bath asked if they could run one there because the train was annoying. Then London. Then someone moving home asked to start one wherever they were headed, which turned out to be Melbourne.

“We’ve scratched an itch that’s universal for people, regardless of where they are. Some of the best ideas exist in the minds of people who aren’t in major hubs. Everyone in London is raising a billion quid to do last-mile delivery faster. I don’t need my McDonald’s any faster than it currently is. But someone in the Outer Hebrides probably isn’t solving that. They’re probably solving an infrastructural problem, and that might be a bigger win for the world at large.”

It’s a fitting note for a fireside chat built entirely around the idea that the businesses worth building aren’t the ones with the loudest ambition, but the ones with the right people, the right alignment, and the discipline to know when good enough actually is.

The practical takeaway

If you’re a founder eyeing a second or third venture, the lesson from Edgar isn’t to work harder or find more hours in the day. It’s to be ruthless about what each business actually gets from you, to build with people you’d choose to spend time with regardless of the business, and to accept that 80% delivered is worth more than 100% you never ship. Start whatever’s next locally and small, and let genuine demand decide when it’s time to go further.

Edgar Thoemmes is the founder of Virtually There and co-founder of Canton Tea. Find out more here!

— Ash Phillips is the founder of Rebellious Co, a community and events organisation connecting entrepreneurs across 30 cities and 10 countries. He hosts Rebel Meetups Bristol monthly.