BQ Spring 2018

£4.95

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Business Quarter Magazine

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Celebrating and inspiring entrepreneurship

BUSINESS QUARTER Spring 2018

HITTING THE HIGH NOTES

Fiona Stewart is the brains behind Wales’s Green Man music festival

THIS IS A WOMAN’S WORLD

Carolyn Pearson’s mission is to give women the freedom to travel

ALL IN THE MIX

American trail mixes inspired the Taylors to launch Real Handful

Spring 2018

FLOWER POWER

Lana Elie’s online business is coming up roses by connecting independent florists to customers

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WE KNOW you’re all different, that’s why you’ll find us different.

We’re more than just accountants; our business advisory team are helping our clients manage more than just their numbers. Our Cloud specialists are putting real-time financial information at fingertips.

The wealth team are on hand to guide and shape futures, our tax and payroll teams taking care of the here and now and not forgetting wills, all part of our service.

t: (0191) 281 8191 e: wanttoknowmore@robson-laidler.co.uk Robson Laidler Accountants, Fernwood House, Fernwood Road, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 1TJ

www.robson-laidler.co.uk

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WELCOME

“This will be the last printed edition of BQ magazine.

Instead, our interviews with entrepreneurs – which have characterised the magazine and made it stand out from the crowd – will shift online.”

BQ is part of BE Group, the UK’s market leading business improvement specialists. www.be-group.co.uk

BQ, Spectrum 6, Spectrum Business Park, Seaham, SR7 7TT. www.bqlive.co.uk.

As a dedicated supporter of entrepreneurship, BQ is making a real and tangible contribution to local, regional and national economic growth across the UK. We are unique in what we aim to achieve as a media brand, a brand that has established a loyal audience of high growth SMEs as well as leading business influencers. They wholeheartedly believe in BQ’s focus on people – those individuals that are challenging the traditional ways of doing things. They are our entrepreneurs. BQ reaches entrepreneurs and senior business executives across Scotland, the North East and Cumbria, the North West, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Wales, London and the South, in-print, online and through branded events.

All contents copyright © 2018 BQ. All rights reserved. While every effort is made to ensure accuracy, no responsibility can be accepted for inaccuracies, howsoever caused. No liability can be accepted for illustrations, photographs, artwork or advertising materials while in transmission or with the publisher or their agents.

All content marked ‘Profile’, ‘Partner’ and ‘Special Report’ is paid for advertising.

All information is correct at time of going to print, March 2018.

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SPRING 2018

Our readers have been at the very heart of BQ since it launched its first magazine in 2008 in the North-East of England. They have guided our story choices, inspired our redesigns and driven us on to celebrate and inspire entrepreneurship, expanding across England, Scotland and Wales.

Over the years, our readers’ demands have changed, stoking the popularity of our BQ Live website and daily BQ email newsletters. That led to last year’s changes, with BQ’s English regional magazines being expanded into a single Great Britain-wide title, shifting live news and opinion pieces onto the website and allowing the printed magazine to concentrate on what it does best – interviews with entrepreneurs and their supporters.

Now, those readers demand more changes – and we’ve listened. Our readers want our content to be delivered online and so BQ has expanded its BQ Live website and its email newsletters.

As part of that expansion, BQ will shift to become a digital-focused publisher, concentrating on the online services that our readers want.

That means this will be the last printed edition of BQ magazine. Instead, our interviews with entrepreneurs – which have characterised the magazine and made it stand out from the crowd – will shift online.

The same high-quality content will still be available free through the BQ Live website. Plus, BQ will continue to publish its popular printed special reports for its commercial partners, focused on specific geographies, sectors and issues affecting the entrepreneurial and high-growth communities in Great Britain.

It has been a privilege and an honour to edit BQ over the past year, working alongside the best team of contributing editors ever assembled for a business magazine – Steve Dyson, Mike Hughes, Maria McGeoghan and Paul Robertson. I also salute the work of Brian Nicholls, who was the launch editor for BQ North-East.

BQ isn’t simply about its readers or its writers though. There’s a team that’s worked behind the scenes to create one of the finest magazines in the country; from designers Stephen Ford, Craig Hopson and Oliver Hurcombe – and previously Jake Charlton and the legendary Sarah MacNeil – and subeditor Peter Jackson, through to ace photographers Kevin Gibson and Nicky Rogerson and distribution assistant Sam Yard.

Those unsung heroes have been supported by members of the advertising sales team, including Helen Gowland, Rachael Laschke, Mike Moloney and Hellen Murray, providing the same high level of service to our commercial clients as our editorial team has to our readers. Holding it all together has been production manager Steve Jessop, who has kept us all in line while having a smile on his face.

And, last but not least, a special thank you to Bryan Hoare, who came up with the concept for BQ and has been a ball of energy since day one.

Thank you to all those who have made BQ such a success over the past decade. And thank you to all those readers who have provided feedback during the past year – I look forward to seeing you all online at BQ Live very soon.

Peter Ranscombe, editor

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CONTENTS SPRING 2018 90

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14 20 24 30

DRIVING CHANGE Richard Simpson, the man behind the wheel at Walker Transport

FIONA’S FESTIVAL Fiona Stewart has made the Green Man Festival an international success

A CREDIT TO HIMSELF Adrian Williamson explains how Jumpstart helps save companies cash through R&D tax credits

IT’S A WOMAN’S WORLD – TOO Carolyn Pearson works to give women the freedom to travel

CV LIBRARIAN Lee Biggins, who owns job website CV-library, insists on doing it right

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SPARKLING CONVERSATION

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BUBBLES ON DEMAND

46 48 68

Steve Dyson talks to Siobhan Holmes who’s taking Prosecco to the nation Nick Baker’s business delivers Champagne to Londoners on the day they order

READY FOR TAKEOFF New routes and airlines are creating jobs and prosperity at Birmingham Airport

TASTE OF INDIA

Ignisis has revived Indian wine and is now selling fruit ciders

CUTTING EDGE BUSINESS

Oliver Bridge who founded the Cornerstone subscription shaving service has been an entrepreneur since he was 15

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Celebrating and inspiring entrepreneurship 14 114

30

24 76

ROSES ARE ‘FLOOMING’ IN HACKNEY

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HOT CHOCOLATE

90

IT’S ALL IN THE MIX

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FITNESS FANATIC

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BEATING BABY BLUES

Lana Elie’s online flower ordering business is coming up roses Amy Granger overcame family and personal difficulties to grow her business

US trail mixes inspired Joe and Carly Taylor to launch Real Handful

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106 114

DREAMLAND’S SAVIOUR

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ROLL OUT THE BARREL

Paul Alexander, founder of elite fitness, has a mission to change lives

Danielle Kinney’s Placenta Plus is helping new mums around the world

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SEEING THE LIGHT IN BIRMINGHAM When Rob Pollard moved Lightbox Digital to Birmingham it changed the business completely

Ben Wiles saved Margate’s famous theme park as Mike Hughes relates

The Whisky Market allows investors to buy and sell casks of Scotch

HIGH LIFE 53

The best in travel, equipment and drinks

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CONTACTS SALES BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Helen Gowland

SENIOR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Rachael Laschke

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Mike Moloney

helenG@bqlive.co.uk

rachael@bqlive.co.uk

mike@bqlive.co.uk

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Hellen Murray

ACCOUNT DIRECTOR Dave Townsley

FINANCE ASSISTANT Maria Winsper

dave@bqlive.co.uk

maria@bqlive.co.uk

hellen@bqlive.co.uk

DESIGN & PRODUCTION DESIGNER Stephen Ford

DESIGNER Craig Hopson

DESIGNER Oliver Hurcombe

stephen@bqlive.co.uk

craig@bqlive.co.uk

oliver@bqlive.co.uk

PRODUCTION MANAGER Steve Jessop

DISTRIBUTION ASSISTANT Sam Yard

steve@bqlive.co.uk

sam@bqlive.co.uk

MULTIMEDIA SENIOR DIGITAL JOURNALIST Suzy Jackson

DIGITAL JOURNALIST Ellen McGann

suzy@bqlive.co.uk

ellen@bqlive.co.uk

DIGITAL JOURNALIST Chris Middleton

SENIOR DIGITAL JOURNALIST Bryce Wilcock

chris@bqlive.co.uk

bryce@bqlive.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPHY KG Photography info@kgphotography.co.uk

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MIDLANDS & LONDON Steve Dyson

YORKSHIRE & SOUTH EAST Mike Hughes

SUB EDITOR Peter Jackson

steve.dysonmedia@gmail.com

mikehughes@bqlive.co.uk

p.jackson77@btinternet.com

NORTH WEST & WALES Maria McGeoghan

NORTH EAST & CUMBRIA Paul Robertson

maria.mcgeoghan@bqlive.co.uk

paul.robertson@bqlive.co.uk

GROUP COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR Bryan Hoare

EDITOR Peter Ranscombe

bryan@bqlive.co.uk

peter@ranscombe.co.uk

0191 389 8468 | bqlive.co.uk BQ LIVE

@BQLIVE

READ ONLINE BQ Magazine is available to read online at bqlive.co.uk for when you are on the move

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B U L L E T I N

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IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT

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Walkers’ blue and white trucks are a common sight on our roads, moving more than a million pallets of goods every year.

Chief executive Richard Simpson tells Mike Hughes about his very personal approach to keeping the operation in top gear.

H

ow do you post a lightbulb? The answer is probably “Very carefully”, and Richard Simpson might add that it is easier if there are a few of them to pack together – so maybe five million would help.

Add to that load the tens of thousands of taps and sinks, more than a million drink bottle tops, four million envelopes and stationery products and basically anything that fits on to a pallet and you have an idea of the work his Walkers Transport trucks tackle every year.

The company has been going for 35 years and now has a base in Manchester as well as its Leeds headquarters, from where it also operates the “Northern Hub” for Palletways, Europe’s largest pallet distribution network. But Simpson is a relative newcomer, joining three years ago and towards the end of last year was at the centre of a £20m management buyout (MBO) with private equity firm Total Capital Partners.

So, he is now in the driving seat and, while his

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eyes are firmly on the road ahead, that doesn’t mean he can’t roll the window down, turn up the music and enjoy the trip.

“We have invested, but have only just started on the journey,” he explains. “Do we want to dominate the world of transport? No. But do we want to dominate the chosen segments in the geographical areas we want to work in? Probably.

“But not at any cost, because the important thing is to keep growing financially, but also grow the people in the organisation and making sure folks are equipped to do their jobs properly, whether they are a driver needing the right tools to do his job or a financial director who needs some new kit to count the numbers better and keep score of how we are progressing.

“We had a good year last year, with revenue up by 14.6% – I still think we could do better, but we set ourselves high standards and on our growth curve we still have quite a lot to do. We are pretty good

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“

“If you can encourage all of your people to do the right thing at the right time with a smile on their face and be engaged with the company then good things will happen.”

at what we do, but for me ‘Pretty good’ is not enough because, as Jim Collins said in his book Good To Great, ‘Good is the enemy of great’.”

The spirit of continual improvement at the company was a key attraction of the MBO. Simpson saw the potential for growth, but he also had to like the company, and the way it dealt with its customers and staff struck a chord. You soon get the impression chatting to this very amiable boss that he wouldn’t have made the move from document specialists Shred-It in the first place if he didn’t think he was going to enjoy himself.

“To be brutally honest, I probably didn’t see the opportunity at the time as clearly as the investors did, because I was so busy getting stuff done,” he admits. “We knew we were doing ok, but didn’t realise how attractive we were and how capable we were doing our jobs.

“I certainly never set out with the intention of being the boss, that was a serendipitous

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event brought about by the MBO. I just sort of keep my head and do what I think is the best thing every day and then it is up to other people to reward where it is due. For me that meant the job being all about getting the people to believe that they can be the best they can be.

“If you can encourage all of your people to do the right thing at the right time with a smile on their face and be engaged with the company then good things will happen. And, so far, it has been a blast – an absolute blast.”

Let’s pause for a couple of thoughts. Firstly… form an orderly queue for the chance to work with this guy and secondly… how often have you heard that sort of supportive and sincere eloquence from an influential boss and what difference would it make to face that sort of encouragement every day? Read on, there’s more where that came from.

Simpson’s modesty – “I’m ok at some things

and not good at others” – fails to mask an impressive track record at Shred-It and he talks of a vision and the execution of “What we had dreamt about” when the MBO succeeded.

“We have rules and regulations about how we behave around each other and there are visions and values and what amazed me when I introduced those in around 2016 was how quickly they caught fire – basically all we did was find a way of communicating what was important to us,” he says.

“I haven’t got any fairy dust because it doesn’t exist. It is about engaging people and as long as you have great people who come to work with a smile on their face because they know where we are going, then we will be fine.

That’s all I can ever lay claim to doing.

“And if people come to work for me with a great attitude and put the effort in then it is up to us to make them successful, which is a very good way of transferring the responsibility

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for your success on to your manager to make sure you have the capability to do the job. I get such a buzz out of someone doing something they didn’t think they could, so much so that if a manager tells me they have had to let someone go, then I’ll say, ‘Well who took them on?’, and if they reply, ‘I did’, then I’ll ask them, ‘Who’s fault is it then? It’s not theirs, it’s yours because you are responsible for their performance’.”

That constructive frankness is key to his work ethic and might well come from his family background. His dad was a farmer at Draughton near Skipton, so Simpson was not a stranger to early starts, nor to being “Up to my neck in s*** all day”.

Working on the farm – because no one else was going to do it if he didn’t – taught him about doing a job once and best. With the unfailing support of his wife, Sarah, he set out to take those principles deep into Yorkshire and along the highways and byways of Britain.

An appreciation of teamwork is a core belief and probably stems comes from his love of sport, playing cricket in the summer and watching rugby at Wharfedale as well as going to the gym three or four days a week and fitting in the odd run when there is time. He certainly needs to be fit, given the job he has ahead of him as the sector in which he is now a leader confronts long-term change.

It can seem easy to criticise from outside, with exhaust fumes pumping out along thousands of miles of roads and fuel-hungry 44-tonne trucks seemingly creating miles of jams all by themselves. That happens, of course, but the smart bosses know that as well as anyone and they are changing the way they work for the good of the planet as much as their own reputations.

“The industry will change, and you can see the start of that in London with tariffs and restrictions on trucks over a certain age,” he says. “The critical thing is the pace of that change, and when we look at 10 million electric vehicles on our roads by 2019, I think companies of our size are still a fair way off that and the Euro 6 engines we have now are already so clean, with all sorts of aerodynamic modifications.

“But there has to be some change because eventually the world will run out of diesel but there are a lot of things that need to happen before we are all racing towards electric vehicles. I know they have done trials in Germany on driverless vehicles, and we have

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“

“The industry sometimes doesn’t do itself any favours trying to get people to come into the industry. Instead, people need to realise it is an honourable vocation.”

watched that from a distance, but I am not 100% sure that people will get comfortable in my lifetime with artics travelling up and down the M1 without drivers.

“The whole industry can sometimes get a bad rap, but it is a completely honourable, earthy business and if it didn’t exist there would be a lot of very disappointed people in shops with nowt to buy. Certainly the more environmentally-friendly we can be and the more caring we are about how we are portrayed will help, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you want to buy a product from B&Q someone has to get it there – and would

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you rather it was on some wheels on the floor or on a one tonne pallet on a drone in the air?”

Driving forward his business are the men and women who sit in the cabs on top of those wheels and take Simpson’s reputation out on a road-trip. In some businesses they might be at the bottom of the pile, but it is no surprise that this former tractor driver reserves special praise for his own drivers.

“They are true professionals,” he says. “They are continually trained on the job – we are now a recognised training centre for the Certificate of Professional Competence, so they are a very responsible set of people and they need to be

because they have a big vehicle that can do a lot of damage if it gets out of control.

“They do a fantastic job and the industry sometimes doesn’t do itself any favours trying to get people to come into the industry.

Instead, people need to realise it is an honourable vocation and should be treated as such.”

The Simpson route is a fairly-straight A-road, with no complicating twists and turns. Come in, do your job with pride and as well as you possibly can and he will be happy to work with you. That’s how simple classic Yorkshire management can be. n

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Partner

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Cross-border trading: how to do business abroad safely

Aziz Rahman, of award-winning solicitors Rahman Ravelli, explains some of the precautions companies must take if they trade abroad.

www.rahmanravelli.co.uk

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Trading abroad can bring a number of rewards. But it can bring challenges that, if not recognised and managed appropriately, can become problems.

Issues such as bribery, money laundering and tax evasion may seem like remote concepts to many corporates and individuals who do business abroad or who are thinking of doing so.

But these are not irrelevant theories and ideas.

Many, if not all, countries are now more alert to the signs of illegal behaviour. Their investigating authorities are now quicker to recognise it, they act faster and they are more likely to work with counterparts in other countries to tackle it if it crosses borders.

Anyone trading abroad has to show the same awareness of and willingness to prevent such wrongdoing. As a firm that provides companies with “health checks’’ – to assess the risks to their business – and internal investigations when problems are suspected, we speak with experience when it comes to the need to reduce the danger of legal problems.

Bribery prevention Companies that are the subject of bribery allegations can see their finances, reputation and ability to function properly all damaged. In the UK, a conviction under the Bribery Act, for bribery anywhere in the world, can lead to unlimited fines, up to ten years in prison and assets being confiscated.

For this reason alone, companies trading abroad must prevent bribery. This involves assessing risks to it and then devising and introducing well-researched and properly-enforced measures designed to reduce the risk of bribery and increase the chances of being able to identify it.

Such measures include efforts to be fully aware of the corruption risks in the countries where the company trades, proactive measures to check on those who work for or with it and appropriate whistle blowing procedures. The authorities are likely to be more lenient if a company that is investigated can demonstrate that it took genuine steps to be legally compliant.

Money laundering Money laundering is another area where companies trading abroad must adopt a careful, methodical

“

“Many, if not all, countries are now more alert to the signs of illegal behaviour.’’

stance in order to avoid any risks. They need to know what it is and be able to recognise the signs of it.

Money laundering is the disguising of the origins of money that is the proceeds of crime. In the UK, money laundering carries a maximum sentence of 14 years, under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

Preventing money laundering involves recognising the risk of it and creating procedures for: checking the identity and background of potential clients, investors or trading partners; scrutinising the motives of anyone who wishes to move money into, out of or around the business; researching the true beneficiaries of any deal, the sources of funding and the exact relationships between all parties involved; reporting concerns about a deal if any party is vague about the amounts of money or people involved, asks for strange conditions to be attached to the deal or insists on cash-only transactions; restricting access to company bank accounts; training staff to be aware of the signs of money laundering and their obligations to report it.

Tax The past two years have seen revelations of large-scale non-payment of tax involving offshore companies. Leaked information in the Panama Papers and then the Paradise Papers has seen many high-profile individuals and organisations placed under the spotlight.

While it is unlikely many companies trading abroad will face such allegations, they have to take the right legal advice to ensure they are complying with the tax laws where they are based and where they trade.

Tax is like many other issues that companies face when trading abroad: it is challenging but can be managed. The problems start when the management falls short. n

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THE

MUSIC MAKER Fiona Stewart has ridden the ups and downs of the entertainment scene to turn the Green Man into one of Europe’s most-loved music festivals, writes Maria McGeoghan.

F

iona Stewart has seen the tide turn in the world of music festivals. From having eggs thrown at her during one particularly stormy licensing meeting to getting a letter of thanks from a local Waitrose for all the extra business from festival-goers, times have definitely changed.

And, in the intervening years, Stewart has become one of the best-known names in the festival industry and the power behind the Green Man Festival held in Brecon every summer. Thousands of people flock to Crickhowell for an amazing music lineup, food, politics, art, crafts, film, comedy, Welsh beer and much more.

With no corporate sponsorship, and a green and sustainable ethos, The Green Man is one of the few independent festivals left and is seen as one of the best in Europe.

And, from the moment she starts to talk about her beloved Green Man, which she owns and runs, you can tell that Stewart absolutely loves what she does and is proud to have come a long way in life after a difficult start.

“I’ve been around music all my life,” she says. “At a young age I was always helping out with bands and trying to see what they needed.”

The youngest in her family, Stewart left home in her early teens when her mother had begun to develop severe mental health issues. At 18, after a period of living in squats and on sofas, she found herself in a homeless shelter with a new-born son.

Stewart then began working with the drag artistes of Camden, who looked after her and brought her in to their family. Eventually, Stewart and her son were given their own flat, which was to signal the start of a whole new life and she eventually went to university to study psychology.

Stewart’s experience of living on a low income with a little one to look after is a thread that runs through the whole Green Man experience. “I know what it’s like

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to be a single mum with not much money, so we have amazing things for kids to do from learning circus skills to learning to DJ in our teenage area called ‘Somewhere’,” she explains.

“Teenagers need that space to do their own thing.”

The Green Man site is also open for “Settlement” the week running up to the festival, which allows families a low-cost camping holiday before the festivities begin.

And again, tickets are priced with families in mind, with kids under five free and under 12s costing £30.

Stewart’s association with festivals started in the late 1990s when she was asked to try and turn around the famous Big Chill Festival and bring it back from the brink. “A friend told me it was having problems so I went as a consultant to try and sort it out,” says Stewart.

“

“We have amazing things for kids to do from learning circus skills to learning to DJ in our teenage area.”

“Then I had to stay to see it through. I loved it. I was building it up to be how I wanted it to be. It was a terrific time of development.

We went from 3,000 tickets to 42,000 in seven years at different sites around the country.”

And that’s when Stewart came face to face with the “Not In My Backyard” brigade, who were prepared to fight tooth and nail to stop a festival turning up on their doorsteps. “I negotiated the festival licences and tried to get the councils and the communities onside,” she says.

“I remember one festival in Dorset when you would have thought the Vikings were coming.

They even took everything valuable out of the church.

“I remember people screaming and throwing eggs at me at another meeting. It was up to us to try and create trust with the community.

“Then, in 2003, the whole licensing system changed and it was a lot easier to get permission after that. It was a much fairer system.”

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Shortly after that, Stewart decided that she wanted to do something for herself and settled on the Green Man Festival. She says: “I’d always been in touch with the people who started it and the concept started to develop into a business.

“I’ll always remember going to a sheep farm in Crickhowell and we drove around it at what seemed like 1,000 miles an hour looking for potential sites.

“Then I saw a bungalow and a garden and I thought that that was the perfect spot. I thought it would make a great amphitheatre.”

The new Green Man was up and running and ticket sales went up from 500 to 6,000 in one year. It was the start of a real success story, which has seen the festival go from strength to strength with 15,000 tickets sold every year and up to 25,000 people on site during the course of the whole event.

In 2010, Green Man was awarded the “UK Best British Festival Award” and people come from as far as Norway, Japan, Germany, France,

Spain, the United States, and Sweden to enjoy the event.

But this successful run hasn’t been without its problems, particularly when the world went off a financial cliff in 2008. Green Man’s insurance underwriters went into liquidation and money was in short supply.

“Oh yes, we’ve had some quite challenging times,” says Stewart. “No-one was lending any money so we had real cash flow problems.

“I re-mortgaged my house, but I still had to find £740,000 in a recession. I rang all the contractors and said we’re not going to make it this year.”

But then something amazing happened. “I got a call to say that they had all got together and they were going to give me credit until after the festival. It was a worrying time. My hair started falling out and I was looking like an old hag.”

Then in 2012 a horse trials held just before the festival damaged the site and the Welsh Government stepped in to help her sort it out.

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“I’ve been around music all my life, at a young age I was always helping out with bands and trying to see what they needed.”

“That was pretty awful too,” says Stewart.

“We lost £1.2m in ticket sales that year.”

Nowadays, Green Man sells 5,000 tickets even before the line-up is announced and is always a sell-out. And, despite the huge array of other treats on offer, good music is at the heart of the four-day August festival with names like the Fleet Foxes and The War on Drugs just two of the 38 acts performing.

“We’ve never had a problem getting amazing performers because the people we approach want to play Green Man,” says Stewart. “The music is very, very important.

“We’ve got six music stages, including the amazing ‘Big Mountain’ stage, which has the Black Mountains as a back drop. American artists want to be on that stage, it’s such a

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dramatic background. When we spoke to PJ Harvey who played last year I think we just had to show her a picture of that stage to convince her.”

And there’s a lot more than music to enjoy.

“The Green Man is a lifestyle event,” explains Stewart.

“The food is as good as you will get at any food festival. We’re also proud to feature a Welsh beer festival and there’s a science area with representatives from universities like Cardiff and Cambridge.

“You can dance all night, stay up and watch comedy or sit in a hot tub looking at the stars with a glass of prosecco. It’s not for an age group or type.”

Unlike many other festivals, those who

come are encouraged to go out and explore Wales, where they have a big impact on the local economy. Stewart says: “Around 75% of people are from outside Wales, so I’m pleased that we are a wealth creator. I once got a letter of thanks from Waitrose in Abergavenny for all the business we had sent their way and during the festival the local butchers said it was like Christmas day every day.

“We have every sort of accommodation from B&B to cottages to five-star hotels. Green Man is very important for the local economy.”

Even the worst that a Welsh summer can throw at you doesn’t appear to dampen spirits.

“People say that it rains every year and yes, that is true,” Stewart smiles.

“We are in the mountains. You can be

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“

“We’ve never had a problem getting amazing performers because the people we approach want to play Green Man, the music is very, very important.”

muddy and sunburned all on the same day.

“They come well prepared. I’ve seen sixperson gazebo tents with their own entrance hall and we give them rubbish bags, so they can tidy up after themselves. They take pride in the space. This is not a druggy event.”

Stewart’s company, Plant Pot, employs six people full time but, during the festival, it has 48 managers who come back year after year.

“We do it all ourselves,” she says.

“Bars, production, stewarding, everything is within the company. We could make more money.

“We are one of the few independents left

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and I value the choices we can make. I’m not down on sponsorship but I’d prefer to have 32 Welsh brewers showing off what they can do instead.”

Plant Pot’s turnover is £4.2m but that includes other ventures like the Kings Cross Welsh Beer Festival, which Stewart got off the ground a few years ago.

“Yes, Green Man makes a profit – but I’m not going to tell you how much,” laughs Stewart. “A lot goes in and a lot goes out.”

Green Man’s charitable arm has already raised £500,000 for good causes.

So, now to the big question. Of all the

musicians she has encountered over the years, who is the best?

“I once looked after hospitality for David Bowie at Glastonbury in 2002,” remembers Stewart. “He was my hero, so I spent a lot of time trying not to look muddy.

“He was supposed to arrive by helicopter but there wasn’t room to land so he had to come by car. Lots of people were banging on the car as he went past so he was a bit rattled by the time he arrived. He was a bit nervous about playing on the Pyramid Stage. David Bowie nervous. I’ll always remember how nice he was to talk to.” n

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Partner

Use your cutting edge research to cut your tax Tax credit specialist Jumpstart helps ecommerce businesses to claim valuable tax relief.

IN his role as a technical analyst at Jumpstart, the UK’s leading research and development (R&D) tax credit specialist, Adrian Williamson is right at the coalface of the digital revolution.

Having previously pioneered revolutionary software for some of the UK’s biggest bluechip companies and having researched human computer interaction and neural networks at university, he is now helping ecommerce businesses across the UK receive the support they need to bring new technological advances to market.

As a technical analyst, it is Williamson’s job to work hand-in-hand with ecommerce businesses from all corners of the UK that feel they are developing new technology on which they may be able to claim tax relief, saving them thousands, sometimes even millions on research and development costs.

“The R&D tax credit scheme is focused on rewarding companies for advancing technology that makes it very attractive to ecommerce businesses,” Williamson tells BQ. “However, because it’s a technically assessed scheme, you need technical expertise to judge where the advance is, the challenges the company has faced developing the technology and whether or not they’re developing something which is above the industry standard, which is where Jumpstart comes in.”

In order to claim R&D tax credits, as Williamson mentioned, businesses must be

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Partner

able to demonstrate to HM Revenues & Customs (HMRC) that the project or projects they’re including in their claim are truly aimed at advancing their field of science or technology beyond the existing industry baseline, meaning an advance on what’s currently available in the market.

So, if you’re a business with an ecommerce website or platform, you might well be eligible to apply for R&D tax credits, as Williamson explains: “If, for example, you’re using an ecommerce platform such as Magento 1 and you’re looking to upgrade to Magento 2 to get the benefits, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to claim simply for that.

“However, if you had a number of plug-ins that were now outdated and not compatible with the upgraded version of Magento, then you would have to start developing the technology yourself or with the assistance of your staff or even freelancers. This you would be able to claim for. It is a typical example of ecommerce development.

“Companies can’t just sit around for six months waiting for updates, they have to be proactive and innovative, especially if they want to deliver competitive advantage to their clients. The technology you’re investing in needs to be leading edge, responsive and engaging for customers whether it’s for business-to-consumer or business-to-business clients and it must make sure those people can access the goods and services that they need to get to easily.”

Another key theme that Williamson and the team have highlighted is the diversity of businesses now applying for R&D tax credits to help them develop new kinds of platforms. Whereas previously the ecommerce space was primarily focused on fast-moving consumer goods, businesses of all shapes and sizes are now operating in the space, selling anything from homes to bathrooms, furnishings and even online lending platforms.

“One of the things that we’ve seen happen in the ecommerce space recently is that we [the consumers] have gone from buying small goods online and bits and pieces from Amazon and eBay to shopping for kitchens and bathrooms,” he adds.

“If you look at the major retailers for example in the kitchen market, you’ll see these very rich, online designer environments where you can design and visualise your kitchen using the products that are currently in stock at your local outlet.

“The development of the technologies behind these ecommerce offerings is very eligible as far as the R&D tax relief scheme is concerned.

Hardware and software wise, you also need to ensure it works across a range of technologies that people may have in their home, as well as being fully integrated with back office systems to ensure fast and effective order processing and fulfilment for clients. These ecommerce systems are well beyond the traditional clothes and food ecommerce websites we all used for the first time 15 or 20 years ago.”

However, identifying technological advances that are above and beyond the industry norm is quite a complicated task, which is why Jumpstart has assembled a well-diversified team of highly-experienced technical analysts such as Williamson. The analysts work with businesses from a range of sectors all the way from finding out if they’re eligible to apply for R&D tax credits, through to preparation and submission of the claim.

For the Jumpstart team, including passionate techies such as Adrian, it is extremely rewarding to see their work pay off and to witness the positive impact tax relief can have in helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) invest more in R&D and transform not only a business, but an entire sector. “Typically, if we’re going out to see a client, we will prepare by looking at the information the relationship manager will have collected about the work that they do,” he says. “This means that, when we get there,

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“The technology you’re investing in needs to be leading edge, responsive and engaging for customers.”

22/03/2018 11:28

“ Expect the BEST RESULTS “The projects most likely to be eligible are the complex and challenging campaigns, where you are required to come up with innovative solutions.”

for your business, time after time.

Having the best people and processes in the business and the experience gained from over 3,000 successful claims means that we: Minimise the demands on your time; we can ask all of the expert technical questions

marketing and commercial activity, companies

Minimisewethe needcomplexity to straight away.” of the claim process; can’t claim directly for SEO and PPC campaigns.

“We usually meet with two parts of the

However, they can claim for relief on projects

Minimisecompany. the risk or over-claiming Firstly,of weunder meet the technical team, aimed atand advancing the technology that inviting an HMRC and so we can discussenquiry; the projects the company underpins performance gains in both SEO and has undertaken and familiarise ourselves with

PPC.

Maximisethethe accuracy and in.value claim. technologies it has invested We will of yourFor example, Google and other search then produce a technical narrative on behalf engines change their algorithms frequently of our customer to describe the activities Ensuring the best results, time after time.and their guidelines are often ambiguous. In they have undertaken, justifying why they are some cases, established techniques such as eligible for R&D tax relief. By working hand-inthe use of keywords may fail to deliver the hand with the technical we make sure expected results and SEO specialists may have For a free R&D tax creditteam, consultation and we aren’t including costs for activities that to experiment to find out what works while analysis ofare the potential returns you might ineligible and are helping them submit a being mindful of those unpredictable and expect, contact Jumpstart team: successful,the but compliant claim. unexpected risks. This is where a claim could “It’s my job to write the technical report to be made. cover that material and then, following that, Williamson adds: “All of the work to build www.jumpstartuk.co.uk we work with the company’s finance team to an ecommerce platform is a complete waste ensure we gather all of the relevant evidence of time if your customers can’t find your helpinghand@jumpstartuk.co.uk on the costs involved. As you can imagine website. We have to be quite careful here software in particular, the costs tend to though as companies can’t claim R&D tax 0370 218for7226 be predominantly staff related for the most credits for marketing and commercial activities, part. We then collate all the costs and ensure it is strictly for investment made in achieving they’re treated correctly, which is another area technological advancements. of Jumpstart expertise. Then, we are ready to “As a general rule, the day-to-day SEO and submit the claim and wait to see how much PPC activities do not qualify for relief – in benefit they realise.” these cases, practices are well established, Another area of ecommerce that companies and you will have a good idea of what works often claim for, which many don’t realise is and what doesn’t. The projects most likely to possible, is search engine optimisation (SEO) be eligible are the complex and challenging and pay per click (PPC) advertising technology. campaigns, where you are required to come Due to the fact that the scheme is only up with innovative solutions and where there applicable to technological advances and not is uncertainty about how effective it will be or

whether it will work at all.”

If you’re an ecommerce business looking to apply for R&D tax credits however, it is worth bearing in mind that there are different schemes for SMEs and large companies.

Companies claiming under the SME scheme can receive 25p of tax benefit for every £1 they spend on eligible R&D or receive a payable tax credit of up to 33.35p if they are in a lossmaking position. While those claiming under the R&D expenditure credit (RDEC) scheme will receive up to 9p for every pound of qualifying spend.

These guidelines mean it can be more worthwhile for some businesses to apply for the scheme than some of their counterparts, however Williamson and the team are well aware of the guidelines and how to quickly identify whether or not it will be worthwhile for a company to progress with a claim.

He concludes: “It’s a case of ‘here’s a tax scheme, it’s very beneficial for companies, and you should find out all about it’. Whether you research it yourself or come to a company like Jumpstart to get some professional advice, it’s worth seeing if you could be eligible.” n

Jumpstart your R&D tax credit claims

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Web: www.jumpstartuk.co.uk Email: helpinghand@jumpstartuk.co.uk Tel: 0370 218 7226

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Uncover the

HIDDEN CASH just waiting to be discovered in your business

Changing consumer trends, the increasing sophistication of the online marketplace and new regulations continue to provide technical challenges for e-commerce companies which may qualify for R&D tax relief.

As the UK’s leading R&D tax relief specialist, with 10 years’ experience putting together thousands of successful claims, we’d love to help you capitalise on this opportunity!

For a free R&D tax relief consultation and analysis of the potential returns you might expect, contact the Jumpstart team: www.jumpstartuk.co.uk helpinghand@jumpstartuk.co.uk 0370 218 7751

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Breaking down boundaries

Carolyn Pearson is on a mission to give women the freedom to travel anywhere they want – and alone if they want. Mike Hughes caught up with the founder of Maiden Voyage to find out more.

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T

he scale of the #metoo movement is so much more than just a wake-up call. It was the shocking revelation of something that we should all have known about anyway.

Finally, just as it was unthinkably on the brink of becoming a part of everyday life, millions of women stopped a tidal wave of abuse and pressure and stood together to stake their claim to a freedom many, many, people didn’t realise they had lost.

The fact that equality should never need to be fought for has been at the centre of Carolyn Pearson’s life since well before she started Leeds-based Maiden Voyage in 2008 after a very corporate career that included ITV, the BBC and EasyJet. She saw the need for a network to support professional women

“

business travellers who might otherwise have avoided some of the most heart-stopping places on the planet because others had decided it was “No place for a woman on her own…”

It has been embraced by the industry and is now a trusted brand, with ambassadors in more than 80 countries offering guidance, recommendations, safety tips, advice and discounts to its members. “I was always an ‘intrapreneur’ whoever I was working for, always coming up with ideas to challenge those corporates to do things differently,” she says.

“I think I’m a magpie wanting to pick up something new and exciting, so I often had other jobs or courses to do alongside my main roles. When I was with ITV, I went on a

business trip to Los Angeles but didn’t get to see downtown LA because it wasn’t safe to be out so I was holed up in my hotel. I yearned for a platform where I could connect with other women in the same position.

“I wasn’t using Facebook at the time, so I didn’t even know what a social network was, but I knew what I wanted to build and for me it was all about liberation and empowerment.

I never wanted to hear another woman say, ‘I don’t want to go there’, I want them to ask, ‘How can I get there?’.

“I am passionate about travel and what it can do for people as a really fulfilling experience, so I want everyone to be able to do it and not feel nervous. If ever I get asked to go somewhere slightly edgy, I just have a little

“I am passionate about travel and what it can do for people as a really fulfilling experience, so I want everyone to be able to do it and not feel nervous.”

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word with myself and say that if I can’t do it then how can I expect anyone else to and before you know it, I’ve booked the flight.”

The key to Maiden Voyage recommendations that lift them far above social media “likes” is that either Pearson herself has been there or she has called upon a small army of women who either live in the cities people want to visit or who are advisers from such varied fields as royal security or hostage negotiations and have worked in hotspots like Afghanistan, Gaza or Syria, bringing a unique insight into how countries “feel” and what risks are specific to each one.

“Because we have such a profile and are thought-leaders in the industry, we get asked to speak at the sort of conferences where

“

these people were also guests, so we would hang out together and collaborate on travel safety projects for Maiden Voyage,” she explains. “There are still a couple of places in the world where I would prefer not to go – like the Congo – but we want women to be able to do their job wherever it takes them and without gender becoming an issue.

“I think whatever an entrepreneur sets out to do, it has to be something very personal like this, because you will get dragged through the mill and run ragged because of challenges in every area of their life. For me, making money is never a strong enough ‘why’, there always has to be a huge pride in whatever the product is.

“As an entrepreneur you are always your own biggest judge and never regard yourself as

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completely successful. Before I set up Maiden Voyage I was managing technical teams of 30-to-40 people who were predominantly men, but when it is your own business your leadership style changes quite a lot.

“In my corporate life, I probably had some… what shall we call them… ‘personality adjustments’ to adapt to that environment, which was a lot more macho, meaning I had to double-prove my technical know-how to win respect. Whereas running the business means I can create my own environment, which has much more of a family feel about it, where there are no secrets and everybody knows where we are in terms of the numbers and if there is a particular challenge then we can share it inclusively.

“Running the business means I can create my own environment, which has much more of a family feel about it.”

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“Even though we have that passion, I still struggle to sit back and congratulate myself after achieving something colossal and am more likely to be thinking of the next thing I need to overcome.”

Those colossal achievements most recently include a link-up with one of the UK’s biggest travel management companies to launch a hotels project and industry giant Booking. com recognising the company’s profile by commissioning an article from Pearson to be sent to 1.5 million hotels, in addition to safety training with everyone from tech giants in Silicon Valley to Hollywood’s big names and a premier league football club.

Pearson has struck a balance between supporting and pioneering a value that is held deep within her and making a business out of it. There is no doubt both would have happened – she would have been championing women’s rights to pursue their careers without boundaries and she would have been a successful businesswoman – so to have achieved both in one go is beyond admirable.

She is one of many such champions whose role in society has been brought into the spotlight in a way she would never have wanted, by those shocking revelations of abuse as women finally felt empowered and supported enough to speak out.

“Some of these incidents happened away from home, in a hotel, on a business trip,

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and we often talk about sexual harassment from colleagues that can happen in these circumstances,” she tells me. “Sometimes people get hedonistic away from the watchful eyes of the corporate machine when the alcohol is flowing and the environment is very casual. It can be a breeding ground for bad behaviour and we have certainly had one woman who left her job because her boss was crossing the line with female employees.

“We have heard it first-hand and we talk about that ‘elephant in the room’ all the time and hopefully help to shine a light on the things that are uncomfortable for some organisations to talk about and give women the strategies to challenge them. Our next piece of research will look at sexual harassment on board aircraft and whether the crew get the right amount of training to deal with it, and what we are finding is that in business class male passengers have been know to harass female passengers but it is the women who have been moved rather than the men.

“We want to tackle it all out in the open, so we will be pushing for new legislation to bridge a gap because there isn’t anything at the moment covering incidents on board.”

Growth is centred around scalability, to be able to take the message to as many people and countries as possible to get nearer to that ‘unattainable’ success Pearson strives for. Perhaps then she will take a break herself,

somewhere that doesn’t involve work, although I suspect she will be sending back notes to the team wherever she is.

“Bora Bora in Tahiti is somewhere I always dream of going to,” she says. “It is the most beautiful place on Earth, but in the last year I have been to St Petersburg, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and always try to find somewhere just on the edge of challenging so that you get that cultural immersion, especially travelling alone as I do.

“But we know there are risks for some women at home just as much as abroad, so we collaborate with British Transport Police and drive home the message that it only needs someone to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a terrorist incident, for example.

People need to understand what the risks may be and mitigate against them with a Plan B or a Plan C, because the biggest risk to any traveller is complacency.”

While this is increasingly necessary work with so much uncertainty around the world, it is one of those businesses for which success would mean not being needed any more. That’s a challenging scenario for any BQ entrepreneur but if, like Pearson, the passion for the work is absolute, then the only achievement that matters is that the boundaries holding some women back have been removed. Anything else takes second place. n

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WE’RE GOING DIGITAL FIRST

MORE CONTENT, MORE OFTEN From this edition we’re going digital first will continue to fly the flag for entrepreneurship across ritain. From Glasgow to Guildford and Cambridge to Cardiff, we stand alone in creating a wide buzz around entrepreneurs. ’s daily email service is packed with all the big news stories and insights from across the North East, North West, orkshire, Midlands, London South, Wales and Scotland .

So, as a valued reader of BQ, we’d encourage you to sign up to receive your BQ daily digital update for your area and continue to visit us at bqlive.co.uk. As this is our last edition of BQ Magazine in print we wouldn’t want you to miss out.

Sign up for FREE at www.bqlive.co.uk/bulletin Celebrating and inspiring entrepreneurship

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Polishing his

CV

Mike Hughes meets Lee Biggins, the man behind the UK’s biggest jobs website, and finds out the vital information that helped him launch his own career – and the difference a Caribbean holiday made to his plans.

I

t always starts with a CV. Think back to when you began your own working life, and it is quite possible it was in something very different to what occupies your nine-to-five slot today, but at the time you were targeting your dream job, so the CV was polished with the good stuff highlighted and the less successful times tucked away in the “Also…” paragraphs at the end.

Depending how far back you have to go to recall that moment, it was probably just a letter sent to the human resources department after half of your mates swooped on the same advert. But now the game is very different, and Lee Biggins is one of the reasons it has changed.

Having bought out his former partner in 2013, he now owns 100% of CV-Library, which hosts millions of CVs from hopeful job-seekers around the world and is on course for revenues of £36m. For Lee, the DNA was well established and there was always going to be another entrepreneur in the family.

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“It’s in the blood – I never met my grandfather, but he used to run a mobile shop and my 70-year-old dad has just closed the doors on his carpet company after 40-plus years,” he tells me.

“I saw how well he had done and that grew my entrepreneurial spirit, but nothing was given to me on a plate. It has been hard work and if I wanted something I had to earn it by running round the house thinking of chores I could do.

“When I was a little bit older I was doing car-washing and even selling cold drinks to fishermen on Basingstoke Canal.

Anything I could find to get a few quid together.”

All this time there was a career waiting for him at his dad Clive’s Surefit carpet business and for a while he put his heart and soul into it, coming home from school and heading straight for the warehouse where he would also sort out estimates for customers. The experience was invaluable, but it led the young Biggins to think he didn’t need school – or

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college – which he left after a few months because he had already found a career on his own. Not advice he would pass on now, but this was a young man with urgency and confidence in equal measures.

“Dad and I worked together for quite some time, and even later we had converted barns next door to each other that we used as offices, so I could always go and lend a hand,” he says. “But I was always having ideas about how I could create my own success and one of the things that sealed it for me was going to Nevis in the Caribbean with my girlfriend’s family when I was 21. I had always known that I wanted to be well-off, but seeing that place her dad had got from working in an office really gave me a push.

“I didn’t know where to start looking, so bought a book of advice on writing CVs but rather than sending mine off to recruitment agencies or applying for jobs from the back of a newspaper, I wondered why there wasn’t a website where you could leave your CV and everyone comes there to find you.”

In true entrepreneurial fashion, he gathered a few quid to buy a computer and asked around at his local pub to find someone who “did” websites. His mate Brian Wakem had recently completed a motors website and thought he could turn his hand to CVs as well and a partnership began.

“Being a young lad of 21, I wasn’t particularly well travelled apart from some family holidays, so I had started thinking about some travel and a little bit of culture, and I knew that with that computer I could work from anywhere in the world,” he says.

“So, for the first few years we did business purely on the web, no customer service teams to talk to or anything like that. I never thought we would have the scale for very many staff and certainly no bricks and mortar offices – that was how things were done back then.”

But, while Biggins’ skills on the keyboard were helping build a formidable new force in the recruitment industry, it was when the business started to grow and he needed staff that his acumen was really proved. He became a manager of people and loved it from the first appointment, and as he started gathering a team around him CV-Library took shape because of the staff who were forming it.

“By the time we were four years in, I said to my business partner ‘if we don’t take on a sales team, a renewals team and a marketing team, we might as well give up now’,” he remembers. “For me, the magic number has always been 15 because managing five to 15 people was the hardest time I can remember because we were bringing in in young people and training them ourselves, so you don’t immediately have managers. But once you get past 15, you start to find people who can manage for you and life starts to become just that little bit easier.

“Now with 200 people, we have a really good team of directors who are my sounding board. I learn from them as much as they learn from me and they have allowed me to be in a position where I own 100% of the business and can incentivise them with perks in their pockets rather than shares.”

The business now has an impressive momentum and regards giants like LinkedIn as one of its competitors. There is a thriving operation in America called Resume Library and work in Poland and India to establish the brand there and give Biggins and his directors a global platform to develop. Here, the London office has taken on more than 40 people in the past few months and in Manchester and Birmingham the story is the same and will be repeated soon in Bristol, Ireland and in Scotland with more offices in the pipeline.

“After working very well with recruitment agencies, a lot of our opportunity for growth now is working with corporates and small and medium-sized

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“At the end of the day, you have to work very hard to be in this position, and be ready to face that hard work every day.”

enterprises that are cash-savvy and realise they can recruit people very cost-effectively themselves using platforms like ours,” he says.

Growth brings profile and Biggins is keen to pass on his experiences – good and bad – to young people who could be on the BQ Live website themselves in a few years. His early exit from the education system gives him the ideal starting point for talks at local schools and colleges, telling students who seek the same sense of freedom that if they pause, weigh up their options and still think it is the right thing to do, then at least have a plan in place.

“Where are you going to get the experience to be able to walk through the doors of your next place and how do you go about getting your CV into the right place to start getting interviews?” he asks them. “I’ll explain to them what they can achieve, as I have done without

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going to uni, but with my own personal angle on it because there is a lot of advice out there and some of them might have a troubled background and might not have access to the usual opportunities others have.

“I know there are lessons to be learned and I wish I had finished some of my experiences properly, so I challenge them by saying it is not about not having just any education, but finding the education that matches the route you want to take, perhaps involving an online course or training scheme. At the end of the day, you have to work very hard to be in this position, and be ready to face that hard work every day.

“I could pack it all up and go and live the life of Riley, but that is just not me. I am a born and bred grafter who wants to be able to say he has earned everything he has, to the point that

we could have been more globally successful now if I had diluted the business and taken on some investment, but I wanted the growth to be organic and true to the way I do things.

“My dad ran his business purely on word of mouth because of his good principles and I echo that with the way I structure CV-Library and look after our customers whether they have a major account with us or are worth just a few hundred pounds. I have terrible OCD about making sure things are done properly – which is probably why I am 40 and single.

“With the America launch, I am now the same entrepreneur I was when I started out and am up to 10pm many nights sorting something out because it is so personal to me and while the dream is to be out there and have the perfect business globally, it has to be done right.” n

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“It was a quick decision and turnaround, but it’s a business venture that I am incredibly passionate about and is something that I knew would work.”

Steve Dyson raises a glass to Siobhan Holmes, who took her passion for fizzy wine to a whole new level by quitting the rat race and launching her own mobile prosecco bar.

H

ave you ever noticed the smiles, the “whoop-whoops!” and the sheer fizz of excitement that infects any group of people when someone pops the cork of a bottle of bubbly? Fun-loving Siobhan Holmes has, and those moments of collective joy when everyone wants a glass are what have channelled her entrepreneurial spirit into creating The Vino Van business.

This is a start-up company that does exactly what its name says – a mobile van full of wine, or bubbly wine to be precise, affordable Prosecco to be even more specific.

“Everyone loves fizz,” says Holmes, a single lass aged 30 from Northamptonshire. “Nothing shouts ‘celebration’ more than bubbles. It’s all about being part of someone’s special day – adding and being a part of an important occasion or celebration. So, I pour Prosecco, which adds to the party, and when I’m not doing that I’m dreaming up new Prosecco cocktails to add to my menu.”

It’s a fun hobby that’s turned into a lucrative little business for Holmes, who’s quickly become known among family, friends and customers as the “Prosecco queen”.

She only launched The Vino Van in April 2017 after getting fed up with what she felt had become a rat race in the social care sector.

More than ten years ago, she had studied for a diploma in childcare and education and then for a degree in early childhood studies, before working hard in various social care roles.

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But government funding cuts resulted in redundancy, and while Holmes found a new job as a substance misuse practitioner for young people, this involved a “really tough” commute of 100 miles a day from her home in Corby.

“I loved the job, but it was too hard to juggle the commute,” recalls Holmes, who then describes how her love of bubbly turned into a serious business idea. “I saw a gap in the market and decided to create a mobile prosecco van that could be set up anywhere and everywhere.

“It was a quick decision and turnaround, but it’s a business venture that I am incredibly passionate about and is something that I knew would work.”

Holmes researched what was needed and applied for a business loan to buy and convert what was once a horse box trailer. This was a hard six weeks in the late winter before her spring launch, when she had to battle with some tough weather while she converted the vintage trailer into The Vino Van, using gallons of tasteful pink paint.

She marketed her concept via social media and was soon featured in Stylist Magazine, which led to the organisers of the Cheese & Wine Festival in London spotting her business and asking her to attend. “It was such a great way to launch the business and we proved very popular at the event,” Holmes says.

Things snowballed from there, and The

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Prosecco Prosecco as a name comes from the Italian village of Prosecco near Trieste, Italy, from where the grape and wine originate.

Prosecco is traditionally made from Glera grapes, and as a basic drink it comes in various forms: it can be spumante (sparkling wine), frizzante (semi-sparkling wine), or tranquillo (still wine).

Unlike Champagne, its main commercial competitor, Prosecco is usually produced using the Charmat-Martinotti method, in which the secondary fermentation takes place in stainless steel tanks, making the wine less expensive to produce.

Approximately 150 million bottles of Prosecco are produced every year, with around 60% now made in ConeglianoValdobbiadene. There are about 150 producers in this region, and together they have formed a consortium for the protection of Prosecco.

As well as its regular use as a less expensive substitute for Champagne, Prosecco is the main ingredient of the Bellini cocktail. It’s also a key ingredient of Spritz, a cocktail made with the bitter-fruit apéritif Aperol that’s popular in northern Italy.

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“If you’re not excited about the words ‘mobile prosecco bar’ then you probably shouldn’t read any further.”

Vino Van spent the rest of the spring and then the summer and autumn touring the country visiting food festivals and shopping centres, getting booked for a variety of cultural events, informal celebrations and weddings.

Holmes markets The Vino Van confidently, telling would-be customers visiting her website that: “If you’re not excited about the words ‘mobile Prosecco bar’ then you probably shouldn’t read any further.”

She explains her direct approach to me: “We have one aim in mind: to bring the fizz to special events. We’re self-contained with our own power, so no location is too remote. In short, if anyone needs bubbles for anything from a wedding celebration to a corporate event then we’ll get them delivered. We’re licensed and fully insured, so customers can rest assured that their fizz is in safe hands.”

What makes Holmes business stand out is this refreshing personal approach – plus her pastel-pink van. But behind that exterior, she insists that it’s the Prosecco itself that tempts people into booking The Vino Van. “For me, Prosecco has always been about celebrating, being with friends and family and toasting to the good times in life,” she says.

“You could say it’s a happy drink. It’s perfect on its own but it’s versatile too, making it an ideal base for so many great cocktails. Also, a small glass has fewer calories than a banana.”

And it’s not just basic Prosecco – there’s a growing list of inventive cocktails that Holmes has created around the product, priced at £6 a glass. The most popular include the “Prosecco Fizz”, which contains raspberries and Chambord, topped with Prosecco, and the “Prosecco Hugo”, which is Prosecco mixed with elderflower cordial and fresh mint. The Vino Van also offers a “Pimp Your Prosecco” service, where people can add fruit and mixers of their choice to the bubbles.

“My Prosecco cocktails accompany different events perfectly,” she says. “The refreshing ‘Prosecco Hugo Cocktail’ works great at summer sporting events such as a day at the races or watching tennis. It’s also superb for a barbecue or for a cocktail day with the girls. And my delicious ‘Prosecco Fizz’ is a classy cocktail that’s popular as a welcome drink at weddings or corporate events.

“I’m always on the lookout for new and exciting ideas that I can incorporate into The Vino Van. For example, I’ve recently discovered

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pink glitter that you can add to Prosecco for a sparkling drink. This is something that’s perfect for festivals.”

While out and about, Holmes has noticed a few other wine vans at festivals, some of them also offering bubbly. So, she’s worked on keeping The Vino Van branding tight and recognisable, paying close attention to her customers to make sure she gives them exactly what they want.

As well as herself, Holmes employs a regular staff member and two other part-timers who work when extra serving hands are needed.

Plus, she says: “I’ve had lots of volunteers too.

I’m single and have no children, so the business is very much me. But I do get support from my sister and mum when I need to run ideas by someone.”

In her first season, Holmes mainly used Facebook to promote her business, and has visited various locations as far away as

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Sheffield and London. Some customers book her presence at their events for several hundreds of pounds. At other times, she attends food festivals to sell her wares.

Still in her early months, she’s reluctant to be drawn on the exact level of revenues and profits, but she insists the business has been a success. And she’s now accessing advice from local business mentors to help develop her plan to increase her touring – and perhaps even expand her brand in 2018 and beyond.

“Prosecco is an extremely popular drink, so I was certain that I had a market,” she adds. “The van is really distinctive and we offer themes to fit in with events. In a nutshell we’re flexible but we maintain a strong image which people seem to love.

“Our customers are a friendly, fun-loving bunch and have been a pleasure to serve.

We’ve attracted everyone from wine buffs, who love the idea of a mobile Prosecco van, to

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groups of friends who just fancy some fizz to get the party started.

“I’ve been incredibly excited to have taken the van around the country, visiting new and exciting places and topping up the nation’s prosecco glasses.

“My hope next year is to grow the brand further. I’d love to expand and have more Vino Vans across the country, providing the whole nation with what I think is the UK’s favourite tipple.”

It’s great to see such a new business woman bouncing with enthusiasm, and to hear her great advice for other would-be entrepreneurs: “Don’t give up. If you’re convinced that you have a great idea, go with it, no matter how difficult it may be in the beginning. Be realistic about the time and effort that you’ll need to dedicate – it will take up all your time, but if you love what you’re doing then you won’t even notice.” n

“I’ve been incredibly excited to have taken the van around the country, visiting new and exciting places and topping up the nation’s prosecco glasses.”

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Special Report

EDM crowned exporter of the year Manchester-based EDM, a global provider of training simulators, was crowned exporter of the year at the PD Ports Northern Powerhouse Export Awards in association with HSBC.

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Businesses from across the north of England descended on Leeds City Hall to recognise and celebrate their entrepreneurial exporting achievements and encourage other small and-medium sized enterprises to increase their global export potential.

Northern exporters were recognised across nine award categories covering a diverse range of exporting activity such as ecommerce, emerging markets, micro exporter, large exporter, and export team of the year.

In total, eight businesses were awarded for their exporting achievements at the glittering ceremony, with EDM being ultimately crowned Northern Powerhouse exporter of the year.

The company, which provides training simulators to the civil aviation, defence and rail industries across the globe, beat a range of incredibly impressive businesses to take home the award.

EDM was also named large exporter of the year and was commended for its entrepreneurial and innovative approach to exporting.

From its base in Newton Heath, Manchester, the company operates in markets spanning the entire globe and has proven to be a real ambassador for the Northern Powerhouse.

Speaking of its success, Lee Whittaker of EDM, says: “The awards ceremony has been absolutely fantastic.

Exporting is a huge part of our business, accounting for around 95% of our turnover.

“We have a lot of business in China, America, South East Asia and all over the world. It’s fantastic that we can be showcased and be awarded something like this for our efforts.”

Speaking of the firm’s future, EDM’s head of marketing, Adrian Lambert, adds: “We’ve doubled our turnover to £24m and expanded our team from 100 to 260 dedicated staff in the past three years.

“To increase our manufacturing capacity, we are constructing a £1.3m 20,000 square feet facility adjacent to our existing premises, which is due for

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“The event has really helped showcase just how powerful the Northern Powerhouse is.”

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completion in May that will house a further 50 new staff.

“We will focus on expanding our export business in Asia, Middle East and South America, which are the fastest growing regions in the civil aviation sector.

“We will capitalise on these markets through focused marketing activity involving direct marketing, attendance at trade shows, and the localisation of selected sales materials.

“The civil aviation sector is booming globally with an expected 40,000 new airplanes valued at US$5.6tn (£4tn) to be purchased over the next 20 years, so we will continue to penetrate all regions as sales opportunities present themselves.”

The awards were once again sponsored by national port operator PD Ports, a company that plays an integral role in the exporting of goods from the UK. Frans Calje, chief executive of PD Ports, says: “If there is one thing that never really ceases to amaze me, it’s the unrivalled and

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“It’s fantastic that we can be showcased and be awarded something like this for our efforts.”

unprecedented success stories that we endure in the North of England.

“Having sat on the judging panel, you see all of these incredible businesses flying by, like EDM, Pecan Deluxe Candy, Brandon Medical; these people, they find a niche in their own market, they explore it and work very hard to make it successful.

“We don’t hear about it often, they don’t shout about it, they don’t scream from the rooftops about what they’re doing and just look at how successful they are. They’re market leaders in their own sector. There are so many winners out there who do exactly that.

“EDM is a prime example of this as are all of the other companies who entered for the awards. I’d like to say a huge well done to all of

our winners and all of those shortlisted on the night. The event has really helped showcase just how powerful the Northern Powerhouse is.”

Global bank HSBC, which provides export finance to SMEs across the UK, also sponsored the event.

Nick Missin, head of trade at HSBC, North and Scotland, adds: “HSBC is delighted to support the PD Ports Northern Powerhouse Export Awards and celebrate those forward-thinking businesses that play such a big part in boosting the region’s economy by taking their products and services all over the world.

“HSBC is an international bank and we have offices in every continent so it’s only right and appropriate that we sponsor an event that celebrates global achievements.” n

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IF WE CAN YOU CAN Join the thousands of UK businesses like Swifty Scooters that are successfully selling overseas.

Visit great.gov.uk

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A SPARKLING

SUCCESS What began as Nick Baker selling bottles from his private collection has morphed into The Finest Bubble, a delivery service that promises to get Champagne to locations in London within two hours, as Peter Ranscombe reports.

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ew sounds scream “celebration” like the pop of a cork leaving the neck of a Champagne bottle. For hundreds of years, France’s flagship sparkling wine has been associated with hedonism, excess and the marking of special occasions, whether they be birthdays or weddings, exam results or promotions at work.

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Now, Nick Baker is bringing the humble Champagne bottle bang up to date. His business, The Finest Bubble, can deliver fizz to locations in London within two hours.

It sounds like a tough ask. With its reputation for congestion, London seems like the last place a wine merchant would want to offer such a precise service.

“The secret is to keep it simple,” explains Baker. “We handle each order individually – so when an order comes in, we pick the bottles from our stock and then arrange for a courier to deliver them.

“When we started the business in 2014, lots of companies offered next day delivery, so our point-of-difference was that we could offer

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same-day delivery. Last year, we upgraded that service to same-day delivery in London within two hours.

“It’s the couriers that make it possible. We work with some great companies and we use bike couriers whenever we can, especially for orders of three bottles or fewer.

“It’s a simple model. If you had a big lumbering delivery system of your own then I don’t think you could make it work.

“The cost depends on how far the customer is from our base in Islington. We classify ‘London’ as being within the M25 motorway but, in reality, most of our clients are within the north and south circular roads.

“For places like the City, Mayfair, Westminster or the West End the cost is £8.50, while other areas such as Canary Wharf, Kensington and Maida Vale are all £9.95. Areas further from Central London such as Barnet, Chigwell, Croydon, Heathrow and Twickenham will cost around £30 to £35.”

Baker’s system is underpinned by a website, with his company employing a technical consultant rather than outsourcing its online operations to a third party. He says the advantage is that he can make tweaks to the design, layout and search parameters on the website much more quickly, helping him to respond to the search terms that customers use and adjusting his listings and content accordingly to help stimulate sales.

Having all the data at his finger tips also allows Baker to get to know his customers: he’s found the most-popular occasions for which clients buy Champagne are birthdays, anniversaries, new jobs, engagements, and moving into new homes. He can also wheel out some fun facts too, like his quickest delivery being made in just 28 minutes or 2002 sitting currently as the most-popular vintage.

“When I was looking to set up the business, I wanted to do something different,” he explains. “There were wine merchants who had been around for decades or even centuries doing the same old things, but no one seemed to have focused on the service side of things.

“A lot of the big companies began as wholesalers, so they have big and heavy infrastructure. Retailing had already changed quite significantly by 2014 and people were very happy shopping online.

“I quickly ruled out the need to have a shop.

No one was offering same-day delivery except

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the florists – who would only offer a couple of bottles – and no one was focusing on Champagne.

“At the time, we didn’t know how big the market was, although we guessed there would be a buoyant gifting market.

A lot of retailers will have the current vintage of a Champagne or its premier cuvee, but not many people have previous vintages on sale and so that’s another service that sets us apart.”

After a busy Christmas, turnover broke through the £1m mark for the first time. The company now stocks more than 350 Champagnes – a far cry from its early days.

“We started off with a range of just eight Champagnes,” Baker says. “These were Champagnes that I’d bought as an investor.

“The company came about because I had more than I needed and so it made sense to try and sell them rather than have them just sitting in bond. I’m much better at not drinking them these days – when I started I wasn’t so good at it,” he laughs.

As well as holding stock at its office in Islington, the company works with London City Bond to hold the bulk of its fizz. Orders will sometimes arrive for 60-odd bottles, especially from corporate customers at Christmas.

Tasting notes

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One of the most-popular themes at The Finest Bubble’s tastings has been to compare the same Champagne that’s been placed in standard-sized bottles and in magnums. In theory, the wines should evolve at different rates; a higher proportion of yeast is added to the magnums, but the amount of empty space – or ullage – left at the neck of each bottle is the same, meaning less of the wine in the magnum comes into contact with the tiny amount of oxygen sitting above liquid.

Nick Baker brought along a bottle and a magnum of 2009 Louis Roederer Champagne, so I could put the two wines through their paces. Was I able to taste a difference?

2009 Louis Roederer bottle (£59.95, thefinestbubble.com) Aromas of crème pâtissière, orange marmalade, doughy bread and red apple on the nose, leading into more apple and warmer peach flavours on the palate, balanced by fresh acidity. The richer and more rounded of the two and showing beautifully on a cold spring afternoon.

2009 Louis Roederer magnum (£119.95, thefinestbubble.com) Much fresher fruit on both the nose and palate, with crisp green apple and crunchy pear and more defined acidity. Hard to believe the grapes were picked nearly ten years ago – the acidity is still really youthful and lively, making this a great aperitif to get the juices flowing before a meal. n

“We do a lot of work with investment funds and law firms,” says Baker. “There are lots of reasons for gifting Champagne – sometimes it’s to say congratulations on a deal being completed, but for others it’s to say congratulations on the birth of a baby.”

Baker also points to the popularity of larger sizes of bottles – such as magnums – and of older vintages, not just among customers who want to give gifts related to a specific year, but also among Champagne enthusiasts.

“There are people out there who really love Champagne,” he explains. “We’ve had people fly in from New York and Hong Kong for the day to take part in our tastings.”

Those tastings are hosted by some of the best-known names in the wine trade, including masters of wine Richard Bampfield and Jancis Robinson, the wine columnist for the Financial Times newspaper and one of the new presenters to join Amelia Singer and Joe Fattorini on Channel 5’s The Wine Show.

Baker is quick to rule out franchising or expansion into other

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“There are people who really love Champagne, we’ve had people fly in from New York and Hong Kong for the day to take part in our tastings.”

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“There were wine merchants who had been around for decades or even centuries doing the same old things, but no one seemed to have focused on the service side of things.”

cities as ways of growing the business. “I don’t think the model would work in other cities because you just wouldn’t have the scale – maybe in New York or Hong Kong, but even then I’m not sure, because Champagne is just so popular in London.”

Another route down which Baker doesn’t plan to go is stocking other sparkling wines, such as Franciacorta from Italy or Cava from Spain. Instead, he believes there’s still huge potential for growth within the Champagne category.

However, one alternative that has caught his attention is English sparkling wine. “People

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started asking us if we stocked any – and we didn’t – so we held a big blind tasting with Jancis and Richard and others and identified ones that we wanted to stock.

“At the moment, the acidity in many English sparkling wines stands out because of our cool climate. But as the average temperature rises, they’ll become slightly fruitier to help balance that acidity – it’ll be fascinating to see how they change.”

Baker has opted for English brands Hambledon, Nyetimber and Wiston. He salutes them for the balance between their fruit and acidity, as well as being left for a longer time

to age on their lees, the dead yeasts cells from the second fermentation – the one that takes place inside the bottle to add the bubbles – which helps to build up a rounded texture or mouthfeel.

Growth is coming from repeat business from satisfied customers and Baker is keen to hold further tasting events to help promote his brand. But he doesn’t want to grow too fast.

“If we get too big then we’ll have to move premises – and that presents its own challenges,” he laughs. “I don’t want to extend my range if it means losing the focus that we have.” n

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2018 takes off at Birmingham Airport New flights, extra jobs and fresh facilities for record numbers of passengers. Steve Dyson reports on Birmingham Airport’s growth in a busy 2018.

More than 50 jobs have been created at Birmingham Airport as its newest carrier prepares a series of flight launches from later this spring.

Primera Air have recruited flight crew and operational positions ahead of its launch of direct, low-cost services to New York, Toronto, Malaga, Barcelona, Palma and Crete from May. Anastasija Visnakova, chief commercial officer for the Icelandic-owned company, says: “We are proud and excited to place Birmingham on our route map for 2018.

“We are opening our operations here with two transatlantic and four short-haul destinations and are looking forward to further development of this Primera Air base.

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“This is an important first step for us and a significant development for Birmingham Airport and the wider region. With the technology that our new fleet offers, expensive transatlantic travel becomes a thing of history.”

Primera Air will operate with the Airbus A321 Neos, a new generation of fuel-efficient aircraft able to fly on routes usually only accessed by wide-body jets.

The forthcoming transatlantic services should suit the business community in the West Midlands, which exported £6.2bn worth of goods to the United States last year, second only behind the South East of England, and exported £778.5m to Canada, the highest of any region in the UK.

Tim Clarke, chairman of Birmingham Airport, says: “Primera has seen the enormous opportunities available in the Midlands thanks to its strong trading and cultural links with the US and Canada, and the leisure travellers’ desire to escape to warmer Mediterranean climes.

“Primera is able to offer low fares due to its Airbus A321 Neos, which means that these services are accessible to all pockets – whether travelling on holiday, visiting loved ones or flying for business.”

Primera Air’s first flights will start on 14 May to Malaga and Palma, with New York launching on the 18 May and Toronto on the 23 June.

Crete will the start on 30 July and Barcelona on 1 October.

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Flights will operate to New York four times weekly, and to Toronto three times weekly, with fares to both destination starting at £149 one way. Crete will operate weekly from £54, and Malaga, Palma and Barcelona will operate daily from £35. Visit www.primeraair.co.uk for more details.

Meanwhile, Air India has launched the UK’s only direct flight to Amritsar from Birmingham Airport.

The new, twice-weekly, and non-stop service complements the airline’s established Delhi service from Birmingham, which began in August 2013.

That service has carried more than 600,000 passengers in the four years it has operated using the popular Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft.

William Pearson, aviation director at Birmingham Airport, says: “We are proud to say we are offering a unique route, as Birmingham’s the only UK airport offering a direct service to Amritsar.

“The Midlands has the second-largest Asian community in the UK and so it’s great news that we’re making more of India accessible to our passengers for business, leisure and to visit family and friends.”

Tara Naidu, regional manager for the UK and Europe at Air India, says: “Amritsar is an important spiritual centre for the Sikh faith, home to the Golden Temple as well as a major commercial and cultural centre in the heart of the Punjab.

“The Sikh community has long awaited this direct route and so we’re sure it will be as popular as our Delhi service from Birmingham.”

Flights operate on Tuesdays and Thursdays, departing Birmingham at 18:45, reaching Amritsar early the next morning at 07:45. From Amritsar the flight departs at 13:55 arriving into Birmingham at 17:15 the same day.

The route will operate with Boeing 787-8 series aircraft with 256 seats in a split cabin, comprising 18 flat beds business-class seats and 238 economy seats. More details at www. airindia.in The new flights come as Birmingham Airport recently announced it had experienced the busiest year in its 78-year history after seeing almost 13 million passengers pass through its terminal in 2017.

In total, 12,983,436 passengers travelled through the airport from January to December, up by 1.3 million from 2016, a healthy increase of 11.5%.

The busiest month fell in August when

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“The Sikh community has long awaited this direct route and so we’re sure it will be as popular as our Delhi service from Birmingham.”

almost 1.5 million passengers were recorded, a significant 16.2% increase on the same month in 2016, and in total there were seven months in which over a million passengers were recorded.

David Winstanley, chief operating officer at Birmingham Airport, says: “Last year we celebrated the busiest 12 months in our history, including the launch of Jet2.com and Jet2holidays and the return of British Airways and Bmi Regional.

“Emirates maintained a strong presence in the region and introduced its second daily A380 aircraft onto its established lunchtime service between Birmingham and Dubai.

“The year was indeed one of celebration but also commiseration as we sadly saw the demise of a long-established airline, Monarch. This airline carried an average of 5,000 passengers per day from Birmingham, but we have seen some existing carriers and new carriers pick up almost all of this capacity already to reduce the impact on our passengers.”

The growth means Birmingham Airport has started a multi-million-pound programme of development works to improve the passenger journey through the terminal.

The works include redeveloping the security processing area to provide more boarding card gates, a dedicated security preparation area and

a refreshed waiting area with new flooring and lighting.

Winstanley adds: “This investment follows record passenger growth and to ensure that we’re prepared for the coming summer period, when the airport will welcome new long-haul services as well as many new popular short-haul destinations.

“The service we give our customers is an absolute priority for us so we’re investing a great deal to improve the airport journey.”

The airport is also developing its retail and catering offer, with the recent opening of The Factory restaurant and the arrival of Kurt Geiger to its airside shopping experience.

Later this spring, a new Bottega Prosecco bar will open as well as Wrapchic – an Indianinspired burrito and sandwich outlet.

A covered walkway to the terminal is also under construction for those who choose to walk to the terminal from the free drop off car park, and a new 178-guestroom Hilton Garden Inn hotel will open in the summer.

New digital wayfinding and signage will be introduced before the summer season, and additional staff are being recruited in key customer facing areas, including terminal operations, customer relations and security officers. n

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“

“Fruit cider is one of the fastest-growing segments in the alcoholic drinks sector at the moment, but is relatively new.”

Ignisis was founded to put Indian wine back on the map – now it’s trying to spice-up the cider market too. Steve Dyson finds out more from entrepreneurs Alok Mathur and Gorvinder Butter.

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ike many of the best ideas, the origins of Ignisis can be traced to a fateful evening of excited banter over drinks and curry. Friends Alok Mathur and Melvin D’Souza were sitting at a reputed Indian restaurant in Oxford in late 2008 when they realised they were being forced to drink either Indian beer or French wine with their meals.

The conversation started with them asking

each other why they were drinking European wine in a curry house, when India itself could boast thousands of years of wine-making.

The reason, the story goes, is that India fell victim to the phylloxera epidemic in the 19th century caused by a louse that wiped out vineyards across Europe and Asia; then, under British colonial rule, India became too used to consuming beer and whisky to have the will to

revive the industry.

But hold on a minute – the pals discussed – surely a few Indian wine producers revived the industry in the late 1980s and 1990s, didn’t they? If so, why isn’t it stocked in curry houses across the UK? That was the lightbulb moment that, several weeks later, became an idea and then, in 2009, resulted in the registration of Ignisis, based

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in Solihull. The plan was to make new wine from an old region a competitor in a global industry; the company’s first brand was Soul Tree Wines, launched in 2011.

“The original idea was to put Indian wine on the map in the UK and beyond,” recalls Mathur. “And it’s now perhaps the only Indian wine business to be based outside India, in the heart of the major wine drinking region of the world.”

Mathur was born in Haridwar, in North India’s Uttarakhand state, in the early 1970s. He was raised in various parts of India, taking a degree in engineering in the city of Indore before joining Tata Motors in India in 1993; in 2000, he moved to the UK to help manage Tata’s UK operations, before returning to education to take a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School in 2007.

That’s when he met Ignisis co-founder Melvin D’Souza, who was born in India in the mid-1970s and brought up in Nasik, the wine capital of India, in the western state of Maharashtra. D’Souza went to the United States for his undergraduate degree and then worked in the family business of poultry genetics in India, managing sales and marketing across Asia and Africa, before taking a sabbatical in 2007 to go to Oxford to study business.

After graduating, the friends became co-founders and are still majority shareholders of Ignisis. But it’s only Mathur, the company’s chief executive, who talks to me, while D’Souza is a shyer if active director who prefers to remain in the background. Instead, joining Mathur in our BQ interview is Gorvinder Butter, himself a minority shareholder in Ignisis and also the company’s head of sales.

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“The original idea was to put Indian wine on the map in the UK and beyond, it’s now perhaps the only Indian wine business to be based outside India.”

Mathur, now aged 46 and living in Solihull with his wife and two children, says: “The early period in Soul Tree, sales was about loading the boots of our cars with cases of wine and literally driving around the Midlands selling and delivering to Indian restaurants.

The first breakthrough was a listing with a small but prominent wine distributor just outside London, helping with early scaling up and paving the way for future listings.

“It was nearly another year before a second distributor put its faith in the brand. We had six wine distribution partners by the end of year two, and we’re now distributed by nearly 30 smallto medium-sized wine and drinks distributors in the UK, with distribution arrangements in the US, Canada and Germany.”

Soul Tree Wines was entirely self-funded by Mathur and D’Souza until early 2015, when it crowd-sourced £364,000 from 218 investors in 16 countries. On the sales front, there are three price segments for the Soul Tree portfolio: a distinctive sparkling wine, retailing at around £13.99 to £14.99; a core range at around £9.50; and a reserve blend at around £12. In restaurants and bars, the core range sells for

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anything between £14 and £32.

“It’s been an interesting challenge,” says Mathur. “It’s primarily a remotely-produced, biological and perishable alcoholic drink that’s packaged in glass, placed into a metal container and shipped halfway across the world.

“On arrival in the UK it’s then sold under a new brand and into a new and unknown market segment, and by a business with no previous experience or expertise in wine.

It has taken hard graft, persistence, and resolution over the years to build the skill levels, the experience, and the networks and connections, as well as to learn the nuances of

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the wine industry.

“We realised early on that, with Soul Tree, we were really in the business of education, as practically no-one we would meet would have ever heard of Indian wine. We focused on the Indian restaurant sector to leverage the natural association of food with wine, and poured our hearts and souls into making it work.

“This has helped Soul Tree become the biggest Indian wine brand in the UK. But there’s still a long way to go before India’s seen and accepted as a mainstream wine-producing region.”

Meanwhile, as the reputation of Soul Tree

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Wines spreads, Butter wants to tell me about the company’s relatively new ODC drinks range. This idea of creating a funky collection of fruity ciders was born in the middle of 2016, and released onto the market in September 2017.

Butter says: “Fruit cider is one of the fastestgrowing segments in the alcoholic drinks sector at the moment, but is relatively new. A handful of brands dominate a rather prosaic marketplace, and are yet to truly capture the imagination – and loyalty – of consumers.

“Yet other drinks have seen rapid evolution in recent years: there’s been a gin revolution;

“We had six wine distribution partners by the end of year two, and we’re now distributed by nearly 30 small-to medium-sized wine and drinks distributors in the UK, with distribution arrangements in the US, Canada and Germany.”

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“The key to success is juxtaposing the trendy ‘craft’ element with consumer engagement, creating an engaging, memorable brand.”

craft beer is more exciting than ever; and brands like Fever Tree have even made mixers sexy. Fruit cider is surely next.”

The enthusiastic Butter was born in Bedford in the early 1980s, raised in North London and educated at Parmiter’s School near Watford.

He studied business information systems at the University of Wolverhampton and then worked for the Cobra Group in direct sales, quickly becoming a manager and training sales teams. After a few roles in recruitment and IT sales, he decided his real passion was in the drinks industry, and he joined Ignisis.

Now aged 34 and living in Solihull with his wife, Butter says: “ODC is a challenger brand in the fruit cider space and wants to change the status quo perceptions of the drink. Fruit cider is relatively young with fickle consumers and low brand loyalty.

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“Yet it’s the drink of choice of millions of coming-of-age consumers who desire experiences rather than drinks and to whom brands are, increasingly, social currency. We think ODC combines the values of ‘craft’ with the excitement of a consumer brand to involve and truly engage with the millennial consumers of today.

“ODC takes the world of cider by the horns and injects it with a heroic dose of mojo. If you prefer the unimaginative, the conventional, or the boring, look elsewhere.”

The early challenges for ODC cider have been completely different to those faced

by Soul Tree Wines. To start with, ODC is stepping into a growing but highly-competitive marketplace, without the clear Indian niche that Soul Tree Wines possessed. Also, the cider sector is dominated by a small number of large

players who control the majority share of the market.

“We’re still new,” admits Butter, “but ODC is breaking through the noise and the clutter by focusing hard on a distinctive brand strategy, marketing, and communication. The key to success is juxtaposing the trendy ‘craft’ element with consumer engagement, creating an engaging, memorable brand that uses real, exotic fruit, is all natural with no artificial flavours, colours, or sweeteners, and that is vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free.”

In case you’re wondering, the meaning of the acronym “ODC” is a company secret, according to Butter. Its current range of exotic fruit ciders includes “Mango Fandango” and “Pomegranate Panache”, both 4% alcohol by volume (ABV) and selling for between £2.49 and £2.99. The drinks are currently listed at several cash-and-carry stores and wholesalers, mainly in the Midlands, London and the South East of England.

There are also several ongoing conversations with various pub groups and retailers, and Butter feels ODC is on the cusp of a breakthrough. The business will soon be looking to raise funds to support its aggressive growth plans. Taking ODC ciders and Soul Tree Wines together, Ignisis is aiming at combined annual revenues of £1m in the next 12 months, and £5m by 2020.

Ignisis currently has seven staff, including its winemaker based in India, and over the next few years plans to launch Soul Tree Wines in India as well as consolidating its reach into the North American and European markets. The aim for ODC ciders is to focus first on the UK and then to look to India, the US and Eastern Europe as primary export markets.

It’s a passionate plan, and this drive comes through again when Mathur comes back into the conversation with top tips for other would-be entrepreneurs. “Find something you’re truly passionate about, then pour your sweat, blood, and tears into it,” he says, without blinking.

“Be ambitious but realistic and prepare for setbacks, and be clear on what value your idea adds and how you can compete. And find experienced mentors to guide you through the maze of opportunities, challenges, emotion, and critical decision-making.”

That’s not bad advice coming from someone whose business dreams to mix our traditional drinks markets began over a few beers and a curry ten years ago. n

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Developers are plugging into the potential of electric vehicles for the next generation of very fast supercars using new technologies, writes Josh Sims.

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“There is a lot of scepticism about eco engines in super-cars, even though obviously there’s a need for them.”

link and you’ll miss it. A Japanese car maker by the name of Aspark has just unveiled a street legal car that goes from nought to 60mph in an astonishing 1.9 seconds. That means its car, the Aspark Owl, makes a mockery of the acceleration of the world’s most expensive vehicles from some of the world’s most acclaimed makers: the Lamborghini Aventador does it in a comparatively sleepy 2.7 seconds.

It is, one might think, great news for fans of the super-car, concerned, as they must be, as to the future of their mode of transport of choice – given growing environmental concerns regarding fuel consumption, emissions and noise. At least, that is, until they discover that the Owl is battery-powered.

“There is,” concedes Mike Kakogiannakis, “a lot

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of scepticism about eco engines in super-cars, even though obviously there’s a need for them. Personally I’ve owned several super-cars and I love the sound of a conventional engine, the smell and the vibration. But there are always better, newer ways of doing things.

Just 10 years ago to buy such an electric or hybridengined super-car would have been more out of passion. You’d have had to have gone out of your way.

Now buying is just that much more feasible because the technology required to make these engines practical is evolving at an unprecedented rate.”

Kakagiannakis is the co-founder of Dubuc, an electric super-car developer that aims to unveil its Tomahawk production model towards the end of this year, and – suggestive of demand – was the first

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to launch off the back of a crowd-funding campaign. It’s just one of a number of small companies – Acura, Elextra, Dendrobium, NIO and, most famously, Tesla, among several others – looking at car development in much the same way as Silicon Valley start-ups revolutionised computing, and arguably stealing a march on research into eco cars by the big gun likes of Ferrari, Porsche, BMW, Aston Martin and the like.

Indeed, the new eco super-car segment might well be viewed as being as much a branch of the tech industry as the car industry.

In part this is because new technologies typically follow a top-down model before being democratised – you don’t need big sales numbers or have to work with price limitations; and launching a mass-production car company is also hugely capital intensive, so there’s an inevitable bias towards more niche products and – for the moment – a less competitive market.

They’re also all making very fast cars – somewhat contrary to the received wisdom that electric supercars are slower than

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“People are probably surprised by the amount of environmental technology development going on in the super-car sector.”

conventionally-engined ones, the lack of any power lag in the step changes between gear shifts makes them much much faster from a standing start. Last summer NIO’s EP9 shaved 2.1 seconds off the all-time lap record at the legendary Nurburgring circuit. When Elextra’s super-car comes onto the market in 2020, it promises to do 0-60mph in an impressive 2.3 seconds.

Certainly, lest anyone rush to pat these pioneers on their tiny boots in congratulations for helping to save the planet, it’s not necessarily the desire to cut Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that is driving this new segment.

Rather it’s the desire for greater performance, with a cut in CO2 being a happy by-product.

“People are probably surprised by the amount of environmental technology development

going on in the super-car sector,” says Donna Falconer, senior manager of global product strategy for McLaren, which in recent years has launched its hybrid-engined P1 and which aims to have 50% of its production with electric engines within the next five years. “But the fact is that you can’t, for instance, just keep putting more and more turbos on a conventional engine to improve its performance. There are limits to the old technology. You have to look to the new to deliver performance.”

Instead, she argues, by combining an electric engine with other new technologies – ones that, for example, allow a car to be much lighter, and therefore require less power to offer the same level of engagement, or by using electric motors on the front axle to allow the application of torque in a way that improves

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handling – “we’ll be opening doors to all sorts of new driving experiences”.

There are still hurdles to overcome before the eco super-car becomes the norm, for those who can afford them, not least the need for ever more advanced batteries to provide longer ranges and faster re-charging. Marco Piffaretti, the founder of Swiss care design agency Protoscar – a pioneer in the design of solarpowered racing cars – stresses that the charging infrastructure currently in place in those countries that have any is also typically geared towards 500v, not the 1000v ideal for super-cars – though since the high voltage is also needed by trucks and buses, that is likely to come. And then, he says, there is the need to move sales and distribution on.

“Conventionally-engined sports cars are perfect quality, from well-known brands, easy to sell and sold by people who know everything

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there is to know about pistons and turbos,” he says. “Getting them to sell electric is like asking a chef who has cooked barbecue all of his career to suddenly cook vegetarian – the change in culture takes time.”

The same might be assumed of the kind of person who drives super-cars too: what is going to make them happy with the idea of giving up the multi-sensory appeal of a conventional engine – “the romanticism that’s around the combustion engine, the appeal of the craft in the mechanics at the super-car level,” as Falconer puts it? Perhaps, it’s suggested, supercar customers are changing much as super-cars are.

“The fact is that the very rich who can afford these kinds of cars are getting younger and younger and they’re less and less interested in old technology,” argues Robert Palm, the designer and chief executive of Classic Factory,

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the company behind Elextra. “They might even see it as a negative thing to be seen to be driving, say, a conventionally-engined Lamborghini. That’s one reason why even if these electric super-cars had been around 20 years ago they wouldn’t have sold – the market for them wasn’t there.”

“Soon for drivers of super-cars to change over from the internal combustion engine to an electric or hybrid engine will simply make sense,” adds Piffaratti, who is currently working on developing electric super-cars for a number of major Italian makers. “In a few years we’ll see Formula E [racing with electrically-powered cars] with better results than Formula One. The difference between a conventionally-engined super-car and an eco one and will be the difference between a black and white TV and a 4K flatscreen. And nobody wants a black and white TV anymore.” n

“The fact is that the very rich who can afford these kinds of cars are getting younger and younger and they’re less and less interested in old technology.”

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CHANG NG T MES Josh Simms travels to Geneva to find out how modern technology is influencing the world of watch design – for both traditional and modern brands.

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he fact is that the watch customer is less and less sold on history,” argues Jean-Marc Pontroue. “They’re less interested in the fact that a company has been around for 150 years.

“They don’t want to wear the kind of watch their grandfather wore, any more than they want to wear the clothes he did. Sure, the share of the watch industry cake is still massively in favour of the historic brands – but our share is growing.”

Pontroue is chief executive of Roger Dubuis, a Swiss watch manufacture founded in 1995, making it a relative youngster against esteemed names like A Lange & Sohne, Jaeger Le Coultre

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or Cartier. And that shows in its product: its latest, the Excalibur Aventador – unveiled at January’s Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH), the annual high-end watch show in Geneva – is a collaboration with Lamborghini: it’s all bold blue carbon fibre case and sci-fi skeleton movement, one with five patents to its name, including the likes of an autonomous stability program and g-force antiejection reinforcement.

But never mind what they are – and Pontroue concedes that most customers, while reassured by the advanced tech, won’t much care either. It’s the look that matters.

It’s about as far away from the traditional, tasteful style of most watches, ones that could have been designed at any point in the last century. It would be too much to call the Aventador part of a trend, but certainly SIHH revealed that the watch industry is increasingly split between the elegantly classical and more statement-making avant garde designs.

The former remain aesthetically conservative – round dials, unfussy indices or Arabic numerals, tried and tested materials, even if these are getting mixed up in more adventurous ways – as with the likes of Baume & Mercier combining brushed steel and bronze

“They don’t want to wear the kind of watch their grandfather wore, any more than they want to wear the clothes he did.”

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on the same case – or include the use of titanium or ceramic, as at IWC, a pioneer in both, and for which both have become more or less standard.

And this is not to say that the more traditional camp does not continue to push the boundaries of both artfulness and mechanical watchmaking either. SIHH saw Cartier’s latest “metiers d’art” involving a dial of gold leaf marquetry sandwiched between two layers of ebonised wood, while Vacheron Constantin’s Les Aerostiers series of five models each depict – in stunning relief, and using plique-a-jour enamel, so thin it’s transparent – one of the earliest balloon flights.

Similarly, on the mechanical front, Panerai revealed its Lo Scienziato, made with the company’s pioneering, patented use of direct metal laser sintering, which uses lasers to produce a part layer by layer using powdered titanium. The result is a watch with a middle case that’s 30% lighter than usual.

Meanwhile Audemars Piguet launched its RD2, the world’s thinnest self-winding perpetual calendar, and Greubel Forsey unveiled the first complete timepiece with its Differential d’Egalite invention – that’s a spherical differential that regulates the energy released by the mainspring so that the exact amount of torque required is delivered smoothly to the escapement, rather than in jerky pulses as has been standard since watchmaking began. It is now working on its Nano Foudroyante, a project that aims to deliver a watch with an incredible 120hour power reserve.

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“We’re more conscious of consumers looking for a visual point of difference in the watch they buy now.”

It’s all impressive stuff – at least for some; the few who both really understand the difficulties involved in pulling off such feats, and the minuscule advancement in precision that they bring. But Pontroue is not alone in the contention that a younger audience – one, in particular, that has grown up with the amazing mobile technology of the information age – now wants to be bedazzled more by distinction in looks rather than the watchmaker’s age-old craft.

Hermes’s stand-out piece for 2018 is the Carre H, for instance, a minimalistic circular dial inside an atypical square case, which, the French luxury goods house insists, is not as easy to achieve as it might at first seem. It’s the kind of watch you can expect to see professionals in the design and architecture worlds fight over to get on their wrist.

“We’re more conscious of consumers looking for a visual point of difference in the watch they buy now,” explains Hermes’s head of watch design, Philippe Delhotal. “You can go around a watch fair and you don’t feel that you’ve really found brand new products.

“I think a lot of watch companies feel the identity of their

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products is closely linked to the brand, and that the brand has certain codes that have to be kept to. Some are still just scared that something new won’t work.

“And perhaps in taking a risk you do have to accept fewer sales. But our aim with this watch was to recruit a new clientele altogether – people who would look at the watch and exclaim ‘Hermes is doing that?!’.”

Of course, on the periphery of the watch world is a band of niche brands – hard to find and sometimes harder to finance – that are now routinely creating the kind of watches that provoke exclamation: the likes of Ressence, purveyor of ultra-contemporary designs, with its new Type 2 e-Crown Concept, a mechanical

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watch containing an electronic component that, with a double tap of the crystal, resets the time if the watch hasn’t been worn for a while; or Urwerk, with its UR-210 Dubai, its case and bracelet entirely engraved in a rococo style.

Richard Mille, another such brand – the average price of its watches is a cool £135,000, but then we are talking about a world in which Roger Dubuis has managed to sell a few Lamborghinis, bought off the cuff by clients just to match their new watch – has long been inspired by its working relationships with sports stars and the insistence that they can actually perform wearing their watch.

So, its new polo-inspired piece, created in collaboration with player Pablo Mac Donough

– who, as a 10-year-old, had a sizable part of his skull bashed in by a mallet – not only suspends its movement on steel cables to increase shock resistance all the way to 5kg, but comes with a triple layer sapphire crystal and polyvinyl glass that, like a car windscreen, makes it shatterproof.

Tellingly though, while such advances serve a purpose if you actually play polo, Richard Mille – like Richard Rogers with Paris’ ground-breaking Pompidou Centre – also lets them dictate the visual appeal of the watch.

And the result is absolutely nothing like your grandfather might have worn.

That means it’s not for everyone. But at least it’s a watch for today. n

“Perhaps in taking a risk you do have to accept fewer sales. But our aim with this watch was to recruit a new clientele altogether.”

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Seventh heaven for foodies

Steve Dyson travels to Newport in Wales to sample the Celtic Manor’s delights, staying at The Resort Hotel and dining at the Newbridge on Usk restaurant.

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s anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m rather partial to a good meal. And so, when the Celtic Manor Resort told me that they had no fewer than seven restaurants to choose from, I was rather excited.

Would I like to dine at Steak On Six, the venue’s award-winning signature restaurant, showcasing succulent steaks from around the British Isles? Or perhaps I’d prefer a table at

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Rafters, set within The Twenty Ten Clubhouse, offering spectacular views and the finest locally-reared beef, fresh fish, seafood and grills?

Another offer was The Grill for relaxed dining with honest and simple food, featuring yet more juicy steaks, pasta, salads, fish or burgers. Or how about eating at Cen, where I could experience the fresh Asian cuisine

created by MasterChef finalist Larkin Cen? There was a more informal dining place on offer at The Olive Tree & Garden Room, for a tasty buffet selection of international cuisine.

Or why not have a short trip out to the resort’s Coldra Court Hotel to be seated at The Rib Smokehouse and Grill, for house-smoked dishes with southern influenced flavours?

They all sounded good, but my ears pricked

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up when the seventh choice was outlined: the Newbridge on Usk restaurant, occupying an idyllic location on the banks of the River Usk, part of a charming, 200-year-old boutique hotel. And it was this secret hideaway, just a few miles upriver from the Celtic Manor Resort itself, that I plumped for, whisked through the Welsh country lanes to the venue in a chauffeur-driven minibus with my student son – up for the night from Bristol.

We arrived at the two AA rosette restaurant to be met by a waiter insisting on cocktails – so we had two, mine wonderfully dry Martinis – before taking our seat in the gallery room upstairs. Without realising its size, we opted to share the Newbridge local fish market platter for starters, at £29.50.

And what a choice: grilled scallops with coconut and chilli; mussels in cider and garlic sauce; prawn cocktails with gem lettuce; a pickled mackerel rolled with shallot and red pepper; a smoked hake mousse; seaweed tapioca puffs; beer-battered soft-shell crab; squid; breaded prawns; and all served with homemade bread.

This starter would have been enough as a main course – and for two diners across the room it was just that. But we’d already ordered our next plate and so battled on. We each had lamb, at around £24 each, which was tender and tasty, with delicious sauce and vegetables, lovingly cooked by head chef Adam Whittle using fresh, local and home-grown produce. It was excellent but… we’d probably have enjoyed it more on a night when we hadn’t had a feast to start with.

My son headed back to Newport station to catch the last train to Bristol, while I was dropped off at The Resort Hotel, where I was treated to a “Signature Collection” room. I loved the space, the sofa, the large bathroom, powerful shower and balcony overlooking the entrance and edge of the golf course.

But mostly, I cherished the memory of that fish platter the evening before. And I’ll be back to try it again. n For more details and to book visit www.celtic-manor.com or call 01633 410 262.

The Celtic Manor Resort is at Coldra Woods, The Usk Valley, Newport, South Wales NP18 1HQ, where double rooms are priced from £133 with special prices for families and dining packages.

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Mixing the old and the new has worked for The Ivy on the Square, the restaurant brand’s new outlet in Edinburgh, writes Peter Ranscombe.

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n paper, The Ivy on the Square shouldn’t work. The restaurant sits below a modern office block with a branch of discount retailer TK Maxx as a neighbour and one of Edinburgh’s busiest Sainsbury’s Locals sitting opposite.

Yet it does. The Ivy Collection – the company that has now rolled out 20 restaurants and cafés throughout the UK – has managed to bring a touch of the magic from the original Ivy in London’s theatreland into a glass-walled development on the corner of St Andrew Square and South St David Street in the Scottish capital.

Inside, the new restaurant has the same Parisian-inspired mix of geometric Art Deco shapes and lines and Art Nouveau patterns and flourishes as the original eatery, even down to the two panels of leaded glass at the door.

There’s a Paolozzi-esque feel to the primary colours in the artwork on the walls – from test

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tubes to lightbulbs – which feels appropriate given that the Leith-based father of Pop Art was one of the designers commissioned to create works for The Ivy when it reopened in 1990.

While the setting works, it’s the food that earns the newcomer its place among central Edinburgh’s eateries. A starter of crispy duck salad had an aromatic freshness from beansprouts, coriander and ginger and a heat from five-spice dressing, finely chopped red chilis and toasted cashews, balanced by colourful and juicy watermelon.

General manager Eric Garnier was rightly proud of the 12oz rib-eye steak served on the bone and highlighted its Scottish credentials.

The steak was indeed excellent, although I’d like to see more made of its provenance on the menu; simply labelling beef as “Scottish” without mentioning the breed, the supplier and the location these days is a missed opportunity, particularly when it comes to helping the thousands of visitors to Edinburgh to fall in love with our local produce and ask for it at home.

A classic baked apple tart fine with vanilla ice cream was skilfully served at the table with flambé Calvados, adding a touch of theatre during the busy lunch service. If anything, the atmosphere sounded even more exciting upstairs on the first floor, with its views of Jenners department store across the road or out onto St Andrew Square.

Garnier recommended a deliciously-juicy

bottle of Tabula’s Damana 5 Tempranillo from Ribera del Duero in Spain to accompany the steak and my companion’s hake and chorizo stew. Other eye-catching wines on the list included the A20 Albarino from Bodegas Castro Martin, Paul Jaboulet Aine’s Mule Blanche Crozes-Hermitage Blanc and a Chardonnay from Creation Winery in South Africa.

And so, to the bill. The Ivy on the Square charges very similar prices to its “Market Grill” outlet in Covent Garden, which appears to be the template for the chain. Those prices put it on a par with similar eateries in the middle of Edinburgh – like Hadrian’s Brasserie at the Balmoral hotel or the Galvin Brasserie de Luxe at the opposite end of Princes Street in the Waldorf Astoria Caledonian. n Find out more about The Ivy on the Square at www.theivyedinburgh.com

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hink whisky, think Scotland. Few other countries could lay claim to be the ancestral home of the dark spirit that’s captured the world’s imagination for the past 150 years.

Scotland has even spawned its own category within the world of whisky: to be called “Scotch”, a spirit must be made in Scotland and aged for at least three years in oak barrels. But Scotch isn’t the only game in town.

Hot on the heels of the craft beer movement, craft distilleries are popping up all over England. Should Scottish distillers be worried about the competition from the auld enemy south of the border?

It’s early days – after all, it can take eight, 10 or 12 years to age a single malt to a desirable level of quality. Yet some of the initial indications are very exciting indeed.

To bring in cash while their whiskies age – and to generate the buzz and excitement required to pre-sell casks and bottles – some distilleries are releasing grain spirit. It can’t be called “whisky” because it hasn’t undergone those first three magic years of maturation in oak, but it does indicate how each distillery’s underlying spirit will taste.

For me, one of the most exciting examples is Son of a Gun (£31.25 for 50cl, Master of Malt) made by the Copper Rivet Distillery at Chatham dockyard in Kent. Don’t be fooled by its translucent colour, which belies its intense and complex flavours.

It’s got a really fruity nose, with gin-like citrus flavours of grapefruit and lime, plus spicy cloves and sweet mandarin. And it’s those orange flavours that carry on through to the palate, mixing with chocolate notes that remind me of Dalmore single malt Highland whisky – high praise indeed.

Distillery Project 001 (£39.95, spiritofyorkshire. com) from the Spirit of Yorkshire Distillery has

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on the rocks?

More and more English distilleries are producing their own whiskies, so should Scotland be worried? Drinks writer Peter Ranscombe eyes up the competition.

the more classic aromas of grain and honey. I found it thinner and less mouth-coating than the Son of a Gun, but the sweet caramel and honey flavours still hit the spot.

While some distilleries chose to release their new-make spirit, others went down the blending route, including The Lakes Distillery, which created The One (£29.95, lakesdistillery. com), a British blended whisky, using spirits from other producers. The nose has light wood smoke and green apple aromas, which lead into honey, raisins, toffee and those TCP notes from a peated component.

The One has an enjoyably smooth and rounded texture, but its flavours are more muted, as would be expected from a blend.

A second version of the whisky, which has been finished in Pedro Ximenez (£39.95, lakesdistillery.com) sweet sherry casks, is much more distinctive and nails its colours firmly to the mast, with flavours of golden syrup and fruitcake accompanying the smoky notes. The Lakes’ own maiden single malt is due to be released later this year.

Yet there was whisky in England before

the current craft distillery boom; the English Whisky Company opened its St George’s Distillery in Norfolk in 2006. The Original single malt whisky (£36.99, englishwhisky.co.uk) has become something of a benchmark, with a big hit of dried fruit and a touch of smoke on the nose, then a lighter mouthfeel full of caramel, honey, raisins, and a savoury element reminiscent of roast pork and apple sauce.

The English Whisky Company also produces Marks & Spencer’s own-label Fine Single Malt English Whisky (£35), which has lighter lemon, cereal and spun sugar aromas and a surprisinglysweet toffee depth given its light colour.

Tourism is another big dimension to its business and its distillery is well-worth the short train ride from Norwich.

Another early entrant was Adnams in neighbouring Suffolk, best known as a brewer and wine merchant, but with a distillery that’s so advanced its design has made it into spirits textbooks. Its Single Malt Whisky (£34.99, adnams.co.uk) is packed full of lemon, apricot and vanilla flavours – sweet and honeyed like a Speyside malt. n

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Emerging lawyers and developing technology EXPERT: Head of commercial at Ward Hadaway, Colin Hewitt.

As law firm Ward Hadaway celebrate a special milestone, Colin Hewitt reflects on how data and technology has evolved in that time.

For more information, please contact Colin Hewitt on 0191 204 4226 or email colin.hewitt@wardhadaway.com

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2018 is a special year for our firm as we celebrate 30 years since the establishment of Ward Hadaway in Newcastle.

Before we get out the party poppers and take a slice of birthday cake, it’s an ideal time to reflect on the developments in technology that are shaping every aspect of our lives today and how life has changed since that auspicious day.

A lot has changed in three decades from businesses adopting mobile working, cybersecurity, cloud working, social media to the media revolution that is about to see BQ magazine become a digitalfocused publishing platform from April.

Not to mention the various devices we have become so familiar with over the years. It’s hard to believe that, around 30 years ago, a mobile phone was the size of a small suitcase and was voice-only.

For many, it’s also hard to believe a time when email and social media did not exist, they have become so integral to our business and personal lives.

As technology becomes all pervading, it leaves every industry having to embrace the new technologically-savvy generation as sitting on the sidelines is not an option.

Law firms, like those in the service and finance sectors, are now operating in an era of the greatest technological developments we’ve seen since the industrial revolution.

Data is without doubt the currency that now underpins the digital economy and the upcoming general data protection regulation (GDPR) in May recognises today’s data-driven world and the advances in technology.

For businesses already familiar with the current data protection regime under the 1988 Data Protection Act, GDPR represents an evolution rather than a revolution but it brings with it major challenges for many businesses that need to think again about the data they hold and how they use it.

The legal sector is constantly battling stereotypes, but with tech-savvy millennials making up nearly half (47%) of our workforce here at Ward Hadaway, our people can switch between media platforms and devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones with ease.

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“There are core areas that all companies need to put in place to remain competitive. ”

Think technology-first Like our clients, our people have embraced technology because as lawyers we have an obligation to keep up with the digital era and are working more efficiently as a result. We communicate with clients in the manner they prefer, with greater client satisfaction as a result.

Our lawyers are used to working flexibly on a broad range of systems and devices and they have access to the information needed at their fingertips at all times. This means that they can connect with clients and prospective clients and share documents and information much more easily than before and so deliver advice more quickly and clearly than ever before.

Adapting to change Every business has its own digital needs, but there are core areas that all companies need to put in place to remain competitive.

They should maintain a web presence to communicate with clients, stakeholders and suppliers and use the cloud for business continuity and more collaborative working. It’s now vital to digitise back office functions too such as payroll, asset data and logistics.

New technologies continue to emerge to which we will need to adapt, with the advent of artificial intelligence within professional services removing some of the more routine tasks and allowing lawyers to focus on adding value to the advice they give.

As we at Ward Hadaway look towards our next decade, our objective remains the same – to continue to be a truly Northern law firm for national business. However a data-led future is one we are already embracing because we know it’s going to lead to us understanding more about our clients than ever before in order to connect with them. n

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FROM JAPAN TO DAN VIA TEESPORT Dan is busy growing his business, which means regular trips to London. He relies on Hitachi Rail’s intercity express trains to get him there on time. But before Dan buys his ticket, long before the wheels touch the tracks, even before 900 people have worked on building the trains at Newton Aycliffe; Teesport made sure the body shell for that train got where it needed to be.

From the North East, Teesport handles high value project cargoes for customers across the UK.

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Our longstanding expertise and engineering capabilities enable us to constantly improve the supply chain.

That’s what we did for Hitachi Rail and that’s what we can do for you.

If you import it, Teesport it.

To see how we can help you call +44 (0) 1642 877 000 or visit www.pdports.co.uk

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PUTTING HIS BIG FEET INTO IT Oliver Bridge is renowned for his Cornerstone subscription shaving service. But his entrepreneurial life started with his size 13 feet as a teenager, writes Steve Dyson.

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he turning point in Oliver Bridge’s life was as a keen 15-year-old footballer, when he was increasingly getting frustrated with the lack of boots available for his size 13 feet.

“It was driving me mental,” recalls Bridge, now aged 29 and the successful founder of Cornerstone, the £10m subscription shaving service. “It was just so difficult to find football boots or any shoes that I liked that were big enough to fit me.”

The resourceful teenager started to look around on the web and high street shops and was soon starting to list places that stocked large footwear. This impressed his mum who one day told him: “You ought to start your own business”. And so Bigger Feet – also known

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as biggerfeet.com – was born in the autumn of 2004: finding, buying and sending large shoes to customers all over the UK. Bridge ran the business from the family home near Cambridge while he was studying for his GCSEs and AS-levels. But by the time his A-levels came along the workload got too heavy, and he found that packing and posting shoes wasn’t compatible with getting the grades he was aiming for.

“I sold it for a couple of thousand pounds to my brother,” says Bridge, “and he carried on running it for a couple of years, more than recouping his money, before technology took over and it became cheaper to buy from Amazon.

“But it had been a fantastic experience at a time when websites were still very basic, and I was running the business on paper and Excel spreadsheets. I learned loads from making tonnes of mistakes – like not keeping a database of the 1,000-odd people who were after bigger shoes. That would be worth a bomb now.

“And it meant that I didn’t have to work as a pot washer for my pocket money as a school boy, plus I got the entrepreneurial bug.”

It wasn’t long before that bug struck again.

After succeeding at his A-levels, Bridge began a degree in politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford, and he launched GenderChecker.com in the summer after his

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first year in 2008. The idea came to him during an internship trying to raise funding for a social enterprise when he was constantly guessing the wrong gender of foreign people he was contacting.

“A lot of the people I was contacting were not born in the UK and I was going crazy not recognising whether someone with a Nigerian name, for example, was male or female,” he says. “It was impeding my ability to form relationships, and I thought: ‘I can’t be the only person who has this problem’.”

Bridge began researching thousands of unusual names, mostly foreign, finding out which gender they usually represented. He then spent half his student loan commissioning a software developer to build him an easy-touse website gadget.

“I remember my student pals asking me what the hell I was doing spending my loan on that, and telling me I was going to have a really crap term with no money,” he says. “But then I came up with a great idea to market it – a ‘guess the name of the teddy bear and win a case of Dom Perignon Champagne’ competition.

“I placed this on blogs, emailed everyone I knew and it went wild, ending up with tens

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of thousands of entries, and because no-one guessed the right name – it was ‘Werner’ – I never even had to buy the Champagne.”

The high-profile launch resulted in top Google rankings for GenderChecker.com and the website still gets up to 50,000 hits a month, bringing in an average of £500 a month from companies wanting to buy copies of the database.

“It’s money I first used to pay my rent when I moved to London after graduation,” says Bridge, “and it gave me another taste of what it was like to run a business.”

Bridge graduated in 2010 and started work at a company called Happen, advising clients like Unilever and Cadbury on new product development, and then as a technology investment analyst at Synova Capital.

But before long, he realised that he wanted to start his own business again. After years of dealing with sensitive skin and razor burn, Bridge was unimpressed by the choice of expensive, over-complicated and ineffective products, plus the unnecessary hassle of having to spend his lunch break queueing in Boots.

That’s when he decided to set up Cornerstone in July 2014 – borrowing a £5,000 start-up loan

and initially working from his kitchen table.

“I believed the industry was serving itself, not the customer,” explains Bridge.

“Cornerstone is about bringing shaving into the 21st century. Our service is very simple: on our website, our members tell us how often they shave and which products they would like to receive, and we send them straight to their door on a subscription basis, meaning they never have to shop for shaving products again.

We give our members complete flexibility in managing their subscription – they can cancel or change any aspect of their plan at any time.”

Example prices for Cornerstone products include a full shaving gift set for £30, a shaving gel tub for £6, and six replacement blades for £14 – with the first order including a complimentary, personalised razor handle.

Orders go through a user-friendly site at www. cornerstone.co.uk.

But how did Bridge initially discover what he claims are “the best” razors and shaving products? “It was my personal experience to start with,” he explains. “I’d always found it really horrible to shave and had tried every type of razor, gel and moisturiser, but still suffered from a bad rash and ingrowing hairs.

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“So, I talked to friends and – importantly – barbers who shaved as a service, and realised I was using both the wrong products and techniques.

Barbers talked knowledgably about dermatology, and the trick of using good-quality products. They advised me to pick a gritty face scrub which helps lift in-growing hairs from the skin, and they urged me not to shave against the grain, as that goes too low and causes the ingrowing hairs.

“I found out what makes a good shaving gel, and realised that what you needed was a thick, lubricating product – not the much-advertised foam, which is pointless. And you should use nothing with alcohol in it.

As well as stinging like hell it dries the skin.

“With all that knowledge I knew what I wanted and contacted 20 or 30 companies to ask if they’d help and, from the few that replied, I selected one in the South of England that is a specialist in turning concepts into products, dealing with the chemistry, the checking and certification.”

Finding the right razor was another challenge, as most manufacturers own dealt in orders worth millions of pounds. But after approaching a company that has been operating in Germany for more than 100 years, Bridge managed to talk them into selling him a small stock of high-quality blades.

He remembers: “When they said they couldn’t supply me with what was a tiny order, I asked them what they’d do if I turned up with €5,000 at their door, and the chap said: ‘If you do that, you’ve got a deal.’

“So, I did. I asked my step-dad to drive me over, went to the bank and got the cash, and arrived at the factory door in Frankfurt 24 hours later.

The supplier was so shocked he gave me a few hundred extra blades for free.”

This got Cornerstone started but, after a while, feedback from

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customers told Bridge that he needed an even better razor – users telling him it was difficult to fit the heads on the handles, or that the lubricating strip didn’t change colour enough to indicate when it needed to be changed. The original supplier couldn’t adapt its product, so Bridge found a new manufacturer in Dusseldorf who could, this one with a 200-year history in razor blades.

Bridge says: “We found that 99.5% of our customers liked the new blade. It worked because we are constantly speaking to customers to find out what they want, what they like, and what they need to improve. We apply the same principle to all our products, then approach manufacturers knowing that our customers will like the end-product. It results in the highest possible standards and de-risks the whole exercise.”

At the beginning, business was tough – including lots of late nights and early mornings. And the new business soon needed serious investment.

But Bridge has been successfully crowdfunding around £1m a year since launch, acquiring 100,000 members in less than three years. He’s recently finished a new investment round worth £3.5m from angel investors and a venture capitalist, and will soon launch a huge expansion of Cornerstone’s product range.

Bridge, who’s now married and lives in Wimbledon, says: “Our mission is to completely redefine how men shop for bathroom toiletries and transform this multi-billion pound category into something much more customer-friendly.

“We currently provide high-quality, British-blended skincare products and German-engineered razors. And this year we’re expanding our product range by launching a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, shower gel and multivitamins designed for men, plus a new dental care range.

“As with any small business, we’ve encountered a number of barriers – dealing with heavy-handed legal challenges from larger competitors, raising funding in a post-Brexit environment and, perhaps most significantly, convincing customers to ditch brands they’ve used for decades and switch to a new start-up.

“The magic ingredient for tackling most challenges is a spirit of determination, something the Cornerstone team has in spades. The main driver of our success has quickly become the energy and resourcefulness of our team – there’s only so much you can do on your own, and unless you surround yourself with top-notch people, you won’t get far.”

With an anticipated turnover of £10m in 2018, the fast-growing London-based business now employs 33 full-time and two part-time staff. Yet Bridge has managed to remain the largest shareholder in Cornerstone, alongside his recent angel investors and the venture capitalist.

One thing you notice about Bridge is his clean-shaven looks – the light literally reflects off his chin. “It’s because I’m a daily shaver,” he laughs, “and I have to be, or I’d get abuse all day from my staff.

“But seriously, I follow the Cornerstone shave guide to the letter: take a warm shower, use face scrub, shave only with the grain, splash with cold water, then use a moisturiser to finish off. Before I started Cornerstone, I found shaving very unpleasant, but now, genuinely, it’s a pleasure each morning.”

From his teenage days finding football boots big enough for his size 13 feet, to his journey towards becoming a shaving millionaire, Bridge certainly insists on throwing his whole body – from toes to chin – into his businesses. n

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What is sustainable investing and can it really make a difference to the world?

Aidan Dunstan, branch head, north east England at UBS Wealth Management, tells Bryce Wilcock why the company is committed to helping its clients make an impact as well as a profit.

SUPPORTING a positive social or environmental impact as well as achieving compelling financial returns is at the heart of sustainable and impact investing.

Social impact and sustainability aren’t usually the first two things that pop into your head when you think of wealth management, however they could be set to play a much larger role in the future.

UBS, as the world’s largest wealth management organisation, (Scorpio Partnership Global Private Banking Benchmark 2017) is acutely aware of the challenges facing the world around us with the global population expecting to reach more than 8 billion by 2030; a population that will require 35% more food, 40% more water and 50% more energy than

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2015, according to The Millennium Project.

This is why, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos last year, UBS announced ambitious plans to position itself at the forefront of sustainable and impact investing over the next five years.

Now, just a year on from that announcement, the industry has reached a point where institutional grade investments are being made available at scale to more investors than ever before.

In fact, according to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance Report 2016, the total number of assets invested using at least some form of sustainability criteria is now estimated to be around US$22tn (£16tn).

However, despite this progress, that figure

only accounts for 8% of the overall global household wealth of US$280tn, so there is still work to be done.

As Aidan Dunstan, branch head, north east England at UBS Wealth Management, points out: “The way companies operate has a profound effect on society and the environment and over the years we’ve seen this become an increasing focus for UBS stakeholders, from clients and employees, to shareholders and the nations in which we operate.

“Across the globe, there is a growing interest in market solutions to ensure that companies have a positive impact, and more investors are looking to incorporate environmental, social, and governance factors into their investment

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decisions, not just to align their values with their investments, but to get exposure to some of the fastest-growing trends in society, such as ed-tech, healthcare and renewable energy and storage.

“As a result, impact and sustainable investing is becoming a force to be reckoned with, and we expect the financial community to play an ever more important role in contributing to a more sustainable society.”

As part of UBS’ ambitious five-year commitment to increasing awareness of impact investing, the company is aiming to educate as many of its clients as possible about the benefits impact investing not only has on society and the environment, but also the financial benefits.

UBS currently manages approximately £2tn worth of its assets on behalf of its clients across the globe and as part of its plan, hopes to increase the volume of impact investments primarily private equity - to US$1bn a year.

So, you might be wondering, what makes an investment have an impact on society? Previously, it was said that in order to be a sustainable and impactful investor, one should avoid simply “sin investments” such as companies involved in the arms trade, tobacco or gambling for example.

However, now it has shifted to a focus on the opportunities for outperformance through leveraging sustainability megatrends. Impact investing now seeks to generate a positive social or environmental impact alongside a financial return for wealth holders comparable to that of traditional returns – indeed if impact investments are not fully competitive in terms of financial, they will not scale and will not achieve the desired impact. This explicit strategy spans asset classes.

Whether investing venture capital in an application that provides mobile learning solutions for under-resourced schools, private equity into emerging markets healthcare companies or financing the transition to a clean energy future through renewable energy infrastructure, this approach seeks commercial solutions to social and/or environmental challenges.

UBS helps monitor such impact by drawing upon the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 17 goals that need to be achieved in order to address society’s biggest challenges between now and 2030.

However, while there is significant interest in SDGs from investors, there is little understanding of exactly how to invest in these themes in ways that can generate real impact. While investment in listed companies that contribute to the SDGs is relatively straightforward, investment in private markets is more challenging. This is where UBS comes in.

“As with any new approach to investing, there are always going to be barriers in terms of familiarity and understanding,” Dunstan adds. “The amount of jargon and some, at times, unnecessary complexity has meant that investors are often left uncertain about new initiatives.

“This is why we want to help our clients navigate this brave new world of investing and have published a guide to explain and used this year’s UBS Forum, our annual conference for investors, to explain what it is all about. We have divided it into sections devoted to some simple questions. What

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UBS’ attempt to bust impact investing myths As with any new investment approach, there are a number of myths around impact investing. Here’s our attempt to bust them: Portfolio profits and impact are mutually exclusive Some individuals and institutions view their investment portfolios in two distinct buckets: one dedicated to returns and one to philanthropy, the former subsidising the latter. Impact investing offers an investment approach that seeks to deliver both attractive returns and a defined social and environmental impact, negating the binary “make impact or make profit” mentality.

Impact investing is philanthropy Impact investing is investing with an expectation of financial return. It is not giving money away to solve social or environmental problems.

It is neither philanthropy, nor based on grant-making. It is also not dedicated to funding public sector projects. However, it can cater to different risk appetites within the same structure and draw investors from both the public and private sectors to encourage innovation.

Impact investing means making financial sacrifices Impact investing need not entail sacrificing financial returns for social or environmental benefits. A range of expected financial returns can be achieved depending on the particular investment, and the great majority of impact investors and impact investments seek market-rate returns. If we are to really grow impact investing, larger institutions should focus on market-rate return strategies, as it has a much greater capacity to scale and address big issues.

High returns imply low impact Higher financial returns need not have a negative effect on the quality of the impact investment. For example, a 2011 study by Grabenwarter and Liechtenstein found that it cannot be implied that financial returns are inversely correlated with impact generation. Indeed, if a company is able to scale quickly with high impact products, and is highly profitable, the problem it is seeking to solve may be solved much faster.

Impact investing is only in poor countries While poverty is more glaring in rural Sub-Saharan Africa than in Western Europe, developed countries also have challenges that impact investing can address. For example, the financial crisis resulted in high rates of youth unemployment in parts of Europe, cut off capital to many small businesses, and reduced investment in critical infrastructure. There are also significant environmental challenges in developed markets around the world, such as ongoing use of fossil fuels and an underinvestment in public transportation. These problems are often less visible than contaminated water supplies or slum dwellings, but impact investing can focus on any social or environmental problem regardless of geography.

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“

“Investing is no longer just about financial gains, but it can also generate social and experiential returns.”

is sustainable investing? Would I lose out financially? How do I go about it? What difference can I make?

“We want everyone to be able to engage with an approach to investing that must become the norm if it is to fulfil its potential and society is to address its biggest challenges.

We have a real opportunity, collectively, to engage more people in investing sustainably and in ways that can make a genuine difference to society while also delivering financial returns comparable to that of traditional returns. We want investors to simply think ‘why not?’”

Also driving the impact investment revolution is the changing demographic of the typical investor. The rising influence of the millennial generation – those born between the early 1980s and early 2000s – is a major driving force behind this shift.

Having grown up in a digital age with a constant flow of easily accessible information and increased transparency, millennials’ expectations of public and private organisations are higher than their previous generations’. Younger wealth holders are more socially and environmentally conscious and expect others to act accordingly.

According to UBS and Oppenheimer Funds surveys with Campden Wealth in 2017, around

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69% of ultra high net worth millennials say they want to align their investments with their social values, along with 88% of women surveyed.

“We know from our in-depth research that women and millennials are driving the adoption of sustainable and impact investing,” said Dunstan. “And as they strengthen their skill-sets and assume more control of assets, we fully expect to see this theme continue to take hold.

“That’s why we’re working alongside our clients to explain the potential benefits of sustainable investing and also dispel common myths. Investing is no longer just about financial gains, but it can also generate social and experiential returns.

“Through impact investing, we’re seeing more people than ever before become interested in wealth management and are helping our clients preserve a legacy. Even family members with no interest in finance are getting involved.”

So, you may be wondering, what makes up a sustainable investment? UBS breaks it down into three areas by looking at the environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, as a way of determining whether companies are sustainable.

Environmental investments for example look at those helping tackle climate change,

pollution and waste as well as those who are pro-actively looking for ways to improve the environment. As for the social factor, it could be businesses that promote and invest in workplace safety, tackling discrimination or those boasting sustainable supply chains. And for governance, investments look at those that are helping tackle corruption, cartel behaviour, tax gaps and promoting business ethics.

And whilst this piece only skims the tip of the iceberg, UBS has released an in-depth report looking into the benefits of impact investing. Investors are keen to understand this new investment trend and the release of the report is UBS standing by its brand values of helping its clients find the answers to life’s questions. n

ab To find out more about the guide or to download it, visit www.ubs.com/forum-2018.

UBS Wealth Management is a business division of UBS AG, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. As with traditional investments, capital is still at risk.

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How can I see the bigger picture?

By looking beyond the obvious.

Only then can we see the true value. Together we can establish strong, open and long-lasting relationships. With the expertise and resources of our truly integrated, global approach. We’re here to bring the bigger picture into focus.

For some of life’s questions, you’re not alone.

Together we can find an answer.

The value of investments can fall as well as rise. You may not get back the amount originally invested.

For more information, visit: www.ubs.com/wealthmanagement-uk

© UBS 2018. All rights reserved.

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hree years ago, Lana Elie was working on digital projects in the fashion and luxury sectors, and was often sending “thank you” flowers to clients, contacts and suppliers. “I was continuously stunned at how dated the floral industry was, both technically and aesthetically,” she recalls. “There was a severe lack of variety among the online options, whilst ordering the skilfully-crafted bouquets of independent florists presented a hassle in its own right.

“I’d also learnt that the US$50bn (£36bn) global flower industry was being dominated by online conglomerates and British independent florists were closing down as a result. And so I founded Floom, to provide customers with an extensive, hassle-free online shopping experience, whilst simultaneously offering independent florists a simple online solution for their businesses.”

Floom launched in February 2016, with bouquets ranging from £25 or so all the way up to around the £250 mark, covering all the price points in between. After little more than two years, it’s projecting turnover in the region of £2.7m for 2018.

“We’ve done over 600% growth in the last year and are now looking forward to continuing with that speed and success in the year to come,” says Elie. The business has recently raised almost £1m in funding and now has plans to expand its pioneering model internationally.

And “international” is a theme that Elie deeply understands. She was born in Paris in the late 1980s, but left aged two and was raised in Bali until she was 15, then lived in California for six years before returning to Bali aged 21.

“Even I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I found Bali life really slow and difficult to adjust to,” says Elie, now aged 30 and living in Hackney, London. “But at the time I was really eager to continue with my career and work for a great brand, and that’s not really what Bali had to offer.

“So, I moved to Melbourne for a year to get a taste of it, absolutely loved it but would have had to apply for another visa to stay and I still felt it was too small and would limit my growth.

I have a French passport so kind of looked on a map to where I could live and work with it

“

given I was part of the European Union, and ultimately picked London, headed over and got my first UK job here at Burberry.”

Elie had never been to university, so when she found herself in the intensely-competitive creative industries in London during her early 20s, she used to dread the “Where did you go to uni?” question.

“Looking back now though,” she muses, “perhaps it was something which has shaped both me as a person and my business in a positive way. I started out at Burberry just at the point where they decided to be the first luxury brand to really take the online world and its opportunities seriously by bringing the relevant teams in house.

“I then worked for an agency creating content, mainly app-focused, for the likes of Gucci and other brands. Finally, I was head of branded content for i-D Magazine, before quitting to concentrate on Floom full time.”

By this stage, Elie found herself ready to create an online floristry marketplace, offering quality and beautiful bouquets from a careful selection of local independent florists, with same-day delivery promised.

“It’s a go-to place where you can find bouquets you are actually proud to send,” she explains. “We’ve built the software to simplify the process of finding and purchasing from the best florists for the customers, and want the florists to take centre stage.

“I knew my idea inside out but I also spent months perfecting a viable business plan and model.”

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“Flowers have always been a love of mine, and I believe they’re an exceptionally personal gift.”

“With Floom, what you get is not only lovingly made by the independent florist, it’s also added to the site by them in the first place, so what the customer sees, and orders, is actually what turns up. This sounds obvious, but it’s something new in the online flower delivery sector.

“It came from wasting so many hours looking for florists when I sent flowers in the past, and frustration that most of the great ones were still unknown to most. I wanted to build something that simplified this discovery and purchasing process, but not just another floristry website. I knew it needed to be built around these independents and their skills.”

One of Elie’s biggest challenges was Floom’s

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launch day – back on 26 February 2016… well, almost that date. Her original launch day was mid-March but when she checked the calendar she realised this was a week past Mother’s Day, so she pulled it forward by two weeks.

“We’re a flower business,” she points out, “and if there’s one thing that the useless giftgiving men in my life have taught me it’s that we needed to be up for Mother’s Day.” Once decided, and despite “1,000 things” that stood in the way of that date, Elie pushed ahead with that deadline in mind. At just past midnight on 26 February – and surrounded by her team who like Elie had not slept for about four weeks – she hit the button that pushed www.floom.com live.

“I got home at 2am, excited, but mostly exhausted,” she remembers. “I went to the sofa to do one last test run.

“Then I saw the test order was overcharging, and anyone who might have been able to fix the problem was, unsurprisingly, unreachable at that time of night. So, I had to hit the same button again that just a couple of hours earlier had given me such joy, and took the site back down…”

This setback didn’t last long. Floom successfully launched the following day – still in plenty of time for Mother’s Day – and since then has surged ahead. Elie says: “I’ve been blessed with relatively smooth sailing to date.

“Everyone who I needed to ‘get’ it has done,

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“I love independent florists, and it’s such a pleasure to be able to champion the hard work and the skills they bring to the industry.”

from open-minded investors to the great team I now have working with me. That said, there’s always going to be things that go wrong: with team members, orders, and the website.

“Overcoming these issues is helped by having risk strategies in place. For instance with regards to funding, I knew my idea inside out but I also spent months perfecting a viable business plan and model that gave both my investors and me the confidence to take things forward, and how to make minor changes when needed.”

During the past two years, Elie has experienced several “breakthrough” moments – such as getting her first round of funding, landing the first customer sale, and hiring and moulding her team. She sounds most proud of how she approaches funding, focusing on two key areas.

“First, I had my [online] deck professionally designed,” she says. “How do you tell and sell a story without a product?

“My answer was to visualise it, and it seemed to work. When you think of great products, it’s the ones that mix being something you need with something that’s beautiful, simple and easy to use. I think that’s often undervalued.

“Second, and I probably knew this less than

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I do now, but being me was pretty important.

I’m fairly confident, I’m well put together, and I can sell something. That’s not what I thought of when I walked into those first meetings though.

“I was more focused on not being a tech or finance whizz, and whilst I did my own projections, it was absolutely the first time I’d dealt with a budget that size, so instead I’d memorised every breakdown of spend and return of revenue for every month in the next five years.

“Obviously no one bothered to ask me about that, it wasn’t a maths test… but I think if you ask any investor who did take the risk with me, they’ll say it’s my passion that led them to.

It’s not my numbers, but it’s the confidence that I want it enough to figure it out.”

Floom now has seven members of staff, with plans to expand in the near future. As well as continuing to grow across the UK, the next target market is New York. Elie is excited by how she feels the American market lends itself to her model and branding.

Given her trade, it’s not surprising to hear how much flowers mean to Elie, who tells me “visiting botanical gardens” is one of her joys outside of work. She’s reluctant to tell me her favourite flower, as she insists that all the

different seasons bring distinctive colours and patterns. But she finally relents: “I do have a soft spot for dahlias.”

And then she gets passionate about the floral side of life: “Flowers have always been a love of mine, and I believe they’re an exceptionally personal gift that has been stripped back and dulled down by bigger companies – so to be able to disrupt that with my own idea and business is really exciting.

“More than the flowers though, I love independent florists, and it’s such a pleasure to be able to champion the hard work and the skills they bring to the industry.”

Her passion continues when I ask her for top tips for would-be entrepreneurs: “Believe wholeheartedly in your idea no matter what anyone says, but also be objective enough to take the right feedback on board. Definitely get used to rejection, just don’t let it mean anything – it’s a fact that not everyone is going to agree with you.

“And remain curious. It’s pretty easy to find the right tools to teach you about things you don’t know, and if you really don’t have those skills, find people who do that can help you.

After all, you can always send them flowers to say thank you…” n

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MOTHER’S

PRIDE Three daughters with multiple food allergies proved to be the inspiration for Amy Granger’s chocolate business but, as Paul Robertson finds out, she has overcome many personal difficulties to grow her Essy & Bella brand.

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f your child is lying in a hospital bed, fighting for her very life, it is difficult to focus on anything else. That was the situation Amy Granger found herself in five years ago but, as the battle was thankfully won, it was also the spark for the 35 year old to take control of her own destiny.

Now, five-year-old Esmé is thriving along with elder sister Isobel, eight, and three-yearold Cicely as their mum’s business is set to expand to cope with the demand for her range of chocolate products – all developed and handmade by Granger, free from the top 14 allergens.

“When Esmé was born, she was very poorly with pneumococcal meningitis and septicaemia,” says Granger. “Nobody thought she would survive the day – it was horrific.

“She was in hospital for three weeks and because she was so small we had no idea how she would be affected by it if she survived – would she be able to talk, would she be able to hear, would she have any additional needs? I’d had 14 months maternity leave and I thought how am I going to continue in a full-time job with a child who may need additional needs and so began to think what I could do.”

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This pivotal moment for Granger and subsequent decision was at odds with the path of her career to this point. Born and brought up in Gateshead, she went on to study sports science at York St John’s University and then on to do a master’s degree in international sports law.

She started work at a Bannatyne’s health club before successfully applying for a job in Spain for the Australian Institute of Fitness, which trains people to be personal trainers.

“I spent 18 months out there, met my now ex-husband and was doing my master’s at the same time,” she says.

“The recession hit so we came back to the UK at the beginning of 2009. I ended up working in banking, investigating payments for signs of terrorist activity, which I really enjoyed, before going back into health clubs and then to another banking job handling complex credit card complaints.”

With Isobel starting school and Esmé progressing well, the planning for her future began – but what was to be her inspiration? “I have always loved food,” Granger says.

“I would get the 4pm bus home from school in Sunderland just in time to make a cup of tea

and a biscuit before Ready Steady Cook started on TV – I used to love it. I was always into experimenting and baking so it has been an interest from an early age, but I never thought food would become my career.”

The fact she and her young family all had more than one of the top 14 allergens set her thinking of products they might like. “Originally, I thought about dairy-free ice cream and made loads of the stuff,” recalls Granger.

“But there was so much involved and lots of cost for freezers etc that I couldn’t see the business opportunity. I did a lot of reading and research while on maternity leave and identified there was a big gap in the market for quality chocolate for people with allergies.

“I could have gone on courses with the best chocolatiers in the world but none of it would have applied to me because it is dealing with milk, butter, cream – everything we couldn’t eat – so I had to work it out for myself. For those of us with allergies, the only thing available was orange or mint dark chocolate and I thought there has to be something better than that.

“I have been vegetarian since 12 and vegan for many years. There are so many of us who have allergies or make lifestyle changes so why

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should we put up with a lack of choice?”

She describes her first effort – melting chocolate into plastic moulds then mixing it with a coffee liquid – as not especially nice. “I had never done anything like this before, so it was trial and error.”

She came up with a brand – Essy & Bella, named after her children – and began experimenting with different flavours. “My maternity leave ended so I went back to the bank and continued researching and experimenting with flavours in my own time,” she says.

“I found out just four months later that I was pregnant again. I dipped my toe in the water at a vegan festival in Newcastle but then Cicely was born at 32 weeks and so things were on hold.”

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She did her first proper festival in November 2015, taking Cicely with her as she was breastfeeding. “I went to a number of festivals during my last maternity leave, selling the products and word got around, especially on social media through vegan groups and Facebook groups for mums breastfeeding babies who have allergies,” says Granger.

“It was then someone from the Department of International Trade got in touch and I began thinking can I really go back into a full-time job with three kids, especially as I am always at hospital with one of them due to their conditions. To allow my business to grow I needed bigger premises because it was getting ridiculous in my kitchen – the house was being taken over.

“The trade adviser put me in touch with

another company he was working for and who, like me, was looking to export. It just so happened it was another chocolatier – Davonport’s chocolates.

“We had a great chat and they offered to rent me some space in the adjoining building they owned. It gave me the opportunity and the confidence to turn Essy & Bella into a business of scale.”

Every product is handcrafted in small batches using the highest-quality, ethicallysourced ingredients without any unnatural preservatives.

She has a range of 13, high-end chocolate products plus seasonal specials, made with rice milk, and her range of gourmet bars include black forest, cherry Bakewell, banoffee crunch, honeycomb and gin (juniper, really, as there is

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no alcohol in any of her chocolates).

“My dad [Mick Laidler] is ‘head of packaging’, apparently, but other than that it is just me,” says Granger. “But we will be employing people in the very near future.”

Her marriage break-up has made her more determined than ever to build on the solid foundations the business has achieved. A map on the factory wall is tagged with all the countries where Essy & Bella products are sold – across Europe to the United States, Dubai, Japan, Nigeria and Australia to name but a few.

Turnover is set to grow at least fourfold over the next financial year with investment planned in new machinery, as well as employees to meet the growing demand. Artisan festivals have largely been superseded by trade fairs, there are two distributors plus the artisan

foods company providing routes to market with Essy & Bella’s website and social media being a big driver for sales.

Christmas 2017 started last June with a new range of products including a Rudolph lollipop and, for this Easter, the hot cross bun bar makes its debut, containing all the ingredients you might expect such as sultanas, cinnamon and nutmeg, with alternatives to dairy such as cocoa butter, rice powder and rice milk.

“We have had a very high number of preorders, which is proving challenging to meet demand,” says Granger. “I can currently do 500 bars a day, but we are under pressure to increase this significantly.

“The business takes up all the time I am not being a mum. Isobel comes to the festivals, she is a proper little sales person, when people walk

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away without buying she says, ‘Would you like to try some’ and gives them the sales patter – she loves it.

“The kids are my motivation. I am a single mother of three quite young kids. I have been told I could just sit and claim benefits but that’s not me.

“I make sure I do the school runs every day – we are at gymnastics club five days a week – and I do everything for them, with great support from my dad.

“I am setting an example to them, showing them they can do whatever they want to do – run a business and still do the family things. They are excited by the map on the wall showing where we are on sale and looking at Instagram pictures of people enjoying our products – they brag about me being a professional chocolatier. At the minute they don’t plan to follow in my footsteps, they all want to be doctors.”

“

“My aim is to make sure nobody misses out – chocolate is something you shouldn’t be denied. It is a treat.”

If coping with all this wasn’t enough, a serious spinal condition led to an emergency operation and regular visits to the hospital for herself for pain relief and possibly more surgery on the cards, but Granger is undeterred.

Already she has won a string of awards, she is developing products for the second half of the year targeted at supermarkets, and has a determination to be number one in the marketplace.

“I am very proud of what Essy & Bella has become and is achieving,” she says. “The kids love it, they don’t get much of the chocolate, but it is a treat that is an alternative to the mainstream products.

“My aim is to make sure nobody misses out – chocolate is something you shouldn’t be denied. It is a treat. There needs to be an alternative for people with allergens.

“I have a huge vault of products in the back of my mind, but it is getting them done and to market as quickly as I want to do them. The free-from market is huge and only growing so who knows where we can go.” n

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Partner

FROM THINK TANK TO BANK Atom bank’s new chair, Bridget Rosewell, talks to Suzy Jackson about her career and her new role.

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“CAN we just… I’m sorry,” Rosewell says, fiddling with a phone cable, “but it’s just not sitting straight.” And as she twists the phone cord into submission, she wryly adds, “…and that’s everything you need to know about me!”

A few hundred miles from Atom bank’s Durham headquarters, I chat to Rosewell in its small London office, just off Oxford Street. It’s a beautiful period building, filled with modern fixtures and fittings to make it suitable for modern businesses, and by looking more coffee shop than office, it echoes Atom’s approach to banking – it’s as “unofficey” as Atom is “unbanky”.

“Right! Shoot!” Speaking of unbanky, Rosewell is not what most of us would picture as a bank chairman in our mind’s eye. Friendly and welcoming, her words are considered and meaningful, not wasted, her thought processes quite obvious as she ends many discussions by finding something new she needs to do, or speak to someone about – some more unfulfilled potential.

“I’ve been involved in Atom bank since the very beginning, before the company was first set up, and we were still talking about why this would be a good idea; to increase the number of civic institutions in the North East, and to attract serious people, and high incomes, into the region.

“I think I was one of the first NEDs [nonexecutive directors] to be appointed back in 2014,” she says. “I’ve seen it from the germ of an idea, into something which is now a serious bank. So, we’ve been through those germ stages – coming up with a group of people, finding Mark [Mullen, Atom’s CEO]. We’ve been through the start-up phase – getting a license, beginning to put money on the balance sheet – and now we’re moving into a more grown-up phase.

We are now definitely a bank, we have assets, we have to fulfil all of the regulatory requirements that go alongside it and we have to show that we’re capable of moving up to the next level – profitable, growing, more technology, more products… doing all of the different things that a bank will have to do. So that’s the challenge that now sits on my plate, and the executive’s plate.”

Nothing too big, then. “I think for all of the challenger banks… well, it’s challenging! The route we have decided to go down is, some people might say, the most challenging – which is to be a full-service retail and commercial

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bank, so savings, loans, transaction accounts – everything. And at the same time, build a balance sheet, because that’s what a bank is; it’s what they’re about.

“If you look around the landscape, I think you can see that many of the other new banks coming in are either taking a niche, or they’re taking a technology approach and really building a technology rather than a bank. We’ve tried to go right through the middle of that and build a real challenger to the bigger banks. A very small ambition, but our own.”

Atom’s founder and departing chair, Anthony Thomson, has been synonymous with the bank since its inception. Big shoes to fill? “Different shoes,” Rosewell smiles. “Not that I wear high heels, I’m usually to be found in trainers unless you can prise me out of them! Anthony was a great chair; enthusiastic, a big personality in that start-up phase and that’s what he enjoys doing.

“Me? I like climbing; I do hillwalking. This isn’t the initial battle; this is the straight slog up the slopes of being a good, serious, respected, efficient bank. So, I’ve got my sticks out, and my boots, and it’s time to get up the path we’ve set out in front of us. We’ve got to get on and do it!

“I’m looking forward to building a successful relationship with all our stakeholders; getting to know them and deepening relationships I’ve already got. I’m looking forward to supporting the executives as they develop the skills and capabilities they need to take Atom to the next level, both in terms of products and new technology.

And on the exceptionally warm reception she was given by the Atom team, Rosewell says she was amazed. “It blew my mind. I was really emotional, really choked; the positivity with which people responded to my appointment was incredible.”

But Rosewell is pretty incredible. Oxford educated, she did a degree in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), followed by a master’s degree in economics in 1976. “And I stayed on and taught for another eight years at the university.” She was a lecturer in economics at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and at Somerville College, Oxford, then a tutor in economics until 1984.

What made her take those qualifications?

“It’s a very good question, I wish I could remember,” she quips. “I went to do PPE because I hadn’t done any of these subjects

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CAREER PRIDE It’s only when pressed that Rosewell can start really listing her career achievements. She opens, coyly, with: “I’m quite proud of being attacked in the House of Lords by my former industrial relations tutor.

“We were proposing the abolition of the dock labour schemes, and I’d done some analysis which supported that.

There was a counter argument that the closure of the scheme would put people out of work, and I was arguing that it wouldn’t.”

Rosewell won that argument, and a few years later when she visited one of those ports and was told that the scheme’s abolition had created jobs, she was happy to find that not only was it a successful piece of analysis… “BUT IT WAS RIGHT!” “Being asked to be on the ‘wise men’, the panel of economists who advised the Chancellor, that was great. And having the Queen pin the OBE on me, that was pretty amazing.”

“And I’m very proud of Crossrail,” she continues. “I did all the economic analysis for that at the GLA. I had to fight against the normal way of doing analysis to show why it was good value for money.

So when we got the decision to go ahead, that was a good moment. You had to think hard about how you won an argument, think hard about how you go around somebody… but we won.”

As you can see, it’s winning an argument that really makes Rosewell happiest. “I’m proud of those,” she concludes.

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Partner

FAIRER WORKPLACES “I think it is a big deal,” Rosewell begins. “It’s a big deal, the way many women get treated, and that’s definitely one of the reasons I went out on my own.

“I haven’t noticed it, personally, so it’s a much more generic thing than a personal thing. Academic life is very dog-eat-dog, not very collaborative, and it’s the rules that are being written by the people who are already there which are difficult to deal with.

“When I started out in my career, you pretended you didn’t have children. You didn’t ever want to say that they’d been ill, or anything, so you just pretended they didn’t exist. That’s changed; anybody can now say, man or woman, that there’s a nativity play, or a sports day, and that it’s important to be there.

“Maybe there’s still some way to go… I don’t have any grandchildren yet, so it remains to be seen how my daughter will fare.

“I think gender representation is quite good at board level, less good at executive level. You can spread available women over the non-exec roles, whereas the executive roles are full time. That’s where an improvement needs to be achieved.

“And it’s a longer game, but it depends on making work, and the way that work is organised, more attractive.”

“

at school and I was fed up, I wanted something new, and this economics stuff? No idea. We hadn’t done it at school.

“And I became fascinated by these questions, about how the world works… and can you make it better? Can you improve it? Are there ways we could manage things better?”

When she finished her education, she applied to be a librarian, and was interviewed by her former tutor. “He said, ‘What are you doing here?!’ …‘it’s a job, I want a job...!’ ‘Don’t be so silly, go and do the M.Phil. in economics!’ So, I did!”

And that’s the complete story of how Rosewell went on to become a leading British economist.

“It wasn’t a career plan. Don’t think I’ve ever had a career plan, really. Do what interests you and do what’s difficult. Challenge me to do something and I’m likely to say ‘oh, alright then!’ and then think, ‘what have I done?!’.”

She remained in education for eight years. “Academic life is flexible with small children, and my then-husband was also in Oxford, so it was obvious to stay. But then I started to realise that I didn’t believe many of the things I was teaching, which is a bit of a problem. So, the assumptions that underlie the principles of economics are misleading, if not wrong: that everyone is rational, that everyone’s got the full information. There’s a whole edifice of conclusions – even now, policy results from making assumptions about how people behave, which is wrong.

“I always felt like I wanted to get to the bottom of that. I still do, and I still am.”

“Challenge me to do something and I’m likely to say ‘oh, alright then!’.”

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Those assumptions can be incorrect because they’re dated, but also because we just… know better, now. “In the late 19th century, when people started thinking ‘what is economics?’ and really doing it, choice was much more limited. Consumers were much less powerful than they are now, and there was no internet; none of that variety of choice, which does mean that you could imagine having information about all the possible products you might want to buy, which is one of the underlying assumptions of economics.

“Some of the other things were always wrong, and sort of known to be wrong – like the assumption that you only care about yourself, and not other people, which is essential to making some of the maths that they developed tractable, so you could solve the system. If you abandon that it’s much harder because the whole thing feeds back all the time, because your decisions are affected by my decisions, and mine by yours, and so on.

You need much more complex mathematics to deal with that, and we didn’t have it.”

Rosewell moved into consulting. “That which I had seen of large corporate life was not attractive to me, particularly not as a woman. I didn’t fancy climbing the ‘greasy pole’, and back in the 80s the glass ceiling for women was very apparent. You knew you’d have to be at least twice as good to get half as far. So I thought, why bother? I can just set up my own business.”

She established her first company, Business Strategies, with two partners. Twelve years in, they bought her out when she felt the pangs of boredom kicking in – “I’m easily bored,” she admits – and Volterra was born.

“There was a material difference between the businesses – Business Strategies did regional economic forecasting, so it was very much around turning the handle on forecasting

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models. I wanted to do project-based consultancy, decision-making stuff, rather than just sell a forecast – which, in any case, was wrong. I began to have ethical problems with what I was doing. So Volterra was to be more of a think tank.”

Where did Rosewell find her entrepreneurial flair; what was the lure of running her own business? “I wanted to be in charge,” she concedes, matter-of-factly. “Yes, definitely. I wanted to be able to do the things I thought were interesting. The difficulty is, once a business creates its own momentum, it starts wanting to do things you don’t think are interesting.

“People say, ‘oh, wasn’t that very brave’, but to be honest, it never felt brave. It just felt like the best thing to do. Here was an opportunity, a market opportunity I could see, I knew how we could fill it, I thought we could sell it, and we just… did!

“It helps if you cut things into the next step.

I never had the 30-year career plan, so you do what comes nearest. Take a thread and pull at it, and be willing to accept new opportunities, that’s really what it comes down to.”

Asked how she balanced the pressures of being a working mother with a burgeoning career in education, the initial answer – ‘badly, probably!’ – doesn’t show her anywhere near enough credit, for doing this in an era where it really was the exception, rather than the rule. “I don’t think it’s changed either – tie and knot and go on, as Wellington said about his campaigns – and hopefully you find everyone eventually. There weren’t many working mothers.

“There were occasions where I thought it might be nice to cut back, because I have this tendency to say yes to things, but when I thought about the consequences of stopping,

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somehow, I… stopped stopping!

“Interesting things came along… Atom came along!”

Two things made her get involved in Atom bank in the first place. “Firstly, it was about supporting the North East economy. As you can tell I’m not from the North East, I’m suburban South East, me, but I came up to sit on the North East Independent Economic Review in 2012 – time flies! We had a conclusion that one thing lacking in the economy was new growing businesses but particularly, not just tech firms coming from universities, but bigger institutions which would see across the whole of the region and help to provide some finance deals that were lacking in the local community.

“The other part was that I’d been sitting on boards from the late nineties, through the financial crisis, and I watched the emerging car crash and behaviours. So, another part of it was about showing how we could do banking better. More transparent, more fair, better deal for customers, not being burdened with the legacy of huge systems that had built over time and become incredibly opaque. Open banking is great news, we’re still working out how we respond to that.

“So, there’s a bit about the North East economy, and a bit about how I do banking.

That’s why I got involved.”

Rosewell talks proudly and passionately about her other roles, on the infrastructure commission looking at transport links and connectivity in different parts of the UK, as well as chairing the “roads for the future” competition, which fits nicely with her role as chair of the Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency.

“And in my spare time,” she says, a twinkle in her eye, “I sit in front of the television and knit.

It’s very therapeutic!”

So, why did Rosewell untangle the phone cable, right at the beginning of our conversation? Not because she’s fastidious or stamping her personal authority on a situation… but simply because she saw a way to make it better, and so she felt moved to jump in and do it.

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g n i w o Foll the trail

Inspired by trail mix in the United States, former Innocent Smoothies worker Joe Taylor and his wife, Carly, launched Real Handful, a high-energy snack now stocked

by Boots, Holland & Barrett and Sainsbury’s, as Dawn Colllinson reports.

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s a keen ironman triathlete, Joe Taylor regularly put in up to 20 hours a week in training to maintain his contest-level fitness.

But a hiking trip to the Grand Canyon back in 2008 gave him more than just a rigorous workout – it introduced him to a business idea that he brought home and made his own.

Looking for something tasty and full of energy to keep him going on the trek, Taylor tried trail mix, a combination of dried fruit, nuts and – in this case – M&Ms. “Trail mix is a term everyone recognises in America,” he explains.

“It’s a really popular nutritious snack that

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provides a great hit of naturally-occurring fats, protein and carbohydrates, and it’s flexible so it can have popcorn, candy or sweets in it along with dried fruit, seeds, nuts or granola.

Me and my wife, Carly, both have a sweet tooth, but we like that feeling that comes from eating natural stuff that is functional and gives you energy.

“When I told Carly about trail mix, we wondered why it wasn’t available here. You could get standard fruit and nut mixes but if you wanted something a bit more unusual or a bit more special, you were left to making it up yourself.”

The couple, who live in Cheadle in Greater Manchester, began creating their own at home and thought it was only a matter of time before an independent company spotted the market for something different in healthy fruit and nut snacking. “We were just waiting for someone to do it and no-one really was,” Taylor recalls.

The pair decided that “someone” would be them. And, in 2013, kitchen table combinations put together for themselves became the starting point for developing their own business, Real Handful.

They launched in 2016, with health food

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“

“Healthier snacking can become a bit worthy so we’re really passionate about making it more of a fun experience.”

retailer Holland & Barrett as their first customer and have gone on to secure major high street stockists including Boots, David Lloyd fitness clubs, Ocado and Sainsbury’s.

With a team of four, Real Handful’s first full-year turnover was £250,000 and it is now looking to broaden its range and look at business opportunities outside the UK For Taylor, now 37, Real Handful has not only been a life change – becoming his own boss, with all the pros and cons that brings – but a 180-degree career shift too.

The Liverpool-born entrepreneur landed his first job with tech giant IBM straight from a management science degree at Loughborough University.

He spent four years in IT with the company, moving to Manchester to be with Carly. But, he says, he gradually realised that he didn’t

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love the industry and was dreading going in to work on Mondays.

“Carly worked in food and drink and I think I had job envy because it was something I loved and it’s the opposite of IT because it’s just so tangible,” he says. Keen to make a move, Taylor focused on a rapidly-growing company he admired.

“I applied for every job Innocent Drinks advertised for about six months and they eventually relented and offered me one,” he laughs. “It was a different industry and a different culture.

“They were launching a new juice drinks brand, which is now Juicy Water, so they spun off the team and we worked on product, marketing and sales. There was this little team of six of us, at the front end, and the first six months were maybe even tougher than

launching a business, but it did really well and I learned so much.

“If anything, being at Innocent was my ‘Sliding Doors’ moment. I saw the founders going through everything: the tough times and the good times but most importantly showing that with a good plan, great people and fantastic products you can create something really special.

“Now there are at least a dozen other start-ups that have been founded by former Innocent employees who’ve all been inspired and empowered to go out and do it themselves in their own ways.”

When Taylor left Innocent for Kellogg’s, and subsequently Heinz, the idea behind Real Handful was coming together and by 2013, with a plan drawn up, he and Carly knew they definitely wanted to take their own products to the market.

“The name Real Handful came about when I was out walking the dog one day and thinking about a name that reflects what we want to do… to just use natural real ingredients, to make something that’s convenient to grab and go, and not only about trail mix so we could stretch our range beyond that,” he remembers.

“We wanted something that was fun as well because we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously – healthier snacking can become a bit worthy so we’re really passionate about making it more of a fun experience.

“It’s not about ‘good and bad’, we believe in better – that’s what we stand for. It’s about natural nutrition and executing it in a way that really focuses on flavour. You should look forward to what you eat, enjoy it while you’re eating it and feel good about what you’ve eaten afterwards rather than feeling guilty afterwards because you’ve overindulged or not enjoy something because it’s a bit dry and dusty.”

Real Handful began life with around 30 concepts, which were narrowed down to test in the market. “We basically started off by drawing up a list of our favourite really decadent desserts – things like Eton mess and Key lime pie – and then we worked with a food developer to recreate those flavours,” says Taylor.

“With Key lime pie mix, we combined limeflavoured raisins with cashews, which replaced the texture of the meringue and little white chocolate drops and lime peel – suddenly we had a fruit and nut mix with a bit of indulgence and it really worked.”

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“

“With a good plan, great people and fantastic products you can create something really special.”

The couple launched with six core combinations to appeal to the widest spread of potential stockists. “Different retailers find different mixes are right for their customers so someone like David Lloyd buys our goji mix because it’s functional and a great source of fibre and protein, whereas Sainsbury’s might prefer our strawberries and cream mix,” Taylor says.

Over time, he explains, the mixes have evolved and some have stayed on the drawing board, despite their best efforts.

“We created this banoffee-flavoured mix that tasted incredible but we never wanted to use unhealthy fried banana chips so we worked with a raw organic banana slice.

“I remember the day we turned up at the factory and the banana slices had all stuck together in transit into one huge banana lump.

We literally spent days preparing that one ingredient and trying to find a way to work with it before we admitted defeat… maybe one day.

“Not everything that we love on paper makes it into production and we’ve realised

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that the indulgent dessert idea can send out a confusing message so now we talk about bigger bolder flavours and that seems to resonate more with people. For that reason, we’re about to launch a new range with names like ‘Mint Choc Chipper’, ‘Strawberry Stomp’ and ‘Blackcurrant Blast’ because it’s all about the energy as well as the lead flavour.”

It’s been 10 years since Taylor discovered trail mix, but his passion for the idea has never wavered. If anything, he says, people’s desire to know more about what they’re eating has grown and smaller independents like Real Handful are best-placed to innovate in the industry.

Alongside the new flavour launches this spring, the company is introducing its first two bars and a range of kids snacks. Those, he explains, have been inspired in part by their own three boys – aged one, four and six – who love eating and testing the products at home.

“They’ve eaten them since they were about two years old, but we know they’re not the only ones who love it,” he says. “Sainsbury’s tells us it has customers getting in touch who

are sharing our mixes with their kids so that’s what’s encouraged us to bring out a range of kids snacks later this year.

“You need to keep kids fuelled, and it’s nice to give parents options. With kids, you get inspired snippets of insight; they eat a lot based on what something looks like, and their palates change so quickly.

“Our two older boys used to pick out the cashews and throw them away but as soon as they were four they’d demolish those as well.

Now they and our friends’ kids are our guinea pigs, helping us create the new kids’ mixes.”

Real Handful is very much a hands-on family business for Joe, Carly and their sons, although it does mean that juggling time can be tricky.

And those ironmen triathlons that helped start it all have had to be put on hold for now.

“I’m lucky if I get out and do a half marathon once or twice a year at the moment,” he says.

“I love the flexibility of working for myself, but you need time for everything else too – the business is the fourth child and I always feel guilty when I’m not giving one of the four enough attention.” n

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“It is tough. If you want to get a result you have to believe.”

Transforming lives What started off as a dream with three clients in a village hall has turned into a rapidly-growing business. Paul Robertson meets Paul Alexander, founder of elite fitness.

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aul Alexander is in the business of transforming peoples’ lives – something the 40 year old has done for himself and his family, turning a passion into a successful business through drive, ambition and plenty of blood sweat and tears. In just four years, Alexander has taken his concept of group personal training sessions – creating programmes for health, fitness and wellbeing accessible for everyone – from a village hall in Tyneside to six studios in Newcastle, Cramlington, Manchester, Leeds, Stockton and Durham, with a further four planned in 2018, and revenues of £1.8m.

There is not a treadmill in sight, but the walls are adorned with before and after success stories from those undertaking elite programmes, with his director wife Jan among the 50 employees and their two “superhero” sons Ollie and Henry, both of whom have cerebral palsy, driving his ambition.

“I never worked in a gym in my life,” he says.

“I started with a rucksack, a skipping rope, boxing gloves and two dumbbells – it was all I could afford.

“But it is not about the equipment or the

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place you train – it is about the person. I have noticed in the fitness industry that all they sell is an environment and some equipment, but clients want to have energy and lose weight.

“My philosophy is, if I can prove to people that I can change them, make them look different, make them feel better then they would tell their pals and word will spread. If someone could invest in a diet pill to make them lose weight then they would be a billionaire overnight, but it is hard work.

“I admire the clients who do it – I have total respect for them as it is tough. If you want to get a result you have to believe.”

Belief, if not confidence, is something Alexander has had from an early age. Brought up in the village of Staindrop in Teesdale, County Durham, the eldest of three boys, he describes himself as always being a grafter.

Dad John was a self-employed builder and Alexander would labour for him in school holidays as well as doing a paper round, milk round, working in a petrol station and a do-ityourself store, while mum Barbara was at home with his brothers, Martin and Simon.

“We were always outside and had a strict but happy upbringing – dad kept us in line,” says Alexander. “I was a bright lad but academically it never shone through in my exam results.

“I felt a bit different, I was not interested in university. I wanted to work with my dad in the business and be in control of what I did but dad put me off and I ended up working in pharmaceuticals at GlaxoSmithKline as a trainee on £30 a week.

“I hated it all 14 years I was there. It paid well but on my breaks I was writing down what I would do in the future – I was looking to start any business.”

By now he was married to Jan and, while out on a run together, she suggested he would be great at personal training, motivating others to achieve their goals. “I was always good at talking to people and training them at work – helping them follow procedure, pay attention to detail and so on,” says Alexander.

“On our run Jan said: ‘You would be quite good at this – you’re good at explaining things and people would look up to you doing it.’

I am a man of action rather than words, so I

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researched career paths, how to be a manager at a gym, how to start a business.”

And so the long, difficult journey to starting elite began. Weekends were spent travelling to Manchester, having invested £6,000 to gain qualifications in fitness instruction, including nutrition and psychology.

During the week, his long shifts at GlaxoSmithKline ended with him climbing into his Nissan Micra and driving more than an hour to Newcastle to deliver free training to people in his own time and at his own expense to get experience.

“People thought I was a bit crazy,” he recalls.

“Friends would go drinking at the weekend whereas I would be at my old schoolyard training my pal – even if it was pouring with rain I didn’t care because I knew it was the step I had to take.”

Jan was then working as a nanny in Newcastle and they had moved north to be closer to her job, even though it meant a 4am start for Alexander to get to GlaxoSmithKline.

Then came the opportunity he was looking for. He managed to get redundancy and threw himself into fitness. He had already dreamed up the brand elite but still wasn’t quite in a position to launch the business.

“I started in a church hall in Newcastle,” he says. “I didn’t know anyone.

“I bought 10,000 flyers and delivered them myself. A mate and my brother spent weeks going around with me, but I just got three responses.

“It was costing me more to hire the village hall, but I was determined not to lose these three people and to make it the best boxercise session I could. Word got around and it grew to a class of 35.

“From there, I upsold personal training sessions to some of them and ended up with some really good clients.”

Jan was now pregnant with Ollie and lost her job, which gave Alexander no option but to turn elite into a proper business. He opened his first studio in Newcastle in 2014, crowdfunding from existing clients, persuading them to pay a year’s subscription up front so he could train them in a better environment and give them a better experience.

“I never had any loans,” he says. “I’d heard about this tactic through an audiobook in my car. If you have a lot of passionate fans out there, use them to help and it worked really well.”

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Things began to take off and it was the launch of his “elite:transform” programme, which in turn transformed Alexander’s life and business. The six-week programme is designed to help people lose 20lbs or more in a healthy, controlled way but also set them up to carry through its ethos for the rest of their life, using social media to encourage them.

He took a huge gamble by charging £228 but offering a no strings full refund if they achieved their goal. Some do – £189,000 was refunded last year – but then they can’t use elite for three months. Most clients stay on.

“Nobody was really doing what I was doing then – posting before and after pictures – I created a process of social proof to build clients and something special,” he says.

“I messaged personal friends and started with nine people and it was great. It was a risk

because it could have bankrupted me, but I had faith and people loved it – if they lost a stone great, 20lbs brilliant. They told their pals and I thought they would be crazy to leave and it grew from that.

“You’ve got to deliver – gimmicks like diet shakes make me laugh. It is about mindset, nutrition, exercise – getting into someone’s head. I could sit for an hour a day and convince them – that is what it’s all about for me and the team.”

In Cramlington, 1,136 clients went through the programme last year with an average of 900 clients signing up every seven months across the studios.

Once “transform” is complete, clients can move on to “elite:fusion”, more intensive training focused on the way people look and feel rather than the number on the scales and

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there is “elite:challenge”, which – in conjunction with travel company Rare Adventures – takes people up mountains and into various fitness challenges across the world.

And he is planning to set up an elite foundation to support charities, with clients getting a say on where the cash goes.

Alexander lights up as he talks about his successes – saying 85% of clients achieve their goal – with the record loss a staggering 215lbs.

“One lady lost 100lbs through the programme and has just climbed Kilimanjaro with her husband,” he says. “She was at the top of the world. It changed her life.

“I have big dreams. I want people to be the best versions of themselves. I am so passionate about being the best you can be. Not everyone can be an Olympian – it doesn’t matter what you do in fitness, work, family or health, you can still be the best version of you that you can be.

“I want elite to become a national brand – people to associate elite as the place to go to change their lives. No gimmicks, it is a mindset and lifestyle change. We don’t believe in pills and potions – people need to have a beer or

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pizza at the weekend to enjoy themselves.”

For the first time he is considering outside investment to get the business to grow more quickly – “I believe we could and possibly should be opening 50 studios a year” – while elite has developed its own nutrition brand and clothing range, though Alexander is more concerned with focusing on the business core strengths for now.

“You go to a typical gym and most have the same ethos, all muscles and six-packs,” he says. “But elite is accessible for people who maybe don’t have the confidence for that sort of thing.

“We’re changing the way people think about themselves. We make the impossible possible for ordinary people.”

Alexander has his hands full with Ollie, eight, and Henry, five. Both are lively young lads – doing well despite their cerebral palsy – and their dad bursts with pride as he talks about the impact they have had on his life.

“What they have been through is ruthless,” he says. “It is difficult having two children with special needs – if it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t have pushed myself so hard.

“Both were born premature. I used to drive into the hospital car park every day for 117 days when Ollie was born and 80 days with Henry and being terrified of what I might find when walking into the special care unit – it gave me the drive, created something different in me.

“I have been in such a scary position so many times with the boys that I am not scared of anything else. Jan is a fantastic wife and mum – the boys are doing well. They are fighters, our superheroes, and we have to fight for them.”

Alexander often does the school run and makes sure weekends are family time.

“I make time work for me. If I don’t have time to exercise I will bike to work or run in with a rucksack on my back.”

Ah, the rucksack, where it all began. Now filled with memories and a business going places with an entrepreneur in Alexander passionate to take it as far as he can.

“What we do is the opposite of a gym,” he says. “We don’t simply train your body, we train your mind. It is about a new way to see health, fitness and well-being, designed for everyone.” n

“I have big dreams. I want people to be the best versions of themselves. I am so passionate about being the best you can be.”

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GIVING BIRTH TO A BUSINESS Danielle Kinney overcame post-natal depression to launch her Placenta Plus brand, which has attracted celebrity customers including Amy Childs, Chelsee Healey and Coleen Rooney, and which is now being franchised, as Janet Tansley reports.

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“I have gone from being a stay-at-home mum to a successful businesswoman, proud of what I have achieved.”

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ith its huge bay windows and imposing solid doorway, Danielle Kinney dreamt about the Victorian house in a quiet, select road overlooking a park near where she lived. It was a standing joke with her family that she coveted the mini-mansion, poring over the property pages when it came up for sale.

“I used to say, ‘if I ever win the Lottery, I’ll buy that house’,” smiles Kinney. That house is now her home, not because her numbers came up on a Saturday night, but because – for the past two years – she has put her heart and soul into building her business, Placenta Plus, born from a personal health battle and a determination to do something about it.

“I have always said, you have to be your own Lottery,” she admits. “And I have.”

Kinney is now the go-to person for a host of celebrity – and ordinary – mums who have embraced the trend to turn their placenta into pills and potions after childbirth and harness the many benefits it has to offer. In just over two years, Placenta Plus has become known around the world and, with plans to franchise the name globally, the mum-of-three is, on paper at least, a millionaire.

“It seems incredible,” she confesses. “I never imagined for one minute it would take off as it has. It feels amazing and while it’s not about the money, that does keep me going… along with the coffee.”

Kinney, 33, from St Helens, is proof of the cliché that every cloud can have a silver-lining, however much it appeared that the one above the mum-of-three was getting ever darker.

After her second daughter, Tess, was born Kinney was wracked with post-natal depression (PND).

“I didn’t realise I had it,” she says. “I thought

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PND was when women couldn’t cope, when they couldn’t look after their child or clean their house; or they wanted to harm their child.

“That certainly wasn’t me. I was the total opposite. I’d get up at 7.30am, clean the house top-to-bottom, get me and the kids dressed and by 9am everything would be done.

“But if the kids got chocolate on their clothes, that would send me into a frenzy of panic; I’d get unbelievably stressed. I would obsess over the silliest things and thought everyone had it in for me, that they were being nasty to me.

“People around me were walking on eggshells, not least my husband, Wes, and there was a time when we thought it would be best if we went our separate ways.

“I remember one night when I was driving along the motorway after a row with Wes – a regular occurrence when I had PND – and a big Eddie Stobbart truck pulled alongside me.

If I hadn’t had my two daughters, Bella and Tess, in the car with me I would have driven underneath it. That’s how bad it can get.

“On another occasion, I was in the kitchen with Wes and we were bickering. I just turned and bit his face, I sank my teeth into his cheek.

I was angry with everyone and everything and I bit him. I’m not a violent person; it was so unlike me and he said, ‘that’s it, you’re ill’. Thank God he did.”

Kinney went to her doctor and was prescribed anti-depressants to help treat post-natal depression, and that might have been it had she not suddenly become pregnant with son Harry, now two-and-a-half. Given her previous experiences, she was desperate not to go through the same again.

“I searched Google for alternative remedies for PND and I came across an article about

Kourtney Kardashian having taken placenta pills to prevent the baby blues,” she remembers. “I did wonder how likely it was to work, but I was willing to do and try anything.

“I looked for people who could do it for me, but I wasn’t happy with anyone – one woman suggested my husband meet her in a Tesco car park with my placenta. There were so many flaws I decided to do my own. I have always been that person who would have a go.

“I did an online course and bought a standard dehydrator and a coffee grinder. I took a Tupperware box into hospital when I went in to give birth to Harry, to put my placenta in.

“Having always had C-sections, I had never seen a placenta, so I hadn’t realised how squeamish I was. And I hadn’t bargained for all the veins and blood. That first time it was like a scene from Breaking Bad.” Kinney roars with laughter at the thought.

“It’s a human organ,” she explains.

“But I carefully cleaned it and dissected it, put it in the dehydration machine and then ground it down, before putting it into the capsules I’d bought. It seems relatively easy on paper – but it’s not.

“I was in Tesco the day after thinking, if only these people around me knew what I was up to in my kitchen yesterday.”

For the first couple of days, Kinney was terrified in case she had done something wrong that would make her ill – the last thing she needed with a newborn – but she grins: “I felt amazing.

“I got up each morning, took two of these pills with a glass of orange juice and I was ready for anything. Harry was born in July so as soon as we were up and ready, we and the girls would be off to the beach or the park. I felt

“Having always had C-sections, I had never seen a placenta, so I hadn’t realised how squeamish I was. That first time it was like a scene from Breaking Bad.”

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great and, crucially, there were no signs that the PND that had reduced me to considering suicide after Bella and Tess.

“Of course, I wondered if it was a placebo effect, or fluke. But I knew inside – and other people could see the difference, not just with my moods, my hair and skin were glowing.

“It’s about putting back what’s been lost.

Mothers who have taken placenta pills have reported a boost in energy levels, balanced moods, a faster recovery and, what was crucial for me, a lower instance of baby blues and PND.” The theory is that the placenta contains

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rich nutrients like iron, vitamins B6 that aids the making of antibodies and E that helps heal damaged skin cells. It has oxytocin, a hormone essential for facilitating birth and breastfeeding and a corticotropin-releasing hormone, which is responsible for reducing stress levels.

At first friends were “freaked out” by what she had done but when they witnessed the results, they were fascinated.

“I went to Dubai with friends when Harry was six weeks old and a pregnant pal asked me if I would do it for her,” she says. “I was reluctant at first, but eventually agreed on the understanding she didn’t tell anyone else.

“But she was so pleased when I gave them to her that she put a picture of them on Instagram and persuaded me to do the same. Within 24 hours, 15 people had booked me to do it for them – one of them was Coleen Rooney.”

Business was booming – not bad for a girl who left school with no GCSEs. “I was diagnosed as dyslexic when I was 15 but it seemed too late by then,” she explains. “I had been described by teachers as ‘bright, but lazy’ and predicted to get nothing but Ds and Es. “But I told my mum I wasn’t going to let those grades define me – and neither should she. If she did, she was letting me down. I said, ‘I’ll be fine in life, I’ll prove myself to you’.

“I left school and got an apprenticeship as a hairdresser at Herbert of Liverpool and at 21 left to work for myself. But I was getting less interested in hairdressing, it wasn’t challenging me anymore.

“I thought about midwifery but realised how long it would take to qualify and, after having children, like most people I put my dreams on hold.”

When she finally set up Placenta Plus, Kinney wanted it to be the best, to be the service she wanted but couldn’t find. She spent £25,000 building a lab in the back garden of her former home and equipped herself with the very best in medical technology to create the brand that won her a “Women in Business Award” nomination and led to a clamour of celebrity mums seeking her services to have placenta turned into pills and creams for around £200 a time.

Rooney was the first famous face – many more have followed, Rebekah Vardy, Tanya Bardsley, Amy Childs, Chelsee Healey and Rochelle Humes – but so too have ordinary mums.

“I have had interest as far afield as Australia, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, China and the United States,” Keeney says. “Last year I went out to the US to provide my service for a woman whose husband said his wife would be disappointed if anyone else did it for her.

“They paid my expenses, travel, hotel – and £5,000. I resisted at first because it didn’t seem right but then I thought, there are days when I have worked solidly for 48 hours, why not enjoy a perk?”

“Mothers who have taken placenta pills have reported a boost in energy levels, balanced moods, a faster recovery and a lower instance of baby blues and PND.”

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In demand, but only able to ‘be in one place at one time’ Kenney has made the decision to sell franchises for Placenta Plus across the globe. “By offering franchises I can help other people offer services with the same standards and quality I provide already – and I will remain on call 24-hours a day,” she says.

“I started this business to help women, but cost and distance has meant it wasn’t available to many and that devastated me.

People in Ireland, Scotland and London even, were saying they would love to use Placenta

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Plus but couldn’t afford the fee, which could be doubled by the costs of the human tissue transport services to carry the placenta to me – now I’m doing something about it.”

Fourteen people are already in legal negotiations to buy franchises, which will be split into territories and will start from £55,000, which includes the name, the expertise and the lab kit needed to provide the service. The licence will last for five years.

Selling 10 will make Danielle a millionaire but it is proposed, initially, to sell 23. She has vowed

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never to let go of Placenta Plus Liverpool, even though that has been valued at more than £1m on its own.

“I have gone from being a stay-at-home mum to a successful businesswoman, proud of what I have achieved and, now, of helping others to do what I started,” she says.

“I am nervous. It’s a bit like having a baby and then taking them to school for the first time, letting them go, but l’ll regain control to ensure clients still enjoy the superior service I created.” n

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INVESTING IN NEW HOMES WHERE THEY ARE NEEDED Fintech firm Growth Capital Ventures, which raises finance for high growth SMEs and property-related projects through co-investment, is opening up new opportunities in house building.

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“The UK housing market is far more complicated than might appear at first sight, it is made up of many different regional markets, which often behave in different ways.”

GROWTH Capital Ventures (GCV), which has successfully raised capital for a number of high growth businesses and projects, has a new drive to revive the UK housing market with its co-investment model.

It has already secured £400,000 of funding for a pioneering project building quality family homes in Chilton, County Durham. Through its innovative co-investment financing model, the project was oversubscribed within a month – 47 days before the scheduled close.

Now GCV has a pipeline of similar residential projects to unlock development sites in a targeted approach which will contribute to addressing the UK’s housing shortage.

GCV co-founder Craig Peterson says: “It is crucially important that the country starts to build the right homes in areas where they are needed and residential property investment opportunities will be a key sector for GCV in 2018.’’

Everyone knows that the UK has a housing crisis. Along with Brexit, it is at the top of the political agenda.

At the core of the problem lies a shortage of housing and it has been estimated that we need to build at least 300,000 new homes a year to meet demand.

“It is sobering to reflect that in the last decade we have only ever managed to achieve about half of that,’’ says Peterson.

The inevitable result of the lack of supply has been a steep rise in prices – so much so that, since the early 1990s, house prices have more than doubled in real terms, despite the 2008 crash.

However, Peterson argues that the problem is not only one of simple supply and demand.

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Certainly house prices are too high in some areas such as London where foreign investors have driven up prices, but indiscriminate building is not the answer. A number of European countries which have undertaken programmes of subsidised housebuilding have only succeeded in building up stocks of unoccupied homes. Less than a year ago it was reported that the number of empty homes in the UK was at its highest for 20 years.

“The UK housing market is far more complicated than might appear at first sight,’’ says Peterson. “It is made up of many different regional markets, which are often behaving in different ways. If you aggregate them, you get overall figures but this can give a misleading picture and that can create problems if it leads to attempts to address the issue by taking the UK, or even England as a whole, and attempt to balance the overall national supply with the overall national demand. A one size fits all approach is not the way to tackle our housing crisis, it’s vital the right homes are built where people need them.”

He argues that the regional nature of the market calls for targeted building by those with the specialised local knowledge who know what kinds of houses are needed and where they are needed.

In the past this function was ably performed by the independent SME housebuilders but they were hit hard by the financial crisis when banks were reluctant to lend, driving many out of the market and others out of business altogether. The numbers of smaller regional house builders – those building fewer than 100 homes a year – halved between 2007 and 2014 to fewer than 3,000 – down from a

peak of 12,000 in the late 1980s. These small builders built just under 20,000 homes in 2013, compared with an annual figure of almost 51,000 a decade earlier.

But, as Peterson points out, in its latest report, property expert Savills says that, if there is to be any step change in the UK’s housing supply, it is precisely these smaller independents that will have to shoulder the burden.

“There are sites all around the country that could be unlocked for development but these don’t appeal to the larger builders because they are just too small for them. However, this is where SME builders could provide homes,’’ he says.

GCV not only has an analysis of the problems behind the UK housing crisis but has also developed a model to help address them.

Its development company, Homes by Carlton, has years of experience in housebuilding and development. It specialises in providing high quality houses on those kinds of smaller sites which the large builders find it uneconomical to develop but where there is still a need and a ready market.

GCV works alongside Homes for Carlton as an a Financial Conduct Authority-authorised investment firm that can focus on structuring the funding packages and introducing these opportunities to its investor base. GCV’s coinvestment model, which it has pioneered over recent years, connects a range of investors to growth focused investment opportunities.

Retail investors can use GCV’s GrowthFunders website to learn about carefully vetted businesses and then invest from £100 upwards, alongside professional

“A one size fits all approach is not the way to tackle our housing crisis, it’s vital the right homes are built where people need them.”

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investors and institutions and high net worth individuals who are part of GCV’s offline G Ventures Investor Club.

Co-investing in this way allows independent housebuilders, which have been starved of capital by the banks, to gain access to the funds that will allow them to unlock sites throughout the country that have great development potential. It can bring them back into the market to do what they do best – apply their local knowledge to provide homes where they are needed.

“Co-investment also gives everyday investors access to those parts of the UK housing market where demand far outstrips supply, so that they can share in the returns which have always been the preserve of the larger investors, but with the assurance that they are investing alongside professionals,’’ says Peterson. “It also allows them to diversify and balance an investment portfolio as such a residential property investment will typically make a return over an 18 to 24 month time scale.’’

In the Chilton development, investors bought shares in the special purpose vehicle (SPV) Homes by Carlton (Chilton) Limited. The project is targeting a base case of a 1.5 times return on money for investors.

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“We will be creating over 200 direct jobs and 150 indirect jobs within the supply chain. Skills and training is high on our agenda and apprenticeships will feature heavily.”

Mike Priestley, a founder member of the GCV investor network, says: “I’m delighted to be investing in this scheme.

Quality regional housebuilders need innovative funding solutions and I am particularly interested in solid alternative investments that have the potential to deliver better returns than mainstream opportunities’’.

David Nixon, also a founder member of G Ventures, adds: “I understand property development and the opportunity to back residential development projects that have the potential to deliver a decent financial return, create jobs and enhance the local area makes this type of investment compelling.”

The site, on which there will be 14 homes, will include three CoreHaus homes, which are built using a standardised modular core that reduces the onsite construction process by up to 50%, providing sustainable developments that deliver both economic and social value.

CoreHaus is backed by national procurement organisation and social enterprise Fusion21, which co-invested and anchored the equity round.

Fusion21 helps people buy smarter in the public sector and make a difference in communities across the UK. The organisation has saved its 400-plus members more than £177m

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Partner

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“Co-investment also gives everyday investors access to those parts of the UK housing market where demand far outstrips supply.”

with fully compliant procurement frameworks and created more than 4,000 jobs, while the social value of its projects currently stands at £68m.

Dave Neilson, chief executive at Fusion21, says: “Working with Homes by Carlton and GCV provides us with a fantastic opportunity to pilot our sustainable CoreHaus modular housing solution, whilst building much needed new homes and generating social value in the form of job creation and apprenticeships.”

The Chilton site will comprise three-and four-bedroom homes ranging from townhouse style terraces to semi-detached and detached homes for families and professionals.

Work is scheduled to start on site later this

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year, with an estimated 18 month rolling build and sales programme.

GCV is encouraged by the success of the Chilton scheme as it is just the first of four planned sites in the North of England, which will see the creation of more than 300 new homes.

Peterson points out that investors in these projects will not only have the potential to realise market beating returns, they will also be helping Growth to address the nation’s housing crisis CapitalVentures and make a positive social impact.

He adds: “We will be creating over 200 direct jobs and 150 indirect jobs within the supply chain. Skills and training is high on our agenda and apprenticeships will feature heavily.

We are keen to support the local supply chain and we will be going out to tender with local subcontractors and suppliers to create more jobs in the North East.’’ n

Growth CapitalVentures

Grow

GrowthFunders Co-invest in deals with real purpose. o nd out more out in esting into propert projects or high growth businesses, visit www.growthfunders.com or call 0330 102 5525.

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Rob Pollard launched his business in a cubbyhole ten years ago. Now his fastgrowing digital agency has been named Birmingham’s best small business, as George Arthurs reports.

LIGHT YEARS

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assion is a key quality for any entrepreneur. And Rob Pollard’s passion for Lightbox Digital is clearly paying dividends.

The Birmingham-based business has doubled its number of staff from six to 12 in just two years to meet demand for its website design, marketing, e-commerce and bespoke digital solutions for companies of all sizes.

Turnover in 2016-17 was up by a record 210% and the agency picked up the “small business of the year” title at last October’s Birmingham Awards.

The recent awards and impressive turnover are recognition for Pollard’s passion for Lightbox. He launched the company from a spare desk in an unused corner of a friend’s company in 2005, surviving the global financial crash of 2008 and adapting to fast-changing digital trends and technology.

Pollard, from Walsall, studied art and design at Sutton College, which gave him an insight into a broad spectrum of design application.

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He then went on to study product design at Birmingham City University before getting his first job with a retail equipment company in Swindon, designing point-of-sale material and other in-store promotional items.

After 18 months with the company, Pollard realised product and retail design had limitations and he wanted to find something more creative. His next job was with a Midlands property company, creating architectural visualisations and computer-generated images of new developments.

It was during this time he completed a marketing diploma at night school to help his understanding of business strategy, which in turn gave him the confidence to go it alone.

“I was in my mid-20s and even at that age setting up on my own was always part of my thinking,” says 37-year-old Pollard, a father of one and keen football fan. “I was picking up tips and guidance as I started my professional career, but I just wanted something more.”

Pollard acknowledges he was still quite young to be setting up a company, particularly at a time when the digital sector was in its infancy.

“There was always a limit to what I could achieve and the impact I could have at someone else’s business,” he says. “It was around 2003-4 and energetic young ‘techies’ were few and far between. Lots of business logic was still based on experience and how long you had been with a company.

“This was a time when younger, talented, and creative people were beginning to explore what they could realise and look beyond traditional limitations.”

Pollard explains how he formed Lightbox with a professional partner – a graphic designer – because he wanted to share business ideas with someone else.

“I wanted to go on the business journey with someone,” he recalls, “and her partner had a kitchen business and let us use a bit of space

“Staff with the right attitude and who are keen to develop themselves as people and workers always stand out.”

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there. I suppose you could call it a cubbyhole, but it was great.

“I didn’t want to work from home. I still don’t enjoy it. I like to feel I’m going to an office to get in the commercial mind-set of a day’s work. It was so helpful having that desk space to help us start building something.”

After a year, it became clear the growing company needed its own base and with a relocation came changes to management.

Pollard’s business partner wanted to stay working near her partner, so she left Lightbox and he found a small space on a farm-turnedbusiness park near Lichfield, working alongside a design agency, sharing ideas and outsourcing work.

Like countless other small businesses, the fledgling agency was bruised by the financial crash of 2008, with the commercial property market and Lightbox’s core clientbase hit particularly hard. “Lightbox started in architecture and property, generating visuals of new buildings, but this stopped in almost

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an instant when the 2008 crash hit and the property sector almost collapsed overnight,” explains Pollard.

“I needed to shift into a different area quite quickly. The financial crash was a major blow and slowed down our progression. I learned a lot about planning and strategy and building up cash reserves for when this happens.”

Pollard repositioned the business into web design and build, focusing on a very local market of small- to medium-sized businesses from all sectors in the Lichfield and Staffordshire area. “Back then websites were a strange part of a business,” he says.

“It was a period when a company might say: ‘Oh, we need a website’, but they weren’t exactly sure why. However, the website market started to shift quite quickly from companies wanting a basic site with a couple of pages to something more in-depth, when they realised how important it was to have a presence online and how it could get them seen by more potential customers.

“The very local businesses all started to want something. These were small- to mediumsized businesses nearby who had heard about Lightbox and wanted to work with us.”

Further repositioning of Lightbox was needed when open-source software such as WordPress emerged. This meant small businesses could for the first time host their own blogs and websites, albeit with limited functionality.

Pollard switched from outsourcing the timeconsuming work needed to create bespoke content management systems to using WordPress. He describes this, and a change to Lightbox’s approach to fees, as a breakthrough moment for the company.

“We restructured our pricing model to appeal to small businesses with ten-month payment plans to include branding, logos, marketing material and websites,” says Pollard.

“It came in at a couple of hundred pounds per month, which was very affordable for a small business. We secured quite a bit of work

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through this approach.

“We were always trying to differentiate ourselves from others. The new pricing model gave us this and clients not having to pay a big, five-figure bill at the end of a project seemed to prove popular.

“We also started using the new open-source software on the market, choosing WordPress.

Bringing all development in-house gave me total design and systems control. We could have some really strategic conversations about where development was going and manage this better.”

A move to a major commercial centre such as Birmingham was another major milestone for Lightbox and saw the business change once again.

“I’d always wanted to move the business to Birmingham to get our foot in the door of some of the larger Midlands businesses,” Pollard says. “We had a great time in Lichfield and Staffordshire but it felt like a natural progression, so we chose our current office on John Bright Street in the heart of the city.

“I was very young when I started, with zero commercial experience. I had to learn quickly.

When we moved to Birmingham, the business changed completely. Everything prior to that I see as a ‘beta’ or test version of what we are today. It was all about learning.

“Being in Birmingham, things got serious.

Our ambitions and expectations went through the roof. We now have great people – really talented, really experienced people. If I can let these people do what they are brilliant at, we can achieve so much.

“I’m still learning all the time, but we now have the processes, the structure and we know what we have to do to be successful.”

Recruiting the right people has always been ‘a challenge’ for Lightbox, particularly during periods of rapid growth and new client wins.

“As a tech business, we need a balance,” Pollard says. “We need a senior team who can demonstrate experience and trust, but we also want the up-and-coming designers with flair but who might be raw.

“In the early days, I had to grow the business around younger people who had creativity and energy but less experience. You will always hire based on talent but for me it’s more about the person and the attitude.

“Staff with the right attitude and who are keen to develop themselves as people and workers always stand out. It’s this I will always

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“I was picking up tips and guidance as I started my professional career, but I just wanted something more.”

look for. We can then develop the talent within the business.”

The agency has worked with major publicsector institutions such as the NHS, Ministry of Defence and Staffordshire Council. And it recently built websites for Birmingham-based companies Associated Architects, Skirting Boards Direct and global fan manufacturer Elta Group. A good example of how Lightbox’s approach has worked is at Skirting Boards Direct, which has seen a 126% increase in online sales since its website was redesigned.

Pollard is now working with a branding expert to give Lightbox a new identity and strategy with the proposed tagline “Making digital human”, which is due to be launched this year. The phrase is intended to explain how the agency works jargon-free and is a “digital

specialist for ambitious businesses, making life easy for our clients, their customers, and their teams”.

Pollard says: “We try to move away from an approach that sees us tender, complete a project, and that’s that. Whether they’re ambitious start-ups or established global businesses, we want to build long-term partnerships with our clients.

“We will do everything we can to help businesses get the most out of technology.

We want to educate businesses and help them understand how they can streamline their workflows, systems and appeal to customers.”

And, with what’s expected to be a healthy £600,000 turnover for 2017-18, Pollard’s partnership approach for Lightbox seems to be working. n

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Azure path to growth

James Harrison, CEO and founder of Ignition.Ai, tells us how Microsoft Azure helped the tech start-up expand across the globe.

ADVERTISING and marketing veteran turned serial entrepreneur James Harrison is no stranger to what makes customers engage and buy from brands.

Starting off his career in media buying 25 years ago, the advertising and marketing industries are now almost unrecognisable and Harrison has been at the heart of this transformation.

“I started off working at a media agency planning and buying TV airtime for clients, but I quickly became bored of the whole ‘ABC1 men buy mortgages’ message,” he told BQ. “It was meaningless as almost any adult can apply for a mortgage when you think about it.

“I wanted to start targeting people who might need a mortgage in the near future, so I started to play around with data. I had a degree in physics and computer science and ended up completely changing the way that we were looking at advertising audiences.”

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This was his first insight into how much of an impact personal data would have on the advertising and marketing industries and he knew he had hit on something big. And he wasn’t alone.

His bosses at PHD at the time, which is now one of the world’s largest media buying networks, were impressed with his work and allowed him to set up his own company under the PHD umbrella, Apollo.PHD. He recalls: “After this I went on to launch a new business inside PHD Media to help our clients make more profitable decisions using data.

“The first question I asked was, okay, tell me who your most valuable consumers are so that we can target them through our media channels. And, believe it or not, the majority didn’t know who they were!

“We then became much more interested in understanding the potential value of the

consumer and what a customer profile meant to business.

“Then, by targeting specific people for certain products, we were able to offer something hardly anyone else could, it was a massive benefit.”

He took the brave decision to leave Apollo.

PHD in 2003 in a bid to set up a business of his own, which he could have complete control over.

This led to the launch of Fuel Data Strategies which he founded alongside a number of close friends and investors.

“Whilst running Apollo.PHD, it became apparent to me that the volume of data available to business was increasing exponentially whilst the use of smart data analytics and data mining was not being employed,” he said.

“With this in mind, I left the company and decided to set up my own business and

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“Ignition.Ai delivers the next generation of self-learning predictive marketing algorithms to make brand conversations more relevant and more human.”

with the help of a few friends, I launched Fuel, which worked with the likes of Lexus & Toyota, VisitWales, Vodafone, Sky, and the UK government before selling it in 2008 to The Engine Group. I then took five years off and began thinking up my next idea.”

It was during this break that Harrison thought up the concept behind Ignition.Ai, the idea he is most proud of.

Using his experience of marketing and advertising and combining it with his knowledge of data and marketing decisions, he decided to launch a business to help businesses make more informed and accurate marketing decisions through artificial intelligence (AI).

He said: “Ignition.Ai delivers the next generation of self-learning predictive marketing algorithms to make brand conversations more relevant and more human.

“We track, capture and connect all of

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your data and combine it with ours to understand consumer needs and the value of communications, in real time, across all connected touch points.

“This allows us to pinpoint the motivations and the needs of the individual so that we can identify content themes and the right moments to engage. This means we can distribute content that counts in real time across connected devices and serve our consumer needs more profitably.

“Our digital data capability is global, optimises campaign performance and delivers customer insights across all touch points.

Delivering accountability, cost savings and step changes in marketing performance.”

So, how could this work in practice? He continues: “A great example would be an online holiday retailer who we were working with, which was a global brand. They were spending quite a lot of money on their marketing but

they just weren’t generating a profitable return.

“We looked at it and connected up our data, tracking and predictive attribution technology, and helped them understand how each different communication contributes towards a sale across the consumers journey to purchase, and we found that 38% of their advertising was going to waste. It was going to the wrong people, at the wrong time, and they were bidding the wrong amount for it.

“Some of the advertising didn’t even render to the screen. The keywords weren’t attracting the kind of consumers who went on to marry and match to their products. By having all of the data in place, we managed to more than half their marketing spend whilst increasing customer conversion rates.”

Using the technology developed by the team at Ignition.Ai, the company was able to easily recognise the type of content their customers had been looking at in real-time

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“The technology doesn’t take the creative thinking away from sales and marketing functions, but it quickly identifies challenges that require innovation and thinking that optimisation alone won’t solve.”

and tailor their marketing campaigns to commercially profitable audiences.

As Harrison explains: “One of the best and most bizarre examples of this was when we were working with a holiday provider advertising a series of luxury spa breaks.

“Using machine learning, the algorithm highlighted that people who were researching recipes online were going on to book lots of luxury holidays, consequently it choose to invest more in content around food.

“This seemed a weird decision at first from the Ai, so we looked into it. We then saw that the algorithm was increasing spend on food sites and was delivering the results the algorithm expected. It proved a huge success.”

“This automatically targeted, predictive marketing is now changing the way businesses go about marketing their products and services and more and more businesses are starting

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to realise that marketing doesn’t necessarily have to be a cost. When executed well, with a predictive attribution, it is an investment.”

Ignition.Ai has now been running for three and a half years and has gone on to work with companies across the globe, from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) all the way through to major blue-chip companies from an array of sectors.

He added: “The question I now ask new clients is “how are data and technology delivering commercial benefits to your organisation?” Often clients are focused on operations, they know what’s possible with AI, but don’t know how to get there, there may be gaps or silos with different information being used by different functions.

“Our data and technology allows clients to be able to organise, learn and evolve fast.

Increasingly we are working very closely with

our clients to develop, connect and empower their sales and marketing functions internally.

“The technology doesn’t take the creative thinking away from sales and marketing functions, but it quickly identifies challenges that require innovation and thinking that optimisation alone won’t solve. Using predictive marketing, companies can learn and adapt far quicker, cheaper and more accurately to consumer needs to gain significant competitive advantage.”

However, it hasn’t always been plain sailing.

Due to the company having such a focus on digital marketing, it has found itself having to provide its services to companies in all corners of the globe.

The London-based tech start-up now actively delivers marketing campaigns in over 14 countries. It would’ve been unimaginable a decade ago, but thanks to cloud technology,

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“When we are dealing with people in Australia or America, we can site a server next to them as opposed to having a local office. In our world, 100 milliseconds is do or die.”

the company can offer its services globally without the typical cost and capital issues a business would normally face.

“We are still self-funded and operating in profit – part of us being able to do this was Microsoft giving us the ability to scale by orders of magnitude. Utilising the same technology platforms, with the same staff base, without running into capacity or capital issues,” Harrison said.

“When we are dealing with people in Australia or America, we can site a server next to them as opposed to having a local office.

In our world, 100 milliseconds is do or die.

You need a server in close proximity to where things are happening.

“Azure also helped us base a lot of our technology on the platform. It works off Microsoft Cloud and is pretty phenomenal in terms of how it allows us to accelerate our technological development.

“Microsoft have also been very supportive to us as a small business. They’ve helped set up speaking arrangements, get to know other clients and also set up interviews such as this as well as offering technology development and access to their internal expertise.

“We can do our development models offline here, too, but when we deploy operationally, we know we can deploy globally.

“Compared to where we were eight years ago, it’s insane, it’s incredible. When our clients

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operate globally, it means we can work with them on whichever market they want to target. For example, last year, we set up an Australian offering overnight.

“Our whole infrastructure was duplicated to a server in Australia, we ensured we were complying with their local data regulations which are really important to us and could then start selling.

“It means we can focus on coming up with great solutions for our clients whilst Microsoft develop the road which helps us get there quickly.”

Ignition now houses 15 people in its London office and is delivering marketing in 14 markets across the globe, an impressive feat for a company which was founded only three and a half years ago. n http://aka.ms/domorewithazure

Ignition.AI uses Microsoft Azure Data Lake to analyse consumer data at scale and speed, transforming customer targeting.

The emotion and psychology of shopping is quite fascinating. Here at Ignition.AI we have taken our fascination with buying behaviour and integrated it with powerful analysis of real shopping data to predict trends in consumerism. In other words, we analyse what makes shoppers tick.

We offer a powerful proposition to big e-tailers. Our self-learning artificial intelligence tools use algorithms to optimise the marketing mix and precisely target customers for brands like Wonga, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, eHarmony and Warner Leisure Group. It means that customers don’t have to see adverts for products they’re not going to buy and e-tailers avoid squandering their advertising budgets.

Turning marketing from an art to a precise science requires ingesting vast amounts of live information from numerous sources such as social media, browsing data and previous purchasing patterns and deploying highly specialised technology. We use Microsoft Azure to manage our data because it provides a cloud based platform to store, process and analyse any amount or type of data at incredible speeds. As CEO I have a lot of things to worry about, but now scaling my infrastructure to serve our expanding demand isn’t one of them. There are no servers or virtual machines so we don’t worry about maintenance or patching, and we can instantly scale the processing power while only paying for what we use.

Being a relatively small company this cost efficiency is a huge attraction.

Azure’s APIs enable us to connect seamlessly with other third party systems to increase our breadth of specialist services. Through clickstream analysis we can view advertising performance metrics and advise e-tailers on how to best spend their advertising budget.

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This is especially powerful in real time bidding for digital advertising because we can optimise bids which doubles the ROI while halving the capital investment. Replicating that scale and speed across the millions of adverts served represents an enormous cost saving for e-tailers, especially against the increasing consumption of digital content.

We have millions of individuals and data points in our customer database and, as you’d anticipate, data privacy and security is a huge priority so we value having access to the latest security provisions and upgrades from Microsoft. We know we’re always up to date and can focus on our core service while Microsoft focus on the infrastructure - our clients get the innovation and service they want with the security they expect. We are a data driven marketing business, we’re not technology specialists, so building our own infrastructure would have taken a serious amount of upfront investment in both time and money, which we’ve been able to skip. The flexibility and robustness of the Azure solution gave us the confidence to unleash the business and expand into 37 territories in less than one year. Without Azure this would have taken millions of pounds to achieve, in other words, the cost would have been prohibitive.

We’re really excited at Ignition.AI to be at the forefront of evolution within the data driven marketing industry. We’re continually developing our capabilities using improved data analysis techniques that enable us to pioneer new insights and create better outcomes for both shoppers and e-tailers. We know that the infrastructure that supports us is fit for the future and will adapt and grow with us as quickly as our business demands.

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All the fun

of the fair The Dreamland theme park in Margate was a hugely-valuable asset for the region – but it was in trouble. Restructuring expert Ben Wiles gives Mike Hughes a unique insight into one of the sector’s most-unusual rescues.

W

hen Ben Wiles got a hug from a Margate builder, he knew he had done a good job. As a managing director specialising in restructuring, bankruptcy and insolvency litigation for global financial advice giant Duff & Phelps, an enthusiastic hug from anyone is not normally on his radar, but this one was special.

Wiles had just led the turnaround of Dreamland, a much-treasured theme park that was one of the UK’s oldest, dating back to the 1860s, but which was heading downward on the rollercoaster rather than riding high after a failed 2015 revamp. Such was the affection the locals had for the place – even Thanet District Council had put its neck on the line with a compulsory purchase order to try to save it – that tradesmen all over the place breathed sighs of relief that Margate once again had a goose that was laying golden eggs. Getting a hug as soon as he was recognised was an instinctive thanks for Wiles having saved more than one business that day.

In its heyday, Dreamland was listed as one of the UK’s top-ten visitor attractions, with its 16 acres including a zoo, miniature railway, 2,200-

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seat cinema and a 2,000-capacity ballroom that had hosted the likes of The Who and The Rolling Stones. But times were changing and, at one stage, even housing seemed a better bet.

But Margate was becoming a capital of retro cool, so £18m was raised to redraw the plans for the 20th century, a plan that quickly started failing, scuppered by an entrance fee and unreliable rides. The park was too important a part of Margate’s renaissance, so the call went out to Wiles at Duff & Phelps.

Why Wiles? Well, remarkably, this wasn’t his first theme park turnaround. The previous year he had resolved similar problems at Fantasy Island in Skegness; Wiles – the 38 year old who was putting the fun back into funding – was on his way.

“Fantasy Island was a very different attraction because it had been there a long time and needed a bit of work in terms of getting some systems in place and cutting out unnecessary costs,” he says. “By doing that we doubled the value of the place over the 19 months I was there and then sold it on to the Mellors Group, a trade buyer.

“That experience and the success we had meant we had a positive message to pass on and the case study came across the desk of Lloyds Bank, which had some lending into Dreamland, which was at that stage only one year on from reopening after a joint development between the Heritage Lottery Fund, the local council and private company Sands Heritage.

“It became obvious to me as soon as I got there that it needed a fresh direction and some diversification in terms of what it was offering.

I think with businesses across the board they all need something unique that will keep bringing people back and although the Dreamland concept was good for a year, it needed more.

“This is the UK and you can’t just have a summer theme park, you also need an event to bring people from outside Thanet, so you need good food for them to eat and you need something for them to watch. From that point, we looked at the season already underway, which gave us a chance to understand the customer and what they wanted and were willing to pay for.”

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The assets certainly seemed attractive, including three Grade-II listed jewels in the crown: the scenic railway, cinema complex and menagerie cages. But as well as celebrating the past, Wiles knew that there had to be enough of a future to bring in a family audience from grandson to son to dad to granddad. One of the challenges of this fresh approach was that it had to be presented in the right way to the original team that thought what they were doing was the only way forward.

Wiles has to be a diplomat as well, which shows in his reply to my question about that aspect of the work. “Look, there are certainly times in our line of work when you are not always the most popular in terms of your views, but sometimes people need to appreciate change and what it will take for something to be a success,” he says.

“At Dreamland there were stakeholders who wanted to maintain a theme park for the family and celebrate purely the historic elements of that, but the reality is that you have to be able to diversify and bring in something current in terms of entertainment and festivals. We had to come up with some fresh ideas of what we could do for them for an appropriate investment.

“I pitched the concept to Arrowgrass, a fund that had been interested in the project and its willingness to let us develop it was very important to its success. We were able to give the place one hell of a facelift and create spaces that were rentable and desirable for the visitors, but also celebrating Dreamland’s heritage by having the old rides restored and create somewhere people wanted to spend time and dwell while the kids were going off and having fun.

“We also created quite a beautiful landscaped area, planting 60,000 trees and shrubs in a very short space of time and to get the whole thing up and running in time was quite an achievement.”

One key development last year to bridge the visitor age gap was an outdoor event space for up to 15,000 people. It’s timing was perfect to capitalise on Margate’s hip new reputation and when it landed the sold-out Demon Dayz Festival headlined by Gorillaz in the summer, Dreamland had landed on the music venue map, with visitors also able to take advantage of the restored 1930s Cinque Ports pub alongside the park – all part of Wiles’ package

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of changes – and the town’s first rooftop bar.

The scale of this impact was not lost on Wiles, who was born further along the coast in Southampton. Dreamland was a key asset for a region trying to establish a 21st century unique selling point and the “builder’s hug effect” was simple evidence of how one keystone project has the potential to revitalise so many sectors.

“The encounter with that builder on Margate High Street meant a lot, when he thanked me for helping him make a success of his own business and I know that in those regions in particular it is so important for key businesses in whatever sector to stay open and attract further investment,” Wiles tells me.

“The thing about Margate is that while it was on the up the failure of Dreamland would have set it back five years, so having brought the

investment into that site and the surrounding sites we acquired there is the opportunity for ongoing investment into the whole area – which gives us quite a buzz.

“There are a lot of towns and cities around the UK that have businesses entrenched within them that are equally important, and years ago I handled the administration of Axminster Carpets, which was very much at the heart of the town itself and employed fathers, sons, mothers and sisters right through the generations. To save that business and sell it on to someone who could keep manufacturing in Axminster was a great pleasure.

“Brighton wouldn’t be the same without the pier and Blackpool needs its pleasure beach – all those are landmarks and it was so fulfilling to be able to turn round another key place at

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“This is the UK and you can’t just have a summer theme park.”

“We created quite a beautiful landscaped area, planting 60,000 trees and shrubs in a very short space of time.”

Dreamland and make the locals proud of it.”

His next project could land on his desk from any quarter, with Duff & Phelps keeping a close eye on the retail sector, where it has needed to do a lot of work in recent years, including Wiles leading on challenges such as BHS. Restaurants and casual dining are another area where there is some concern and, while the automotive sector is considered fairly robust, it is still likely to attract the attention of Wiles and his colleagues as the market changes here, in Europe and further afield.

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For him, Dreamland was also an opportunity to redefine what the administration process was. “At Margate, it was the rebirth of the business and that is what Duff & Phelps is all about, giving the business the protection it required to sort itself out,” he explains.

“In that case – and I hope in more cases in the future – we are able to return a business to new shareholders or new directors and back to normal trading. The key principle around what we do is early engagement to find a better solution before the situation becomes a fait

accompli for the business – and its employees – because we never forget that while we have a duty to advise the board as to how they should proceed, there will always be a very human aspect to it all, from employees to a director who might have put their life savings into the company.

“If we can help put together a strong business plan that will look after the workers who have also invested their time, then we know everyone involved can be aligned in that one objective – to make a business succeed.” n

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ey created g id h C ig s a r investor cis and Cr o f n a y r a F w t t e o tiv Leo Sc he an innova , t e k r roviding t a p M o ls y a k is e h il h The W e casks, w inbottom brand, d a r t d n a to buy their Higg r o f l ia r e t reports. e b m raw ma o c s an as Peter R

I

didn’t even like whisky to begin with,” laughs Craig Chidgey. It’s quite an admission for the chief executive of The Whisky Market, a London-based drinks company founded in 2014 to give investors the chance to buy and trade casks.

“My earliest experiences were being sick after drinking blends like Bell’s when I was 18.

Now I love it and my wife enjoys a tipple most nights.”

“I think that’s true for a lot of people,” agrees fellow director Leo Scott-Francis. “A lot of people’s first experience of whisky is a supermarket blend.

“But when they try single malt Scotch whisky for the first time, they realise that it’s something completely different. And that’s what we’re dealing with here.”

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The Whisky Market buys casks from distilleries through specialist brokers and then sells those barrels on to its clients. Most of the casks are stored at a special facility at Newton Stewart in Dumfries & Galloway run by a company called The Whisky Broker, with a small number kept at distilleries dotted around Scotland.

“I do the business side of things, while Leo chooses the casks and actually goes out and sells the whisky,” says Chidgey. “It’s a good combination.”

Scott-Francis is very exacting when it comes to selecting the casks he wants to buy and offer for sale to his clients; he’s primarily looking for first-fill sherry or bourbon barrels, most of which contain liquid that’s more than five years old. Current highlights in the

warehouse include: barrels of Laphroaig, a peated whisky from the island of Islay being aged in Port wine casks; Bruichladdich, also from Islay, in 20 barrels that previously held first-growth Bordeaux wines from chateaux Haut-Brion, Latour and Margaux; and a 1991 single grain whisky in a sherry cask from Cambus distillery in Alloa, which closed two years later.

“Only about 15% of the whisky ageing in Scotland is over five years old,” Chidgey says.

“It means that older whiskies are rare and so the rules of supply and demand push up their value over time.

“The minimum time for which we recommend clients hold their casks is three years, but we can be very flexible. Figures compiled by Whisky Invest Direct suggest that

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investors are making a return of about 7% per annum across the wider whisky market and our clients are getting a return of up to around 9%.

“Whisky is treated like wine by Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) because it’s a ‘wasting asset’ or ‘chattel’ and so it’s exempt from capital gains tax if its predictable life is less than 50 years and the investors earn less than about £6,000 per transaction. We’re not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) because we’re not selling financial products, but we are regulated by the strictest regulator on the planet – the taxman.

“The key factor is that we offer our clients a guaranteed exit. We will buy the cask back from them after an agreed period.”

Once Scott-Francis and Chidgey have bought back those barrels, their bottling business – HAH Whisky – will bottle or blend them to create its brands. The first, “The Higginbottom”, went on sale last autumn and is a 27-year-old single malt Scotch whisky from the Bunnahabhain distillery on Islay.

The brand is named after Scott-Francis’s grandfather, David Higginbottom, who – under the penname Nicholas Fisk – wrote science fiction books for children, including “Trillions”, “Grinny”, and “A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair”. He died in 2016 and the packaging for the whisky features many tributes to him, including images of his trademark pipe.

The brand’s heritage stretches back even further. Higginbottom’s grandfather owned a large brewery and a chain of pubs in Newcastle and bottled whisky for the army during the First World War.

“

“The key factor is that we offer our clients a guaranteed exit. We will buy the cask back from them after an agreed period.”

“It’s nice to have this genuine heritage,” nods Scott-Francis. “It’s not something that we’ve had to make up.

“But I didn’t know about the family connection with whisky when I started the business. It wasn’t until two years later that my grandfather showed me his own grandfather’s silver 1920s business card case, which had his ‘AHH’ initials on it and that prompted him to tell me the story.”

The company’s next bottling, a blend called Club 8, follows this spring.

Scott-Francis is clearly excited by its mixture of whiskies from Highland Park, Glenrothes and The Macallan, which have been married together in a Pedro Ximenez rich, sweet sherry cask.

Other whiskies in the initial “Fine & Rare” range include a 27-year-old grain whisky from Strathclyde distillery and a bourbon from Heaven Hills in the United States, which is the firm’s first foray into overseas spirits.

The next steps include plans to buy casks from Ireland and Japan, as well as brandy, gin and mezcal, the broader category to which tequila belongs.

Clients have another option too. Instead of selling the casks back to The Whisky Market to be turned into HAH Whisky brands, the customers can choose to have their whiskies bottled themselves.

“If we hold a whisky for three years then in effect we’re buying a five year old and bottling it as an eight year old,” Scott-Francis explains. “So, following that through, we could buy a 25 year old and bottle it as a 28 year old or hold it for longer and bottle it as a 30 year old – in that range between 25 and 30 years old, whisky really increases in value dramatically.”

Chidgey adds: “We’re aiming to sell most of our whiskies priced at between £100 and £200 a bottle. We want people to feel they can drink

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these whiskies and not just collect them. Club 8 will retail for around £45 a bottle and we’ll bottle about 10% of them at cask strength of around 60% alcohol by volume.

“Some of our other casks will sell for more like £400 or £500 a bottle. These are really special barrels.”

Scott-Francis and Chidgey met through their involvement in the wine trade. Chidgey had previously worked for estate agency Foxtons, but got into the drinks business when a company that had sold wine as an investment to his father ceased trading.

“My Dad had a list of creditors who all owned wine through this company,” he explains. “A lot of them wanted help to sell their wine and so I contacted Leo, who I’d met before.

“After we helped the investors to sell their wines, they asked if there were similar ways of investing in drinks. That’s where the idea came from for The Whisky Market.”

Their wine business morphed into One Vine Day, which now mostly sells investors’ wines to Bordeaux Index. One Vine Day’s revenues peaked at around £1.5m three years ago, but

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have since slid to £500,000 as the market has become more crowded, with its profit margin reduced from around 15% at peak to around 8% now.

In contrast, The Whisky Market has surged ahead. Revenues stand at around £1.4m and profits at about £87,000.

The company’s clients hold around 800 casks, with the stock value at around £3.5m.

The ultimate aim is to build the brand to the stage where it will become attractive to one of the larger players in the drinks industry.

It’s come a long way from the first batch of barrels that Scott-Francis bought. That initial purchase consisted of 50 casks from Tullibardine distillery in Perthshire, which had previously held 2010 Chateau Talbot, a fourthgrowth red wine from Bordeaux in France.

“Back in the 1990s, consumers used to be able to buy casks directly from distilleries,” Scott Francis says. “But distilleries are working sites and it was time-consuming if investors wanted to come along and try individual barrels, so the practice died out.

“Then I found a broker that could get us casks from distilleries. When I went and visited

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the broker for the day and saw the casks, that’s when I knew that we could make this business work.”

Scott-Francis had been introduced to fine wine collecting by his grandfather and brought One Vine Day to consumers at just the right time, when the market was flooded with sellers. His track record in selling wine has led many of those investors to follow him into whisky.

“Leo has this knack of getting predictions right,” smiles Chidgey. “He predicted the growth of drones and now he’s been right about how whisky has become much more mainstream.”

“The growth areas are among women and younger consumers around 35 years old,” Francis-Scott adds. “Whisky is no longer seen as an old man’s drink.

“Just go into the whisky clubs in London and they’re full of women and younger drinkers.

Although Haig Club might not be the besttasting whisky, it just goes to show what can be done if you launch a brand targeted at people who aren’t traditional whisky drinkers.” n

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Garry Sheriff with co-founder and Finance Director Michael Jopling.

Partnerships drive business growth Garry Sheriff, managing director of IT managed solutions and services specialist ITPS, highlights how strong supply chain partnerships are crucial to commercial success.

www.itps.co.uk

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As a business with 18 years of steady growth behind us, we know that rather than simply making sales, the real key to success lies in building strong partnerships.

Nurturing client partnerships is one of our key strengths, but good relationships with high-calibre partners are equally vital in supporting our own business and those of our clients.

For example we hold strategic partner status with Virgin Media Business (VMB), a level only available to a select few within the UK, and an award that is measured on customer feedback, technical expertise, volume of business and the ability to support VMB’s product range at the highest level.

We have invested over £1.2m in a peer-to-peer, high-speed, large-capacity communications and infrastructure at our ISO27001 Tier 3 North East of England data centres. While we deal with other carriers, we partner and lead with VMB for its ability to deliver 21st century fibre network solutions. It guarantees our customers reliable, scalable connectivity with reduced latency, faster access, and no other unknown parties involved in their connectivity solutions.

As one of the UK’s acknowledged IT connectivity experts, we are one of only a few suppliers currently permitted to sell connectivity and services such as unified communications, security and cloud services for the new health and social

care network (HSCN). This will replace the N3 network, which is one of Europe’s largest virtual private networks and connects 1.3 million NHS staff.

HSCN is a vital element in the digital transformation of NHS services and the demonstrable qualifying criteria is extremely stringent. It will connect health and social care organisations, delivering reliability, efficiency and cost-effective connectivity, and giving them the freedom to choose network services to suit their needs.

Our commitment is to help all our clients find the right solution, one that will reduce costs and negate risk, increase service levels and improve availability, security and efficiency. The VMB partnership means we can give clients access to discounts, a portfolio of 60 VMB products, and a level of VMB extended support not open to others.

The combination of investment in HSCN and our strong VMB partnership delivers immense benefits to our clients, and leverages new opportunities with those who can see the benefit of a partnership approach.

The power of forging strong partnerships throughout the supply chain cannot be underestimated. Not only does it deliver results, it turns clients into ambassadors and has an impact where every business wants to see it – on the bottom line. n

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