It has been a rollercoaster ride for our three budding entrepreneurs since we
started profiling them a year ago. There have been setbacks and u-turns,
tears and exhaustion, excitement and euphoria. Now, 12 months into pursuing
their dream, we revisit them to take a look at their progress.
Rob Taub
Sportsbase.co.uk
A YEAR AGO: Former schoolfriends Rob Taub and Nick Kenton were starting
a free online directory listing all the sports clubs in Britain. They hoped
it would make money by attracting advertising. They had obtained an
unsecured bank loan of £12,500 from Barclays and had combined savings of
£12,500 to get the business going. They planned to employ an agency to sell
advertising and last August launched an additional service on the site,
Sportsmate, an online interactive community to enable people to find players
in their area and for local clubs to announce fixtures. One early casualty,
however, was Taub and Kenton’s business partnership. Four months after
launching, Kenton withdrew from the firm for personal reasons, leaving Taub
to run the venture alone.
NOW: The Sportsbase website has had 3m hits since it was launched. But
the hoped-for advertising revenue failed to mate-rialise and with the last
of the start-up capital spent on launching Sportsmate, Taub had to put in
£1,000 of his own money to keep the site ticking over. However, in April
Taub struck gold, bringing in two partners, who between them will invest
£80,000 over two years in return for a 25% stake each. One investment
partner, Global E-Network, will put a voice-over-internet-protocol (Voip)
system on the site. This will lead to the launch of Sports Impact, an
application that will enable sports clubs to offer their members free calls
and texts in return for a monthly subscription. Taub, now 24, said: “Our
research shows that club captains spend an average of £80 a month on phone
calls to arrange games, so using Sports Impact will greatly cut this figure
and will make it much easier for club captains and members to communicate.”
The other partner, Mediarun, is an online advertising agency and its role
will be to attract advertisers to the site. “It is really exciting,” said
Taub. “Hopefully, with these guys on board we can start getting everything
moving again. The site has huge potential and I think it is really going to
take off.”
Julie Diem Le
Zoobug
A YEAR AGO: Julie Diem Le, a 29-year-old eye surgeon, had left her job
with the NHS to start her own business making and selling sunglasses for
children. After attending several courses run by her local Business Link in
Birmingham, she wrote a business plan and got a start-up loan of £35,000
from NatWest. She had found an Italian designer to help her create the
sunglasses and last July launched her first range, aimed at children aged 7
to 16. She launched a second range for younger children aged three to eight,
called Flexibugs, a few months later.
Her sunglasses were chosen as the official eyewear for the British junior surf
team and she was in talks with a London department store that might be
interested in stocking her range.
NOW: Le is selling more than 2,000 pairs of Zoobug sunglasses a month.
They are in Selfridges in London, Manchester and Birmingham and are also
being stocked by several upmarket opticians around the country. She got a
fantastic response to her sunglasses at the Mido exhibition last month in
Milan, the largest optics show in the world, and is now selling them in
France, Italy and Germany. “It is really taking off,” she said. “People are
loving the brand so we need to make it more available.” It has been a steep
learning curve, however. Because of their high retail price – £29 to £50 –
Le has found it harder than she expected to get fashion retailers to stock
her sunglasses. She has also had to postpone the launch of her smallest
range of sunglasses– for babies and children up to three years old – because
she was not completely happy with the design. She has extended her bank loan
by £12,000 and invested £20,000 of her own money, which she raised from
selling her house. Now 30, she said it had been hard adapting to the
business world after the NHS, but added: “I am learning very fast.”
Marc Demarquette
Demarquette Chocolates
A YEAR AGO: Marc Demarquette was a management consultant at a large
firm in London but an accident made him rethink his priorities. He decided
to turn a love of chocolate into a business. After learning how to make
chocolate at a culinary school in Paris he got a £40,000 bank loan to get
started and within four months had opened a shop, Demarquette, in Fulham,
southwest London. He also set up a production facility nearby and employed a
chocolatier to help him. Once the first shop was up and running, he planned
to look at other ways of selling his chocolates, perhaps online or by mail
order, or through concessions within stores, or by selling to hotels and
restaurants.
NOW: Sales of chocolates at Demarquette’s shop are going so well that
he is planning to open a second one, also in London, by Christmas. “It is a
risk but I just think let’s go for it,” he said. “We had people queuing for
45 minutes to buy chocolates for Valentine’s day.” Demarquette, 34, is
producing 220 lb of chocolates a week and has started supplying several
hotels and corporate clients who give the chocolates to their customers as
gifts. From next month he will also begin monthly tasting events. Despite
spending his £40,000 loan within six months of starting up, Demarquette is
now able to fund the business entirely out of cashflow. He said: “I feel
fabulous. It is hard work but it is well worth it. There is a buzz. I wake
up in the morning happy and with a sense of purpose, and I didn’t get that
when I was working for a blue-chip company.”
