Category: Entrepreneur

As this year draws to a close, I’d like to post an update about all we’ve achieved at BigChange in 2018.

Our financial performance

I’m delighted to announce this has been another year of stellar growth for the company. Sales are up by an incredible 65% year-on-year and we now have more than 20,000 active subscribers on our platform.

We signed an impressive £16m-worth of new business contracts this year, which is bang on target. Our lack of customer churn also brings me great satisfaction. We have lost just 1.5pc of of our JobWatch subscriber base in the last 6 years, which proves that we’re consistently delighting clients existing and new. On average, we deliver a return on investment of £15 for every £1 spent.

Our sales performance has landed us some great awards. I was very proud that Bigchange came 49th in the Sunday Times Tech Track this year. We are also one of Deloitte’s Fast 50 yet again, a ranking of the fastest growing technology firms in the UK. As BigChange moves from start-up to scale-up, we’ve also managed to boost profitability by nearly 300% to hit £1.4m.

Charitable work

Building a profitable business has enabled BigChange to make significant charitable donations. We don’t stick to a set figure each year but I like to give a minimum of 10pc of profit to great causes. This year, we managed to do a little better than that: we gave more than £200,000 to charity in 2018.

One of my personal highlights this year was visiting Zambia with Transaid back in March. BigChange is a corporate partner and I visited Serenje, where Transaid is doing life-saving work, improving road safety and facilitating the transport of crucial medicines. Bicycle Ambulances can now get people to medical centres quickly and easily, reducing deaths dramatically.

My time in Zambia reminded me to be grateful for all the blessings we take for granted. The people there live without luxury and yet were some of the happiest individuals I’ve ever met.

I’ve also loved working with racing driver Nic Hamilton on Leaders for Life www.bigchangeapps.com/leadersforlife , an initiative to help encourage road safety across the UK. I’m excited to sponsor him next year, as he moves into the next phase of his racing career.

Our people

We’ve expanded our team by 60pc to hit more than 100 people in 2018. I’ve been so impressed by the calibre of our new recruits, but it’s also important to say that the colleagues who have been with us for years – some since day one – continue to flourish and learn new skills as the company grows. It’s given me immense pleasure to see great people rise through the ranks here. Our office move ensures we have space for many new team members, as we start to work with larger and more complex customers. We have also now appointed a new head of HR, Sonal, who will help us to continue finding and hiring great people in 2019.

The future

The end of the year is a great time to reflect on all we’ve achieved but let me assure you, my feet are firmly on the ground. I’m already looking forward to 2019, and all our bold plans for growth. We’re hoping to hit £25m in new contract wins next year, and we want to invest even more into charitable activities. We’re expanding geographically all the time, and next year hope to announce a new presence in the US and Germany, as well as our operations in France, Israel and Cyprus.

Not all smooth sailing

This has been a tough year for me personally. I lost my mum recently, which hit the whole family very hard. As any entrepreneur will know, it’s hard to grieve when you’re also building a fast-growth company. My wonderful wife and children were a great comfort to me and encouraged me to cut down my working hours, which was the right thing to do. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned this year is that family is precious, and we all need to do more to make sure we’re making time for loved ones.

I was also very sad to hear of the passing of Jayne Gray, the Transaid fundraiser who was tragically killed during a charity bike ride in September. My thoughts are with her family.

A message to our customers and colleagues

I just want to say a massive thank you to all our loyal customers. Your support and feedback has been the secret to our success this year. I see you all as our partners rather than customers. I promise to keep doing all I can to make life easier for you, and help you ditch that inefficient paperwork, and cut down on all your plate spinning. That’s the vision that underpins all we do here at BigChange.

To my incredibly loyal team: where to start? You’ve all gone above and beyond this year, and I’m so proud of all we’ve achieved together. I’m consistently impressed by the way colleagues go the extra mile. Even during tough times, everyone pulls together and treats every challenge as an opportunity to learn and improve. It’s inspiring to be around you all.

And finally, thank you to all of you who have been following my posts on LinkedIn this year. I’ve loved hearing all your comments and feedback. Since I started this blog series, my posts have received more than 3,000 likes and shares. Thank you so much for the ongoing support.

That’s all from me for now. Season’s greetings to you all. Have a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

JobWatch is a revolution. It lets you plan, manage, track and schedule your mobile workforce, without the need for inefficient paperwork. Your people will love it your customers will notice a real difference.

BigChange by name, BigChange by nature. JobWatch will deliver tangible benefits. From reducing the time it takes to raise an invoice to boosting productivity and utilisation, your business will reap a big change to its bottom line. Visit our website

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

 I am always on the move. Whether it’s by plane, train or automobile, rarely a week goes by when I’m not travelling to some foreign country or new city.

This lifestyle has led to some pretty hair-raising situations over the years. On a trip to Bucharest in Romania a few years back, the cab driver rigged the meter to charge me double the going rate, and then proceeded to offer me every illegal drug under the sun, and tried to drive me to a brothel.

Last week, I caught an Uber in London. The driver was either drunk or under the influence of some other substance, and suffered from chronic road rage, getting into fights every passing motorist as he weaved in and out of traffic. If that wasn’t bad enough, the car’s warning lights were on. A message on the dashboard said clearly: “Check hybrid system. Stop the vehicle in a safe place.” He just kept on driving.

Some of these horror stories were unavoidable: I was in the wrong place at the wrong time – or just unlucky. But it’s got me thinking about some of the business travel hacks that I’ve picked up over the years, which either make journeys cheaper, easier or safer. Some, I wish I’d found out about years ago.

So here is my early festive gift to you all: a comprehensive list of all the tips I’ve found useful. May all your journeys be fruitful, safe and enjoyable.

Beware hotel booking platforms

As a VAT-registered business, BigChange is able to claim VAT back on certain expenses, such as booking hotel rooms for business trips. But platforms like Booking.com, which is based in the Netherlands, do not allow you to claim back VAT. This means that even though you might get a 15% discount on your room, you’re still out of pocket because that’s less than the 20% VAT you can’t claim. My tip? Find the room and hotel you want and then call the hotel and see if you can get the same rate. By booking direct, you could both land a discount and be able to make the VAT claim. Win, win.

Airport lounges

If you’re a start-up founder, or you’re bootstrapping your business, it’s unlikely that you are flying first class when you travel. But this doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the benefits of the airport lounge. For between £20 and £30, you can buy one-off access, and work in peace before your flight with proper wifi and a decent meal. When you arrive calm and refreshed for your meeting, you’ll know it’s worth it.

Get an Amex

Use your personal Amex for all your business purchases, and then claim it back, or get a dedicated business Amex. American Express lets you collect air miles as you spend, and these can come in useful for both business travel and the odd holiday. Best of all, these air miles don’t count as a “benefit in kind” according to HMRC. Here’s the paper on it, in case you don’t believe me: https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-manual/eim21618

One colleague at BigChange has amassed over a million air miles to date. His top tip: only use the Amex for purchases where there’s no card fee, otherwise you end up landed with unnecessary charges.

Credit, not debit

When you check in to a foreign hotel, never hand over your debit card at the reception desk. When they run their pre-authorisation transaction, sometimes putting as much as £400 on hold from your account, you then can’t access that money. Even worse, when you come to pay for your room, the charge is processed on top of the pre-authorisation amount, and you may have to wait up to 10 days for that money to be unfrozen. That’s fine if you have lots of cash but if you’re not feeling so flush, you’re better off using a credit card.

Never pay full whack for rail travel

If you haven’t heard of split ticketing yet, this is your lucky day. On sites like raileasy.co.uk or trainsplit.com, you can plug in your journey details and it will charge you a fare that is up to 30% cheaper than booking direct. You can often travel first class for the same amount as a standard fare. It does this by allocating a series of tickets, rather than one direct fare. This means you may end up with as many as 12 tickets when you go to print out your order but it’s worth the extra hassle of more tickets for the saving.

Disability perks

I recently found out that being hearing impaired (I have 70% hearing loss) entitles me and another person to 30% off our rail travel. You simply have to register for a disability card, and then you can access the saving. Apply here: https://www.disabledpersons-railcard.co.uk

I hope you’ve found these tips useful. If you have any great ones to add to the list, please post them below.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

When was the last time you packed a bag, said goodbye to the office, and went in search of the truly exciting new ventures that could change the world?

That’s a trick question. I know that most of us are far too busy. And anyway, how would you know where to start? This is why I was honoured and delighted to be invited on a recent technology mission that made that dream come true.

Last week, I joined executives from MasterCard, British Airways owner IAG, and Citibank on a trip to Israel to meet some of the entrepreneurs building outstanding businesses there. The two and a half day trip started in Jerusalem and ended in Tel Aviv. It was a whirlwind tour, organised by UK Israel Business, packed with meetings and seminars designed to foster new trade links and show off the nation’s top talent.

I must have met about 30 brilliant entrepreneurs over the course of the mission. I can honestly say it was one of the most inspirational things I’ve done in my life.

I’d like to tell you all a little about the people I met and the incredible ventures that I discovered on this journey. I hope that you too will feel inspired – and perhaps pack that bag and go in search of your own inspiration too.

Then there was Ziv Aviram, whose hi-tech glasses are about to significantly improve the lives of the blind and visually impaired people across the world. The glasses can sense colour and describe the outside world to the user – they can even read a newspaper. Orcam Technologies is Aviram’s second venture; he sold his first, Mobileye, to Intel for $15.3bn.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

Reading the headlines in the newspapers you’d be forgiven for thinking that the UK is going to hell in a handcart.

Brexit. The spectre of recession. Talent shortages. Britain’s economy is under siege. This is why I am delighted to announce that BigChange is bucking the trend to post a record third quarter.

So far this year, new contract wins have surpassed the £10m mark, a 50% increase on 2017. We have welcomed 170 new customers into the business over the last nine months. Our existing customer base remains loyal and committed to our service too: we now have a total of 800 customers in the UK, Scandinavia, France, Cyprus, Australia and the US.

We couldn’t have done it without you!

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all our customers, existing and new, for your faith in us and your continued commitment to BigChange. Over the past few months, I’ve been blogging regularly about the ways that BigChange hopes to make a difference to your business. Here are some of the highlights:

You can read some of our customer case studies, featuring incredible brands like Housing Unit, FSH, Complete Business solutions and GAP Group on our website www.bigchange.com/about-us/news-blog/

I also want to thank the spectacular team at BigChange, who have worked tirelessly to support our incredible growth. We now employ more than 90 people between the UK and France. As a testament to our internal talent, we have promoted many team members this year, helping them to progress in their chosen fields and careers. We continue to introduce lots of new talent to the company to make sure we can support our future growth.

As mentioned last week in my blog Pain and sorrow of recruitment, we are looking to recruit another 25 people over the next 12 months. These roles include: developers, project managers, business advisors, and RoadCrew customer support. Finding great new people is always a challenge so if you, or someone you know, are keen to join a fast-growth tech company in the UK’s greatest city – Leeds – get in touch!

Our commitment to innovation

I’m excited to announce the launch of our new Business Advisory team, which will focus on helping our customers to meet their growth goals, helping you to get the most out of the BigChange service offering.

This team will offer regular review meetings, workflow integration optimisation, training, report writing, custom reports and automation to help deliver further return on investment to our JobWatch customers. Interested? Contact the RoadCrew team for further information.

The innovation doesn’t end there. We have now launched our booking app, and have seen an excellent take up. It will revolutionise the way your business manages both planned and reactive bookings.

Our lab development team has been hard at work developing new features such as our new Collaboration tool, which allows two separate companies to share a job. Collaboration manages the whole process, from booking to scheduling jobs, and even takes care of health and safety and workflow using the managing company’s own templates. At a recent shop floor day, I connected two companies in the door industry using our new tool. I look forward to posting an update on how that relationship benefited both firms. Other developments include:-

Other notable changes; Incoming call popup. Shared credit limit to descendent contacts. DSAR – data subject access requests now possible in one simple action via admin section. Enhanced Sage 50 link

A great place to work

We are also excited about our new office at Thorpe Park Leeds. We were getting a bit cramped at our old site so it’s been a dream to move into this 10,000 sq ft modern building. Moving was a headache read my blog I Survivor office move but it was worth it to have this great working environment for both the team and our customers.

We must be doing something right. We keep winning awards for our success!

Recent notable awards include: The Deloitte Technology Fast 50, The Sunday Times Tech Track 100, The LinkedIn Top 10 Startups to Watch Outside London , The Brake Fleet Safety Innovation Award, SHD 2018 Logistics Award “EDITORS CHOICE AWARD” BigChange in partnership with Silentnight Beds. We were also shortlisted for the IOD CSR award this year, and hailed as “one to watch” in the LDC Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders programme, supported by The Telegraph.

Charitable work

Last but not least, BigChange continues to support many charitable organisations that are close to our hearts. We now donate to more than 25 brilliant charities that do incredible work in Leeds and beyond.

I was proud to be made an ambassador for Transaid after personally visiting Zambia with the charity earlier this year. I saw for myself the incredible work done on the ground fighting malaria in Serenje and visited the driver training school in Lusaka. If you want to support this great cause, find out more here: http://www.transaid.org/

Thanks for tuning in to this update on our progress. Normal blog service will resume next week!

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

BigChange collaboration allows companies to allocate jobs to their partners.

It tracks all the paperwork, monitors issues like health and safety, takes care of billing and scheduling, and updates all parties on the progress of the jobs in real time – giving a sense of control and transparency.

Imagine that you run a plumbing company in Scotland. Your local customers love you and want to work with you on a nationwide basis, but you don’t have the resources to take on contracts in Wales or down in London. Through BigChange, you can now collaborate with other plumbing companies in other areas and sub-contract out the work.

I can’t overstate the potential of something like this. Small businesses can act like big companies – at the touch of a screen. They can reach an almost unlimited scale, bolting on other services and growing their empires. Think of the savings in travel costs if you could sub-contract out work at the other end of the country?

Virtual companies could be created, drawing on the expertise of other firms, using their sales and marketing expertise to grow and thrive.

UK businesses could expand overseas using this system – something that many entrepreneurs may find useful post-Brexit. You could find a contractor in Australia for your customer and watch the job being done in real-time.

In the past, collaboration like this has been bogged down in paperwork, email and endless phone calls. The mist falls over Paper Town and it’s hard to know what’s going on. With JobWatch, it’s all clear and paperless, and your partners appear like an extension of your own firm. Your customers even see the same screen if they log into the booking portal to check which jobs have been completed. Your partner company invoices you, and you invoice your customer as usual – all through BigChange.

It’s that easy.

We don’t charge our customers anything extra to collaborate, but we benefit because we believe that the collaboration feature will encourage more customers to join us. That’s the beauty of a business like this: by focusing on making our customers more successful, we succeed too.

If you are interested in receiving more information on how you can expand your network please email [email protected] for more information.

All The Best

Martin

Martin Port

Founder & CEO

Tel +44 113 4571000

Direct +44 113 4570966

Mob +44 7973 671779

Email [email protected]

Web www.bigchange.com

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

Focus. This is the most underrated term in entrepreneurship today.

Concentrating on your core business – consistently doing what you already do well – may sound easy. The reality is that it’s very hard.

There are always distractions out there. Sometimes, these distractions are disguised as great business strategies or innovative projects. They rarely are. They are follies that suck up time and money and make you and your business less efficient.

I was reminded of the importance of focus recently, when reading about the woes at John Lewis. This is a business that is beloved by customers and employees alike. It’s been going for years, has an incredible track record, and is generally seen as the ‘rock’ of the high street. But suddenly, it’s making losses and posting 1,800 redundancies.

The management has blamed Brexit but I think there’s a different reason. John Lewis has been distracted from what it does best: selling goods that people want to buy to customers who want to buy them.

If you look at John Lewis’ model, it’s become confused in recent years. The business made an investment in Ocado over a decade ago, sustaining losses that – luckily – ended up in profit when it sold its stake in 2011. This once-in-a-blue-moon success seems to have convinced John Lewis that it is a venture capitalist, and it’s been backing lots of start-ups through its accelerator programme, JLABS. In the last year and a half, it has even moved into the service engineer space. It is my opinion that they’ve totally lost the plot there.

Can you imagine British Gas opening a department store? Or Homeserve selling wallpaper? John Lewis has no experience running a home services business. It’s completely foreign to the industry they know.

I think that all business owners, me included, should heed John Lewis’ cautionary tale. It’s easy to get carried away with a new idea. When you have shareholders to please, it’s tempting to keep announcing clever things that lift the share price that day. But it’s nonsense: long-term, the business will suffer.

I do some mentoring through Connect Yorkshire. There have been many times I’ve found myself sitting in front of someone turning over £1.5m, making £300,000 profit, with just 15 employees, who says to me: “I’ve got this great idea to do something completely different with this business.” Why? It’s because we entrepreneurs bore easily, and we love a challenge. But that’s the antithesis of good business practice.

I’m not infallible either. At BigChange, I nearly lost focus recently. A company approached me, offering to add drones to our product set. It sounded so exciting: hi-tech drone deliveries! I was tempted for about an hour but something kept bothering me: none of our customers have ever asked about drones. And I don’t believe in first-mover advantage in business. The pioneers often fail and it’s a later mover that wins the day – the second mouse gets the cheese, as they say.

As an entrepreneur, when you are considering a major move outside your comfort zone, ask yourself three questions.

1.) If the time and money it will require to launch this new idea were instead invested in your core business, listening to customers, and making improvements, would the return be higher?

2.) Have your customers said – explicitly – that they would pay for this new product or service? Not that it would be nice to have, or that it’s an interesting idea, but that they would spend cold, hard cash?

3.) Is someone already doing this better than you ever could?

I’m not trying to squash innovation. We need to be imaginative and keep trying to improve things for our customers. But we need to do that while maintaining focus on the sweet spot: the thing we are good at that customers consistently want to buy.

Right now, we’re selling our software to 25,000 mobile workers in the UK. But the UK market size is an estimated 7m people. That’s our focus, and I shan’t be getting distracted from that.

What’s yours?

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

They travel the length and breadth of the UK, fixing our broken pipes and delivering our shopping. Have a heart, and hug a White Van Man.

Last week, I wrote about my frustration with Britain’s enduring dislike of sales people. It’s drives me mad. We need to treasure our salespeople and understand the value they bring to the economy.
This week I’m back on my soapbox. This time, in defence of the White Van Man.

On Wikipedia, I found a definition. It says that the White Van man is ‘typically perceived as a selfish, inconsiderate driver who is mostly petit bourgeois and often aggressive.’ Where the hell does this misconception come from?

I spend a lot of time with the tradespeople and engineers who drive Ford Transits. This is because of my regular “shop floor days” [read more about them here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/shop-floor-day-let-martin-take-closer-look-martin-port/]. I’ve spent 100 days on the road with White Van Men in my time, and every single one of them has been a decent, kind person who goes the extra mile for their customers and does a difficult job with long hours.

These engineers and drivers are absolutely vital to the UK. There are around 2.5m white vans out on the road. These people are delivering parts, fixing our broken equipment, bringing our shopping, and keeping our utilities running smoothly. They go out in the rain and snow, all hours of the day and night, to do their job. Yet they do not get the respect they deserve.

The rise of internet shopping has put a lot of pressure on the couriers that deliver all our parcels. So yes, some of them may be pushy drivers, but only because they have up to 100 pick-ups and drop-offs to make in a single day. Don’t blame them, blame the managers and office staff that send them on poorly-planned routes and overload them with deliveries. But, according to the Renault Master White Van Man study, couriers account for just 22pc of vans on the road. The typical driver is actually: “a service engineer, a fishmonger, a roofer, an exhibitions erector, a picture framer or even a theatre director”, it explained.

The WVM experiences a lot of prejudice. “People look at me like I’m dirt,” one, Patrick, told me. He spends up to 25 hours a week driving in his van – double that if he’s on call – covering a catchment area that reaches from Romford to Acton, all the way to Cambridge. “Often we are doing the nasty little jobs that people don’t realise are getting done but which are essential to their lives. Yet people have a bad attitude towards us.

“People do not want to let you out when you’re driving on the road. They especially won’t let you out when two lanes merge into one. People do not want to let you go ahead of them, especially in the centre of town. Many people wouldn’t dream of doing my job. They’d hate it. But they’d miss us if we were gone.”

In my experience, WVM can drive between 15,000 and 25,000 miles a year Who would want to spend that much time behind the wheel, often stuck in traffic? It’s time that we truly appreciated the White Van Man. They do an amazing job, often under tough conditions. Let’s stop putting these people down.

I’d love to hear from you on your thoughts so please leave a comment below.

All the best

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

BigChange. The name of my company is no accident. What’s the point of aiming small? I want to make a big difference in this world, and I’m not shy about telling everyone about it.

I created this company five years ago, so BigChange is now moving beyond start-up to become an established business. It’s time for us to move into the next phase of growth. Today, I’d like to tell you about realising my vision for the company in the first 5 years of trading. Safe to say, it is a game changer.

My ambitious plan for BigChange was to build collaboration into our technology. Imagine that you run a plumbing company in Scotland. Your local customers love you and want to work with you on a nationwide basis – but you don’t have the resources to take on contracts in Wales or down in London. Through BigChange, you can now collaborate with other plumbing companies in other areas, and sub-contract out the work.

Our JobWatch technology not only allows companies to allocate jobs to their partners, it also tracks all the paperwork, monitors issues like health and safety, takes care of billing and scheduling, and updates all parties on the progress of the jobs in real time, giving a sense of control and transparency.

I can’t overstate the potential of something like this. Small businesses can act like big companies – at the touch of a screen. They can reach almost unlimited scale, bolting on other services and growing their empires. Think of the savings in travel costs if you could subcontract out work at the other end of the country?

Virtual companies could be created, which draw on the expertise of other firms, and use their sales and marketing expertise to grow and thrive. Just imagine, the next Uber could be created this way – after all, Uber doesn’t actually own any taxis.

We could help UK businesses to expand overseas using this system – something that many entrepreneurs may find useful post-Brexit. You could find a contractor in Australia for your customer and watch the job being done in real-time.

In the past, collaboration like this has been bogged down in paperwork, email and endless phone calls. The mist falls over Paper Town and it’s hard to know what’s going on. With JobWatch, it’s all clear and paperless, and your partners appear like an extension of your own firm. Your customers even see the same screen if they log into the booking portal to check which jobs have been done. Your partner company invoices you, and you invoice your customer as usual – all through BigChange. Easy.

We don’t charge our customers anything extra to collaborate, but we benefit because we believe that the collaboration feature will encourage more customers to join us. That’s the beauty of a business like this: by focusing on making our customers more successful, we succeed too.

All the best

Martin Port
Founder & CEO
Martin Port Visitor Website

Both my mother and father worked day and night when I was a kid. People sometimes ask where my work ethic comes from, and it’s from them, 100%.

From the age of 10, I would be with them, travelling all over the UK. My dad ran an auction business, and we’d be in Glasgow one day, London the next. My mum worked as the cashier. It was a true family business.

Dad would put an advert in the Evening Standard, offering TVs for £5, fan heaters for 50p, and so on. Up to 1,000 people would come to these auctions, and bid for the goods. That was my introduction to the world of business: seeing my dad up on the rostrum, commanding the audience. He was a great showman.

My dad let me have a go selling a few lots. It was late in the day, so there were fewer people left in the room. I remember getting up on the rostrum, and learning the patter: “If you miss this, you will miss your way home…”

This is how I learned the basics about business: buy, sell, make a profit. It was also how I learned to be a salesman. At 14, I started my first business. My best friend and I bought a printing machine for £500 from Exchange and Mart, the old classifieds magazine. We bought some card and some pens and offered to print promotional flyers and goods for small businesses. We used to hop on the train and go to Leeds, Sheffield, Blackpool – all over, trying to convince restaurants and shops to buy from us.

We got some orders, came home, and tried to print the things. For people who don’t remember these old machines, you put the type into the jig, and the machine would warm up, the type would hit the foil, and the words would be stamped onto the card. But our machine was faulty from the start. The type would just melt onto the jig. It was a complete con. This was my first experience of what entrepreneurs now call “a barrier to growth”. It was also the moment I knew for sure that I was a salesman and not a manufacturer.

Instead, we took the orders to a printing company and had them made. The customers never knew about the faulty machine, which we eventually managed to sell back to the manufacturer. We ran that business for almost a year. We even had our own little office in Leeds. But the money wasn’t great and it wasn’t a business we could scale.

I left school when I was 15 and started working Saturdays at an upmarket menswear shop called Cecil Gee. Next, I moved to a high-end jewellery shop. Then I was a blue coat on the shop floor at Comet, the old electricals chain. All of these early experiences helped me to understand the customer, anticipate what they needed, and work out the best way to solve their problems.

That’s when I began working with my father full-time. This was during the Thatcher era, when imports were starting to flood into the UK and factories were stuck with loads of stock they couldn’t sell. Interest rates were as high as 15% in those days so companies would sell £500,000 worth of stock for £100,000 just to get some cash back in the business. This is where I learned the power of market forces, and how the economy can work with you or against you.

I learned a lot of entrepreneurial lessons in my early teens that stood me in good stead for the rest of my life. But it’s remarkable how often we have to remind ourselves to follow the basics. ‘Buy at one price and sell for a profit’ seems obvious, but when you have a new business, you often undervalue your services just to get the deal. I’m grateful to my parents for giving me an education in business from such an early age. I feel like it’s always been in my blood.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how I ended up going to America, and starting up my bread business – the first company I successfully sold. But for now, I would be grateful if anyone would share stories about being a teenage entrepreneur. What were the first lessons you learned in business? Did you have entrepreneurial parents, like mine, or did you learn everything for yourself?

Martin Port
Founder & CEO