Every year hundreds of people decide to take the plunge and start their own
business. And, judging by the fantastic response we have had to our request
for budding entrepreneurs to contact us with details of their start-ups,
many of them are Sunday Times readers.
It has been exciting to read about their plans and, with great difficulty, we
have chosen three people who are about to take the plunge and become
entrepreneurs for the first time. We look at their plans below and will be
reporting on their progress in six months’ time.
Julie Diem Le
Zoobug
THE STORY SO FAR: Julie Diem Le is a 29-year-old eye surgeon who has
left her job with the NHS to start her own business making and selling
sunglasses for children. It is a big step to take — in the NHS she was well
on her way to becoming a consultant eye surgeon after being accepted as a
member of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists. But every day at work she
saw young eyes that had been damaged by the sun and she wanted to do
something about the problem.
“It was an incredibly difficult decision to leave hospital medicine but I feel
passionately about the product and the message that needs to be put out
about protecting young eyes from the sun,” said Le.
After attending several courses run by her local Business Link in Birmingham,
she secured a start-up loan of £35,000 from NatWest bank with a business
plan that she wrote herself.
She has found an Italian designer to create the sunglasses and made several
visits to Italy to work with him. She originally wanted to give her
sunglasses the brand name Firebug — fire for the sun, bug for children — but
after discovering the word means arsonist in some parts of Britain she
changed the name to Zoobug.
THE FUTURE: If all goes according to plan, Le hopes to launch
her children’s sunglasses at the Premier Kids trade exhibition in Birmingham
in July and then exhibit them at the Ski and Snowboard Show in London in
October. She plans to launch two different ranges — sports and designer —
each in several styles and colours.
Her first range will be aimed at children aged 7 to 16 with prices from £45
but she hopes eventually to produce a cheaper range of sunglasses for
children aged three and above.
Le hopes to persuade big department stores such as Harrods, Selfridges and
Harvey Nichols to stock her sunglasses and will be creating a website at
zoobug.co.uk.
She said: “It is really exciting but also nerve-racking. I am naturally very
optimistic but every day is a rollercoaster of emotions. I know it is a
great product but now my job is to convince other people.”
Marc Demarquette
Demarquette Chocolates
THE STORY SO FAR: Until last year Marc Demarquette was a management
consultant at a large firm in London. He had always been interested in
catering and, after an accident made him rethink his priorities, he decided
to take the plunge and turn a love of chocolate into a business by opening a
high-quality artisan chocolate shop.
His first step was to attend culinary school in Paris to learn the art of
making chocolate. He then headed to the Alps to work with a master
chocolatier.
He said: “I set myself loads of milestones, so everything was bite-sized.”
Demarquette, who is half French and half Chinese, has managed to get a £40,000
bank loan from Lloyds TSB after writing a business plan. He has already
found a production facility in west London and is kitting it out. He wants
to use only natural British ingredients and has started talking to
suppliers.
THE FUTURE: Demarquette is looking for retail premises in
London in which to open his first chocolate shop, which he will call
Demarquette. He hopes to open it in September in time for the run-up to
Christmas, which he hopes will be a period of big sales. He is also about to
start recruiting and training staff to make the chocolate at his production
facility and has a long list of other things to do, including briefing
designers and arranging PR and marketing.
Once the first shop is up and running, he will look at other ways of selling
his chocolates, perhaps online or through mail order, or through concessions
within stores, or by selling to hotels and restaurants. He also hopes to
open several more shops in Britain and overseas.
He said: “The whole purpose of going on this journey is to produce something
that I am proud of. I feel confident and optimistic about what I am doing.
It has been a difficult journey to get to this point and I know there are a lot of challenges ahead of me but, even if the venture flops today, it has
been well worth it.”
Nick Kenton and Rob Taub
Sportsbase.co.uk
THE STORY SO FAR: Former schoolfriends and university graduates Nick
Kenton and Rob Taub, both 23, are starting up an online directory of all the
sports clubs in the UK. The directory, which will feature obscure sports as
well as mainstream ones, will be free and they hope to produce revenue by
attracting advertising to the site.
Kenton said: “When I was nine years old I always wanted to play table tennis.
What stopped me was that I couldn’t find the nearest club.”
They have managed to get an unsecured bank loan of £12,500 from Barclays and
have combined savings of £12,500 to get the business going.
Since November the two of them have worked virtually full time on setting up
the business, supporting themselves with Kenton working in a bar and Taub
giving tennis lessons two days a week.
They got someone to design the website and have 35,000 pages of information
ready to go when the site is launched.
THE FUTURE: Kenton and Taub will be unveiling their website
at a launch party in London this Thursday, and it will go live by next
weekend.
The launch follows a two-month countdown in which they invited people to their
website to guess what the company would be about. It has attracted about
25,000 hits.
On launch Kenton and Taub plan to have information on the site for venues
covering 70 different sports nationwide. They are going to employ an agency
to sell advertising on the site and are deciding at the moment which agency
to use. In August they hope to add an additional service to the site, which
is still under wraps.
They hope to break even by the end of their first year and to start making a
profit by the end of 2007.
Kenton said: “I am incredibly positive. Entrepreneurship is 90% about how hard
you work at a project and how much time you dedicate to it, and 10% to do
with how good the idea actually is. Luckily we are fine on both fronts.”
BACKCHAT
What do you think of their ideas? Which is most likely to succeed?
Tell us at our online forum on www.timesonline.co.uk/backchat
