Our list of 42 Yorkshire-based entrepreneurs aged 42 or under is spreading out this year, as we are covering it over the next three months. So to get the ball rolling, Peter Baber reveals the first 14 of the 42 names we reckon are ones to watch.
**Hedley Aylott, 36** **Managing director, Summit Media** In 1995, Aylott got a call from one Alison Rose-Quire, then governor of HMP Wolds near Hull. "I don't like your record," she said, "but I like what you are doing." The record in question was a single Aylott had produced with the prisoners from Strangeways called The Summit, which had charted at number 18. Rose-Quire invited Aylott over to do something similar with her prisoners. Not long after Aylott hit on the idea of employing prisoners to provide digital marketing services, and, with Rose-Quire and Aylott's mother Marion Aida's support, Summit Media was born.
Seven years later, the company is among the top five digital agencies in the country, has a turnover of £317m and has clients that include Argos, Comet and Play.com.
Many staff are ex-prisoners, including the manager of its new European office in Prague, and anyone in any prison across the UK can apply to join. Aylott acknowledges that some people might think he was taking advantage of cheap and captive labour, but he says what me makes up for in labour costs he loses in training prisoners who by their very nature move on - he can't employ everyone. But he has no doubt about their commitment - "there is no replacement for determination and attitude," he says - nor about their professionalism.
"We have blue chip clients coming in to see us at the prison who say to me: "When are we going to meet the guys?'" he says. "None of them realise they already have."
**Si Baskind, 38** **Founder, Si Sushi** Baskind has been running a digital imaging and a promotional agency for 15 years, but it is his latest venture, Si Sushi, that has probably made more Leeds city workers sit up and take notice. Having tested the market with a branch tucked away in Great George Street, Si Sushi's second branch opened in Infirmary Street in November 2007, bang slap next to Pret a Manger, a national chain Baskind certainly wants to take on. Already it is doing 150 packets of sushi and 200 pots of soup a day.
Baskind grew to love sushi from many trips to the Far East with his other businesses and is determined that, as the company rolls out more stores - he wants to be in Harrogate, Manchester and York by the year-end - the chain's USP will be that everything is prepared fresh on the day, not shipped around in freezers. "As soon as you do that the quality goes down," he says.
He believes he has come to fast food at just the right time, when his clientele are more concerned about eating healthily. He would love eventually to introduce other kinds of sushi that are relatively unfamiliar to the British palette - fruit sushi, for example.
**Chris Beck, 33** **Corporate development director, Card Factory** While he was still at Grant Thornton - a company he went to work for straight from A-levels - Beck was our young corporate financier of the year in 2004. In November 2007, however, he moved to work for Card Factory, a card retailer he had been advising through a long period of growth, including the acquisition in the spring of 2006 of Celebration Cards.
Beck says he is already learning much from Dean Hoyle, the man who founded Card Factory in early 1990s working out of a van. "He's absolutely fantastic," says Beck, "very focused on what he does, but equally aware of the need to build a team."
"We sell most cards at 59p, 89p and 99p," he says. "While we may have introduced more seasonal and handmade products, those three price points have not changed in ten years."
**Chris Berry, 27** **Business development director, Liquid Voice** Berry set up Liquid Voice in 2005 with technical director Andrew Barrett, also 27, after the plc they both worked for did not enthuse as much as they hoped about the computer telephony software they were writing. It's been an amicable parting, however, as their former employer is now one of their resellers.
The company specialises in sophisticated call recording software and, while there is a long list of competitors, Berry says what distinguishes their product is that it can bring all functions - call recording, call logging, and call indexing - together in one programme. "We are already seeing our resellers taking out old systems made by some of the market leaders and replacing them with ours," he says.
2008 is already looking promising too, as the order book is already as strong as it was for the whole of 2008.
**Julie Cater, 32** **Senior building surveyor, LHL Group** Cater is shortly to become one of only a select handful of surveyors in the country who are fully accredited by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors to work in building conservation. She insists that, despite the negative impression some property developers may have about the need to conserve buildings which may not have an obviously viable future, conservation is an idea whose time has come. "Because we are focusing on repairing rather than replacing property," she says, "conservation can actually be a cost-saving exercise. And there's the green issues, too: an existing building comes with embodied energy, which you would only have to spend again on a new build."
**David Cooper, 42** **Managing director, Coopers Coffee** Since 1990, Cooper has run eight different businesses. It's the freedom to do what he wants (such as ringing Insider while contemplating his garden) that attracts him to being an entrepreneur.
In recent years its Britain's new-found obsession with coffee that he has latched onto. He has successfully sold off his initial barista training company and taken training in-house for the benefit of customers of Coopers Coffee, an independent coffee house supplier which now accounts for 2 per cent of the UK coffee market. At up to £311 per kg, his coffee is considerably more expensive than competitors on £36 per kg, but that, he says, is a direct result of the way the coffee market has gone. "There may be 4,500 coffee outlets in the country, compared with 1,500 a few years ago," he says, "but most people would agree the quality is not fantastic. We have gone for a West Coast sanitised version of coffee in far too big a cup. I am more interested in the Italian culture of coffee, which has a tradition going back hundreds of years."
Hence the need to train his 650-odd customers - and not just in coffee brewing. Successful cafes need to turn over at least £32,000 a week to break even, he claims.
Since 2006 Cooper has also become the main UK importer of Dalla Corte coffee machines and is in discussions to take on other agency roles too. "It's only because of our profile that people have been looking to us," he says.
**Chris Hopkins, 37** **Managing director, Ploughcroft** Ploughcroft is proof that small businesses are interested in training their staff. Since 2005, when Hopkins took over full control that he had previously shared with his father, the Brighouse firm has become the only roofing contractor of its size in the country to have a City & Guilds-approved NVQ training centre on site.
Hopkins initially set up the centre to train his own staff, after realising that colleges in the area were only interested in "large contracts that got bums on seats" rather than something more tailored for small businesses.
But it now trains other companies too and offers a training course to help long-term unemployed get back into the jobs market. He admits that setting it up has caused what had been a steady growth trajectory to level off for a couple of years. But his past career as a national bodybuilding champion taught him everything about getting the product right first. "You need the right diet, the training, a natural physique and shouldn't expect overnight changes," he says.
Two years down the line with national awards for his efforts and more referrals as a result, plus a lucrative new line in solar panel installation training, he expects turnover to double to £32m this year.
**Chris McDonald, 41** **Managing director, The Trading Floor and www.thecomparisons.com** After many years working for some of Yorkshire's top law firms in a sales capacity, McDonald found himself working for a company that specialised in internet lending. He quickly realised that much of the data such companies collected was wasted. McDonald felt there had to be some use for this. "After all, much of the data industry is based on incorrect information," he says. The result was the formation of Sowerby Bridge-based The Trading Floor, a company which specialises in collating "wasted" data and selling it on. "We take the data for nothing, and if we successfully sell it on we share back half the proceeds with the orginal owner," he says. The company has over 500 clients, including Barclays, Norwich Union and Asda.
Its success spurred Mcdonald on in 2007 to launch www.thecomparisons.com, a price comparison site that McDonald says sets itself out from the opposition by charging all companies who want to be featured the same flat fee. He's already in discussions about customising the site for clients including football clubs and airlines. "It's exactly how MBNA launched themselves in this country," he says. "They were producing affinity cards for other people for years before they launched any of their own."
**James Michelsberg, 34** **Managing director, Michelsberg Tailoring** Eighteen months into his venture of providing bespoke suits for the well-heeled professionals of Yorkshire, former recruitment consultant Michelsberg says he doesn't have any time to look back, what with putting together 40 suits in three months. In October 2007, after a year's stint at Leeds Met's incubator centre, for which he has nothing but praise, the company has moved into new premises in the same mill as Edwin Woodhouse, one of Leeds best-known worsted producers.
A meeting this Christmas with Thomas Mahon, who he describes as the David Beckham of the suit cutting industry, has got him looking at even broader horizons. "My eventual dream would be for there to be a shop in every major city in the world which could supply a tailored suit from Michelsberg which they would acknowledge as Yorkshire's finest tailor," he says. Some ambition indeed.
**Paul Oldridge, 42** **Managing director (Yorkshire), McInerney Homes** Three years ago, at the start of his current job, Oldridge moved into a new office in Leeds armed with nothing but a laptop and a mobile phone. But he wasn't bothered. This is a man after all, who started out in housebuilding at the age of 18 and whose career includes turning around former employer Wild Bennett Homes and successfully selling it on.
Three years later, his division is turning over just under £350m, and building around 300 units a year. He says he isn't bothered about any downturn in property, as he is pleased to see owner occupiers returning and has a simple answer for how to succeed in property. "Build houses and plots that people actually want to buy."
As for the future, the company is currently not represented in the East Midlands. Oldridge hopes that might be an extra region he can take care of.
**Richard Pinkney, 38** **Operations director, Celloglass** Three years ago Celloglass, which was then a laminate-producing subsidiary of Alcan, was bought out by American investors. Huddersfield-based Pinkney was one of two full-time directors given the job of turning what had been a loss-making division around. Pinkney, who has responsibility for the eastern half of the UK, says part of the problem was that the 57-year-old company had become too used to being part of an aluminium smelting "oligopoly" that was used to taking years to come to a decision. Modern printing demanded something slicker.
Apart from reducing sites from 24 to 14, Pinkney and his colleagues have succeded by setting up partnerships with finishers and by going over the heads of their printer customer base to promote their services and products to the designers who employ the printers in the first place. "We wanted to stimulate ideas with them," he says.
Although the company has made an acquisition to become the largest foil blocking company in the UK, Pinkney says the result of all this renewed sales effort is that "we have grown organically for the first time in 15 years".
Turnover is currently £326m and there's a batch of new products on the horizon, including Cellogreen, a biodegradable laminate, and Cellomed, a laminate that is designed to inhibit the spread of bugs like MRSA.
**Andre Senyk, 25** **Founder, www.speckyfoureyes.com** Former Bradford Grammar schoolboy Senyk took a module in optics at Anglia Ruskin University and soon discovered "just how much glasses could cost if you subcontracted out the manufacturing of them". Spending 18 months working in a high street opticians convinced him, he says, that the general public was not being best served. "There is no law which says you have to buy glasses from the place you had your eye test," he says.
To prove it, he has set up a website that, having started out just selling glasses, now offers contact lenses too - "everything you can get in an optician", he says. There are other sites selling glasses online, but Senyk believes he has the advantage having come up with a "tongue in cheek" name that is easily memorable. With 50 orders a day currently, and the recent successful acquisition of a competitor that has added 15,000 customers, he may have a point.
**Tim Reeve, 39** **Managing director, Advent Developments** Reeve, a scion (but not a beneficiary) of the family that founded Severfield-Reeve, worked for Rushbond for 13 years before setting up on his own in 2006. "Like everyone in their late 30s," he says, "I reckoned that if I didn't do it now I never would," he says.
The company is already working on projects with a total value of £324m, and hopes to complete 150 mostly residential units in the next two-and-a-half years, in Leeds, York and Sheffield.
Reeve says while he can foresee a downturn in his chosen £3100-£3300,000 market in the coming year, he feels protected because his company has always gone for higher specifications than normal, such as hardwood flooring and doors. "If the market is going to go flat as a pancake people will pay more attention to things like that," he says.
**Clare Whitehead, 34** **Founder, Kit it Out** Former maths lecturer Whitehead was a management consultant at Accenture when she started dabbling in buy-to-let property and soon discovered that, when it came to kitting out apartments, you were faced with two choices - expensive interior designer, or bargain basement tat. With the encouragement of friends whose flats she had already kitted out (and Accenture, who gave her a two-year sabbatical) she launched Kit It Out, a company which, for prices starting at around £33,000, can kit out any flat that already has a kitchen and plumbing installed - right down to the choice of cushions and cutlery.
Since 2007 she has also started working with property developers, including Asquith Properties and K W Linfoot, offering her services for them to use as incentives to customers. And that's why she is not particularly bothered by any downturn. "Anybody's problem helps us," she says. "If there is a glut of properties to rent then those that are properly kitted out will go first, while any developer trying to flog their properties will only see what we do as a help."