by Real Business - Thursday, 30th August 2007

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The rules
1. Your business must be under four years old (or have reinvented itself in that time).
2. It must be really going places (no small-scale ambitions allowed).
3. And if you’re yet another about-to-create-a-billion-pound-in-nine-months-flat Internet company, we’ll take a lot of convincing.

Michael Walton: Nvision
IT consultant Michael Walton returned from the US to set up NVision, an Internet consultancy. Since April 1998, its blend of strategy, creative and technical expertise plus Walton’s go get ‘em approach has attracted £5m of fees, a pile of blue-chip clients such as Granada, Thomas Cook and IPC and 90 clever young things to do the business. Rich young things, too: Walton earmarked 30 per cent of the equity for the first 250 employees. It’s making loadsamoney and should float within 18 months. Further big fund-raising looms. And just this month NVision received the CBI/Real Business gong for the year’s “Most Promising Young Company.”

Tony Sullman: Claims Direct
Some people might point an accusing finger at Tony Sullman for making us a more litigious society. But, hey, this is the market at work, and there are few savvier entrepreneurs than this man. In 1995 he saw there was a national mass market - and no-one was filling it. The market: personal injury compensation claims. In the twinkling of an eye, Claims Direct has become one of the country’s biggest specialists in personal injury claims management. Driven by heavy advertising, customers call Claims Direct (not the other way around) and are then visited by one of 200 or so franchisee claims managers. Assessments of the claims are made by a panel of independent solicitors. If a case fails, the client pays nothing. The speed and simplicity of Sullman’s concept is going down a storm. Claims Direct has already won more than 6,000 cases (although the average settlement is less than £4,000.) Turnover has more than doubled every year and the company is on target to triple to £30m in 2000. Expect a full market listing.

Rowan Douglas:WIRE
Rowan Douglas says the business of WIRE is “portals for lucrative financial markets”, but the word lucrative might have been more significantly placed at the beginning of his description. WIRE has not raised a penny beyond its original seedcorn financing since Douglas started it after a two-year stint as a Lloyds underwriter. It has built intranets and extranets for a dazzling array of global insurance companies, thereby bank-rolling the launch of five portals so far with 27 more currently in the pipeline. If they all get off to the same good start as WIRE’s personal injuries portal - it is getting plaudits from victims, insurers and judges - WIRE has an electrifying future.

Hugo Lywood: Entertaining Solutions
If you thought that the toy industry was all about Chinese factories, plastic and computer chips, think again. Take a visit to Hugo Lywood’s office, somewhere between Ludlow and Tenbury Wells, to revive your faith. “We’re redressing the technological overkill in this industry,” he says. Scores of products are tumbling out of his fertile imagination - from handmade wooden replicas of medieval siege equipment to “activity packs” that enable children to grow sunflowers or forecast the weather. Lywood has also come up with Dr Knowall, a cartoon character concept who gives a brand to the company’s many initiatives. “We see Dr Knowall as the face to replace Mr Blobby,” he says. Expect a children’s activity club and much, much more.

Don Smith: Eyestorm
Watch out for this “virtual Guggenheim” in 2000. Former Tony Stone CEO Don Smith leads a team of art experts that will bring limited-edition photographs, prints, books etc to people that might otherwise be intimidated by going to an auction. Founded in August 1999, it’s already got backing from Arts Alliance and e-partners.

Daniel Gestetner: FocusDigital
“Two months ago we had six employees. By Christmas it will be 30.” Must be another Internet business. Shopsmart is a portal to online retailers. You don’t need to track down the small online firm that will deliver seabass fillets to your door - it’s already there in Shopsmart’s food department. It’s got more departments than Harrods. Daniel Gestetner, whose forebears were big in duplicating machines, says Shopsmart is way ahead of rivals because it has whizzier price-comparing technology, checks out its partner sites more seriously and offers a lot more editorial content. And that’s why he gets twice as many page hits as nearest rival, Microsoft.

Kiki Grigson & Louise Eadie: Inkerman
Kiki Grigson and Louise Eadie are trying to change the image of corporate gifts. Inkerman is a purveyor of tasteful goodies for businesses. Former employees of Tiffany’s corporate gift division, their tasteful catalogue has attracted a client list including Merrill Lynch and Schroders who like their £10 champagne flutes and wooden boxes in mahogany. Their turnover has been doubling every year, and the women estimate their £400,000 turnover to May 1999 should be followed by one of £700,000 for the same period next year. The small circle of friends who backed them at the beginning are also quite happy.

Tim Little: Tim Little
This shoe designer/retailer started up business two and a half years ago in Chelsea’s Kings Road. Formerly international account manager at Leagas Delaney for Adidas, he knew all about running a brand and decided to set up his own. He went up to Northampton, with a veteran shoemaker (with 50 years of experience), and put some shoe designs together. Today his best-selling model is the “whole cut”, a shoe whose upper is made from a single piece of leather. As well as his Fulham store, his shoes are sold in Selfridges and SAKS in the US. Devotees include Jeremy Irons and Tina Turner who is so desperate for his designs she has to buy the men’s shoes (a women’s range is in the works). This year’s £1m projected turnover is 65 per cent up on last year. Next aim? Shoe shops in New York, Milan and Paris.

Trinny Woodall & Susannah Constantine: Ready2shop
So far, the women’s shopping portal Ready2Shop is a women-only business. “We’re an equal opportunity employer,” says co-founder Trinny Woodall. “It’s just that we haven’t found any men good enough yet.” Armed with £5m of venture capital from Atlas Venture and American VC house, JH Whitney, Britain’s favourite shoppers (their weekly Daily Telegraph column sells more clothes off the page than any other, they claim) aim to create “woman’s secret weapon online” - leads and information about everything from perfume to divorces. Full launch of the portal is set for March; after that, it’s another £20m fund-raising and European expansion.

Mark Dyer: Blue Bar Café
Is Mark Dyer on the verge of the next hit bar? He currently has just one Blue Bar Café, in the nether regions of West London, but it’s enjoying rave reviews. What’s next? Twenty or 30 more, says the ex-Welsh Guardsman.

Mary Portas: Yellow Door
The former creative director at Harvey Nichols, and author of the recently published Windows -The Art of Display, set up Yellow Door, her own retail marketing consultancy three years ago this January with backing from the three men behind New PHD, the award-winning media agency. The businesswoman and her 17-STRONG team now has a client list which includes Christian Lacroix, Alfred Dunhill, Patek Philippe, Thomas Pink, and Jasper Conran for whom she performs a range of PR, marketing, in-store display, design, events and publishing functions. Her next aim is to buy in an advertising arm. Money is no object, she says.

Simon Collins & Louise Kiesling: Global Aspirations Co Ltd
Why does mail order have to have a fuddy-duddy clientele? Simon Collins, former international sales director of Johnstons of Elgin, the cashmere specialist, and Austrian fashion designer Louise Kiesling, felt there was a niche for mail order luxury goods. Just like a stroll down Bond Street, Global Aspirations Co Ltd’s branded goods include Loewe handbags, Chester Barrie overcoats and Caviar House caviar. The mail order catalogue and Internet site was launched together in October; the first 200 orders were over £200 each. He has persuaded Alfred Dunhill to try mail order for the first time and aims to have reached 100,000 people by December 31, 2000.

Anne Storey: Anne Storey
Anne Storey began her own fashion label in spring 1998, after spending nine years as Nicole Farhi’s right-hand woman. Her fashion is not dissimilar to Farhi’s: plenty of natural fabrics, linens and wool yarns. The Yorkshirewoman is not as high profile as some of the new designers seen at London Fashion Week. She does not have a catwalk show, for instance. But her Chelsea-based business is probably far more stable. It is a well-known fact that 95 per cent of designer companies never reach maturity, but after just a year of full trading, Storey already has a turnover of £850,000 and the business is growing at a rate of 30 per cent each year. Her clothes sell in designer boutiques and Fenwick’s.

Hugh Hoather: Zero Waste
Hugh Hoather built Cheshire Council’s waste department into one of the country’s most successful landfill enterprises, winning a roster of contracts with neighbouring councils. When Cheshire put it on the block in 1998, the municipal employee with 25 years’ service assembled a £115m buy-out but was pipped at the post by a trade buyer. Hoather resurfaced six months later with a £17m venture capital package which bought a considerable supply of virgin holes in the ground. Zero Waste already processes Durham’s dustbins and a second big contract starts in January. Why zero? “Because by the time we’ve finished reclaiming and recycling it, that’s how much landfill we aim to require.”

David Best: Bioscience Innovation Centre
David Best’s company, MMI, has “been consulting on university/pharmaceutical company interface” for 12 years. Now it has spawned the smartest new building in Cambridge - a £6m Bioscience Innovation Centre which will shortly start wet-nursing academics who want to take a concept out of academia and pursue it to commercial development. On hand in the centre will be business plan writers, seasoned big-pharma people and patent attorneys. It hopes to replicate the success of its neighbour, the St John’s Innovation Centre. “But they are generalist,” says Best. “Where they have conference rooms, we have laboratories.”

Philip Moore & Richard Burnett-Hall: Lammas Resources
Waste fruit and veg from food processors can be no less challenging to dispose of than wastes polite people don’t talk about. Philip Moore chops it up, serves it up as a 16-hour feast to specially developed bacteria and, hey presto, you have a nutritious feed which pigs love. It sounds easy but it took years, and not a little input from Moore’s lawyer, shareholder and chairman, Richard Burnett-Hall (below). The pilot plant ran like a dream in 1999 and Lammas’s Christmas present should be a £1m contract for a commercial scale plant. Next: the impolite stuff.

Michael Noble & Martin Fraser: Total Organics
Michael Noble and Martin Fraser (below right) intend that Total Organics will become “the biggest name in organics.” For the one-shop enterprise based in Aberdeen whose special target this Christmas is to sell 50 turkeys, that’s a bold objective. However, it could already be in the bag, judging from the publicity they’ve generated. Style, fervour and an impressive product range are the key ingredients in a formula that arrives in Glasgow in the new year.

Antonio & Priscilla Carluccio: Carluccio’s caffe
Husband and wife team, Antonio and Priscilla Carluccio, best known for their Neal Street Restaurant and delicatessen in London’s Covent Garden, have pooled their culinary and design talents to launch the upmarket Italian eaterie, Carluccio’s Caffé. “The concept combines a food shop selling quality Italian produce - fresh pasta, cheeses, meats, bakery - with a caffé offering simple Italian bar food such as soups, pastas, risottos. The first Carluccio’s opened at the end of November in London’s West End. Priscilla Carluccio, sister of restaurateur Terence Conran, is planning two further caffés in London in the coming year and is aiming for five outlets over the next five years. Slowly but surely is the philosophy behind this new venture. “This is not about fine dining and it’s not about a chain being rolled out,” she says. “The most important thing about this venture is the quality of the food.” Apax, the venture capital group, has backed the business.

Pete & Chantelle: Gottgens Fresh
Pete and Chantelle Gottgens arrived in London from South Africa in 1994 to open the Springbok Café where the menu features an unexpectedly large vegetarian section nicely set off by a range of zebra steaks. To limber up for the launch of their second concept, a top of the market sandwich bar with serious organic credentials - “Fresh” - Chantelle signed up for the MBA course at London Business School... where she came upon the perfect site for Fresh’s first branch. Now she slices tomatoes between lectures, when not organising the opening of the Oxford branch.

Ivan Taylor: Pizza Piazza
Not your classic entrepreneur, this. Ivan Taylor spent his career in big food groups. Then came the chance to buy 20 Pizza Piazza restaurants from Whitbread in 1997. Up against ten or 11 bidders (including his former chairman), he won with £13m of 3i backing. Now he’s revving them up, creating a new line of Pizza Organic eateries, a Pacific “concept” chain called Firehouse (Taylor can tell you everything about Habanero chillies), and operating the Chah tea chain for Unilever. The aim is for 50 pizza restaurants nationwide and an AIM float. So how’s life away from the corporate world? “Corporate life teaches you conservatism. If you’re in trouble, your instinct is to chop, chop, chop. As an entrepreneur, your instincts have to be sharper.”

Alex Chesterman: Bagelmania
Alex Chesterman’s Bagelmania currently has two shops in London; and is aiming for six or eight more next year. He and his Dad John are raising £400,000 to £500,000 to make it happen. After that, it’s franchise time. Why bagels, Alex? Well, they’re mainstream in the US, he says (there are 6,000 bagel shops there; and under 20 here). Plus they’re healthy, fat-free, energy-giving and all that... But the big problem isn’t anything to do with baking. “Finding the right sites is the only hindrance to our growth,” says Chesterman.

Danielle Downing: Bagel Street
Recruits of Danielle Downing’s Bagel Street chain spend one hour of their first day on “smile training.” She’s equally serious about the bagels, judged “wonderfully chewy and stuffed with all the right things” by food critics. The ex-Salomon investment banker who speaks five languages including Mandarin Chinese and Russian, first toyed with launching a bagel chain in Russia in 1991. She helped set up a commodity exchange, instead. This time, she’s serious, planning 100 stores by 2003.

Mark Mills: CashCard
Mark Mills’ last idea was post boxes at petrol stations. They attracted more petrol buying visits and plenty of advertising money. The £5m he is rumoured to have made from selling that business to More, the bus shelter advertisers, is now being recycled. From January, his new venture, CashCard, will be installing cash machines in places the banks won’t consider, such as medium-sized petrol stations, hotels and SPAR shops. He plans 1,000 installations within 18 months. “The trickiest problem was that each machine needs a float of £50,000. But then I realised how we could do it...”

Richard Farleigh: MegaAge.com
High-tech business angel Richard Farleigh has a new passion. MegaAge.com began by selling tennis rackets worth $200 for only $30. Now he’s looking at all sports. “There’s no reason why fans should pay such heavy mark-ups on tennis rackets that cost a few dollars to manufacture,” Farleigh insists. “Many young people can’t afford to buy a racket - and that’s a tragedy.” Indeed, racket sales have been falling. Cue MegaAge. “We are determined to kickstart a revival by making available quality rackets at extremely affordable prices around the world.”

Luke Montague: Wide Learning
Talk to Internet folk, and someone will soon mention “distributed learning.” One of the most promising training sites is Luke Montague’s Wide Learning. From here, amateur investors can quickly educate themselves about P&Ls; fund managers can do crash courses on hedge funds. The future of training?

Courtney Sheets: Eutilities
The Web site says “Coming soon.” But it could be a blast once it’s here. Courtney Sheets’ eutilities promises to combine all your utilities bills into one, allowing you to compare suppliers against one another. Roll on the launch.

Andrew Muddyman: Cashtec
Surely with all this technology around, thought Andrew Muddyman, cash delivery no longer needs armour plated vans driven by heavies in bullet-proof vests. Cue bog-standard Transit. Cue sachet of indelible purple ink in every bundle of notes. Cue exploding ink if the satellite tracking system says the cash is more than three metres off course, or if anyone tries to open it anywhere other than at its rightful destination. Cue a cost structure 30 per cent below the competition. Cashtec will be trialled from February and aims to be looking after 1,000 ATMs by the end of 2000.

Tim Weller: City Financial
Acquisitions and big growth are on the cards for City Financial Publishing (publisher of titles such as Investment Week). The aim is to build profits from the current £2m to £5m so that the company can go to the main London stockmarket within the next two years. And Tim Weller’s four-year-old business is getting aggressive, too. It’s about to launch a competitor to Investors Chronicle; establish a major consumer show, Investor 2000, and develop of financial portal.

Graham Wellesley : FX
After ten years of dealing in financial futures and foreign exchange for some of the City’s biggest names, Graham Wellesley judged there was room for a smaller operation: “The banks are so inflexible and so big - it can take six months to open an account.” With around $15bn of turnover a month, he reckons IFX, his “streamlined liquidity provider” is now the UK’s “third largest non-bank marketmaker.” Next comes 24-hour dealing and a new bet on Internet bookmaking.

Andy Harding: PFE
Forget about the clunky name, Printable Field Emitters Computers (PFE) has its sights on a potential $30bn market. PFE is working on revolutionary ways to make cheaper, lighter and bigger flat display screens for TVs, computers and anything that plans to surf the multimedia wave. First demonstration took place in October. “Since 3i’s investment 16 months ago our small team has produced this demodevice three months ahead of schedule, 20 per cent under budget and with four times the number of pixels originally planned,” says CEO Andy Harding.

Christopher Smithies & Jeremy Newman: PenOp
Founded by Christopher Smithies and Jeremy Newman back in 1996 to market digital signature software into the US, PenOp hit the big time last July when its kit was used by senators at the US Congress to sign - remotely - the Year 2000 Liability Bill before it was sent to the White House. Based in Frome, Somerset, the company’s software is able to record every forensic detail of a handwritten signature. To date, more than 60,000 software sets have been sold worldwide. “Sooner or later,” Smithies predicts, “the great majority of online product sellers will demand a verifiable signature before goods are despatched.” Big prospects.

Russell Smith & Bent Jakobsen: Avidex
To recognise intruding viruses, the body produces two chemical weapons: antibodies and T-cell receptors. Monoclonal antibodies have produced big improvements in moderating nasties inside body fluids - but no-one has yet managed to meddle with the chemistry inside cells where malignant things such as cancer lurk. Until now. Step forward Avidex, the company formed this March at Oxford University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine. Avidex is in hot discussions with the biggest pharmaceutical firms which will license the core technology in order undertake the huge developmental research required to perfect end-product therapies. “This little goldmine could change world medicine - in the way monoclonal antibodies did back in the eighties,” says one investor.

Mark ArmSTRONG: Systemcare Outhosting Solutions
Systemcare Outhosting Solutions span off from long established software house, Systemcare, in May 1999, when its supply chain management system, mfour, won a mega-contract covering British Airways, Invensys, TRW, Lucas Varity, Perkins and Ingersoll Rand. “This made us the global leaders in e-procurement,” says managing director, Mark ArmSTRONG. A BA mechanic logging onto SOS’s Web site, requisition.com, triggers off a process including replenishment, which delivers him a packet of rivets without further direct human intervention.

Brendan Hyland: Kymata
Phone and data networks don’t use electronic signals to get the traffic around these days. It is all done with light. Hence the potential of Kymata, the Livingstone-based telecoms hardware business that creates optical integrated circuits. This is a hard-core scientific team. MD Brendan Hyland began his career with ICI and PA Consulting; technical director, Dr Richard Laming, comes from one of the UK’s leading academic groups in photonic technology. And it’s well backed by 3i, too. When many e-companies have gone to the great superhighway in the sky, Kymata’s hardware will be out there carrying the news to disappointed investors.

John Lancaster & Argy Krikelis: ASP Technology
Ex-Brunel University chip designers John Lancaster and Greek-born chief scientist Argy Krikelis started ASP Technology International two years ago to market the university’s world-class skill in producing super-fast semiconductors. The work done by ASP opens the way towards desk-top diagnostic machines for doctor’s surgeries - and instant, in-depth diagnosis. “We’ve created the first true interactive volume visualisation system, and almost certainly the world’s fastest,” says Krikelis. All sorts of applications loom.

Asif Mitha: Marketing Control Solutions
Former programmer and all-round database whizz, Asif Mitha has his eyes on the $5bn European market for sophisticated customer relationship management technology. “A mini-Oracle” is how 36-year-old Mitha describes MCS. In 2000, it launches the Internet-enabled version of its Uniq system, which should take it into a new league.

Russell Beale, Alan Dixon & Andy Wood: Aqtive
IT lecturer and world traveller, Russell Beale (below left), thought he might be onto something when an American VC who had tracked down his research persuaded him to take a break from his stay in Fiji to fly to the US to discuss the commercialisation of his work. He left that deal on the table but back in the UK persuaded his PhD student, Andy Wood (below right) and fellow don, Alan Dixon (centre), that they should pool their Internet expertise. Backed by 3i, their product, onCue, “imports the Internet right into the application programme.”

Stephen Greenhorn: 911 Recovery
Stephen Greenhorn left school at 15 to become a £27-a-week apprentice mechanic. Nine years later he was running the recovery department of a Glasgow garage and mulling over how the job could be done better. He sold his car for £2,000 and persuaded the bank to finance a breakdown truck based on a business plan showing £30,000 income in year one. Twelve months and £260,000 of income later, he runs the biggest recovery fleet in Glasgow. He ascribes his rapid capture of the market to “better quality and better training.”

Alison Edgar: Grafters
The mini-skirt and wellies delicately picking their way across the construction site belong to Alison Edgar, who “can’t pass a crane without calling in to introduce myself to the site manager.” Grafters supplies brickies and every other trade to construction projects from Aberdeen to Kent. She was first inspired to go it alone by a boss judged insufficiently effusive after she landed an £800,000 contract. Grafters plans a second branch in 2000 and a stock-market flotation in 2005.

Ashley Cooper: Veterinary Practice Initiatives
Two years ago, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons cleared the lump in its throat and said, OK you guys, we are no longer requiring you to be partners; if you want to turn yourselves into companies, so be it. “Few vets want to do boring things, such as marketing and figuring out how to afford the latest equipment,” says Ashley Cooper, CEO of Veterinary Practice Initiatives. So he relieves them of the trouble, by buying their practices and running the business side. VPI aims to be the UK’s biggest vet.

Gil Marer & Chris Tooze: Paid Attention
Would you be less depressed by telemarketing calls if they were paying you £1 a minute to listen to their spiel? And your phone rang in a special “it’s a telemarketing call so don’t pick up if it’s inconvenient” way? Gil Marer and Chris Tooze (below right), founders of Paid Attention, think so and persuaded two big hitters in the telephone world, MCI and Genesis, to partner them in developing the software. Now, it’s ready to roll and the VCs are just being shown where to sign.

Howard Crocker: Metropolis
How about developing apartments for the urban professional and then letting them choose from a selection of trendy bathrooms and kitchens to make them feel as if they have had some say in the design of their new pads? Howard Crocker and his brother Paul are building or redeveloping properties in areas such as Notting Hill and West Hampstead, and selling the apartments off for £175,000 to £600,000. Crocker is launching an interior design services division in January and a yuppie-friendly financial services arm is also planned. Then Europe.

William Archer: Global Workplace
Business schools churn out hundreds of super-brains every year, yet never make commercial use of their alumni. Enter William Archer, who’s creating an international recruitment business based on the alumni of 30 top business schools around the world (he’s secured 16 so far). Global Workplace will work as a private, online network and will, he hopes, challenge the “mysterious and expensive world of senior appointments.”

Phil Tee: Riversoft
The first stage in keeping a corporate IT network humming is to “discover the network infrastructure” and monitor exactly which bits are down. Obvious? But according to Phil Tee, that was not possible before Riversoft. After three rounds of VC, the product is out winning blue-chip clients and, in the shape of Cisco, blue-chip investors. It started 1999 with 24 staff and should end 2000 with 200. A float is planned.

Luke Montague: Wide Learning
Talk to Internet folk, and someone will soon mention “distributed learning.” One of the most promising training sites is Luke Montague’s Wide Learning. From here, amateur investors can quickly educate themselves about P&Ls; fund managers can do crash courses on hedge funds. The future of training?

Adam Laird: Magicalia
“Split your time into aliquots, each devoted to a specific aspect of fitness,” advises John Metcalfe, the winter fitness counsellor hired to whip into shape the mountain biking fraternity assembled at bikemagic.com. Take note, Adam Laird whose company, Magicalia, created bikemagic.com. Along with Metcalfe and lots of other editorial, the site contains the e-mail addresses of e-bikers, all the other stuff you’d expect from your e-cycle club, and a model for the further community sites planned by Magicalia.

Martin Leuw: Medidesk
Only ten per cent of the UK’s surgeries currently boast an Internet connection. As the rest come flooding in over the next two or three years, Medidesk’s co-founder, Martin Leuw, reckons most of them will sign up for his easy-to-use, remotely maintained cocktail of the tools of the medical trade. So do 3i, Advent and other VCs who have put up £6m to date.

James Caddy: Orbis
The Internet businesses that are making real money are the ones that do the hard slog in the background. Companies such as James Caddy’s Orbis, which develops back-end systems for clients such as Flextech. The fastest-growing market for Orbis is applications development for online betting and gaming. That’s a massive growth area (forecasts are for $200bn of online betting by 2004) - and Orbis is among the pioneers. Three years in, turnover is £3m and it’s making profits.

Philip Jenks: Harriman House
Harriman House’s chain of 120 cyber-bookshops specialising in finance and investment got off the ground when Philip Jenks and Stephen Eckett, merged their legal and banking expertise. In the age of the Internet it mattered not that Eckett lives in Toulouse and Jenks in rural Hampshire. “Financial sites prefer linking to us rather than Amazon because we give them a customised service.” Now, they are hatching a flock of other financially oriented Web sites.

Sasha Serafimovski: Filmworld
Sasha Serafimovski (below left) describes himself as “a typical Slavic art film type.” He’s found his metier, then. The ex-director of research at Merrill Lynch founded Filmworld in January 1999. But this is no whizz-bang Internet start-up. Serafimovski has been cautious about outside investment thus far; an undisclosed firm recently took an eight per cent stake. His site (www.filmworld.co.uk) sells videos online, orders “hard-to-get” films and is generally a marvellous place to be if you’re a film buff. Serafimovski describes Filmworld as “a true Internet model - content and commerce”; and if his predictions come true, he could be returning to the City, this time in search of cash.

James Carr-Jones: Fatplanet
James Carr-Jones is about to recruit a board of directors for his new venture, Fatplanet. The ideal age will be 17 and all recruits must agree to retire when they reach 21 as old fogeys have nothing to offer. Funded by a host of angels and due to launch in March, Fatplanet will be a “3-D space for young people” serving up a rich diet of music, fashion and relationships and perhaps a spot of e-commerce and advertising, too.

How did we find our “50 to watch”? By sheer, hard trawling. But if you feel you should have been there, then tell us about yourself.

50 to Watchers from years gone by
Two years ago, we alerted the world to the Northern Ireland business, Giltspur Scientific, which makes orthopaedic “shoes” for limping cows. Well, it’s gone from strength to strength. Just this year, sales have soared 47 per cent; and it now exports to 16 countries from its small factory on a Ballyclare industrial estate. This is one smart exporter. For example, in Switzerland, where cows commonly graze on uneven hillsides, Giltspur devised a special product to suit.

You first read about Dr Mike Lynch, this year’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” (Growing Business Awards) in Real Business (“50 to Watch” 1997). Just three years after its launch, his knowledge-management business Autonomy is worth 80,000 times its initial £2,000 investment and is a top performer on the European Easdaq market. Revenues are growing at 280 per cent a year, forecasted for £27.8m for 2000. Phew.

Now we don’t really count ourselves as big clubbers, but we were spot-on when we nominated simon raine and his Sheffield nightclub Gatecrasher as one to watch. Nowadays, it’s is the number-one name in British club culture and a £10m business. That’s just the beginning. Raine wants to create a truly global youth brand (Virgin is the paradigm). If you want to sample his wares, millennium night promises to be big. Gatecrasher will be packing 25,000 people into Sheffield’s Don Valley Stadium. How do they keep ahead in this notoriously fickle world? “By always changing and staying in touch,” says Raine. You’ll normally catch him on Saturdays running the door at his clubs.

Fast forward to 1998. For Bruce Isaacs of Soupworks, it’s been “a good year, but not a fantastic year.” His chain of soup cafés has extended to four units in London, but finding sites - and finding money - has been tough. “We need to have six to ten units for critical mass,” he says. Then he can really start persuading those landlords.

And it’s been “a hell of a year” for Martha Lane Fox of Lastminute.com. “I guess the most exciting thing has been to see the awareness and excitement grow around and in the company,” she says. A barely heard-of new Internet company in December 1998 - “a year ago, people often put the phone down on us - today she and co-founder Brent Hoberman are probably Britain’s best-known Netpreneurs; indeed, they have just snaffled the “Company of the Year” gong at the Growing Business Awards. Lastminute.com has 80,000 unique users on the site every day; revenue this year will be £6m; and it employs 130 people in three countries across Europe.

Charles Muirhead of Orchestream enjoyed a bumper year, too. The company raised $16m; brought in a new CEO; launched its network management product Enterprise 2.0 in the US, to great critical acclaim (it won the best of show award at Networld + Interop); and opened a New York office. But they’re bored of being counted among Internet companesi. “We’re a software business,” insists one insider.

In 1999 Norwegian-born Thomas Hoegh of Arts Alliance confirmed his reputation as one of Britain’s shrewdest Internet investors. In April, Launch.com, an online music site, made a tasty exit when it went public on Nasdaq at $22 a share; then in June, AOL acquired Spinner.com, an online radio service in which Arts Alliance had seven per cent, as part of a $320m deal. Oh, and just to keep themselves busy, Hoegh and team raised $92m for further deals in transatlantic Internet companies.

It’s been a good year for Earthcare Products, gaining industry prizes and many plaudits for their environmentally friendly air-conditioning products. Sales for the first quarter of 1999 were ahead of total sales for 1998 but, says managing director Nicholas Cox, “there’s still much drum-banging to do.”

Contacts
By Alistair Blair, Matthew Rock, Stuart Rock, Gill South, Marcus Gibson, Mike Kenward and Amanda Hall

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