
‘The reality of being a founder…you make it up as you go along!’
More Founder Stories
“It feels like we cheated the system – entrepreneurship is meant to be risky”
Charlie Green doesn’t believe he ever took a risk while co-creating his £500m business, The Office Group. “We just did what made sense,” he says. And he has some simple advice for anyone thinking of following in his footsteps. Starting with ‘Step one: use a proven business model’…
I might be battling incurable cancer, but I’m living my best life
We were recently introduced, through one of our G100 members, to an incredibly kind, brave and courageous person called Laura Middleton-Hughes who is living with incurable breast cancer. Laura was first diagnosed in February 2014 at the age of 25 with stage 3 breast cancer after discovering a small lump in her left breast. Having […]
SECRETS OF A SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR: HOW ACTIVATE GROUP ENTERED THE FEBE GROWTH 100 HALL OF FAME
What fuels a serial entrepreneur? What motivates a founder who, having sweated blood and tears to launch, develop and exit a business, repeats the exercise, swerving the beach in favour of more early morning wake up calls and interminable spreadsheets? In the case of Mark Wilcox, the answer may surprise you. This serial entrepreneur says his second multimillion-pound company came about because his wife kicked him out…
I’m an accidental entrepreneur…now turning over £38m
Hamilton Court provides foreign exchange services through its subsidiaries Hamilton Court Foreign Exchange Limited (HCFX), Birchstone Markets, Goldhawk Partners and Italian subsidiaries of HCFX. Clients of the subsidiaries include both public and private entities – ranging from FTSE250 companies to private equity firms, and high-net-worth individuals in the UK, Europe and Canada.
How we blagged meetings with buyers to build our brand
Husband and wife team Manav and Rimi Thapar started LoveRaw: a plant based chocolate brand with £600 and a food processor. Today, the confectionery is sold in 20 countries, and stockists include Asda, Coop and WH Smith. LoveRaw secured £2m of funding from investor Blue Horizon Ventures in 2020, after rejecting an offer in the BBC’s Dragons’ Den.
Fancy-dress costumes, robots and £1bn
This is a story about robots, a six-year-old company worth £1bn, and a costume-wearing CEO. This incredible ‘unicorn’ business is on a mission to disrupt how surgery is done around the world. So, how did this unicorn with more than 500 staff come about? Read their amazing story here…