In the E
“Like everything in life, you have to grow organically. The funding that we had initially didn’t seem to last very long. It surprised me how much everything cost”
4
beginning - Pitchcare
As Pitchcare celebrates its 10th anniversary, Managing Director, Dave Saltman, charts the company’s progress
very entrepreneur can tell you the exact moment, when the light bulb lit up and the seeds of a business idea began to germinate. For Dave Saltman it was a question from a young groundsman, at the beginning of the 2000/01 football season, as they
were busy preparing the pitch at Molineux. “How do you make money from the internet?” asked the youngster. So started the thought process which led Dave to spending all his savings, and more, plus investments he coaxed from a large number of supportive family and friends, on pursuing a dream to produce the best ever website for the sports turf industry, offering free help and advice and, hopefully, making a living for himself in the process. After fifteen months in the planning, and investment in design and developing the website, Pitchcare went live on the 26th July 2001 with, not unsurprisingly, Dave Saltman as its first member. By the end of August, membership had zoomed to the grand total of twenty-two! Ten years on and the website is attracting fifteen new members a day. As Pitchcare celebrates its 10th anniversary, we ask the founder and Managing Director, David Saltman, to share some of the highs and lows of a website that has revolutionised the sports turf industry.
Where did the idea for Pitchcare come from?
I was half way through cutting Molineux on a lovely June day in 2000. The lad working with me (Simon Britton) and I stopped for a break and sat up in the North bank. He asked me how to make money on the internet, did you get paid for the number of hits the website got? I replied saying, no but that, with good traffic, you could get advertising and, by selling online, there was also generation of revenue. As far as I can remember, that was the catalyst that gave me the idea to start Pitchcare at that moment. I excused myself from Simon and went and knocked on the door of the club secretary, Richard Skirrow. Richard invited me in, and I asked him if I could bounce an idea off him - it took about one minute to do so and, when I finished, he said “what are you going to write about at the end of the first year?” I said that I could probably write a different article at each venue and for each sport every year as finances, resources, usage and weather were always changeable.
How did you go about turning the idea into reality?
Well, initially, I spoke to the local chamber of commerce and enrolled with a business adviser to get a business plan written. This service was free and I’d meet up, maybe once a week for a month or so, to finalise the dialogue and then work closely with the adviser to put some figures and forecasts together. I also started making appointments to meet up with various key figures working within the industry, both practitioners and Managing Directors of companies, to explain the concept that was Pitchcare. Richard continued to advise and mentor me, meeting up after work for a jar in the local, to go through various issues. He also set up some meetings with accountants and solicitors that he knew. We even took Mark McGhee, the then Wolves manager, out one night for a meal, as he’d recently bought
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