L-r
we took the UK’s tallest man, Chris Greener, to Saltex; The first mag cover in July 2005; we have sponsored Terrain Aeration’s Unsung Heroes award from its very beginning in 2003
and funded a different website venture. The other main issue was funding the
project. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, but it’s a massive step to leave a ‘safe’ job and step into the great unknown. Finding funding wasn’t an easy task, Pitchcare was going to launch soon after the Dot Com stock market crash, and persuading people to part with cash on a new internet model for a small equity stake was difficult. However, I did receive some money
from friends and family, as well as two or three businesses in the industry, before being permitted to do a presentation to the Wolves players one lunchtime. Happily, a couple of the lads also bought into the idea, and I had raised over £100,000 to get started.
So, it was now time to leave my job as head groundsman at Wolves, but Richard Skirrow still continued to mentor me. I remember saying to him, “I think I’m
ready to start now, but I could do with someone who can shoulder responsibility and doesn’t need a big salary, initially”. At that point he suggested I spoke with John Richards, my former MD at Wolves. I went to see John (he loved the concept) and, within a week or two, he and I set up in our first office on the Wolverhampton Science Park. That was July 2001, just over twelve months from the original idea.
What was your biggest hurdle in getting the project off the ground?
I’m not sure if there was particularly one big hurdle, but there were certainly many hurdles to overcome; some, as I’ve detailed before, were in the initial setup. People that I went to see, who weren’t interested (for varying reasons), obtaining funding, companies that couldn’t understand or see the virtues of what Pitchcare could offer.
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; rent, car, fuel, insurances, advertising, salaries, travel and accommodation. It all adds up, and I was soon using a host of credit cards to their maximum limit to keep the business going. At the time of starting out, I’d applied for every single credit card going, and many of them had maximum borrowing of up to £15,000 each. NatWest, Visa, MBNA, Marbles, Lloyds, Barclays, American Express, Capital One ... I had them all!
It was nearly two years before we started getting any real sort of income, and the end of year three before we showed a slight profit on paper for the year. Years one and two showed losses of around £250,000!
r: our launch edition paper at Saltex 2001; In 2003
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