Pedal power - the route to business success!
“I bought a Land Rover,
some bikes, a box of brochures and some adverts and started what has felt like a 15 year gap year,” says Lancaster Universi- ty Management School student Chris Ford.
With this, Chris began the biggest adventure of his life, launching his highly successful cycle holiday business, Cycle Active, aſter ditching his career as an accountant and going it alone. Now, with his company established, Chris is back in the classroom part-time on Lancaster’s Executive MBA programme, determined to learn new skills, theories and absorb knowledge to feed back into his growing business.
Cycle Active offers holiday makers a range of guided or self guided cycling and mountain biking tours across the world, in stunning locations from Morocco to Cuba, as well as weekend breaks all over the UK. Now in it’s 14th year, the company provides tours and holidays for around 500 people each year.
Chris, 39, had spent the previous five years at Deloitte as a chartered accountant, and in 1997 took the plunge to move to Harare in Zimbabwe, looking for a new challenge and a new way of life.
“I knew I wanted to start my own business and the choice of cycling was a natural one,” says Chris, “I love
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exploring hidden places by bike and I love introducing that idea to other people too.”
Chris admits, in the early days of Cycle Active, things didn’t always work the way he expected and as with any new business, he learnt from trial and error: “I wasted time, money and effort on all kinds of mistakes but in the end it was part of a very long learning process. Tankfully the things I got right were the ones that really mattered - I knew how to design great cycle experiences and I knew
how to guide people safely and make sure they had a good time.”
Over the following years, the company grew and Chris secured sponsorship with some big names in the cycling world, including Adidas and Orange Mountain Bikes. Chris knew, however, that new ideas and the development of the business were crucial to its con- tinuing success, so he decided to seek out courses that would offer practical insights into running a business that he could implement in CycleActive.
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