Stealing a lead

A fine edge

Name: Joe Sillett, 34, chief executive
Company: Woodworm, sales of £2.5 million, founded in 2002, based in Billingshurst, West Sussex
Profile: Modern languages grad and avid cricketer who still plays in the Surrey Championship. He started his career at Wilson, the golf and tennis brand, before joining Compaq and SAP. He nurtured his ambition to start a business by reading every book he could find on taking ideas to market.

‘Design an outstanding product and then protect it’

‘Go into a sports shop and you will find 15 cricket bats on a shelf. They are all the same shape apart from ours, which are the ones that Freddie Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen use. Although our design ideas are subtle, they’re a definite point of difference. Instead of the usual elongated rectangle bolted on to a handle, we have moon-shaped indentations two-thirds of the way up on either side. We have used the wood lost there further down in the sweet spot, where you hit the ball.

If anyone else wants to do anything to the front edge of the bat, adjusting it inwards or making a dink, then my patents stop them doing it. No one can touch us. It’s what you pay the money for. We have spent thousands on protecting ourselves in all cricket-playing countries. The last thing you want to do is to bring anything to market, then in the next trade season, see four of your competitors with exactly the same design that gave you the point of difference. You can’t afford to let that happen.’

Best in town

Name: Dorian Harris, 37, chief executive
Company: Skoosh, £1.5 million turnover, founded in 2004, based in Buckinghamshire
Profile: Began his career in the travel industry in 1992, but always wanted to sell the sort of hotels where he would genuinely like to stay himself. His current favourite? The Skt Petri in Copenhagen.

‘Enable customers to share their experiences’

‘When you book a trip, you know that your flight will get you from A to B and you have a good idea what your hire car will be like, but the most important part of your stay, your hotel, is a lottery. They can be depressing places. After I won a trip to Paris once and stayed with my girlfriend in a dismal hotel above the metro, I decided there must be a
better way to decide where to stay. So I set up Skoosh.

We have made a selection of what we think are the best hotels in various categories in cities across Europe, as well as North America and Asia. We only choose the top 20 per cent, but then our USP is that we ask our customers to review them after they have been to stay. People generally love passing on their comments and we give them a five per cent discount on their next stay. Our response rate is currently 40 per cent. If a hotel receives two bad reviews on the same point – service, cleanliness, location – then we drop it.’

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