Pet project proves a winner
Nov 7 2007 By The Journal
Young business person winner
So big, that Mr Berriman is contemplating a move from his 5,000sqft warehouse and distribution centre in Jarrow to a site six times bigger. The judges announcing him winner said: “He has all the marks of an entrepreneur who will go far in whatever he turns his mind to.”
He started the drinks side at 21 and, with his mother, built it within two and a half years to a net profit of £50,000. He left this activity with her to set up the pet side.
With the success of his online Pet Supermarket he bought back Gifts2Drink.
This year, Viverdi could make £120,000 profit on sales of £2.6m. Mr Berriman employs 17 people, doubling the number during the Christmas rush, and envisages £20m sales and 100 staff within five years.
Mr Berriman who lives in South Shields, says: “Since the age of eight I had always wanted to start a business. It’s in the family. Both my parents had their own businesses.”
He gained eight GCEs at school but decided A-levels were not for him. Instead, being keen on computers, he linked up with his mother’s off-licence shop initially.
His attraction to the pet food trade came when he discovered just how little a £3.5bn consumer market was being served on the internet: a mere 0.5% in fact, compared with a 10% average on the retail market. Within two and a half years he has done a lot to plug the gap.
Mr Berriman’s success as North-East Young Business Person of the Year follows a shortlisting for a national Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. In addition, Pet-Market has been named Retailer of the Year on South Tyneside and was also shortlisted for an innovation in technology award.
“Vivendi’s potential is huge,” he says.
RUNNER-UP
MANY young men would have been doubly dispirited if, like Chris Quickfall, they were not only dyslexic but also a trialist who had lost his chance to play schools rugby for England after a cartilage injury.
But Mr Quickfall, undeterred, went on to university and now has set up Invate to help other young people with disabilities to achieve academic goals. Invate works with both the private and public sectors, ensuring through hardware, software and other technology that everyone can be considered equally for opportunity in every aspect of education.
“Having had some difficulties myself I could see there was a vacuum adversely affecting many people. There was a new industry to be created and I have created it.”
Young people often find it hard to get start-up capital together and Mr Quickfall, fresh from university, was no exception.
He sold all his belongings bar his clothes and his watch to help realise his financial need. Later he won support through the Prince’s Trust and Project North-East, while Lloyds TSB Bank granted him a factoring facility.
During a year out from university, Mr Quickfall from Whickham, had worked at a gas refinery and on oil platforms. On graduating in 2005, he became a member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. Today his unusual services and skills are retained by a construction company.
He employs seven staff and two doctors on consultancy in the business, which now has a turnover of £380,000, against £180,000 in the first year. “Frustrating? Yes of course running your own business can be frustrating,” he admits. “But when that happens I go down to the gym and work on the rowing machine. I hate it so much so it makes me feel better.”
The judges say of him: “He is a well rounded person, and whatever he does he will do well.”
RUNNER-UP
Rebecca Philipson, 23, founding owner, UR-In The Paper, Stanhope.
OVERCOME by ambition to run her own company, Rebecca Philipson suspended her English and art history degree studies at 21.
“I had wanted to buy a personalised reproduction of a newspaper as a treat for my grandfather,” she explains. “When I couldn’t find anyone who does that kind of thing I sat down and had one designed and printed myself. Soon everyone who saw it wanted one too.”
Working with a local software and website design team, Ms Philipson experimented for six months with various techniques and methods before achieving the standard she wanted.
She now has a firm that produces mock newspaper pages for corporate promotions, and for customers who want celebrating friends and relatives featured in amusingly shocking scenarios. The pages are also bought as props for the cinema and for television films.
Ms Philipson, who is from Crook, runs the business from a Grade II-Listed building in the Weardale market town of Stanhope. And she has not been disappointed. “There is nothing to beat running your own business,” she says. “In so many ways, whatever it is you decide to do, you will find it deeply rewarding.”
She made the national final of an Enterprising Young Brits competition and received from Prime Minister Gordon Brown a prize for the people’s vote in the business entrepreneur category.
On television, she came through
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