Bidding to build £20m empire
Aug 3 2007 by Andrew Mernin, The Journal
A SERIAL entrepreneur plans to turn his £1m business into a £20m empire in 2008 by opening warehouses across the UK.
George Kinghorn’s Durham-based Bayagent, which sells surplus stock for businesses on eBay, will open nine new warehouses next year.
The company has been in talks with regional development agencies from around the country over possible locations for the new sites and expects to open a warehouse a month from the beginning of next year. Each new site will employ around 10 people.
The company, which was launched last November and currently has one warehouse on Durham’s Belmont Industrial Estate, also said it would consider expansion into Europe in the longer term.
Bayagent founder George Kinghorn said: “This year revenue will be between £1m and £1.5m but once we have the model sorted out in the North-East we will be talking about £20m revenue by the end of 2008.
“It sounds like a lot but it’s fairly simple. Because of our model, our warehouses only need two or three big clients each.”
Bayagent sells goods for companies which don’t have the time or resources to do it themselves, taking a 33% cut from each sale.
The company has sold a vast range of items from mobile phones to dune buggies (pictured) and once sold a batch of specialised toilet seats for cats.
The firm uses its expertise in online sales to get the best price for products and is able to cut shipping fees by dealing with bulk orders.
It also has its own photography studio and specially-developed software to help maximise the ultimate selling price of goods.
Mr Kinghorn said: “We have developed software which we could market and sell to other people doing the same thing as us.”
Mr Kinghorn is best known for the studentmobiles.com business he co-founded with business partner Steven Bell in the late nineties.
The pair sold the company, which was once thought to be worth around £100m, to Carphone Warehouse in 2002.
The former Durham Johnston Comprehensive pupil later went on to create Touchbase, a company that installed touch screen internet kiosks in public places such as cafes. The business ultimately went into liquidation in 2006 and Mr Kinghorn went on to start a service selling people’s household goods on eBay. This later led to the launch of Bayagent.
The 36-year-old entrepreneur said he had no plans to get involved in any other lines of business at the moment. He said: “I learnt a long time ago that trying to do more than one thing at a time doesn’t work.”
Mr Kinghorn and his commercial director Colum Smith, a former business development director for Eversheds law firm, currently employ two staff at the company’s Durham headquarters.
Find out how George Kinghorn went from selling toffee in the playground to becoming one of the North-East's most succesful entrepreneurs on page 2
