Iain Withers: MB7 is a mountain biking business. We teach folk how to ride mountain bikes better, and we do skill sessions for beginners right up to folk who are quite advanced and want to learn how to jump through the air, that kind of thing and we also run holidays on the mountain bikes taking in all the best trails around the Borders.
We're just going into our fourth season with MB7 now and with kind of three full years behind us, it's really starting to get its own life and start to snowball really.
To start with, it was quite slow, it took us a good few months to even get the first customer but once you get that first person they speak to a few more people and it just takes the time.
I was working as a bike courier in Edinburgh up to about three years ago, and I was hit by a bus and that kind of created a bit of a light bulb over my head that maybe if I did something else to do with bikes then maybe things wouldn't try and run me over quite so often.
Before I started, I would say I had zero knowledge of how to run a business. I knew a bit about how to market a business because I'd been doing that for other companies, but I didn't know how to put a plan together, how to judge how much money you were going to make from it, and really how to put a case together that a bank would have all the information they needed to say yes, that's something we'll support, so I needed to like I say put together a good plan, with what the company was going to do, how it was going to do it, who I was going to sell things to, how I was going to do that, and you know really importantly for the banks, you know, what money that was going to cost and then bring in afterwards.
So I went to an organisation called the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust and they got a business advisor who's an ex bank manager to come round and visit me, go through everything that was involved with starting a business, advise me how viable my idea was, how I needed to change it and how, most importantly for me, how to get a bank manager to say yes to giving me some money to start it.
I worked out that I needed about £10,000 to start my business and get it through its first eighteen months. I only had £100 to my name, when I wanted to start the business, so therefore to get up to that £10,000 mark I had to make slow kind of inroads towards that.
Firstly I managed to get a £1,000 grant from the Business Gateway that they were offering for young people who had a viable business to start up. That helped me then get a £5,000 loan from the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust and then that £5,000 loan helped me get a £5,000 overdraft from Barclays Bank which then added up to a little over £10,000 which meant that I could get going with my business.
I was quite lucky when I started the business that I had a, one of my best friends had started a business three years before me, and we had quite a nice match up that I was quite good at marketing but rubbish at accounting, he was the opposite way round so he could help me out with the books, keeping a track of the numbers, making lovely complex spreadsheets about, you know, if I spent a tenner now what would happen to my cash flow in three years' time. He was good at all that, you know, the geeky side of it.
I was quite creative, good at marketing, so I helped him get his business out there to more people coming to him, he helped me make sure my business didn't go bust.
With a company like mine it's so important to get good marketing and get your brand out there. So we decided that the Internet was our main way of doing that, so we got a really nice website together, lots of great photos, and we used YouTube to put videos out there that people find and send people vile emails with funny pictures on them, and videos that they'll pass on to their friends.
What I've learned over the past few years is that things can start to snowball when you start your business. It's slow to start with, then it picks up, then it starts getting really kind of busy, so things are looking really busy for this year and we have to think about expanding, you know, doing more things for the people who already come to us, and doing different things to get new people into the business so the world's kind of your oyster when you get to the point where you've lost your debt in your business and you're ready to expand, you can go in any direction you want, you know?
It comes with a lot of responsibility as well, you know. Just doing what you want doesn't tend to make a great business, but I know that every effort that I make with my business goes towards a result that I'm aiming at, not that I'm working for a company that I don't really believe in, making a product I don't really believe in and doing tasks I don't really believe in.
Everything I'm doing is something that I do believe in and want to make it happen, so it really helps with the motivation.
One thing with my business because my business is my hobby, it's turned what used to be for fun into what I do for work, so people talk about your work life balance, you know, how much you work and how much you play, but what I do feels like playing when it's work, so it's pretty perfect to be honest, in that respect, I get to play around on bikes and get other people to play around on bikes and I make a living out of it.
I think if you're thinking of starting your own business, there's a lot of things to consider but you don't have to worry about doing everything at once, you know, you can start off with the simple things like, you know, are you looking to make a load of money out of your business, or is it the fact that you're passionate about something and want to make that how you work.
I'd say that the first step you can do is go to whoever your business advisor's with, whether it's the careers advisor at school or the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust are really approachable. They start businesses for people who are eighteen to twenty five but you don't have to be eighteen to start the process, you know.
You can speak to them about what you need to do to start a business, if you've got your big idea but are not sure how to make that make money folk like the Business Trust can help you with that.
There was a few times during the first year I was running the business that I kind of felt like you know crikey, this is too hard, you know, this is me against the world, you know. And at that point I made sure that I got in contact with my business advisor and say look this is just how I'm feeling about it and you know I didn't realise quite how much support there was out there to get me kind of through the low points of the roller coaster, so to speak, so I started going to monthly meetings of other young people starting businesses, and very quickly found out that everyone feels that way at certain points, you know, especially in your first year.
You hear these statistics that one in ten businesses survives, and everything kind of seems a bit scary sometimes, but there are other folk out there going through that experience who will help you out and there's a lot of, you know, older folk who've got that experience who will tell you how to avoid getting yourself into trouble and there's plenty of support out there if you just make sure you ask the question, you know, where is it?
To my customers, MB7 means mountain biking at seven, but to me it means that it took me seven bank managers before I could get an account, get my business started, so never give up.
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