Sumon Sadhu has crammed a lot into his 25 years. The first ever intern at Library House, he has consulted for the government on enterprise policy, set up Europe’s largest tech entrepreneurship society and sits on the advisory board of Seedcamp. He recently abandoned his Phd to help set up Snaptalent in the US, after being headhunted by Paul Graham of the prestigious Y-Combinator fund. Using controversial IP targeting, Snaptalent will disrupt the way online recruitment ads are distributed, with relevant job ads appearing where prospects spend their time on the web. Launched in March, Snaptalent has $1.5m backing. Sadhu is confident of big success, and hopes eventually to become an angel investor himself.

Independent retailers often struggle to find a good spot in busy shopping areas, but thanks to notonthehighstreet.com, this is becoming less of a problem. The site showcases the wares of 800 small businesses in the UK. Set up by Tucker and co-founder Sophie Cornish, 42, it gives independent retailers a means of selling to a national customer base, while consumers can select products from any number of partners in a single transaction. Partners pay a highly competitive membership fee of around £500, and the site takes around 25% of each sale. With those featured selling everything from fashion to homeware, turnover has rocketed from £100,000 in 2006 to an anticipated £3.7m this year. The duo have now secured over £1.5m from Spark Ventures and Venrex LLP to develop their technology and fund their highly popular 128-page catalogues. 

The disarmingly affable Wallis co-founded Content and Code in 2001 with Craig Beard, and the London-based IT Consultancy has been enjoying solid organic growth ever since. Wallis attributes the current strength of the £3.5m firm to a restructuring which saw him move from the role of chief technology officer to chief executive. Now one of the UK’s market leaders in the provision of Microsoft business products, having been a Microsoft Gold Partner since 2003, the company counts Deloitte, Sony, EMI, BT, and Virgin Atlantic among its clients. Wallis anticipates staffing up to match an aggressive sales drive, and thinks a stormy economy might even help – as talented technical people lose their jobs in the City, Content and Code will have the pick when it’s hiring.

Loyalty programmes are nothing new, but Reward takes an innovative approach to the concept, removing the need to carry a loyalty card when shopping. It also ensures that the rewards are tailored to consumers’ interests and spending patterns.
The firm’s award winning cardless technology means no point-of-sale training is required for employees and there’s no extra plastic in consumers’ wallets. Dein calls this quid pro quo an “alignment of interest”. Clients come from the banking, charity and sports sector and include HSBC, AC Milan, Halfords and Arcadia, while membership has grown from 50,000 to five million in 18 months, and turnover is expected to hit £3m this year.

Co-founders Nicholson and Smith launched their presentation design firm in 2004, and its turnover is set to reach £1.1m this year. The company’s initial offering saw it providing everything from simple PowerPoint to corporate video for clients such as BP, Barclays and Unilever. When blue chips began to view Article 10 as a preferred supplier, Nicholson and Smith expanded its offering to cover online advertising, integrated marketing and event management. The growth has been funded without debt. The founders simply gave up 25% of the firm to experienced executives who have guided it through a diversification which has led to the launch of three new businesses.

After leaving a senior position at Easyspace, one of the UK’s largest web hosting companies, Craig-Wood formed Memset with her brother, Nick, in late 2002. Its focus on technology, innovation and corporate social responsibility has led to some impressive client wins, including Experian, Hilton and The Disney Store. A host of smaller businesses have been attracted to its ‘mini server’, which closed the gap between web hosting accounts and costly dedicated servers. In 2006, Memset became the first UK internet service provider to be carbon neutral, a move that marked an acceleration in its growth. The company is currently targeting chief information officers in blue chips, where Memset’s mix of competitive pricing and green credentials could prove to be a powerful offering.

Powell has always had an interest in property, and made a tidy profit from a website design agency he founded that targeted estate agents when he was just 15. Despite becoming Hamptons International’s youngest ever sales manager, he felt true progress would only come from building something of his own. Global investment specialist 7CI, founded in 2006, helps high net worth individuals buy property abroad. Powell takes an approach to property investment that’s inspired by the financial services industry. Capital growth on clients’ portfolios is just a bonus, he says, and 7CI focuses purely on properties with positive cash flow incomes. It’s an approach that has already delivered 11,500 active clients and a £2.2m turnover.

AdJug enables advertisers to buy space directly from website owners rather than through a network, giving them an unprecedented level of control over where their messages are being displayed on the web and knowledge of their return on investment. With 650 publishers now selling inventory and 20% monthly growth in the UK, founders Jayakumar and Stephanblome are expanding overseas. Having gained £1m funding from Benchmark Capital and MIVA president Seb Bishop, AdJug received a further £3.3m from Balderton Capital and German media company Tomorrow Focus AG. AdJug Germany has just launched, and an Indian office has opened to capitalise on the country’s talented software developers.

McGuire joined Broadbean, set up by serial entrepreneur Kelly Robinson, at 21. He believed in the concept so much he took out a loan to buy a 25% equity chunk of the business, and ran it successfully on a £35,000 overdraft for the first 24 months. It’s now a market leader, turning over £3.5m and with offices in London, Amsterdam and, soon, LA. Broadbean’s innovative technology distributes job ads to multiple locations online and allows recruiters to track their exact return from online ad spend. Broadbean counts many of Europe’s top recruitment firms among its clients, and McGuire recently signed an industry-first global deal with Manpower. The business has an exceptional client and staff retention record, and revenue should soar to £5.5m next year.

Devono is a commercial property company with a difference – it’s the only one to exclusively represent tenants looking to rent office space in London. Offering unbiased advice, Devono helps tenants to find the best office space for the best possible terms. Boasting an unrivalled level of market intelligence, last year it acquired more offices for businesses than any other property company in London. Customers range from start-ups to Toshiba, Bebo and Eon, and all receive the same high standard of service. Several companies have gone back to Devono when expanding, resulting in far more lucrative deals. Turnover has doubled each year and is now £2.5m. Leigh is confident of growth even in a downturn, saying: “Whether businesses need larger or smaller space, they still need to move.”

Horror stories of web projects running over schedule and over budget abound. Enter New Bamboo. Co-founders Tanner and Williams are proponents of a project management style known as Agile, which involves regular meetings with clients to avoid these problems. They are also specialists in a new web development framework, Ruby on Rails, which enables the creation of well-architected applications more rapidly than Java or .Net. Entirely self-funded, New Bamboo has been profitable since day one. Customers range from tech start-ups to global brands, with projects ranging from the launch of environmental social network Edenbee to a contract to deliver the first application in conjunction with Channel 5’s new digital strategy.

Tim Campbell has come a long way since winning the first series of The Apprentice. Last year, he left his six-figure salary job at Amstrad to launch The Bright Ideas Trust, and it’s proving to be a triumph. Supported by a range of corporate partners, the trust aims to unlock the entrepreneurial talent in Britain’s young people, aged 16-30, by investing in their business ideas in return for an equity stake. Unlike other VCs, any return goes back to the trust to help other young start-ups. One of the government’s social enterprise ambassadors, Campbell has already attracted funding from some of the UK’s biggest companies to kick-start the venture, while trustees include The Big Issue chairman Nigel Kershaw and restaurateur Iqbal Wahhab.

Priding itself on the ability to offer a tailored service for the “discerning gambler”, Fitzdares prioritises discretion and boasts the best odds. New members are welcomed by word-of-mouth referrals to preserve the members’ club-style exclusivity it offers big spenders who want to have a flutter. Fabricius had the idea while working at Ladbrokes, where he noticed the high-street bookies were becoming increasingly comfortable with guaranteed low margin products. Fabricius on the other hand, who famously lost a £50,000 private bet with co-founder Zac Goldsmith, accepts that to win big sometimes you have to lose big. Not that he seems to be losing much. Fitzdares turned a £5m profit on a £89m turnover in the last 18 months.

Despite having little experience in retail, McLean and Thommen weren’t afraid to question the received wisdom of the High Street with the Edinburgh-based lingerie boutique they established in 2005. The two ex-accountants focus on personal service and creating a memorable customer experience, with lingerie hand chosen by the founders and sold by a team of trained bra fitters. An online boutique was launched in 2006. The approach appears to be working; they’ve recently opened a second boutique in Glasgow, have three more in the pipeline and add their inclusion in Young Guns to a host of awards and industry recognition.

Founded three years ago, Aspect Maintenance offers a full range of property repair services, with work evenly balanced between pre-booked jobs and emergency call-outs. The London-based company’s growth story is as much about an impressively executed turnaround as it is a startup. Davies, who has a background in investment banking and private equity, helped business partner and friend Nick Bizley, who specialises in maintenance, take a faltering £500,000 firm out of a CVA and turn it into a profitable £7m business with 115 staff by improving processes and implementing a solid management structure. Plans are afoot to hit £20m by 2010.

Former stonemason Notz knows how hard it can be for tradespeople to find steady work. Sick of agencies sending him out to jobs that didn’t match his skills, he set up MyBuilder, which allows consumers to post jobs online that tradespeople can bid for. Originally self-funded, Notz recently won European-wide funding competition Seedcamp, securing €50,000 and mentoring for a 10% stake. He has since netted a further £500,000 from investors such as Bebo co-founder Paul Birch and construction giant Travis Perkins. Trading since October 2007, already 1,500 jobs are listed each month and more than 12,000 tradespeople have registered. Revenue is doubling month by month and Notz, who takes a 5% success fee for every completed job, expects turnover to hit £10m by 2009.

While there are many courier companies, Abel has differentiated his offering by developing ground-breaking technology. His P4D business can process an unlimited number of parcel movements per day. In fact, so efficient is his technology, that a client could ship a million parcels to a million different addresses and Abel wouldn’t even have to get out of bed. As well as licensing his technology to competitors, he is also able to resell courier services from major carriers by integrating with their systems. A new company, Parcel Shipping Manager (PSM), saves businesses from having to waste hours typing in their shipping information. The PSM software pulls the data from a firm’s shopping cart or an eBay account and sends it to DHL or Parcelforce. Combined turnovers will exceed £1.7m.

Moross likes to think of his business as the world’s online stationer. Given that MOO has customers in more than 180 countries, it’s a fair comment. Soon after launching in 2004, he began to realise the growing potential of web 2.0 sites. Since then, relationships with the likes of Facebook (with more than 100 million users) and photo sharing site Flickr (30 million users) allow customers to grab their photos and put them onto stationery products, including business cards and greetings cards, which are printed and shipped all over the world. MOO offers an unrivalled level of product customisation, and growth has been propelled by £2.75m investment from Atlas Venture and Index Ventures in 2006, secured on the strength of Moross’ business plan before the business took off.

Loman set up Eurogamer at 16 as a place for games fanatics to discuss and review the latest releases online. He soon realised the business potential of the site he created with his brother. In bringing together a group of avid gamers, it was an advertiser’s dream – and they soon flocked. Finishing his A-levels, Loman took a gap year to develop the business. He’s now taken six. Based in Brighton, Eurogamer is used by 2.4 million people every month, employs 22 staff and turns over £1.2m. Recent diversification into events and internet TV should see this figure rise significantly next year, helped by European expansion through franchising and joint ventures. The site will run in
eight languages by the end of the year.

He hasn’t been shaving for long, but Bell has already set up and exited four businesses, including teenfront.com, the online magazine he founded at the tender age of 14. He received a considerable exit three years later, and the Newcastle-based entrepreneur has been busy ever since. His most recent venture, QuickTV, provides a B2B service for major brands and e-commerce sites looking for interactive video content for their websites. QuickTV has already raised £1m in funding from a combination of angel and venture capital sources, and Bell aims to raise between £5m and £10m next year to drive aggressive growth plans, which include targeting US agencies immediately. Bell predicts turnover will hit £6m in year two.

FCL coordinates the movement of clients’ cargo around the world. It specialises in catering for small to medium firms’ logistical needs, which the founders feel are often neglected by big shipping firms. Set up in 2003 and entirely self-funded, FCL employs 16 staff and has a £5.9m turnover, which will hit £8.5m next year as FCL’s flexibility attracts more business during the downturn. As companies become more wary of locking themselves into expensive logistics contracts, FCL is picking up the slack. Expansion into India and China is on the cards, and the business has recently diversified into clean energy. Sister company FCL Clean Technologies is one of the biggest suppliers of sustainably sourced bulk biodiesel in the UK.

By operating its own national network, Ask4 offers the fastest residential broadband in the UK, as well as a range of value-added services, such as VoIP and IPTV. Burrows launched Ask4, which supplies telecoms services to multiple-tenanted buildings, such as student halls of residence and apartment blocks, in 2000, when he was just 18. This followed three and a half years spent building Ask4’s own infrastructure to deliver these services, funded by £750,000 angel investment. Since then, the business has been self-financing. It has doubled in size profitably each year for the last three. This year’s turnover will be £2.5m – double that achieved in 2007 – and is expected to hit £4.5m in 2009. Ask4’s 35,000 end users will also double next year, due to the addition of 60% more outlets.

Having set up teen website Dubit at 14, Hildreth already has almost a decade of online experience under his belt and an estimated personal fortune of £25m. His latest venture provides online child protection technology to clients including service providers, children’s virtual worlds and social networks. Crisp Thinking’s technology roots out online predators by analysing conversation patterns, typing speed, use of grammar and punctuation. It looks at hundreds of factors on a software ‘fingerprint’ that can ascertain whether a user is grooming a young person online. A study by Cambridge University found that Crisp’s software is 98.4% effective in detecting potentially dangerous conversations, and angel investors have shown their faith in the product, stumping up combined backing of £3.3m. 

A man so ridiculously well connected that Barack Obama follows him on Twitter, former Butlins redcoat, new Growing Business columnist and serial entrepreneur Oli Barrett is also something of a ‘go to guy’ for both the public and private sectors. Arguably top of his list of social entrepreneurship achievements is the influential Make Your Mark with a Tenner campaign, which sees 10,000 pupils competing to build enterprises in a month with just £10. He also brought speed networking to the UK, took 20 UK web companies to San Francisco to learn from key people in Silicon Valley for Web Mission, and helped create the Catalyst Awards, celebrating achievements in social technology. He’s also helped launch a few companies, such as language learning network Friendsabroad.

Former Times sub-editor Sarah Curran and husband Andrew have turned a North London fashion store into a thriving online retail website in under two years. The site made its name with designer womenswear, offering second line brands, such as Farhi from Nicole Farhi, and Vivienne Westwood Anglomania, which position it between the exclusive Net-a-Porter and the high-street appeal of ASOS. The firm has received over £2m in angel investment and turnover should reach £3.5m this year, helped by a redesign that introduces a TV channel that will communicate trends, new designers and help build a community feel. It also has plans for a dual-branded homepage to support an extensive menswear offering.

Mitesh Soma only founded his online pharmacy last November, but he’s already in the enviable position of being able to project a turnover of around £5m for his first full year. The already profitable Chemist Direct buys stock in bulk, sells nationally and offers discounted prices on products that include everything from toothpaste to anti-malarials. Customers can also call to speak to registered pharmacists who check every order. Hitwise ranks Soma’s business as the UK’s leading online chemist, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to aim for. While the search firm classes Boots as a general retailer, the high-street giant is now in the sights of a man determined to turn Chemist Direct into a household name.

Doherty started selling his home-made jam when he was 14. He officially launched Superjam in January 2007 with the aim of selling his healthy jams, which are made entirely from fruit, in the supermarkets. Helped by a £5,000 loan from the Prince’s
Trust, he perfected his recipes, labels and ramped up production enough to fulfil this goal. He’s the youngest person ever to supply a supermarket and buyers have loved the modern image of his brand. He’s now stocked by Waitrose, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons, and expects to be listed in the rest by the end of the year, doubling turnover. He’s preparing to launch in Ireland and other European countries, and beyond that, into supermarkets all over the world.