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Bradley Mcloughlin sold sandwiches at school, buying cheaper lunches to pocket the difference.

After A-levels in Business Studies, IT and Music Technology, Bradley worked for his Granddad, saving up for a one-month travel ticket to visit London. Armed with a suit and leather folder, every day he walked into various companies blagging his way in to see the HR Director, pretending to reception that he had an appointment!

After finding a job as an Accounts Assistant, Bradley worked in London for eight years, finally ending as a Management Accountant for a large corporate.

With the experience of managing businesses from a financial perspective, Bradley started his own, Trading4u. In five years, turnover reached over £1m and Bradley successfully exited the business.

Bradley’s current venture is a London bookkeeping and accountancy business named Braant, which provides professional, reputable and reliable accounting services to SMEs.

What makes you an entrepreneur?

 Being relentless in your goals

 Overcoming every challenge, and not to let it stop you

 Being completely driven on success

 Calculating risk

 Not always following traditional/conventional methods

What inspired you to start a business?

Reward – self-satisfaction and financial.

Self-satisfaction comes before financial quite simply because someone starting a business purely to make money will achieve less compared to someone who completely lives and breathes their venture. Those who completely love what they do will often make money as a by-product of their success.

Money doesn’t make you happy, it’s the people and achievements in life that does. And if you’re a true entrepreneur you will use money as a tool to invest in more ventures, ideas and passions that will yield you more knowledge and self-satisfaction.

I was always inspired by people who’d built up their own companies, in what they had achieved by creating great brands and services, and sometimes changing the way we do things for the better! All I read are entrepreneurs’ autobiographies.

I understood at a very young age what a margin was, and more importantly, how to make it. To this day it gives me a great buzz when a deal completes successfully. Of course, the bigger the better and you can then invest the profits into larger opportunities.

However, you have to take the rough with the smooth. It’s about calculating your financial and commercial risks, weighing up the pros and cons. As long as overall, most of the time your activity delivers positive results then your risk management is in balance.

Is it possible to start from scratch and do you have any tips?

Absolutely, and platforms such as Google, social media, directories, email marketing and your own site certainly provide opportunities to start and grow most businesses.

Here are some tips:

 At the beginning DO NOT tie yourself into lengthily contracts

 Everything is negotiable. Negotiate EVERYTHING!

 Start to use Google AdWords. You can even set your own daily budget

 Don’t waste money on marketing unless you comprehensively target your potential clients

 Set your marketing spend as a % of gross margin

 Track marketing spend against income to calculate which marketing channels produce an ROI

 Get comprehensive insurance including legal cover – you never know what’s around the corner!

 Accept your weaknesses and commission expert suppliers

 Offer an unbelievable discount to your first customers for referring business

Is starting your second business any easier?

You can apply broad experiences to any business, but a bookkeeping and accountancy firm is very different to buying and selling consumer products!

Braant’s market share is concentrated in London and all potential clients are businesses as opposed to consumers, so our marketing needs to target them appropriately, via the most efficient channels. Additionally, CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) will be higher as the industry is more expensive to advertise and competition is a factor.

In short, it will be a challenge, but it wouldn’t be me unless I was pushing myself!

In its first year, Braant has met its ambitious target and with more aggressive advertising and more services introduced to compliment the core business, Braant is on track to become one of London’s best firms.

Bradley Mcloughlin

Founder, Braant and Trading4U

www.braant.co.uk