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Success stories - Freshminds

Here are some real life stories which chronicle the ups and downs of starting your own business and illustrate how the Portobello Business Centre can offer vital help

Innocent : Urban Kids : Holistic Silk : Asquith : FreshMinds : Damaris :
Coco-Ribbon
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Freshminds FreshMinds provides corporate clients with access to some of Europe's top young minds for research projects and permanent recruitment. Charlie Osmond and Caroline Plumb founded the company in September 2000 and it has doubled its turnover in each year since then. Now, it boasts no less than twenty of the FTSE 100 on its client list. Business magazine, Management Today, has named Caroline Plumb one of their young women to watch in 2003 and she's the youngest on the list.

Fresh Minds has also won the Sage Website of the Year Award and the Shell Livewire Employment Award in 2002. The idea for their business came up when Caroline was temping for a large company on a research project and realised that there was a gap in the market for this type of bespoke research service

"The Business Centre gave us a lot of help in entering the Livewire competition," says Charlie. "They also gave us a lot of help with our business plan. Going through our plan at the Centre forced us to stop and think about our strategy and improve and refine it. The staff at the Centre are not directive, what they do is to help you to think things through for yourself.

"We now have seventeen full-time employees and around 600 'minds' we can call on, most of whom are undergraduates or recent graduates. Our clients range from small start-ups to blue-chip multinationals like Unilever and Diageo. "We still use the PBC for advice and we plan to continue doing so.

In fact, we now recommend and refer people to the Centre. We're planning to continue growing our company and we'll be looking to the Business Centre for advice we know we can trust. Both Caroline and I have a great deal of respect for the work that the Business Centre is doing in helping businesses to succeed."


 
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