Transcript

ALEX BOND:

: Some of our colleagues won an award for a business that they'd started based on detecting fungi in potatoes. And we thought, we want to do something really similar to that. We did-- we're PhD students studying chemical biology of health and disease. And so we wanted to tackle something in that area that we thought we could hopefully make a bit of money from, but also really make a change to the world around us.

NICK ALLEN:

My wife is an interior designer, or has been a commercial interior designer for quite a long time. She has a huge array of different designs. And she asked me to start to try and sell them for her.

So we put them onto cards. We put the designs onto pictures. We took them to some markets and asked people what they thought of them.

We had a little suggestion box on the end of the table. And lots and lots of people said put these designs onto silk scarves and see how you get on. And that's where the business went for us.

EMMA PRINCE:

It really came from working with children and young people, my whole career in Essex and directly in schools, and seeing just how many of them were going without effective intervention in place, due to restrictions on budgets and things in the local area. And so I wanted to try and set something up that kind of complemented what was already in place. And mentoring and coaching seemed the place to start. And it seemed to be the way that I could reach the most children and young people and have the impact I was looking for.

CLAUDIO MARTURANO:

: The idea came from my own experience within the field. I've been in aviation for over 14 years now. I was the chief engineer of an airline. And one of my responsibilities was the training of maintenance personnel. I had over 200 personnel.

And one of the main issues was that people were always away on training, and there was a huge manpower, man planning burden. And I couldn't find a provider to actually come up with the needs that I wanted. So the idea that business came from that, to develop the actual need for the industry.