Date: Wed 19th March, 2008
Venue:
Number of Guests Attended: 150
A Sheffield-based businessman who has set up and successfully sold on a succession of logistics businesses was this year’s winner of Best Entrepreneur at the Yorkshire Business Insider 42 under 42 awards, held at the Royal Armouries.
Neil Taylor runs TAL Logistics, which has a turnover of £11.5m, but has seen growth of 550 per cent over the past two years. The judges were very keen to give the award to someone who had not just built up a business, but sold one on as well, and Taylor clearly fitted the bill.
The Best Start-Up award went to Andrew Johnson of Living Salads. Having been made redundant from a job in Portugal, Johnson returned to the UK and set up business growing salads in their own boxes in East Yorkshire and is already supplying all the major supermarket chains.
Hedley Aylott, chief executive of Summit Media, won the award for Best Innovation. Summit Media is a fast-growing marketing agency that employs current and former prisoners at its base at the Wolds prison in East Yorkshire. That hasn’t stopped it getting some major blue-chip clients. The company has also recently set up a European headquarters in Prague.
The award for best practitioner went to Paul Oldridge, managing director of McInerney Homes (Yorkshire). He set up a Yorkshire branch of the Irish-owned business three years ago on his own, and has already built it into a £50m-turnover business.
The International Award was won by Jude Nottingham, managing director of Huddersfield-based The Leadership Factor. She has been busy setting up branches of the customer service consultancy in the Ukraine and Japan.
The 200-strong audience was entertained by Garvis Snook, chief executive of ROK. His 5,000-strong company won £1.5bn of contracts last year. But when Snook joined what was then EBC Group in 2000, it was loss-making and with a most uncertain future. He explained how first by restructuring the company to give it a more youthful image and name, but more importantly by engaging with his staff and valuing and encouraging their contributions on how to improve the business, he turned such a situation around. The South West-based company now has representation across most of the UK – including Yorkshire, having taken over Lemmeleg in 2005 and 2007.
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