Home Leisure Direct is Supplierbank’s  first company of the week. Michelle Beresford is the 27 year old director of Bristol-based online retail business Home Leisure Direct and told I spoke to Michelle about the company and what they do.

The company, which Michelle launched in 2007 at the age of 23, specialises in selling leisure products including pool tables, snooker tables, table tennis tables, table football, air hockey, arcade machines, jukeboxes and even neon signs to give games rooms the final touch.  It retails via its website (www.homeleisuredirect.com) to consumers, businesses, clubs, schools, councils and even prisons.

The company is now selling its products – from £100 football tables to £10,000 luxury pool tables – from Lanzarote to Switzerland and Ireland to Hong Kong.  Michelle’s husband Andy, formerly the divisional managing director for a leading mobile phone company, joined the business full-time last September.

She subsequently worked for numerous publishing houses selling print and on-line advertising.  But Michelle also harboured ambitions of running her own business and, after moving to a new out of town home and aspiring to a work-life balance that would allow time to have dogs, she decided it was time to realise her entrepreneurial aspirations.

“I realised that I’m good at spotting weaknesses in a plan and at coming up with ideas and solutions.” explains Michelle.“It can be hard to get taken seriously by some people when you’re 23 years old but I thought, forget them, I’ll do it for myself.

The company’s philosophy (“We only sell products we would be happy to have in our own homes”) and the knowledge and friendliness of its team has helped it to establish an enviable reputation for excellent products and superb customer service.

Asked what particular skills she has brought to the business, Michelle is clear.  “I bought my ambition and tenacity.” she replies.  “I work hard and am exceptionally resourceful.  I wanted to run a business for myself and demonstrate that you don’t have to have a university degree to make an impact in the business world.  I’m sure it can help, but equally, don’t discount us street-smart kids just yet!”

With plans to recruit staff and move to new offices in the coming year and longer term ambitions for a showroom, dedicated tele-sales team, and then larger retail outlets as the brand becomes established, Michelle has her sights firmly set on business expansion.

To find out more about HLD and the products they sell, please go to their website www.homeleisuredirect.com.

Speaking to Michelle about Supplierbank and the plans we have for the site, She enthused about the networking elements “Finding good people to talk to about how to expand your business is important, being able to find suppliers and buyers will help me increase my potential” Michelle added “I am particularly looking forward to seeing the events pages and classified sections grow and when I need to recruit will be looking at supplierbank as a low cost route to finding people”

It gives me great pleasure to introduce myself to my fellow suppliers on Supplierbank. I am Paul Smith, the Commercial Director of Supplierbank, the force behind our networking community for Public and Private Sector suppliers.

I have been working within the Public Sector for a number of years, mainly on large procurement and financial system projects, implementing changes to how the Public Sector communicate with the the people that supply their goods and services.

Supplierbank was born out of frustration. A large problem facing virtually all bodies in the Public Sector is the lack of realtime information on their suppliers. This becomes even more apparent when implementing Purchase to Pay systems (online ordering software) when the most significant key information of an email address to send purchase orders to is usually missing or not to hand for the team handling the supplier adoption.

Supplierbank was the brainchild of Grant Viklund, the Technical Director and I, of creating a simple portal to collect all the supplier information, load it into systems and then effective and efficiently communicate with our suppliers. With a great team supporting me, it has grown and expanded to accommodate other strategies the Public Sector works with. We now have over 10,000 companies, and organisations on or network.

We started small but with some key objectives behind the site:

• Make supplier communication easy for all involved
• Collect accurate information to make purchasing efficient and easy
• Build networks of suppliers
• Train and inform our community to up-skill them and help them win more business
• Make it easy for suppliers to be found by buyers and procurement professionals
• Inform the community of new opportunities, jobs and events
• Bring our UK supplier sector together

Over the past three years we have cultivated the site from its humble five pages of html to the fantastic large interactive portal we now share. We have formed relationships with strategic partners and begun the process of meeting our objectives of building a supplier network that meets the demands of challenging and changing time for the UK.

New buttons and a brand new look

Many of you may have noticed over the past few months subtle changes to the supplierbank portal. We have changed much of the site and made it more supplier focused. Over the summer we will be making some big announcements and I can start now by telling you what you can expect very soon;

• The ability to upgrade your Company Profile to make it stand out to the public sector buyers and the supplier community
• You will be able to post jobs and opportunities in the classified directory to a large market of suppliers and their staff
• Promote your events, sales launches, promotional days etc to your community

Not only do Companies have a profile on Supplierbank, so do their staff! Presently we have allowed the person creating the Company Profile to create a personal account. Very shortly you will be able to send out staff requests add additional people to your Company profile. We will let you know when it comes online.

Networking

Probably our biggest and most important objective was the ability to bring suppliers together and help build new relationships, share ideas and experiences and create “offline” communities. One of the most frequent comments back from our supplier community was “Can I talk to other suppliers?”

When a supplier creates a Company Profile you join a local network, we will shortly be adding simple touches that will allow you to find other suppliers in your network as well as running, breakfast, lunch and evening networking events close to you.

We will be looking for local representatives to help run and build the local communities. If you are interested in becoming a Network Associate, drop me an email to psmith@supplierbank.com.

We have also been asked if we could run networking events by industry and will be looking at that in the very near future.

Company of the Week

I want to promote your company and I want to share who you are with the rest of the community. The Supplierbank team will be posting each week an interview with a Company and making them front page. If you think your Company has what it takes to be on our front page, send me an email with your name and telephone number and I will call you back.

Look out for my posts and let me know what can we do to improve the site, if you have a news story and ideas that you want the world to know, then lets share them.

Kind Regards

Paul Smith

Commerical Director