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Entrepreneur scoops 000,000 in prize money
Page 16
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A 25-YEAR-OLD haulage website entrepreneur has won his second business award this year, bringing him more than 1.100,000 in prize money.
The latest award for Robert Matthams, 25, was £10,000 last week as the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year, but his company Shiply.com, has already won €100,000 (£90,281) in the Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Challenge. -We have done rather well in competitions this year," says Matthams.
Shiply.com links up hauliers running partially or fully empty with potential customers. The site claims this has huge environmental benefits by decreasing the amount of empty running.
The website has 5,500 UK hauliers registered, and Matthams predicts that by the end of its second year of business in April 2010, he predicts it wil have a turnover of £500,000. "We are growing by 20% month on month," he reveals.
There are no sign-up fees to use the site, but •Shiply will take a percentage of the fee, on a sliding scale from 9.9% for the smaller loads to 3.4% for the biggest. Matthams says the benefit to hauliers is that if they get a load from Shiplycom, their running costs do not increase because they are making the journey anyway. "From a haulier's point of view, the extra money they get from work through us is pure profit."
Shiply.com's offices are in London and Manchester. The company has just established a similar operation in Germany and has plans for one in the Netherlands.