Member Article

Family idea is just the business

A County Durham family is celebrating after winning a competition with their idea for a dream family business. The Bradley family from Langley Park has been rewarded with a brand new Apple MacBook laptop as well as business start up advice from Business Link County Durham after winning the Family’s Fortune competition held at the Gala Theatre in Durham this weekend. The Bradley family – made up of mum Louise and dad Steven, both 36 along with their children Ruth and Jacob aged 10 and nine respectively - won the competition with their concept for an online newsletter template, which they plan to sell to schools to avoid the potentially difficult process teachers go through to get school news home to parents.

Mum Louise, a childminder, said: “It’s always been a bit of a struggle to receive the school newsletter in one piece. Even with three children at the same school, it always ends up at the bottom of their bags so we came up with a format where schools could email a newsletter to parents directly.”

Dad Steven, a lecturer at Durham University, said: “We still can’t believe we have won though the children did put in a lot of hard work. “We hope to use Business Link County Durham’s start up expertise to do a research pilot in Durham and expand the company throughout the North East and perhaps even go national if the market was there.”

Business Link County Durham’s What’s Yours? campaign will end in March following two further information events for budding entrepreneurs, held on Wednesday 14 March from 6pm–8pm at Four Clocks on Bishop Auckland and Wednesday 21 March 5pm–7pm at the Lamplight Theatre in Stanley.

Anyone considering setting up their own business can can contact the Business Link County Durham team on 0191 374 4000 or log onto the website at www.whatsyoursdurham.co.uk. The website also gives you the opportunity to test your entrepreneurial nature with the entrepreneur-o-meter.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .