I was born on the 11th August 1980 in a small town in the north west of England called Burnley.
I lived in Burnley for the majority of my life except for a 4 year stint at Lancaster where I went to university to study Computer Science and also did 8 months work up there at a local ISP called Business Serve.
After 8 months of “living in the real world” I decided to setup my own business. I had always done my own thing all through college and university such as designing websites for local businesses and even had my own mobile DJ business too. If you haven’t heard “DJ Chesworth” you don’t know what you’re missing! Lol.
The company I setup while up in Lancaster was called Ekm Systems and our first product was going to be hosted ecommerce solution called ekmPowershop. So in 2002 I started work programming the system and waited for the millions to roll in.
Unfortunately it didn’t work exactly to plan and so I had to claim the dole and run up massive credit card debt while trying to get the business off the ground. I was in a vicious circle; I needed money to get customers and I needed customers to get money.
Eventually though after a lot of cold calling and pestering I got my first customer (who is still with us today!). After a very hard 3 year slog I managed to build up 100 customers by myself and decided it was time to expand the business and take on staff.
Once I had the initial 100 customers the snowball effect started and the company picked up momentum picking up lots of new customers and staff. I now employ over 30 people, from our offices in Blackburn and Manchester, and we get several hundred new customers each month generating a turnover of over £2.5 million at present.
ekmPowershop.com is now the UK’s number one hosted ecommerce solution and powers 1 in 5 of all the online shops in the UK. Due to its success we have close working relationships with several major companies such as PayPal, Google, Sage and many other household names.
Over the years we have added various other products and services to our portfolio including ekmResponse which is our email marketing system, ekmWebDesign which is our web design agency and PriceNinja which is our shopping comparison website.
In November 2009 I moved over to Poulton-Le-Fylde with my girlfriend Alison and our two kittens Tigger and Poppy. We are going to be busy now getting the new house all setup as we would like and getting all the relevant gadgets installed.
In February 2010 we are expecting our first child; we know it’s a girl. So we are both very excited about that and probably have no idea what to expect.
I’ll update this again at some stage in the future.
(last updated 14th November 2009)