Jason Dainter - Big Brain Ltd
Who are you? What do you do? Where do you do it?
Jason Dainter, Director of Big Brain Ltd based in Leeds.
Why did you start-up a business?
Since a young age I’ve been very interested in starting up a business, and since my first small ventures in my college days of buying broken phones on eBay, fixing them, then selling them on, I suppose I caught the entrepreneurs bug. I love the idea of creating and growing something to work on myself, and love the huge potential involved in starting up your own business compared to working in someone else’s.
How (and when) did you start-up a business?
In 2005 myself and my business partner Daniel Chinnery set up Big Brain Ltd (formerly Eurogiveaways Ltd) which I would say was the first “proper” business that I have run. We saw an opportunity in the online marketing industry in a specific type of marketing called incentive marketing, and within the week had set up Eurogiveaways.com which the following week was making a profit. After graduating from university we were in the fortunate position to be able to move in together and work full time on the business, along side starting DesignerIsland.com a website design business.
What have been the biggest challenges in running your own business? How have these been overcome?
Lack of capital has probably been our largest challenge and one we are still constantly facing. I would argue it’s relatively easy to make money when you have a lot of money, the hard part is starting from scratch. We managed to cut a lot of costs in the development of Eurogiveaways.com from doing a lot of the system development ourselves (our computing & management degrees came in fairly handy for this).
What have been your greatest achievements in running your business?
I would say managing to start up a business that we could draw a full time salary from whilst still in our 2nd year at university, from an investment of just 200 quid! I would say this was our biggest achievement because it gave us the opportunity to do what we’re doing now full time straight from uni without having to worry about jumping straight into a job working for someone else.
What would be your advice to any young aspiring entrepreneurs?
My main piece of advice would be to be pragmatic. If you have an idea already, or simply a passion to start your own business, don’t just talk about it, do something about it! A lot of the time this simply involves picking up the telephone and making some enquiries, or going on Google and doing some research. Make sure you are mingling with the right people, often starting a business from scratch can be more a case of who you know and not what you know.