The unobtrusive teenage tycoon
When the Royal Bank of Scotland compiled a list of teenagers capable of making serious money over the next 20 years, Adam Hildreth, 19, a little-known internet entrepreneur from Leeds, came out well ahead of better known teenagers such as Wayne Rooney, the football prodigy, or Sam Branson, son of Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson.
But that was 15 months ago, and the RBS Rich list, like most High Street bank publicity gimmicks, has been long forgotten.
Mr Hildreth has changed jobs and his name has sunk from sight, apart from an embarrassing moment last year when he crashed his car on a foggy night after consuming five double vodka and cokes.
Fortunately, he escaped a driving ban after a stockbroker friend admitted he had spiked Mr Hildreth’s drinks in order to “liven him up a bit”. Such are the perils of being a teenage entrepreneur. He still enjoys “going to the pub and having a laugh”.
But if anyone asks what he does these days, he passes himself off as a student, rather than a managing director, and parks his BMW out of sight.
“Most of my friends will not know what I do”, says Mr Hildreth, who commutes between offices in Leeds and Colchester, where he is starting up his second business, AvechoSensei, in partnership with Avecho, an internet security firm.
It is developing a computer tool to block paedophiles from accessing children’s internet chat rooms. However, Dubit, the youth marketing company that he and school friends founded five years ago, goes from strength to strength. It has a staff of 14 and a turnover of ￡1m-plus. Its youngest director is 15 and its oldest is 56.
When Halifax, the UK’s largest savings provider, carried out research last summer into teenage pocket money habits, it was Dubit which did the research.
The Sun, Britain’s top-selling newspaper, Coca-Cola and various government departments are among other big names which have tapped into Dubit’s skill at reading the hearts and minds of Britain’s teenagers.
It has a much frequented chat room and a website with 302,000 registered users who spend an average 31 minutes each time they log on. In less than year, it has issued more than 200,0000 Dubitcards, a discount/loyalty card aimed at 11-17 year-olds, which operates in cinemas and fast food chains, such as Pizza Hut. It is talking to banks about turning it into a teenage debit card.
Dubit’s big selling point is its ability to offer corporate customers swift responses to questions about new ideas, technologies and advertising campaigns targeting teen-agers.
A teenage army tests out new products, new clothing ranges and new music before they are mass marketed. ”We really aim to get to the bottom of what teenagers think,” says Ian Douthwaite, 40, who took over as Dubit’s managing director after Mr Hildreth left to set up AvechoSensei in the autumn.
Mr Douthwaite met Mr Hildreth when he visited Harrogate’s Rossett School as a volunteer business adviser for Young Enterprise, a charity which helps around 150,000 youngsters a year gain business experience by setting up their own small companies while still at school.
Mr Hildreth was 14 when he first had the idea of establishing a teenage marketing organisation. He felt banks and government had little understanding of how to market themselves to teenagers. The Young Enterprise scheme, supported by 2,000 businesses and 11,500 volunteers, offered a chance to test out his big idea. But he quickly ran foul of the rules.
Young Enterprise schemes are supposed to be dissolved at the end of the school year. But Mr Hildreth, bored by learning how to do VAT returns, wanted to go on expanding Dubit. “Young Enterprise turned around and said ‘this is not what the scheme is meant for, you are no longer allowed to be a Young Enterprise company because you are too enterprising’. It was awful,” he remembers. But it produced one lucky break. Mr Douthwaite, impressed by the pupil’s communication skills, ditched his volunteer job at Young Enterprise and went to work full time for the young star, an entrepreneur half his age.
Nevertheless, many potential investors who also liked the idea backed away on learning that the founder of Dubit was still only 15. Neither was his old school much help.
“For them it （Dubit） was a PR gimmick rather than a real business,” says Mr Hildreth, “and I wanted a real business.”
For the first three days of the week, he would be doing maths, science and business studies, and on Thursday he would be going to see important clients in London. “It was a bit surreal”.
It was on one of those flying visits to London that Mr Hildreth got his second lucky break. He struck up a conversation with Mike Briercliffe, a fellow first class train passenger intrigued by the young man’s wheeling and dealing on the mobile phone. Mr Briercliffe, 56, a marketing and IT consultant, agreed to join Dubit’s board. He was the first of a series of non-executive directors recruited to help fill the cracks in the knowledge of Dubit’s teenage board. By the age of 16, Mr Hildreth had left school to go full time at Dubit. He was already employing 4 staff and had rented an office in Leeds.
But his original business proposition a teenage debit card took much longer than anticipated to develop and still has not been launched. Mr Hildreth had to find fresh sources of revenues to tide the company over and he diversified into teenage market research. The first thing he did was to set up one of the largest teenage websites in the UK to capture information on the market. Despite Dubit’s early problems in finding investors, managing its finances has never been Mr Hildreth’s biggest challenge. “The hardest part was having an idea of where you wanted to go and sitting down and driving the business to get there,” he says. “Often it does not happen because ideas change halfway through”.
Mr Hildreth exhibits some of the early symptoms of a serial entrepreneur. He had expected to be at Dubit for another three years but by last summer he concluded that he had driven the business as far as he could in terms of “ideas generation and innovation”. Once a business has settled down and is growing steadily, he gets bored and wants to move on to a new idea. He remains a big shareholder in Dubit, but has resigned from its board.
“I have run one successful business and hopefully I am about to move on to the next one”, says Mr Hildreth, who promises that his new venture, AvechoSensei, will be an “awful lot bigger and more global” than Dubit.
声色不露的青少年大亨
苏格兰皇家银行（Royal Bank of Scotland）列过一份未来20年最能挣钱的青少年的名单。一位来自利兹的19岁青年、默默无闻的网络企业家亚当?希尔德雷思远远排在了那些更出名的年轻人之前，例如足球天才韦恩?鲁尼（Wayne Rooney）、维珍（Virgin）老板理查德?布兰森爵士（Sir Richard Branson）的儿子萨姆?布兰森（Sam Branson）。
但这已是15个月前的事了。如同一般银行宣传的大部分噱头，这份苏格兰皇家银行的排名榜早被人们遗忘了。
现在，希尔德雷思已经换了工作，除了去年的一桩糗事，他的名字也早已淡出了人们的视线，那晚他喝了5杯双份伏特加兑可乐，在一个雾夜撞坏了自己的汽车。
幸好他躲过了被禁止驾车的厄运，他的一位证券经纪人朋友承认，为了“让他轻松点”，他对希尔德雷思的饮料动了手脚。看来这就是当一名少年企业家的危险。如今他仍旧喜欢“上酒吧乐一乐”。
但要是有人问他最近在干什么，他会谎称自己是学生，而非一名董事总经理。他会把自己的宝马轿车停在不引人注目的地方。
他说，“我的大多数朋友都不会知道我是干什么的。”他频繁往来于利兹和科尔切斯特的办公室之间，在科尔切斯特，他正在开创自己的第二家公司――与网络安全公司Avecho合作的AvechoSensei。
该公司正在开发一种计算机工具以阻止恋童癖进入儿童的网上聊天室。而他与同学一起在5年前成立的青年营销公司Dubit正日益强大。该公司已有14名员工，年营业额超过100万英镑，其最小的董事只有15岁，年纪最大的56岁。
去年夏天，当英国最大的储蓄服务提供商哈里法克斯（Halifax）调查青少年花费零用钱的习惯时，委托的就是Dubit。
英国销量最大的报纸《太阳报》、可口可乐以及各种不同的政府部门等都是Dubit的客户，它们都曾利用过Dubit善于解读英国青少年内心想法的技能。
该公司有一个访问者众多的聊天室，其网站拥有30.2万名注册用户，这些人每次登陆平均停留31分钟。在不到一年的时间里，它已经发放了20多万张Dubit卡。这是一种针对11岁至17岁年龄层的打折卡，能在电影院和诸如必胜客（Pizzahut）之类的快餐连锁店使用。该公司正与银行洽谈，要将这种卡变成一张青少年借记卡。
Dubit最大的卖点在于，它能为企业客户针对青少年拟定的新想法、新技术和广告宣传提供迅捷的调查结果。
在新产品、新服装系列和新音乐推向大众市场之前，一群青少年大军会为它们测试市场反应。“我们的目标是真正摸清青少年的想法，”40岁的伊恩?杜思韦特（Ian Douthwaite）说。他于去年秋天希尔德雷思离开Dubit设立AvechoSensei时，接管了董事总经理一职。
杜思韦特是在访问哈罗盖特的罗塞特学校（Rossett School）时认识希尔德雷思的，当时他的身份是“青年企业”（Young Enterprise）的义务商业顾问。这家慈善机构每年帮助大约15万名在校的年轻人通过设立自己的小公司获得商业经验。
希尔德雷思最初产生建立一个青少年营销组织的念头时只有14岁。他觉得银行和政府对如何向青少年推销知之甚少。这个“青年企业”计划得到了2000家企业和11500位志愿者的支持，它向希尔德雷思提供了一个尝试其大胆设想的机会。但他很快就突破了游戏规则。
“青年企业”计划照理要在学年末结束，但希尔德雷思对于学习计算增值税的报税方法感到厌倦，他想继续扩张Dubit。他回忆说，“那时‘青年企业’反对说，‘这并不是计划的意图，你再也不能开‘青年企业’的公司了，因为你太富于企业精神。’这真是糟透了。”但这也带来了一个幸运的突破。这个学生的沟通能力给杜思韦特先生留下了深刻的印象，他辞去了在“青年企业”的志愿工作，全职为这位只有他一半年纪的企业新秀效力。
然而，尽管许多潜在投资者喜欢希尔德雷思的想法，但当他们获悉这位Dubit的创始人只有15岁时就退缩了，就连他那所古老的学校也帮不上什么忙。
希尔德雷思说，“对这些投资者来说，Dubit只是一种宣传上的噱头，并非什么实在的生意。而我要的是实实在在的生意。”
每周的前三天他会学数学、科学和商业等课程，星期四他就要上伦敦见重要的客户。“这很有点超现实主义，”他说。
正是在那些飞往伦敦的日子里让他有了第二个幸运的突破。他在火车上与同坐头等舱的迈克?布里尔克里夫（Mike Briercliffe）交谈，后者被这位年轻人通过手机敲定生意的技巧深深吸引。于是，这位56岁的营销及IT顾问同意加入Dubit的董事会，成为第一位受聘为非执行董事的成熟商人，以填补Dubit公司由青少年组成的董事会在知识上的不足。到了16岁那年，希尔德雷思离开了学校，开始全身心投入Dubit的工作。那时他已经雇用了4名员工，并在利兹租了一间办公室。
但他富有创意的商业计划――青少年借记卡的开发比原计划所需的时间要长得多，而且至今仍未推出。为了保住公司，希尔德雷思不得不寻找新的收入来源，于是他转向了青少年市场调研领域。他所做的第一件事就是设立堪称英国最大的青少年网站，以获得这方面的市场信息。尽管Dubit早期在寻找投资人上遇到麻烦，但希尔德雷思从不觉得财务管理是最大的难题。“最难的地方是明白自己想往哪个方向发展，再定下心来把企业带到那里去，”他说，“但这种情况并不常见，因为这些想法在半路中途就会出现改变。”
现在希尔德雷思已显露出连环企业家的某些早期问题。他原本想在Dubit再待3年，但到了去年夏天，他得出结论认为，就“创意及创新”而言，他对企业的贡献已经竭尽所能。一旦企业踏上正轨并开始稳步增长，他就觉得厌倦，并想要转到新的想法上。目前他仍旧是Dubit的大股东，但辞去了董事会的职务。
希尔德雷思说，“我经营过一个成功的企业，现在希望能转移到下一个。”他保证，他的新企业AvechoSensei将比Dubit的规模“大得多，而且更加全球化。”
