Brilliant Weekends was born on 9 September 2002 and here's the story so far from our very own Bernard Cribbins..."It was my 33rd birthday. 3 weeks beforehand we had upped sticks, rented our house to cover the mortgage and left Bristol living off Liz's enhanced maternity pay as Martha had been born 3 weeks earlier. So we ended up in a very remote half renovated farmhouse 2 miles up a dust track in deepest Umbria, 15 miles away from anyone we knew and without a single word of Italian between us and about £400 in our bank account.
A rickety laptop, a mobile phone set up on a wooden kitchen table with an open fire for heat, frequent power cuts, no landline and just the local radio ("centoduecinque - power hits") for company. We spent a few pounds advertising
stag weekends to
Rimini (our local seaside resort) on Google while spending the spare time understanding the intricacies of Google's "natural" listings. All was fairly slow and uneventful until boxing day 2006 when our trickle of five or six weekly enquiries and a sale or two suddenly roared into a torrent of 50 enquiries of which more than 20 were on the phone (via a virtual 0870 number diverted to my UK landline diverted to my UK mobile on full roaming charges). Google had picked up our site and we were really in business.
The first few days of 2003 were total chaos, as fuelled by non-stop espresso coffee, we worked from 6am to 1am each day keeping up with everything, but to no avail. So we pretty well stopped answering the phones and focussed only on the orders we had taken. A week was spent writing a business plan to try and raise enough cash from the bank to get us back to the UK as it was clear we were going to need to expand quickly - not an option in rural Italy!
On 10th Feb 2003, our bank kindly agreed to a £5000 overdraft and on 8th March 2003 we moved back into our old house in Bristol, and with the help of a kindly neighbour rented a one room office above a shop in Clifton Village. A free job ad brought just one applicant who we hired in desperation after 10 minute pub chat - and she did a Brilliant job for us for 3 years! Then we hired a salesman, then another administrator, then another and another until we got to our current size of 25 staff all settled perfectly in our newly refurbished offices on the Hotwell Road on the harbour side.
Since those early days our company has grown rapidly to its current multimillion pound operation. Along the way we have been featured on national TV (GMTV weddings, Holiday programme) had features in all the national press & won awards (Richard was Bristol business person of the month in Nov 2004 and runner up in Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year the same year). Almost 100,000 people have enjoyed a Brilliant Weekend and since Jan 2006 almost half of the UKs FTSE 100 companies have used the company for
corporate events,
teambuilding or hospitality services across the world.
Our turnover for 2007 is expected to be in excess of £3.5million and we have sold almost £10m of holidays since we began! It's been great fun so far but in the words of Karen Carpenter, we have only just begun! So many ideas and so little time, we have major plans for continued expansion and also as our amazing team and loyal customers have grown with us, our passion for great value, exciting, inspiring weekends away has not changed one bit. We are careful to remember that we don't just sell weekend breaks, we sell Brilliant Weekends and as more and more opportunities and markets open up to us we are still determined to provide the same buzz and excitement as we ourselves felt during those pioneering days just 60 months ago 1000 miles away in deepest darkest Umbria."
to be continued...
Richard
