IF YOU'VE ever thought there must be a more rewarding way to earn a crust than the daily grind of a nine-to-five job, or climbing aboard a crowded commuter train five days a week, then this story is for you. In 1999, Jeff Hume and Tonya Hills were young professionals with successful careers - Jeff worked for BT, Tonya was with Lloyds of London. However, sick of commuting to London to work for big companies, they traded their well-paid, secure jobs to start their own venture, a web design and e-business company called A Recipe for Success. While some people might consider setting up a ebusiness venture risky in the wake of the dot.com crash, and at a time when many small web design businesses are still struggling, it's a risk that has certainly paid off for Jeff and Tonya. Five years and a lot of hard work later, A Recipe for Success has lived up to its own name. Jeff and Tonya - partners in life as well as business - have gone from a team of two to employing a team of 18 people. The company - profitable virtually since the day it opened for business - is turning over more than £500,000 annually. The fledgling business has come of age, outgrowing its start-up location inside the Suffolk Enterprise Centre, in the heart of Ipswich Docks, and Jeff and Tonya are contemplating a move to bigger premises in the technology precinct under development at Ransomes Europark. A Recipe for Success has a client base that stretches from Yorkshire to the East Midlands to London, and comprises a mix of small and medium size businesses, major technology companies, local and regional government, and education and training organisations. The firm's core activities are e-business consultancy and development of software for the internet. A Recipe for Success provides e-business solutions that enable companies to maximise the full potential of their websites and use the internet to run their businesses more cost-effectively and efficiently.

Using customised internet technology to perform business functions, such as trading, customer service, marketing, business-tobusiness and communications, usually translates into considerable cost savings. One client, a seed company, has dramatically reduced the need for printed catalogues by posting them on the web and enabling customers to order and pay online. Another, a holiday cottages operator in the Yorkshire Dales, has achieved the same by enabling guests to view its brochure and book online. "Many of our customers are grappling with the same issues," said Jeff. "They know what they should be doing, but they don't know how to do it. That's where the consultancy side of our business comes in. "Each customer gets something unique and customised to what their business needs to achieve. We're driven by best practice - if companies spend a pound with us, they'll get more than a pound back in benefits. We make sure they make the most out of their websites." The potential for e-business to streamline business transactions across a broad range of sectors is enormous, particularly for companies interested in exporting. "A lot of our customers are becoming exporters, but it's not viable for them to set up an office in every country they export to," said Jeff. "However, they can do it with the internet." It was a belief in their ability to do a better job than many of the contractors and consultants they encountered in their corporate careers that provided some of the impetus for Jeff and Tonya to strike out on their own. "We saw a lot of projects being done by companies not very well," said Jeff. "Looking at what people were paying to get rubbish implemented, we realised that if we could do it well there was a living to be made." At first Tonya worked parttime on A Recipe for Success and continued to commute to London a couple of days a week. Eventually, she gave up her job at Lloyds to concentrate on the new venture and Jeff followed not long after.

Through their contacts, Jeff and Tonya teamed up with a web designer and secured four clients to get the business started. For a period of about three years they won just about every industry and technology award going. "We had a deliberate policy of targeting projects that we knew could become national case studies, " said Jeff. "We saw it as a way of raising our profile. BT, TXU, local authorities and regional government all came to us as a result of that visibility." A Recipe for Success now has more than 50 industry awards to show for its efforts, including the IP-City Technology Award in the 2003 Anglia Business Awards, the 2003 National Business Award for Best Use of Technology and the 2004 European Seal of Excellence in Multimedia. The company has developed an area of specialisation in egovernment and has been involved in two local projects - the Suffolk Portal Project and the Suffolk Digital Pathfinder Project, a pilot project designed to enable people who do not have access to a computer to use the internet via satellite digital interactive TV. "We've grown a lot," said Jeff. "When we first started everyone was a contractor and we had no permanent employees because work flow was up and down. Everyone could work from home on an extranet and it was all very flexible." Jeff and Tonya have worked hard to retain that flexibility. After all, what frustrated them about working for big companies was their inflexibility, the slow pace at which decisions seemed to be made and lack of control over the direction in which the company was travelling. Their team is made up of a mix of permanent full timers, parttime staff and freelancers, who, to a large extent, control their own working hours. However, like many small businesses in the developmental phase, rapid growth has forced Jeff and Tonya to adapt the way they run their business, perhaps curbing some of that early free spiritedness and embracing a new sense of responsibility. "In the first two years it was dead easy," said Jeff. "It was just us and a few contractors. But when you start employing people there's a new level of complexity and professionalism. You can't run it as a hobby business if you are paying people who have mortgages to pay. You have to be more professional and responsible for them.

"In the first three years we could have shut the company down if necessary and paid everyone off. Now the company has a life of its own. It becomes this thing you're sitting at the back of, hopefully steering it in the right direction. "You're learning a lot of skills, doing things you never get to do in a big company - marketing, sales, buying commercial property, learning how government works." Asked if he ever thought he'd be running his own company, Jeff 's response is "probably not". He admits that, once the company took off, it was quite a shock to discover that, unlike in a big company, there was no safety net for a small business. Running a business meant standing by your own decisions and was far from a nine-to-five job, but involved evenings networking and weekends catching up on paperwork. "Business breakfasts and being nice to people before eight o'clock just isn't my strong point," he said. But with the company well established, Jeff is now aiming for future growth through the development and marketing of its proprietary e-business tool e-KIS (Keep It Simple), which was developed initially as a tool to help Jeff and Tonya run their own business more efficiently. e-KIS is designed to enable companies self-sufficient when it comes to maintaining and developing their own websites, rather than having to engage designers at considerable cost to make relatively minor changes, such as prices in an e-catalogue or photos in an e-brochure. The company will market two versions, one for designers to help them make more dynamic, interactive websites for clients and another for IT managers running company IT departments to enable them to perform regular site maintenance.

The plan for the next 18 months is to build a network of resellers throughout the UK and sell e-KIS under licence. "It's a crowded market, but we're going on the useability of our product for non-technical people," said Jeff. "People don't have to go on a training course to use it - you install it and forget about it." In the longer term - the next five to 10 years - Jeff is not looking for massive growth for the company. "We don't want to be bigger than 25 people," he said. "What should happen is that e-KIS becomes a company in its own right and A Recipe for Success continues as a consultancy. I would hope that by that time we would have work in Europe and would have e-KIS resellers in Europe too. "If you like, Phase A is continue with A Recipe for Success, phase B is develop the resellers network for e-KIS and phase C is Bill Gates buys us!" While it might not be Bill Gates who comes along tempted by the prospect of picking up an innovative, highly skilled company, flourishing in the mainstream in e-business technology, there have already been others who have made an approach. But, said Jeff: "We're not ready, we still have too much to do."

As featured in the East Anglian Daily Times Suffolk Business magazine July 2004. Words by Jayne Lindill