I have heard of bathing in champagne. I have heard of covering the bed in red rose petals. But cleaning the sports car with Evian water? Who would do that?
William Hindmarch is that man. Let me tell you how it happened. Back in 1999 he was on a family holiday in Dubai and as he walked through the airport he noticed a sports car on a display stand. Buy a ticket, and you could win the car. A simple enough idea, and if it worked in Dubai, why not try it in London? Hindmarch has the entrepreneurial spirit. His father, Michael, built up a company that made plastic plant pots, and his sister Anya, who is famous for her designer handbags, opened her first shop at the age of nineteen. So Hindmarch, then twenty-five, approached BAA, who agreed to let him trial the idea at Heathrow.
Hindmarch bought a Porsche, drove it to Terminal 4, and then set about giving it a clean. Being an entrepreneur is all about overcoming problems and at this point Hindmarch was confronted by an unusual one. He was unable to get his bucket under any of the taps in Terminal 4’s cloakrooms. Desperate times call for desperate remedies. So the following morning, when the first passengers arrived at the departure lounge, the Porsche was gleaming with the sheen of Evian water. ‘Mind you,‘ said Hindmarch, ’it cost me a fortune.’ It is not something that he has had to repeat. Now his company, Best of the Best employs teams of people in fourteen airport terminals, including the first one overseas at Copenhagen, and they take care of the car cleaning and everything else.
It sounds like a simple, but crazy idea. And yet it works. Here is how. Every month a new car is put on the stand. The number of people passing through the UK’s airport terminals is pretty constant from week to week although, terrifyingly, the Department of Transport predicts that the number is set to double to 500 million over the next twenty years. There is something about being in an airport that seems to make us all free with our cash. Maybe it is the holiday mood. Maybe it is because many travellers are wealthy or are on business expenses. Or maybe it is just the need to somehow pass that tedious hour or two.
Spot the Porsche
Whatever, there are plenty of car enthusiasts who will happily nose around a smart new car while they are killing time. What Hindmarch’s team has to do is to make sure they buy a ticket. ‘Our sales people are crucial,’ he told me. ‘They are probably the biggest determinant of our success.’
What the sales team has to do is persuade travellers to buy a ticket that costs £20, and then to play a ‘Spot The Ball’ competition, running a mouse over a footballing image and clicking on the likely spot. This, by the way can also be done via Best of the Best’s web-site. At the end of four weeks, a professional referee is called upon to adjudicate where he thinks the ball would be, the winner is identified and the car delivered - to anywhere in the world.
There could hardly be a simpler business model than this. Best of the Best pays for the site by giving the airport owner a share of turnover, with a minimum guarantee. It pays its staff, now numbering about seventy in total. It buys the car. And it sells more than enough tickets to cover the cost of all this and generate a healthy profit.
BA is so impressed that it owns 14% of the company’s shares, which are traded on AIM under the ticker BEST.L. Hindmarch himself owns 47%, and from his small office in Parsons Green he is plotting Best of the Best’s expansion. The business has been tested at other centres with high ‘foot fall’- for instance the Bluewater shopping mall, but none can match the unique ambience of a departure lounge. The wealthy travellers, the time and money to burn - and also the support of the terminal operators who want to turn the tedium of boarding a plane into something more glitzy.
So the most likely avenue of expansion is through airports overseas, and Hindmarch is on the case. With the business forecast to make a profit of over £1m this year, he can afford a few overseas marketing trips. And, if the need should ever arise again, he can afford a few more crates of Evian water. This is definitely one to watch...
Regards,
Tom Bulford
for The Penny Sleuth
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