insideKENT Magazine Issue 45 - December 2015 | Page 166
BUSINESS
#VOOM
Kent business wins
Pitch to Rich 2015
interview with Fourex co-founder
Jeff Paterson
INTERVIEW BY LISAMARIE LAMB
Coming up with a good idea – or a great one
in the case of Jeff Paterson and Oliver du Toit
of Fourex – is often a case of realising there
is a problem and solving it. And that’s exactly
what these Kent-based entrepreneurs have
done. All that spare holiday change, all those
old coins that no one else wants, all that money
that we stash away in a drawer because
throwing away money is something no one
ever wants to do (certainly not in a literal sense)
can now be made into something useful.
Jeff Paterson and Oliver du Toit
From initial idea to winning Richard Branson’s
Pitch to Rich scheme, Fourex is soon to be a
household name. We caught up with one of its
founders, Jeff Paterson, to find out what went
right (and what happens next).
What gave you the idea for Fourex?
I think it was purely born out of the same
frustration that everybody else has, because I
had a whole pot of money in my drawer that
nobody was interested in exchanging – I think I
had about £500 worth of coins and notes just
lying at home that I couldn't do anything with.
So, we asked a couple of friends, and everybody
we spoke to had a similar problem, and we just
couldn't believe that there was nothing in the
market that could to what we wanted to do.
Can you explain a little about what the kiosks
do and how they’re used?
Basically, you have a jar of mixed money, the
kiosk adds it up and pays you out in pounds,
euros or dollars. So, it's not only a leftover
currency machine, it's a bureau de change, which
anybody from any country can use. It's currency
exchange on steroids.
What made you apply for the Pitch to Rich
scheme?
We'd knocked on a thousand doors to get finance
to do it, and everybody said to go and build ten
machines, put them out there, and if it works,
then we'll fund you.
That was no good to us then, so we crowdfunded and it just went crazy. We had 430
investors invest in us in under two weeks, and
we over-funded by 250%.
Sir Richard Branson, Jeff Paterson and Oliver du Toit
When Pitch to Rich came up, we thought,
well, you know what? If it works for the man on
the street, let's just give this a bash, and we
ended up winning it; it was amazing for us.
When you finally went to Richard Branson's
home and did your pitch, how did you feel
it went?
At the beginning of the pitch, Richard Branson
was asked what makes a good pitch? And he
said, you know, oh, a good bribe, and everybody
laughed. Part of my pitch was to give all the
judges a pot of money, because that was my
prop. So when I gave it to him, I said, “Richard,
I'm so glad you're up for a good bribe, because
I've got a pot of money for you.” When he took
the pot of money, he said no, I'll have the big
one, and I pulled it away from him and I said,
“No, Richard, come on. You've got more money
than all of the other guys. You can have a small
one.”
As I walked away I said to myself, “Ah Jeff,
you're such a *beep*,” and didn’t realise the
microphone was right next to my mouth and
everybody heard it.
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Embarrassing, but it broke the ice, and all of
the judges simply loved the business.
What has winning Pitch to Rich enabled you
to do that you couldn't do before? Where do
you see the company going?
We've recently closed the second round of
funding, which is several million pounds. We've
had interest from probably 20 countries around
the world to franchise this and we haven't even
got a machine up!
I recently met with someone from the Middle
East, who wants the rights to the whole of the
Middle East. That's Saudi, UAE, Bahrain – that's
a big contract for us. So the idea is that we work
with partners, they'll buy the machines and we'll
manage the software – that's the bigger picture
for us. We want to put 10,000 machines around
the world.
www.fourex.co.uk