THE first entrepreneurial idea that came to Daniel Laurence never got off the drawing board. At the age of 17 he had an idea for a bag that could carry a water bottle strapped to your leg. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find anyone to manufacture the bags and had to abandon the project.

Years later, an idea that came to him while teaching led to the creation of a successful business making and marketing award stickers.

Laurence grew up on a council estate in Bromley, Kent, with two brothers. After leaving school he did a chemistry degree at Aston university and then obtained a postgraduate teacher-training certificate — his father had been a teacher. Laurence spent two years teaching at an inner-city boys’ school before deciding it was time to leave.

“I looked at some of the people in the school and thought I don’t want to end up here in 20 years’ time. I didn’t think it was fair on the kids or myself,” he said.

During his time teaching he created a wall-sized periodic table and wrote a book on chemistry demonstrations, so when he left he decided to try selling them to schools using direct mail.

He also developed an idea he had tried out as a teacher — of using award stickers to mark a pupil’s good work.

He said: “I used to hate marking books and so I had the idea of a sticker I could just stick by the work they got a merit for.”

Laurence started printing stickers on an ink-jet printer in his spare room at home and sold his first box to the school he used to work for. Each sticker was round and had the name of the school and the subject it was awarded for, as well as a graphic.

It was, however, hard to find a printer that would do all these things without making errors.

“I had no printing experience and no idea about software packages so I had to go round PC World trying to find one that would do circular text,” he said. “I had sheets of blank stickers that were slightly smaller than A5 so I went through nine laser printers — bless PC World because they took each one back — until eventually I got one that would take a sheet smaller than A5.”

His persistence paid off and in the first month of trading he sold £3,000 of products, racking up sales of £186,000 in the first year. He did not do quite so well dealing with the paperwork — after four months his accountants realised he had been sending out Vat invoices with no Vat number on them.

He soon realised that his stickers were far outselling his other products so he dropped everything else. Then, after a year of printing at home, Laurence moved into serviced offices. He got a £10,000 overdraft from the bank and brought in a business partner, Richard Monday, to help him sort out his invoices, giving him 50% of the business.

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