RateMyPlacement assists students from all degrees find a role that fits them working closely with Universities and employers across the UK
Eureka Moment
"You've got a wonderful business with great potential, if you believe in it, it needs your time."
said to us by Dragons Den star Peter Jones at the final of the 2008 Unipreneurs Competition. This was our Eureka moment.
Four of us had started RateMyPlacement.co.uk in 2007 during our final year at Loughborough University whilst we were also holding down full time graduate jobs in our spare time.
Peter Jones changed all that. To have him say this was so empowering and gave us such confidence to step into the unknown.
Two weeks later, Ali & I had both resigned from our graduate jobs. With £4k in savings between us and working from our parents' back bedrooms, we set upon a scary but incredibly exciting journey together working full time on RateMyPlacement.
Finance
In 2010 we received £150k from angel investors and grew the business by investing in people and products purely from retaining profits. In 2022 we completed a debt-funded management buy out, allowing us to give our angel investors a thank you whilst enabling some of our fantastic leadership team to buy in and have ownership of the business.
Regrets
Not doing the management buy out sooner! The positive impact it's had on 100% shareholders working on the business has been phenomenal, and it's exciting being on a new but very similar journey with the people we work with every day.
What would you have changed?
We've built fantastic media and service-led products that are people heavy and therefore harder to scale. We're increasingly involving technology to enable our products to be more efficient, scalable and to provide a more streamlined service. We wish we'd started with more of a tech mindset, but we were only students at the time so we can't be too hard on ourselves!
