Alchemists made the Grades

'There are two things in life you never get any training for - one is being a parent, the other is running a business," says Paul Campbell.

The father-of-two has enjoyed the highs and lows of both, but in business, he has been helped by some of the North-East's leading entrepreneurs.

Mr Campbell is the man behind Amazing Grades, a company that has helped thousands of A-level students through their exams.

"I was running an online lifestyle business in London when I had a conversation with a headteacher who said: 'Why is there no dedicated information on the Internet for A-level students?'.

"The problem is, if you type King Lear in to the Google search engine, you get 244,000 hits, and top of the list is someone's personal site."

Mr Campbell devised a system in which teachers picked out a handful of relevant and accurate websites that schools and pupils could trust and access quickly, saving them hours of surfing the Internet.

"For about two years, it was funded from my other business," he said. "It was on the back burner. It was one of those businesses I did but I wasn't wholly sure why."

His lifestyle company was established, but he wanted to get away from a service industry with no recurring revenue, and despite seeing growth potential in Amazing Grades, he was convinced there was much greater scope for the business. He turned his back on his job, moved to Newcastle, and concentrated on Amazing Grades.

Mr Campbell said: "It was financially painful, and it was a hell of a risk, but there was no alternative but to do it, really. All my ambition and all my logic was pointing in that direction. It is partly a process of elimination - you think 'What am I doing at the moment? How sustainable is that? And, can I still be doing it in three years time, or in ten years time? Do I want to be still doing it in ten years time?' When the answers to most of those questions are 'No', you think 'What are the alternatives?'."

He went to see The Alchemists, an organisation that chooses successful business people to act as mentors to entrepreneurs hoping to improve their businesses.

A series of meetings helped to clarify what he was doing with Amazing Grades and gave his business plan some structure.

With a rueful smile, Mr Campbell recalled those meetings: "I was roundly abused in four-hour meetings by a lot of business people."

Despite this, he views the experience as a positive one: "The Alchemists is about getting completely dispassionate people looking at your business from the bottom up. I started thinking more strategically about what I wanted to do with the business."

He decided to take the core idea behind Amazing Grades - an educational tool delivered by the Internet - to create a number of other lines.

He was introduced to Warwick Brindle, director of the Brindle Stewart Partnership, by Lucy Armstrong, chief executive of The Alchemists.

Mr Brindle was responsible for the creation of Scotsman online when he was managing director of Scotsman Publications and was senior vice-president of Thomson Newspapers in North America and chief executive officer of Thomson Newspaper (US) New Media Division.

After many hours of meetings and soul searching and the occasional angry word, the result was the Amazing Group. The new business plan was to take the original Grades concept and adapt it to cover a range of e-learning courses, online assessments and other areas of education and training.

Mr Brindle admits to not knowing a thing about Amazing Grades before meeting Mr Campbell: "It is better that way," he said. "If you take on other people's perceptions, it is problematic."

"You have to be very cynical about the idea because that is what breaks the scaffolding. You have to ask people how committed they are to the idea. I try to take the scaffolding away from them so you see their commitment. With Paul, he's dedicated to the concept of building a business and surrounding himself with people that are dedicated to that concept."

Mr Campbell said: "The most important sentence I have ever heard about business was 'Don't work in your business, work on your business'.

"You see so many examples of people who run small businesses, but actually, they are run by their business, and they can never get that sense of 'Hang on a minute, what is wrong with this business?'. I now spend every Friday at home to catch up on paperwork and to think."

The metamorphosis from Grades to Group has been a learning experience for both men.

Mr Brindle said: "If you are in company where you are bouncing ideas off each other, then those transfer to me and I transfer those to others, and that is the greatest thing that I get out of it."

The Alchemists has helped 22 businesses in the past 18 months and has worked with more than 30 mentors.

Ms Armstrong said: "This is a bespoke service for fast growing, already successful businesses where they are taking a clear step-change in scale and ambition. That will only be for a few businesses."

She uses Mr Campbell's parenting analogy to explain why the companies The Alchemists will help are so limited:

"A baby very quickly starts telling you what it wants, and actually the business does too. You have the option to be a listening parent or a deaf one. There is more of a tendency for the non-listening parent in the North-East."

When I asked Mr Campbell what he gained from the Alchemists experience, he said: "The future. I know what we want to do now and I am much clearer about how to achieve it. There is a lot more focus, there is a lot more strategy and also a plan.

"It was imponderable before. It was driving me mad because I thought, 'Why have I spent two-thirds of a million pounds on this when I am not quite sure what to do with it?'

"I just felt stupid, actually, and annoyed with myself. Now, by contrast, if feels as though that wasn't wasted.

"Not only that, it has spawned a much bigger idea with vast potential.

"It is a sense of liberation to think that I have finally got my hands around something that I have been striving for for some time."