SHILDON-BASED ENTREPRENEURS PUT ‘BUMS ON SEATS’

Two entrepreneurs from County Durham have teamed up to launch a new website for training providers, designed to fill up those few spare places on courses across the North East.

Craig Fantarrow and John Patrick have set up HelpTrainingCourses.com, which will be launched fully next month with the aim of allowing companies and individuals to snap up remaining training course places at a discount instead of them going to waste.

“We were friends as kids before losing touch, but we got back in contact years later when John started working for another local business nearby,” explained Craig, who also ready runs a successful training company called Help! First Aid Training and came up with the idea for the new website through trying to find ways to fill remaining few spare places on his own training courses.

“When you’re holding a training course, the overheads are already paid – so you may as well fill the places at a discount rather than get no return. Filling the spaces last minute at a discount is better than leaving seats empty.

“Our aim is to help get bums on seats. We’re already getting lots of interest and so we are really pleased that the hard work we’ve put in over the last few months is starting to pay off. We’ve had great feedback from early users of the site and the number of training providers on the site is continually increasing but we need to keep building on that.”

John owns a software development and consultancy firm, Actuance Consulting, and builds bespoke software and web applications so was able to put his web acumen to good use. As well as creating the website, he had previously developed a custom search application and found that the same system could be applied to training courses.

“What makes us unique is that nobody else offers last minute training course bookings as well as course advertising. We’ve also came up with some innovative features to make searching for training easier for the end user and added a way of sponsoring searches that we have never seen in this industry.”

“People can find the right course without having to know the exact keyword or locations – our system does all the hard work and that’s resulted in us developing a site that helps people find the right courses at a bargain.

“It's great to see the last few months' effort finally public but this is definitely the start of a process, not the end. We have loads more ideas for this site and for the moment we're listening carefully to our customers and building little extras that they're asking for. I think that the listening and refinement stage is really important. It's so easy to dream up potential new features but sometimes filtering that a little and prioritising on what people really want to use is what counts.”

HelpTrainingCourses.com will be officially launched on Wednesday, 14th July at Locomotion: The National Railway Museum in Shildon, where training providers in the North East will be able to find out more about the website.

At the event, training providers can buy search phrases from as little as £20, while it is free to register your company and set up a company profile to advertise on the website as money is made from search engine phrase sales.

Craig and John plan to employ a small team of three once the business is established, before aiming to expand the website to cover other regions of the UK.