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A 25-year-old haulage website entrepreneur has won his second business award this year, bringing him more than £100,000 in prize money.
The latest award for Robert Matthams, 25, was £10,000 last week as the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year, but his company, Shiply.com, has already won 100,000 euros (£90,000) in the Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Challenge.
"We have done rather well in competitions this year," says Matthams.
Shiply.com is a website that links up hauliers who are running partially or fully empty with potential customers. It claims that this has huge environmental benefits, because it decreases the amount of empty running wherever it is used.
The site has 5,500 UK hauliers registered, and Matthams says that by the end of its second year of business, which ends in April 2010, he expects it to have a turnover of £500,000.
"We are growing by 20% month on month," he reveals.
There are no sign-up fees for hauliers, but Shiply takes a percentage of the fee, on a sliding scale from 9.9% for the smaller loads to 3.4% for the biggest.
Matthams says that the benefit to hauliers is that if they get a load from Shiply.com, their running costs do not increase at all because they are doing the journey anyway.
"From a haulier's point of view, the extra money they get from work through us is pure profit," he says.
Matthams is originally from near Brighton, but Shiply.com's offices are in London and Manchester.
The company has just established a similar operation in Germany, with 300 transport firms signed up, and there are plans to do the same in the Netherlands.