Enterprise Nation

Congratulations to Steph and Paul Savill! They are winners of our Home Business Couple of the Year. They win a stay at the luxury Cotswold Water Park Four Pillars Hotel. A nice treat to reward them for the hard work they put in to the business!  

FOXY Lady Drivers Club

How are you promoting your business, being efficient and increasing your profitability?

Promoting - Our website helps us punch above our weight! I also write a blog, a motoring review and Steph's Motoring tips all about motoring from a female perspective. We use a PR service for keyword news to help with SEO. Being a unique support service with a huge potential market helps but it is also a hindrance because women don't know what we do and our marketing budget is limited!

We focus on three female segments; Women in Business, Community Mums and Solos, setting up special deals with large organisations and employers. We work with leading industry suppliers to add value to their female friendly sales proposition, we have a CSR strategy that makes us feel good and we are talking to Government bodies about ways we can reduce motoring emissions. I am happy to speak at trade conferences, business and WI meetings to spread the FOXY message.

Efficiency - We are now a totally online business which makes us flexible and quick to respond to change. Membership benefits are scaleable so we handle volume with relative ease. Members use a password protected area of our website to download discount vouchers, see the latest deals and contact the helpdesk service for advice or support. At the end of July our website traffic was up 67% on 2007.

Profitability - This is all about volume. Whilst we break even on operating costs (with some 10,000 members) we plan for many more and our profitability then rises dramatically. An unexpected spin off is that we saw the demand for an associated B2B website where female friendly businesses can promote themselves to motorists. This launched to the trade last Friday (www.foxychoice.com) is a totally commercial challenge and contains a high profit element. No other business is doing anything like this in the UK motor industry or for women and it's happening in an ordinary home in rural Sussex.

How are you successfully combining your business with your domestic life and maintaining a healthy environment both in and out of your home office?

Paul and I are proud of what we have achieved so far and this makes us happy. We bring different talents to the party. I have the marketing and sales background whereas Paul is the IT systems and database expert with an encyclopedic motoring mind.

We both need our own space of course (upstairs and downstairs) but make time for a laugh at the end of the day. We are mostly here for our 15 year old son and can choose the hours we work to suit the need and family commitments. The need is great at present because we have our latest venture to nurture, but we both love that buzz....

We take short breaks as often as we can to recharge our batteries, enjoy family camping during the summer months, keep in touch with friends and are avid cinema-goers and readers... Otherwise we are just a normal family with quite a few PCs dotted around the place! We are lucky to be able to walk into our local village and support the High Street shops (and pubs...). Spare time is a real luxury and we try not to waste it.

How are you making the most of technology to improve your business and your lifestyle?

We wouldn't be here without technology as the business set up costs for something as different as FOXY would have been prohibitive. Not only that, but technology gives us serious advantage as we grow, compared to bigger, richer clubs with more traditional HQ and staff overheads.

We decided on Open Source systems for strategic advantage from Day One; our helpdesk and sales team work from their homes using VOIP/Skype; we can set up business anywhere and are becoming increasingly sophisticated with simple email marketing. This makes us financially lean and quick to react to change. We use many Google products, like Alerts and Analytics and our branded FOXY shop is hosted by Amazon.

TomTom stops us from wasting fuel or getting lost and mobile devices keep us in touch when we are away from home. Oh that we had more time to learn new business applications to improve matters further!

PS: Were you to ask our son about technology in our lifestyle he'd be quick to tell you that the Wii sports console and BBC iPlayer are popular items in our home!!

• FOXY Lady Drivers Club