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Obese people in the north east town of Stockton on Tees are less likely to pop diet pills than anywhere else in the UK – data released today has revealed.

With more Britons then ever before turning to pills to help them lose weight the UK’s first ever weight loss supplement league table has just been published.

The table – reflecting the UK sales of leading organic weight loss supplement Proactol – reveals that dieters across the length and breadth of Britain are seeking help to shed the pounds.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the UK’s largest cities make up the top of the table with more Londoners turning to Proactol for help than anywhere else in Britain. Dieters in Manchester and Birmingham are also buying Proactol in bulk while Scotland’s largest city Glasgow comes fourth in the table ahead of Sheffield in fifth place.

Perhaps the biggest surprise comes at the foot of the table – with Stockton on Tees being revealed as having fewer Proactol customers than anywhere else in the country - data which flies in the face of the stereotypical fish and chip loving Teesider image.

Entrepreneur and star of TV’s Dragon’s Den Duncan Bannatyne made his first fortune selling ice cream in Stockton – but it seems his former customers still aren’t seeking help to lose weight.

Cornish pasty munching Penzance also fares well in the table and ice cream loving Scarborough also features in the ten places with fewer Proactol customers than anywhere else in the UK.

And Wales seems to have less of an obesity problem than England, Scotland or Northern Ireland according to the data – with four Welsh places in the ten UK wide locations with the fewest Proactol customers.

Proactol product manager Katie Downing-Howitt said the company advocated a healthy lifestyle as a strategy for weight loss.

She said: “Our sales have risen steadily over the past couple of years as more and more people acknowledge they need some help to shift their excess weight.

“The majority of our customers do come from Britain’s largest cities and there is a pretty even spread across the whole of the UK.

“But I was surprised to see so many Welsh towns in our bottom ten as I have seen research which said Wales had a real obesity problem. If I’m honest I wasn’t expecting Stockton on Tees to have fewer customers than anywhere else. Where are all Stockton’s obese people? It’s a mystery.”

She added that Melton Mowbray was a further surprise. The Leicestershire town famous for its pork pies had a low number of Proactol customers and narrowly missed out on a place in the product’s bottom ten. For more information please visit www.Proactol.co.uk 

The league table top 20:

1. London

2. Manchester

3. Birmingham

4. Glasgow

5. Sheffield

6. Edinburgh

7. Bristol

8. Leeds

9. Belfast

10. Nottingham

11. Coventry

12. Liverpool

13. Cardiff

14. Newcastle upon Tyne

15. Southampton

16. Leicester

17. Milton Keynes

18. Hull

19 Oxford

20. Bolton

And the ten locations with the fewest Proactol customers:

1. Stockton-on-Tees

2. Ludlow

3. Flint

4. Workington

5. Wrexham

6. Nantwich

7. Caernarfon

8. Penzance

9. Scarborough

10 Brecon

ENDS

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Steve McComish

The London PR Agency

020 7193 0566

steve@LondonPRagency.com

Children as young as ten are increasingly taking diet pills to help them lose weight, it was claimed today.

The team behind fat binding supplement Proactol claimed they are seeing increasing demand from customers wanting to purchase the product for their children.

Britain has the highest childhood obesity rate in Europe with more than a quarter of 2 – 15 year olds being classed as overweight according to research.

Now it seems an increasing number of parents are shunning exercise and turning to dietary supplements to help their offspring shed their excess pounds.

Proactol, one of the UK’s leading fat binding products, is safe for youngsters aged 12 and over being 100 per cent organic. It combines with dietary fat in the stomach and helps prevent absorption and storage of fatty deposits in the body.

It is sold mainly online and through a telephone sales system – meaning customers must have a bank account or credit card to purchase.

Proactol’s marketing manager Katie Downing Howitt said the company had noticed an increasing number of parents were attempting to place orders for their children.

She said: “Proactol is an ethical company and we do not recommend our product for children. Our customer service team actively encourage selling the product to over 18s only. When people mention that they are buying the product for their children we refuse to process their orders.

“Proactol has been tested as safe for over 12s but we recommend that only those aged 18 and above take it. We definitely do not encourage children to take it.

“As our customers need a credit card to purchase the product they have to be at least 18. We know from our market research that more than 12% of those who take Proactol are under the age of 20.

“We are hearing anecdotally from our sales team that an increasing number of parents are coming on the phones wanting to buy Proactol for their children. We have had one mother who wanted to buy the product for her ten year old daughter. We refused her request but it is difficult to know how much of an isolated case that is.

“We would urge all parents to encourage their children to eat a healthy balanced diet and take plenty of exercise before turning to a fat binder such as Proactol.”

Britain’s obesity time bomb is one of the biggest problems facing the NHS in the coming decades.

Obesity increases the risk of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes which is normally a disease seen in later life in adults. However, increasingly children in their teens are presenting with type 2 diabetes as a consequence of being obese. There are also marked psychological effects leading to low self-esteem.

In the UK, around two millions youngsters - 27 per cent of all children - are now overweight and 700,000 of these are classed as obese. Research suggests the main problem is a continual reduction in the amount of exercise children take along with other factors such as poor diets.

The problem is more pronounced in girls than boys – 25% of girls are overweight compared with 20% of boys.

High-calorie foods such as chocolates, sweets and fast food are cheap and readily available to children. Alongside this, physical activity and exercise are no longer a part of most children’s days - some children never walk or cycle to school. Many of them spend hours in front of a television or computer rather than playing sport outside of school.

Children with overweight parents are much more likely to become overweight than the offspring of skinny mums and dads.

According to a recent report by the International Obesity Task Force, there are already over 4,000 British children with Type 2 diabetes symptoms. 58,000 have bad glucose tolerance.

The report stated: “With fewer and fewer playing fields in the UK, in comparison to ten or twenty years ago, British children are becoming less physically active at school. Add to this the change in eating habits among young children, and the reasons for this growing childhood obesity problem becomes evident. British children are eating more and more of the wrong foods and doing less and less exercise. The number of hours children spend either watching TV or sitting in front of some kind of screen at home has increased.”

ENDS

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Steve McComish

Pressman PR Ltd  tel: 01159648214

Thousands of British businesses up and down the country have been recently forced to learn some harsh lessons about operating during a recession.

But for Richard Seel, MD at Xact Document Solutions Ltd, the challenges of the credit crunch have been secondary to the battle his company has waged for the past four years as they fought their way out of a CVA (Creditors Voluntary Arrangement).

Seel’s company sells Xerox printing equipment throughout the UK. It began life as Xera-Logic Ltd in 1993. Seel, a former Xerox executive, left the print giant to set up a firm devoted solely to selling his former employer’s products. Together with a partner who has since retired, Seel took on the exclusive rights to sell Xerox products in first Lincolnshire and later Nottinghamshire.

Xera-Logic thrived with support from Xerox who had encouraged talented young execs like Seel to go it alone as a means of developing their sales channels. In the first three years of operation Xera-Logic was named Xerox partner of the year and Seel watched happily as the profits rolled in.

His success was rewarded in 2002 when Xerox encouraged Seel to sell a wider range of products – something that was only given to an exclusive number of top Xerox sellers. That same year, with Seel’s original business partner Wally Welford now retired, Seel brought in one of his former colleagues at Xerox to help him manage the growing business.

Dave Rollo had been instrumental in setting up Xerox Facilities Management in 1990 – a division which had gone on to be one of the most lucrative arm of the print giant’s business. Rollo had been responsible for the division’s Midlands area – which alone had a turnover of £36m by 1995.

After taking early retirement from Xerox Rollo joined Xera-Logic Ltd as Business Manager and he and Seel began to eye opportunities for expansion.

Seel says: “We looked at the map and saw that no one was doing very much for Xerox up in Scotland. We knew there was a lot of potential up there and we decided to tap into that.”

With Xerox’s blessing the pair set up Xera-Logic (Scotland) Ltd, appointing a management team to run the business out of Edinburgh. The move appeared to be a great success in the early days but over time it became apparent that not everything was quite as rosy as it seemed.

Seel says: “I was spending a lot of time in Scotland and that meant I took my eye off the ball down in the Midlands which was my core business.”

But the real problems began when Seel and Rollo learned their management team in Scotland had negotiated with Xerox to break away and launch their own business.

Seel says: “It was a low point. We had to wind up our Scottish operation and only when we came to do that did we become fully aware of the level of debt within the company.”

Xerox continued to support Xera-Logic in their original territories of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire but (Xera-Logic Scotland) Ltd ceased trading.

“There was a high level of debt which we had to absorb.” Seels says, “For a moment it wasn’t clear if we would be able to carry on. In the end we met with the creditors and decided to go for a CVA (Creditors Voluntary Agreement) and rebrand the company.

The move was approved in court with 100 per cent of all creditors voting in favour of a four year payback deal starting from December 2005.

Seel and Rollo were still in business, now trading as Xact Document Solutions Ltd, but the reality of running a business subject to a CVA soon hit home.

Rollo says: “A lot has been said about this recession we all find ourselves in right now but for us the credit crunch started in 2004.

“The CVA made it difficult to recruit good people and some companies wouldn’t deal with us because of it. Worst offenders were the finance companies who refused to enter credit agreements with us which meant our customers couldn’t buy expensive machines from us on credit.

“We had to focus on selling the stock which we held already – and there was quite a bit of that after what happened in Scotland. Slowly we turned it around. Each year the profits increased. But it was a real battle.”

Seel adds: “The CVA presented multiple challenges to trading. It makes borrowing impossible so everything has to be financed from cashflow. It effectively meant I was operating the business but I didn’t own it anymore.”

Thankfully Seel and Rollo’s years of successful business experience came to the fore. They paid back the last of their creditors in full in February this year – ten months earlier than necessary under the terms of their CVA.

Rollo says: “I do feel immensely proud of what we have achieved. Around 80% of businesses subject to a CVA fail in the first 12 months yet we have battled through and fought back to where we are today – all our creditors paid off and a turnover of £6.5m.”

For his part Seel focused on customer satisfaction and getting the fundamentals of the business correct.

He says, “It may be a cliché but it really was a case of going back to basics. Good customer service is the keystone of everything we have achieved as is having a strong team of talented people who feel a part of what we have done here and have helped us to turn things around.

“There are still plenty of challenges ahead. We want to sell more product through our website www.Xactuk.com where we can cut our costs and reach a much wider audience.

“What we have been through means we are now in a much stronger position than many other businesses who are only now struggling to come to terms with the problems of trading during a recession.”

ENDS

More info and images:

Steve McComish

London PR Agency

0115 9648214

steve@londonpragency.com

www.LondonPRagency.com

Starting your own business requires faith, resolve and steely determination so it’s no wonder many new businesses are founded as partnerships. At least in a partnership you have someone else you can turn to for enthusiasm, focus and commitment.

The strongest partnerships are those which bring together two or more complementary business brains, producing synergies which create an enterprise which is hugely ambitious in its aspirations.

But what happens if one partner suddenly decides the newly embarked upon entrepreneurial journey is not for them? What if they lose faith in the enterprise and choose to return to the land of the employee? Can the remaining partner push on without them and prove them wrong? Or would the loss of a co-founder deal such a confidence body-blow to a newly founded business that it would be impossible to continue?

It’s a situation which Teddy George found herself in last summer when her business partner Helen Jacobsen decided to leave George Jacobsen, the professional outsourcing company they had founded together at the end of 2007.

With backing from boutique investment bank Spayne Lindsay, Teddy and Helen had created a company which offered small and medium sized businesses the chance to build an operational structure without the headache of a high salary bill by outsourcing functions such as human resources and finance.

Teddy explains, “We provide support services to SMEs and professional partnerships. We make it easier for our clients to do what they do best and operate more efficiently with cost certainty.”

Both partners were thrilled when the business got off to a great start – quickly winning contracts with businesses in diverse sectors such as corporate finance and recruitment. But after just a few months of trading Helen announced that she wanted to leave.

Teddy says, “Helen decided to go off and do something completely different – she was given an opportunity to teach University students and felt she had to take it. In life you have to do the things you want to do so I understand her decision and there’s no bitterness there at all. But at the time it was definitely a blow.

“We had spent a whole year planning our business before launching it. We had extensively researched the market and put together our business plan. We incorporated at the end of 2007 and launched officially at the start of 2008.

“The business achieved success very quickly and we were able to pick up some wonderful clients. So when Helen said she wanted to leave after just seven months I was shocked.

“I actually couldn’t believe it at first but after a few moments I could see she was serious. It was painful at the time but I had to accept that she had an offer to pursue something which fulfilled her life’s ambition. But it turned out our ambitions were not aligned.

Teddy added that Helen’s decision to leave the business didn’t rock her own belief and commitment to the company – or her determination to make it a success.

“We had backing and some wonderful clients so I always knew we had a great business. But running a company is a roller coaster ride and it’s shocking how much one’s emotions can vary. Tiny triumphs make you feel euphoric while the smallest setbacks can be crushing.

“So when Helen left there was a feeling of, ‘Oh my God! What does this mean for me? It was a very unsettling time.

“It’s important to be honest with oneself in business and admit your own strengths and weaknesses. I knew my strengths but I was also aware that there were areas of running a business which were not my forte. So I was clear that it would not be something I could do on my own and decided that I would seek to bring in a new partner.”

Teddy began seeking recommendations and was eventually introduced to Melanie Simpson. The pair hit it off and Melanie became a partner in George Jacobsen in January of this year.

Teddy says, “We soon discovered that our skills complement one another’s perfectly. I come from a HR background while Mel has a great deal of experience of providing complex outsourcing solutions on a very large scale for blue chip companies both in the UK and throughout Europe.

“Not only do we get along, which is important, but we also have a similar ambition for the company. We both have exacting standards and have very high personal goals. It’s absolutely essential to have a business partner you can trust and I know I can do that with Mel. We’re both passionate about moving the company forward and building the business so it’s a very exciting time.”

More information about Teddy and Melanie’s company can be found at www.GeorgeJacobsen.com

ENDS

More info / images:

Steve McComish

The London PR Agency

020 7193 0566

steve@LondonPRagency.com

www.LondonPRagency.com