Last week he took his PHP 5.3 Zend exam and passed, which now makes him a Zend Certified Engineer. Ollie’s 16th birthday is not until the end of July, so at just 15 years old I think he must be one of the Youngest Zend Engineers in the world. Do you know anyone younger? If so, leave us a comment.

We have set out our stall at the Graduate fair and, for our first attempt, we’re very pleased.  If you’re a student and are thinking of attending the event drop by and have a chat.

Fubra is on the hunt for content writers, marketing experts, project managers and in particular developers, to help us continue to grow and invest in the future. The only requirements are that they are highly motivated, ready for a challenge, and well suited to our friendly, supportive working environment.

You can find the Fubra stand in the Austin Pearce Building on the University of Surrey campus and we will be available to chat from 2pm to 5.30pm. For the more technically minded we’ll have developer quizes ready for you to rate your skills. Alternatively come and chat to our friendly marketing and content team about the great opportunities in a non-technical role.

Take a look at the benefits of becoming a Fubra employee…

• Flexible working hours
• Casual dress code
• Chill out room with XBOX 360 and cinema
• Free gym on site with unlimited access
• Awesome social events
• Generous funding for training and books
• Up to 10% company pension contributions
• Excellent profit share scheme
• Free bike – Cycle to work scheme
• Free on site car parking
• Your choice of Mac, PC or Linux
• Friendly, supportive working environment

If you’re unable to attend the fair but you still want to get in touch about the opportunities at Fubra then take a look at our careers page, or email paul@fubra.com.

The costume arrived, and on Monday 14th March, Nick came into work fully prepared (beard trimmed, hair in the style of Riker, facial expression toned and polished) and we handed over the costume, with instructions to make sure it got a lot of exposure. Take a look at the resemblance below. During the week Nick reluctantly willingly took part in the many embarrassing challenges we set for him, including  a trip to the bakery and into town. It turned out that people in Aldershot didn’t really bat an eyelid at the fact he was dressed as a Star Trek enthusiast!

Nick managed to raise £145 for Comic Relief – Well done Nick

Next on our agenda was getting the rest of the company involved. Seeing as we have an in house gym, we decided to take full advantage of it and organise an exercise-a-thon spanning over 9 hours. This involved us each taking part in a 30 minute cycle and 3, 10 minute stints on the rowing machine. Not only a great way to exercise but a way to take your mind off work for a while and get the endorphins flowing ensuring an even happier team!

The starting gun went and we all pedalled and rowed as much as we could being sure to keep track of how far we managed to get. As a company we covered 110 miles on the bike and over 57000 metres on the rowing machine, the equivalent of 2 London to Brighton bike rides and rowing from central London to the mouth of the River Thames.

As a few extras our Product & Marketing specialists Hannah Bird and Annie McLoughlin cooked up a storm to keep all the exercisers going, making ‘Red Nose Day’ themed cupcakes, cookies and a cheesecake. These were available for a small donation, and turned out to be very popular in the afternoon during the exercise for staff who needed a quick sugar injection. Combining the cakes, with the exercise-a-thon, pick a pose sweepstake and Nick’s Riker challenge we managed to raise over £350 for Comic Relief. A big thanks to everyone who took part. Any ideas for next year are very welcome!

Following on from our first decade of trading we find ourselves in an exciting place where we are not just helping to drive our own business growth, but also working closely with start-up companies, and investments we have made, to help them grow too. I’m confident there will be a lot more to learn as we apply what we have already learned, and we are certainly not short of challenges and great ideas.

When I set out to build Fubra, I had something to prove to other people. Some of those people had doubted me, but equally, others had believed in me. However, over time I realised this goal was not making me happy. My Dad, Paul and I have discussed at some length what we would like Fubra to do and stand for.

We have come up with 66 words which represent what we are going to do. What’s nice about them, for me, is that they are based on what we have most enjoyed doing at Fubra, and together I think they represent well, what we have built.

Others might call this a mission statement, but I prefer to call it “66 words”

Embrace change and seek long term growth by building radical, disruptive technologies.

Create excitement for our team, customers and suppliers by valuing curiosity, creativity and ambition.

Respect our customers by listening carefully to them and precisely understanding their needs.

Promote awareness by creating new interfaces for information that was previously difficult to access.

Invest our surplus resources equitably, with long term partners who share our values.

I couldn’t be more excited about having taken the time to think about our goals as a business, and codify them like this. It has taken us time to get round to it, but it’s a great feeling now we are here.

“Updating your site regularly gets you noticed, your competitors and clients may be watching, and when you update something it might get their attention and they’ll come look.”

They also listed a total of 19 tips on how to drive traffic to your blog, including these:

Fubra Bootcamp is a new way of hiring employees that we came up with and decided to try out to find out if we could achieve our hiring goals such as:

• Hire the best employees
• Hire people who want to stay with the company for the strong career prospects and don’t just want any old job
• Find hard working, smart, creative and individual people who are eager to learn new skills and be part of our growing company
• Increase employee retention through better assessment strategies
• Create a buzz around wanting to work at Fubra

Over the last month or so we have been busy here holding our first Fubra Bootcamp in which 5 potential employees were put through their paces competing for 3 spaces in our growing team as Online Marketing Assistants.

What does bootcamp involve?

Our selection process involved starting off with 60 applicants. We then decided on around 40 people who took our initial pre-interview test which was designed to test research and communication skills. Next was the interview stage, and around 20 applicants were invited to come to our offices in Aldershot, Hampshire for more assessments and a face to face interview allowing us the opportunity to get to know each person and find out what their skills were.

After much discussion we chose the 5 interviewees who had the attitude, skills and experience we were looking for and invited them to attend a one month trial period with us. At the end of the month’s trial they would be told whether they were to be offered a full time position or not and that they were competing for 3 positions that we had available.

The month’s trial involved training sessions in online marketing and advertising, brainstorming days, welcome lunches, halo playing and many other tasks based around determining where each persons skills lay and what they could bring to the company plus what we could offer them.

Why have a bootcamp?

You may wonder why we chose to hire people using this type of process, considering that this is not something that is usually the norm for most businesses.

Well, we did look into other routes as well, and one of them was hiring through the governments Apprenticeships scheme which seemed like a good opportunity to find talent among those who wanted to learn new skills as well as earn money which, in theory, should have been perfect. However, it turned out that this route was not suited to us at all due to the time and costs involved in dealing with the process and because the NVQ courses on offer alongside the job were not really related very well to our work. It seemed that there were going to be a lot of hoops to jump through in order to show that we were “training” the students properly, according to the NVQ syllabus. However, the training that we were required to cover would have actually been far too simple to be beneficial to the job role or in fact, to the student. We do think that Apprenticeships are a great idea in principle and could bring a lot of people back to work, but really they could be run so much better if the emphasis was put on to the employer to come up with a training program and syllabus covering skills related to their industry which was then approved by the governing body.

Another option was just to hire people based on the popular C.V. filtering, plus one or sometimes two interview process that is adopted successfully by many companies. We have tried this before and found that, whilst first impressions undoubtedly count for a lot, it has proven very hard for us to find the best suited people with such a short character assessment which can often turn out to be a false judgement by even the best of assessors due to the environment of the typical interview and the fact that anything will be said in order to impress and secure the job. This can lead to a bad decision being made by both the interviewee and the employer about whether the role is suitable for the candidate.

So we came up with the Bootcamp process to give both us and the potential employees a chance to get on the job experience, get to know everyone, learn new skills and be assessed over a whole month. This allowed room for discovering whether the 5 candidates were really suited to the job and to the company as a whole which we see as just as important to the development of each individual and their career with us.

What was the outcome?

Bootcamp was completed on Wednesday 31st March 2010, after a lot of suspense about who would be offered a full time position with us and overall has been a great success. We are now very happy to welcome to our team Hannah Bird, David Pomonis and Ricky Dawn who are our new Online Marketing Assistants and will be working alongside the whole team to improve the traffic, visibility and buzz around our network of websites.

A big thanks also go out to the candidates who didn’t make it through at the end of the month, it was an extremely hard decision to make and Warren Tilley and Ben Egan also did an excellent job in their time with us.

This whole process has been a successful one for both us and our new team members as we have both had a chance to get to know each other and they have been able to get an understanding of the job that needs to be done to find out if it suits them.

Everybody came up with some great results across their tasks and we are really happy to have such creative, enthusiastic and hard working people in our team and look forward to getting on with their first task of working on increasing the profile and profitability of our Airport Guides network in time for the summer travel season!

Congratulations to Hannah, Ricky and Dave we all look forward to working closely with you all and producing some excellent results in the near future!

When’s the next bootcamp?

We have already started to think about our second Fubra Bootcamp and how we can improve the process, so keep checking back for updates on when Bootcamp 2 is to be held and if you are interested in attending just get in touch and tell us why you think you would like to work for us.

This is potentially something which we could use to employ for other positions in the company as well, and we are excited about looking into this for future recruitment drives!

Before you approach us though, I thought it would be good to give some hints of what we are looking for and what we can offer to you in return for shares in your business. In addition to reading about our company and investments on our site, to see what we are doing, these hints should give you more of an idea what to expect in a meeting with us.

Did you know? In 2009 Fubra invested £250,000 into private companies. In 2010 we want to invest double that if we can find enough good prospects.

But why are we special?

1. We are investing our own time and money not other people’s.

This is quite unusual in the investment space as most investors work on behalf of governments, pension funds, large institutions or wealthy individuals. They are paid to manage others’ money and then paid an extra fee called the ‘carry’ if they make good investments on behalf of their backers. Unsurprisingly because it is not their money most of the time they mess up in fact you would be hard pushed to find many venture investors who have made any real money for their backers in the last 8 years or so.

2. We focus on the earliest stage ventures where risks are highest.

Most venture investors will look to back businesses at a point when they don’t need the money in fact one we recently spoke to even boasted of it. We think this kind of pride in cowardice is exactly what a company looking for investment shouldn’t want. There aren’t many people or firms you can approach who will back an early stage idea or just people but we are just that and even less of those who do shout about it as most prefer to get qualified enquiries through their networks only. We want to cast the net wider for reasons that will become clear later in this post.

3. We care about the bottom line first and the big prize second.

One thing we have noticed is that a lot of investors tend to invest in first time entrepreneurs and through a process of transference decide that the entrepreneur is ready to take their company global and deal with huge challenges even before they have learnt to turn a profit. This is all very well for the investor who can later dilute the entrepreneurs equity when they need more funding because of the lack of profit but not great for building sustainable long term partnerships with entrepreneurs.

4. We don’t expect your business plan to do our job for us.

We would prefer you to spend time learning about us, deciding on what you need from us very clearly, and seeing how your business can fit in what we are already doing. Our job as investors is to know the market you are in we can tell you how big it is and we don’t just get our figures from second hand research reports. We look at real numbers and what is actually going on. All that means if you can tell us the benefits your idea is going to bring to customers of your business, we can figure the rest out. Most investors are not like this because they are investing in things they don’t understand and they want you to hold their hands.

5. We have access to loads-a-money if you can handle it.

Fubra invests small amounts initially from £5k to £50k is the range we like and the reason for this is that if you can’t build a business with this much money something is wrong. You shouldn’t think this means we can’t support you as you grow though because if you really need more money in the business and you can prove you can make a good return on it safely there is plenty more funding either directly from Fubra or from our extensive range of contacts who are keen to invest alongside us. Our investment partners can often add even more value to your business as many are very successful entrepreneurs in their own right. They know Fubra partners with the companies we invest in so they are very keen to work with anyone we are vouching for.

6. If we help you build a billion pound business we only want £300m

The main reason we want you to keep funding low is so that you can retain a good stake in your company. Some businesses think the equity we take up front is high as it is usually around 30% of the business, but if you take a typical venture route and have multiple rounds of funding you will typically end up owning less than 10% of your own business. We think hard work and turning a profit early on to give you real independence and a strong partnership with us is the best way to work together but it’s up to you to choose the best model for your company.

If you like the sound of what we are doing perhaps you should get in touch and find out 4 more reasons we are special. We only let people know all 10 when we actually invest.

You might also like to read my business partner Paul’s take on what we have to offer and are looking for here.

Before you do get in touch though please read what we don’t want too and get prepared:

Commercial or marketing founders with an idea but no one to help them build it. Lots of them tend to think technology is an easy afterthought they buy with investment. We respectfully disagree and some want us to help with the technology but as we are only getting 30% of your business so we are not going to build it all for you too. The advice I always give to marketing or commercial ideas people is get a co-founder if your strengths are marketing find a techy then come to us together.

The other way round, too. Whilst most technical people understand that to build a business you need to take something that costs 50p and sell for £1. However some lack this basic commercial acumen and are more interested in the technology itself than the business benefits of what they are doing for customers. If you can code we might back you as a one person business but we want to know you care about the customers you are going to be delighting with your software as well as the microprocessors that are going to be exposed to it.

Finally if you just want a small business, or you’re only in it for the paycheck. We are looking for ambitious people who really do want to grow the next Microsoft. It’s fine by us if you don’t have the idea for licensing Windows to IBM yet but what is not ok is if we think you would be satisfied if you were to build a small business. We want people on a mission to change the world not just people looking to line their own pockets get a nice house and retire to the bahamas. If any of our Entrepreneurs sell their business we would ideally like to see them investing like us and helping more new aspiring entrepreneurs start their own exciting journey which is what we think it’s all about.

You might think we sound a little keen to invest which may appear strange given the economic situation and you would be right. If you are wondering what the reason for that is you only have to read a bit about the world’s most successful investor who once said “to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful” Not to put too fine a point on it but we have been saving up for the recession which we believe we are now entering as we think it is the very best time to meet people who want to change the world rather than buy a flash car. So we are very excited about all the gloom which is good news for entrepreneurs as it means we will act quickly and help you get on with things, we hope you are too there is a lot of opportunity out there!

It took nearly 8 hours, 6 staff members and over 100 snow blocks to create, as you can see the result was pretty fantastic.

My fellow designer Harry has prepared a brief video of the event complete with Hoff/Pingu soundtrack enjoy!

The following video shows you the construction process and some of the problems we encountered while building our snow house: