Neutral vendor founder Matthew Sanders

How I made it: Matthew Sanders, founder of de Poel

His firm, which arranges the hiring of agency workers for big companies, will have a turnover of almost £300m this year

Matthew Sanders has thrived by supplying temporary staff to big organisations (Andrew Fox) Matthew Sanders has never been scared of hard work. The first signs of his entrepreneurial flair emerged at the age of six when he set up a stall on his front lawn and offered to paint other children's Dinky toys for a fee.

As an adult he was prepared to make personal sacrifices for his own venture. "I worked ridiculous hours for the first four years of the business, well over 100 hours a week," said Sanders. "I was in my office every Sunday for years, sending out emails to potential clients. I had next to no social life. It was just work, work, work."

His hard graft paid off. His firm, de Poel, which arranges the hiring of agency workers for big companies, will have a turnover of almost £300m this year and employs 53 staff.

The elder of two children, Sanders was born in Wallasey on the Wirral but brought up in the village of Cuddington, Cheshire. His mother was a nurse and his father a salesman and would-be entrepreneur.

His parents divorced when Sanders was 14, leaving his mother to raise him and his sister. On finishing school at 18 he went to college to study automotive engineering but left after three months.

After various odd jobs, Sanders joined a recruitment firm in Warrington, rising from consultant to director before leaving in 2001 to work for Manpower, the recruitment giant. He lasted only three months before deciding that, at the age of 27, he wanted to start his own business.

Sanders had seen a gap in the recruitment market. "I saw that the clients we worked with weren't particularly good at buying temporary agency labour," he said. "They either focused on getting the right quantity of staff but not the cost, or they focused on the price but not the quality or the quantity.

"I set up de Poel as poacher-turned-gamekeeper to use our expertise of selling labour to clients to go and buy it on their behalf."

Sanders, who is chief executive, raised £80,000 by selling his house and put another £60,000 on his credit card. He brought in Mike Campbell, a former colleague, as a business partner. Campbell subsequently invested £100,000.

Sanders named de Poel after his Dutch grandfather. "Because you have to spell it to every single person you talk to, people remember it," he said.

He rented an office above a kebab shop in Warrington and all went well for a year. Then business went quiet. The firm had become too focused on existing clients and not enough on getting new ones. "We didn't get the balance quite right," he said.

Then Sanders created the electronic timesheet and invoice processing system (Etips), which has turned into the backbone of the business. It allowed de Poel to send clients a single electronic invoice every week, no matter how many locations or agencies they used. He could also standardise the rates that clients paid for agency labour.

"One of our first clients spent many millions of pounds on agency labour with 300 agencies over 100 locations and received 60,000 invoices a year, with all the agencies charging different amounts for the same things. I thought this was madness," he said.

The system saves clients an average 10% a year on their agency labour costs, Sanders said. It soon won de Poel a big contract from TNT Logistics and more followed.

The recruitment agencies weren't too happy. Sanders was encouraging big clients to use fewer agencies working on smaller profit margins. Some refused to work with him, but he said that there were so many agencies it was not a problem. "We didn't make ourselves a lot of friends in the early days," he said.

However, de Poel, based in Knutsford, Cheshire, now claims to be the biggest purchaser of temporary agency labour outside the government. Its clients, which agree to get their agency labour only through de Poel, include J Sainsbury, Carlsberg and Mencap.

Now aged 36, and separated with one child, Sanders believes the secret of his success is this: "I am very good at seeing solutions to problems and understanding how technology can fix a problem. When I designed Etips, I had drawings covering the walls showing how each page looked."

Sanders, who owns a "substantial" stake in the company, gives this advice: "Somebody once said to me, if you have two men in a room with the same ability to do something and one believes he can do it and one believes he can't, the person who believes he can, will.

"Nothing is impossible, you just need to figure out how you are going to do it - and then do it."

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/business/small_business/article370739.ece