Brad Liebmann - BView

Many online companies have tried unsuccessfully to displace business directories like Yell, but BView, which was set up by serial entrepreneur Brad Liebmann, is different. It has a lean operational model, which is perfect for business-building in a recession; it is easy to scale; and it has captured the mood of the moment by including money saving offers for consumers in their local area.

This is the second business Liebmann has built in a recession. He started Xbridge, Europe’s largest online small business insurer, in 2000, just as the technology crunch was starting. But Liebmann believes that businesses are better placed if they have weathered a downturn. “It is about putting in place strong foundations,” he says. “So when the good times come back you have rock solid foundation for continued growth.”

BView was initially incubated in Xbridge in 2007, before it was spun out and launched last year. “The original vision for BView was connecting business with their customers and vice versa and that is still the case,” says Liebmann. “We are doing it slightly differently than how we envisioned we would – but every successful company evolves.”

BView began when Liebmann looked at the 80,000 small businesses customers of XBridge and realised how many were struggling to connect with customers and other businesses through one channel. He says: “It is only larger business with scale and those with online channels that can connect. I wanted a way that smaller and local business could connect with customers.”

The market had changed and local advertising was becoming increasingly less effective than it had been. At the same time it was costly for local businesses to advertise online.

In less than a year the hyper-local advertising model created by BView has grown a UK-wide database of 2.3 million businesses. It combines ratings from users and social networking, as well as money saving offers from businesses.

BView has neatly captured the moment by identifying the desire among businesses and their customers to save money. Liebmann says: “We did not initially envisage the money saving aspect but after launch we talked to customers using BView and we realised our core customer is very focused on saving money.”

Of course there is more to BView than just offering money saving vouchers. But by muscling in on a market that used to be dominated by companies that operated nationally, and helping customers to save time – as well as money – by pointing them towards offers BView has delivered a unique business. Growth has mostly come from word of mouth.

“We are customer services company that uses technology in a smart way,” says Liebmann. “Our customers are both businesses and consumers.”

BView makes money in a combination of ways including Google ad words, some national agents who advertise on the site, and local businesses.

As the fifth generation of his family to own and run a business Liebmann is an entrepreneur through and through.

Even an eight year career on Wall Street only served to convince him that he wanted to run his own business.

He describes this realisation as his big break in business. “I had a successful career in Wall Street but I knew I was not going to be truly happy unless I started my own business.”

He says the fear factor of setting up a business is always there, but ‘growing up in a family of entrepreneurs it felt a bit more natural’.

For Liebmann there are no hard and fast rules about what makes an entrepreneur. But he says: “The one consistent quality is they believe in themselves and in what they are doing.”

He points to Xbridge, where there were a number of really tough moments and people wanted to give up. “You have to have the same belief in what you are doing and make sure that rubs off on other people,” he says.

Building Xbridge has taught Liebmann many valuable business lessons. The best one is to trust his own instincts especially when it comes to hiring people. “When you don’t trust in this you make bad mistakes. In the first couple of years at Xbridge I hired based on what people told me I should be hiring. Many were the wrong people.”

Liebmann is ambitious for BView. He already has his sights set on launching in another country. Unlike Xbridge, which faced regulatory issues when the management team wanted to expand into new countries, BView is not restricted in terms of the markets it can enter. It can also expand using few people.

“When I started BView I applied some of the lessons I had learned from Xbridge. I wanted to be certain it would be able to scale and would be efficient in terms of people,” explains Liebmann.