Charlie Osmond (30) has just been crowned Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Esquire magazine’s “Man at the Top” business awards. Other notable finalists include Michael Birch (Bebo) and Richard Branson (Virgin) in the Most Influential Business Thinker category and Simon Woodroffe (Yotel) who just pipped Artemi Krymski (Extate) to win Best New Idea.
In June 2000, Charlie graduated from Worcester College, Oxford with a degree in Engineering, Economics and Management. Subsequently he co-founded FreshMinds with Caroline Plumb, a St. John’s College graduate. They started up with £500 of their own money and worked out of a spare room at Charlie’s parents’ house. The money allowed them to buy a Web address, a telephone line in the spare room and some business cards. This saw them through to January 2001 at which point they received £100,000 angel funding.
The business initially carried out bespoke research projects for management consultancy firms and other large companies, but over the last few years FreshMinds has evolved into a fully fledged research and recruitment consultancy with a talent pool composed of some of the UK’s top students and graduates. They work with the full spectrum of clients right through from small start-ups to the largest blue chips. FreshMinds now has a £5M+ turnover and over 70 full-time employees.
Facilitating the talent acquisition process for FreshMinds is their Ones to WatchTM (OTW) scheme which annually rewards 50 of the most promising students in the UK:
“Every year we ask students at the UK’s top universities to predict who out of their peers will go on to become the business leaders of the future. FreshMinds picks out the nominees who we think really have the wow factor.”
I first met Charlie at the 2006 Oxford OTW party. Both Andy and I, along with 4 of the students who have worked on ClickUni over the last year (AJ Asver, Jamie Harvey, Sagar Shah and Ran Wei) have now been given the accolade of “One to Watch”.
Charlie also regularly speaks at the Said Business School – usually sharing his experience of shunning the City jobs in favour of entrepreneurship. Hopefully success stories like this will inspire more Oxford students to take the leap of faith in future years:
Freed from The Matrix 