Boy Wonder
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Powerline broadband uses electricity lines to deliver high-speed internet services, and it’s currently being tested in Scotland. Churchill says he hopes to be able to offer it by the end of next year, but he’ll have to be quick off the mark. “A lot of people are talking about it, and it will be a bit of a fight for the first person to announce they can do it.”

This casual talk of fighting to be first shows a steely determination in Churchill to succeed, at an age when most of his contemporaries are at university, not thinking much beyond their next pint of lager. How can big clients possibly trust a 19 year-old with such valuable contracts?

“You find a few customers a bit hesitant at first with dealing with me because at the end of the day I’m 19 – and only just 19!” he says. “First of all they think ‘how can I trust my whole venture with these guys?’. But when they listen to what we’ve got and the capabilities we have, there’s suddenly a flick of a switch. They trust us because they see what we’ve got is genuine, and our customer base speaks for itself.”

In fact, says Churchill, his age can be an advantage too. The internet is a young sector, and many of its movers and shakers are young. He’s found that while some companies can be nervous of dealing with a teenager, others like it because it reflects the image of a young sector full of fresh ideas.

Schoolyard success
And in spite of his tender years, Churchill has been honing his entrepreneurial skills for some time. He says he never actually thought of himself as an entrepreneur, but admits that he was the boy who bought big bags of sweets to then sell at a profit in the school playground. “I was always doing things like that to get cash together to buy computers, or bits of computers,” he says. “It’s how I’ve always been.”

It’s how you imagine someone like Richard Branson must have been too. But Churchill shrugs off the comparison, and says that the people he looks up to now are not necessarily the household-name business giants, but anyone who can use their initiative to create something out of nothing.

“It doesn’t matter what they made or where they started from,” he says. “I could point to Alan Sugar, Richard Branson, or Bill Gates, but there are lots of other people who perhaps haven’t made quite the money they have, but still have done really well. I admire anyone who can start with nothing and really make something. They don’t have to make millions, just do well.”

Being projected to make £100 million by 2020 sounds like a dream, but it’s only conjecture, and Churchill knows it. In fact, you could say it’s a bit unfair to create such high expectations of someone so young. “It’s a tall order,” he agrees. “But it’s based on dedication and ambition, so it’s an achievable target. If in 17 years’ time someone asks if I’m worth £100 million and I say no, I don’t think they’ll point and laugh. At least I’ll be the guy who tried.”

A silver lining
The Rich List is bound to inspire other youngsters to try too, so what advice would he give them? Unsurprisingly, it’s a don’t-give-up philosophy. “You have to be prepared to work 110 per cent more than you would usually,” he says. “It’s a big commitment. The big tip I would give is never get disheartened, and find the tiniest bit of hope in even the smallest glimmer of success. It’s hard work and you can easily get down when things go wrong. But if you buy something for £9 and sell it for £10, you’ve made a pound. Making a pound is better than losing a pound, and you have to take that as success.”

Churchill also suffers from that perennial bugbear for small businesses – cashflow. Lack of it can be a serious problem, as he found out the hard way. “It’s a really big issue,” he says. “We’ve had people owing us thousands and thousands, and it seems like they’re never going to pay, and sometimes you wake up and think ‘why do I bother?’ Things go wrong and you want it all to go smoothly but it just doesn’t sometimes. There are days when I’m sitting in front of a server at three in the morning just thinking ‘I want to go to bed’.”

It must be frustrating sometimes, wanting to loaf around like most other people his age, but having to get up and run a business. Churchill’s typical day is 9am to 7pm in the office, after which he’ll go home, go to to the gym, have dinner, and then get back to work. The people who work on the company’s servers are night owls, and often expect their boss to be awake at the most unsociable hours. “And everyone else expects me to answer the phone at 9am too,” he says.

Still, he now is able to take weekends off at least, often going to Birmingham to visit family or friends, many of whom are at university. “They just see me as having a job. Perhaps slightly different to the jobs they would expect, but a job all the same. It’s nice to just go and chat about normal things and leave work in the office.” He also plans to continue his own education, possibly studying multimedia, but probably at the Open University – he won’t be going down the normal route of Fresher’s Week and stealing traffic cones.

And does he flash lots of money around to impress his student friends? Absolutely not, Churchill insists. In fact, he lives pretty simply, preferring to put most of the money back into the company. “My house is very modest, I drive a modest car,” he says. “If there’s a thousand pounds free in the pot at the end of the month and I take it, the company doesn’t benefit – I benefit. But if I put that thousand pounds back in the pot, and turn that thousand into two thousand, in the future I will benefit.” With that kind of discipline and long-term vision, it looks like the projection for 2020 might well come true.

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