Oliver J Bridge

Oliver Bridge is a young entrepreneur who has owned and run several businesses, including Bigger Feet, Forge Properties and Things Are Going To Change. He recently won acclaim from Duncan Bannatyne, who named him as a potential success of the future in his autobiography Anyone Can Do It.

Early life

From a young age, Oliver Bridge was interested in business and money. At the age of eight, he set up a virtual stock portfolio which beat his fathers' actual holdings - not bad given that his father was an Independent Financial Advisor. In secondary school, he started a mobile disco business, and used the revenues to finance his first Limited Company a few years later.

Oliver attended Kimbolton School, Cambridgeshire, where he was head boy in his final year. His academic acheivements included scoring 99.7% in his A Level Economics & Business course. He then took a place at Lincoln College, Oxford, to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics and is currently in his second year.

Bigger Feet
Aged 15, Bridge had size 13 feet, which prompted him to launch his first company, Bigger Feet, in 2004. Since Bridge was not old enough to establish the company himself, so co-founder Paul Wilkinson acted as legal guarantor. In 2005, he won the Make Your Mark / Lloyds TSB Enterprising Young Brit Award, presented to him by Gordon Brown. Some media performances on TV and articles on the internet followed. He is claimed to have appeared on CNN and the BBC, and was mentioned in a list of Britain's Top 40 children in the online edition of The Independent.

Having taken the decision to apply to Oxford, Bridge sold the business to his younger brother Thomas in mid 2006, who shut down the retail arm and focused on large-scale orders to school cadet forces.

Forge Properties

In 2007 Bridge co-invested in a French property with his mother Lesley. Following extensive renovation, Forge Properties is now operational, with Bridge's mother managing.

Entrepreneur Exchange

Summer 2008 saw Oliver Bridge working as an intern with James Uffindell, a successful entrepreneur, with whom he started a social enterprise designed to inspire entrepreneurship in schools, prisons and universities.

Pebbleo

Keen to carve out a career as a successful entrepreneur, Oliver Bridge created a holding company, Pebbleo, to incubate his various big projects in September 2008. The first of these projects is thingsaregoingtochange.com - a site aimed at people who are fed up with their lives.

Promoting Entrepreneurship

Bridge won an award from Make Your Mark in 2005 and once visited with Year 9 students at Prince Henry's High School in Evesham to encourage them as future entrepeneurs.

Oliver Bridge was also recently appointed the Alumni Officer of the Oxford Entrepreneurs Society, and tasked with establishing an alumni network for ex-members of the Society.

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