Young Entrepreneurs: Ben Towers, Towers Design

Name: Ben Towers
Company: Towers Design
Age: 16
Website: www.towersdesign.co.uk

Ben Towers puts most business owners to shame, and that’s not hyperbole.

At just 16, he has built a profitable digital media agency with impressive turnover and has a team of 15 people working for him, although ironically he’s not even old enough to hire people so has to have them as freelancers or interns.

Towers founded the Kent-based company in September 2011, aged 13, after working as a freelance web designer for two years and dealing with several requests from family friends who would give him £50 to create a website. Realising the potential for monetisation, Towers scaled his web design service into a full-scale, multi-channel offering which helps “forward-thinking” small and medium businesses to succeed online on a budget.

Although Towers admits his age has sometimes held him back – he has lost large contracts in the past due to misconceptions that young people “don’t know what they’re doing” – it’s very clear that the opposite is in fact true for Towers, with company turnover set to hit £500,000 in 2015.

Towers’ entrepreneurial pursuits don’t stop there. While his peers might be considering plans for college, the teenage businessman is currently raising a six-figure funding round for his next venture Social Marley. The tool is a social media dashboard for businesses to manage a range of social accounts and will be launching later this year.

A finalist in the prestigious Startups Awards 2014, Towers has attracted over 500 clients to date which ranges from fast-growth start-ups such as Mallow and Marsh to Britain’s Got Talent finalists. He also has support from leading industry bodies The Federation of Small Business (FSB) and the Young Entrepreneur Networking Association (YENA) which he acts as ambassadors for.

With a vision to become the CEO of a “collection of businesses that will help other entrepreneurs to find their own success”, Mark Zuckerberg had better watch out…