My best business decision

We invested about £500,000 in employing and training people to market our childcare vouchers, and in purchasing the software to process them. That was before the government introduced legislation to make the vouchers non-taxable.

The decision was based on a calculated risk that the legislation would go through, but we couldn’t be certain of that and a lot of people in the industry thought we were taking a massive gamble. It paid off though – because we were among the first nursery companies to market the vouchers we now control 50 per cent of the market, with more than 12,000 companies using our vouchers.

John Woodward, group managing director of Busy Bees