Michael Phillips, managing director of ConsumerChoices.co.uk, reveals his best business decision was building a database from scratch.

‘The business started with next to nothing, just three guys in a room with about £15,000. The best decision we made concerned technology.

Rather than going for off-the-shelf solutions, we decided to build a database that could manage thousands of different tariffs. It’s the aggregation of that information for our customers and presenting it in a simple way that shows them how to save money.

‘We’re the only comparison site in the UK that builds and manages its own broadband availability checker. What we realised is that it’s absolutely vital that the data is at the heart of everything we do. It meant that we weren’t reliant on anyone else for the solution, and that’s helped keep costs down.’