Nick Craven: Widening his company’s offerings

Nick Craven, chief executive of Weatherbys Ventures, says his best business decision was to widen the company's offerings from its traditional remit of horseracing while using skills it already had in-house.

We were founded in 1770 and provide banking and administration for British horseracing. Quite a lot of the business is also in printing and publishing, producing race cards and other literature.

Given there was a ceiling on what we could sell to the horseracing market, we decided to draw on the skills we already had in-house. We were already printing quality sales catalogues for the horse pedigree market and realised that it wasn’t such a huge leap to move into other sports like rugby and cricket.

Related: 20 of the best business decisions examples

Marc Barber

Marc Barber

Marc was editor of GrowthBusiness from 2006 to 2010. He specialised in writing about entrepreneurs, private equity and venture capital, mid-market M&A, small caps and high-growth businesses.

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