About Us / Our History
Former business advisor Richard Hallam spent years advising businesses and entrepreneurs how to make even more money – but his vision was more grass roots: to help the unemployed into work to enable them to shape their own future and maybe even start businesses of their own.
Now MD of Business Advice Direct (BAD), which has a turnover of £2.5m a year), Richard has succeeded in his personal ambition.
He won his first contract with learndirect in Lincoln to deliver learndirect courses to unemployed learners and in only its third academic year of contracting with learndirect, BAD was responsible for 52% of course enrolments across the whole of the East Midlands region.
This was just the start as far as Richard was concerned, and with emphasis on quality staff and quality training provision – as well as free tea and coffee for learners! – he now runs 16 learndirect centres across the North West, North East, Yorkshire and Humberside, East Midlands, the East of England and the West Midlands including Manchester city centre, key sites in Greater Manchester, Derby, Leicester and Luton.
BAD has trained thousands of learners since its inception and helped them to improve their lives and careers in ways which many of them might have believed impossible.
The company’s success in the annual learndirect Achievement Awards is tribute to his efforts and marks the life changing improvement that BAD has made for countless previously unemployed people up and down the country – not forgetting the employment he has created for his own staff.
But Richard is not one to sit on his laurels and once BAD was successfully up and running with currently 48 staff, he launched The Bridge End Complex in his home village of Hayfield in the High Peak, which is a successful – and unique – guest house and residential training centre.
About Richard
Richard was born in Lowestoft in 1965 and spent his childhood in Suffolk, Merseyside, Caithness in Scotland and from the age of ten lived in Grimsby, the East Coast fishing port.
Aged 18 Richard moved to London where he spent three years before returning to Grimsby. He then worked in sales and marketing for a company which published b2b magazines and organised exhibitions.
In 1993 he started working for an Enterprise Agency in Hull and trained as a Business Advisor. He worked as a Business Advisor with Business Link Staffordshire in Stoke on Trent and then went to work in Sneinton and St. Annes in inner city Nottingham where he helped to set up a business advice service for a regeneration trust which offered advice, grants and loans to small businesses.
He then moved to a Nottinghamshire Enterprise Agency, which was then a struggling one man concern, and built it up until it had five staff and won several European Funding Bids, before winning his first learndirect contract in 2002. The rest, as they say, is history.
