Tom Freeman

I was brought up in Norfolk but was away boarding at various schools from the age of seven. By the age of 9 I was selling Joss (incense) sticks to other pupils at a 300% profit, making a tidy sum, of course not knowing what the smell of the sticks was supposed to cover up. Naturally, I was firmly scolded when the school got wind of it! At the same school, we had to polish our shoes every Friday, which was a bore at best. A friend and I started a shoe-shine business, doing it for the many who didn’t want to, and doing it very well. School got wind of it, same result sadly!
Moved to Norwich School for sixth form. Here I started the Journalist Society there, getting such people as Kate Adie and Craig Brown to come and talk to students in after school seminars. I was in those days heavily into the “dance” scene, and this is where my first proper entrepreneurial scheme came about. I wanted to start RTV – Rave TV, a SKY channel dedicated to the various forms of dance music, which still doesn’t exist. I had sourced various promoters and DJs about the idea, and was being helped superficially by the chap who started the Extreme Sports Channel and its various add-ons. Though I felt, and still do, that the idea was sound, I was staring down the barrel of a Law degree at university, and so all such plans had to be shelved.
I decided, after a gap year in which I didn’t attempt to “find myself” but just to have a really smashing time in southern Africa, to read law at Nottingham, an academic environment that suited me down to the T.
It was at university that I spotted a gap in the market that I have since capitalised on. My Law degree was going badly in that I felt unwilling/unable to apply myself to it, and I was looking for something to fill my time and to aid my retreat from the law.
The incumbent student newspaper at Nottingham, Impact, was poor and few read it. For this simple reason, I felt that there was room for a paper that was good and people did read. I applied to the Student Union for help, but they were ‘dog in the manger’ unhelpful and so I went it alone, sourcing the advertisers myself and carefully assembling a strong editorial team. Through a combination of the fresh, uncensored editorial and the forceful (unrivalled to this day) distribution, the paper became popular. Those advertisers who I had persuaded to get involved were coming back for more due to strong commercial response and the paper was profitable.
The paper had eight editions out in my final year at uni, a year in which I also became re-enamoured with my law degree. I finished the year with an excellent law degree and the beginnings of something rather good. In the last year or so, I have been working diligently to get the papers to their current stage – at 12 top universities in the country. This satisfies the demands of the top graduate recruiters, who are the papers’ lifeblood.