Profile: Hatton's fighting spirit
He's not related to Ricky Hatton, the boxing champion with the same surname, but there's no doubt that Rippleffect MD Ben Hatton has more than a touch of the fighting spirit.
At the tender age of 32, the Liverpool-born entrepreneur has already built up a £3.2 million website development business employing 42 people across three offices.
It was never a forgone conclusion that Hatton was going to become one of the region's most high profile business figures. In fact, as a teenager he looked more likely to end up a professional football player. It was during a stint as a student of George Washington University in the USA from 1995 to 1999 that his life took a change of direction.
"I was there on a football scholarship and was studying visual communications, which is essentially graphic design," he explains. "Much of my studies were web focused because at the time the internet was becoming big in America and graphic design over there was moving into website design."
When he returned to the UK, he decided the time was ripe to set up a website design company, and, with the help of his father, the former Labour councillor Derek Hatton, launched Rippleffect in 1999.
Over the years Rippleffect has established an enviable client base and although Hatton may not have ended up playing for any of the premiership clubs, he does work for them. In 2002, winning the contract to develop Everton Football Club's website kick-started a major period of growth that continues to this day, and the agency has since added a number of other football clubs, including Arsenal, to its ever-expanding client list
"We've been working on launching new websites for both of those clubs, and when you think of the volume of traffic those sites generate, they are critical projects," says Hatton
Equally impressive is Rippleffect's client list outside the Premier League, which includes the likes of Peel Holdings, Total Fitness and Mercedes Benz. But Hatton is quick to point out that it's not just the large, high profile work they go after.
"We still do a lot of work for SMEs, so it's not like we only do work for big companies. At any one time we could be working on projects for a company selling fishing tackle, a local police authority and a leading leisure venue. It's very broad, and it's all exciting work.
"What we tend not to do is just design a website for someone and that's it," he says. "We're much more about becoming an on-line partner for our clients, which is how they get their return on investment."
And this, according to Hatton, is the secret to Rippleffect's success. "Of course we keep in touch with what's new technology-wise, from social networking sites to video content, but rather than just jumping on the bandwagon and telling our clients they need to do blogs and so on, we make sure we're choosing the right techniques for them - new or not."
It's certainly proving an effective strategy; the last three years have seen Rippleffect achieve double digit growth in turnover, and the firm has featured in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 league table of top growing technology companies in Europe for the last two years.
The company's healthy growth record and solid client base obviously made it an attractive acquisition target, because in April of this year, Rippleffect was acquired by Trinity Mirror plc.
"Trinity Mirror acquired us because they see on-line and digital media as the way forward," he says. "For us, being part of the group means we are recognised as being part of a major plc so on a national level, that puts us on another platform. We also get to access a broader base of prospective clients. As for the way we operate - it won't change a thing."
At a time when many businesses are feeling the pinch from the economic downturn, Rippleffect seems to be going from strength to strength. And with an ever-increasing profile in the Northwest and beyond, who knows where it will be flying the flag for Liverpool next?
