I came across an interesting profile of Pete Petrondas and thought I would share it with you. Pete founded Eazyfone to sell mobile phone contracts to customers and quickly built his business to 14 employees and 250,000 pounds in revenue.

Then disaster struck. Pete’s supplier pulled the plug on him and he had to let go of all but one of his staff. While trying to decide what do to with his business he came across a realization: “It was surprising how many companies asked me if I knew how they could dispose of their old mobiles in an environmentally friendly way. I then did some research and found out there were around 90m old phones lying around, and soon realised I’d stumbled on a fantastic opportunity.”
Pete create a new business model to acquire old mobile phones and resell them to new customers. To get the phones he partnered with organizations like hospitals who were looking to raise funds and encouraged people to donate their old phones. In return he would donate 25% of the resale value back to the organizations.

“It proved a great success and, because the concept was environmentally friendly, we got a huge amount of media coverage, which then enabled us to get our message across to a wide audience.”

Pete’s business is now booming. He is expecting to make 5,000,000 million pounds in revenue this year with profits of over 750,000 pounds. “That figure is ahead of our competitors, but we need to donate as much of the profit as possible to the schools and charities, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have a business.” Not bad for a 30 year old entrepreneur whose business was all but destroyed only a short while prior.

Pete’s success demonstrates the power of effective partnerships. Find someone who can benefit while helping you and you can quickly take your company to the next level of success.

Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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