After a trial run at university, Ross Marshall and Andrew Harding started for real with Palatinate Leisure, a company that includes golf holidays venture yourgolftravel.com

Andrew Harding About six months after meeting at Durham University we realised that we both had entrepreneurial aspirations and we set up a gambling website. It was a very small venture but it was a bit of fun and that was around the time of the real start of the boom in internet gambling. The site was fairly successful but difficult to run alongside our studies and social lives.

Ross Marshall We stayed in touch after university and decided we wanted to set up a business together. We played a lot of golf and Andrew was involved in setting up the London Golf Show, Europe's largest golfing consumer exhibition, and I had a lot of contacts in the travel industry. We just thought we'd have a go at setting up a golf travel business purely on the basis that none of the large travel companies were selling golf holidays and it is a growing market.

AH Setting up the business was very stressful. You are faced with so many challenges—we were 24 years old and it was not easy to get funding, so we set up with £10,000 credit cards each. We were lucky because at that time credit was quite easy and cheap to get with certain online credit cards. Working 15-hour days was not uncommon and it was very tough for the first year when there was just no money to pay ourselves. It was not very enjoyable to begin with, but we managed to wade through and come out the other side.

RM We said from a very early stage that we would try to run our business as a large business so we had regular meetings, even when we were doing very little sales to get into a good habit of doing the things you should be doing in [any successful] business. We had daily targets and we planned our spending and rates of return from the very early days. The hardest thing was the that phones just didn't ring, so we constantly had to self-motivate. We were utterly skint, but when you have no money it really focuses the mind.

AH There will always be differences in any partnership; whether it is a husband and wife or business partners, no two people will ever be exactly the same. We just try to work out our differences in a positive manner.

RM We keep it very simple. If both of us aren't in agreement about something it doesn't happen. I suppose when your interests are very similar then it limits the differences you have.

AH We try to avoid doing the same things. Ross has his skill set and I have mine. He has a background in finance so it was natural for him to look after the balance sheet, whereas I come from sales so I deal with driving the sales forward in the business. But there are so many facets to running a company and we try to manage the business according to what we are each good at. There is no real benefit in us doing the same things.

RM I admire Andrew's desire to make something more of himself in a very competitive world. He likes winning and he is very focused on making our company a success. He is honourable and loyal and because we were really good friends before we went into business together he feels like an extended member of my family.

AH I really admire Ross's winning attitude. I have always liked people who want to achieve things and better themselves. I think it is such an important attribute to have. If you are going to do something, do it well; don't do things half-heartedly.

RM Although we have had some success, we want to grow even more. Since setting up in 2005, we now have over 30 staff and we estimate we will have 85,000 clients this year—but we are still a small business. The high point has been not going bankrupt. We are both very ambitious, so right now we see ourselves at the start of a longer journey and we are far from the finished product.

AH For me personally the best part of starting the business has been to build a team. The people who work for us have been phenomenal and you do get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing the graduates who come to us with no experience develop into account managers and become successful. In any business, the people are the biggest assets.