If you go into business for the money, you will fail, says Vikas Shah, joint managing director of textiles comany, Swiscot Group

He is yet to hit 30, but Vikas Shah has already spent 15 years in business. Although he originally set out trying to scrape together pocket money, he insists that being in business shouldn't be about getting rich.

"If you are the best, chances are you are going to make some money, but Microsoft wasn't built because Bill Gates had an ambition to become rich; he wanted to see what he could do with an operating system. The motivation was not money," he says. "The aim is to find a gap in the market or something new and just be brilliant at it."

Shah fell into business when one summer holiday he was playing on his father's computer and built a website that received attention from around the world. He spotted an opportunity and offered to build company websites for £50. "It was a fortune to a 14-year-old but very cheap for the businesses," he says.

He set up just before the dotcom boom. "Thanks to a wonderful economic cycle, within a couple of years I had a decent-sized team of designers and we had some incredible customers including Unilever and Nike," he says.  

Today Shah is joint managing director of the family business, Swiscot Group, a textiles company. His father used to run it on his own alongside a bookkeeper, but since Shah joined seven years ago staff levels have risen to 20 and he has launched several successful brands under the business.

Starting early prepared him well. "When you are young you are more fearless and you take the knocks and get them out of your system," he says. "The risks for us when we were teenagers were the same as they are today: cashflow, losing customers and changes in economic cycles. If you are passionate about what you do then you always find a way to make it work," he says.