Having sold his email marketing company, Pure, for £3.9m, now Darren Fell has moved into online accounting

Darren Fell knew that he wanted to set an exit point for Pure, the email marketing company he founded in 2001, so that he and his employees could earn "a nice chunk of money" for all the hard work they'd put in. That moment came in May this year, when he sold the business to a US firm, MobiVentures, for £3.9m.

Fell's "next big thing" is an online accounting system for contractors and freelancers called Crunch. He joined the firm after two young entrepreneurs approached him to take charge of the project. "It had no structure or business plan, but it did have the support of a high-street bank," he explains. "What they needed was an entrepreneur like myself to take it and make it scaleable. We go live this winter."

He says the timing's right for online accounting, as the nature of the workplace is changing. "The thinking of big utility companies like BT is that they will move to a small, fixed-employee structure, controlling a mass of contractors. And generation Y is more transitory already."

He plans to get 10,000 freelancers and contractors signed up within three years, which "will generate significant profits". He says the key to his success has been surrounding himself with a good team. He adds: "I didn't know what I was doing at the beginning with Pure. Now I know the format and that's what we'll do with Crunch—look for a bigger corporate body after three years to enable expansion."