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Review of My Little Wrapper
Nigel Botterill, N5 Ltd

Home business opportunity selling wrapped chocolate

This is one of a few examples of Business Opportunity Watch Reviews which are available for the public to view on the public section of the website. The reason for making a small sample of the reviews freely available is to help potential customers decide if they want to subscribe, and also to communicate some matters of general interest arising in the case of some of the reviews. All the other reviews are available only to subscribers. A zero score or a low score means that in our opinion the business model or the investment model has flaws and/or that we have found inadequate evidence to back up claims about earnings, sales, profits etc. It doesn't mean this evidence does not exist and it doesn't mean that the opportunity is a scam and it doesn't mean that the promoters are unprofessional or dishonest. Questions arising are normally contained within the body of the review, and readers who are interested should contact the company with these questions and/or questions of their own.

Page Two of Two

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1. Review
Review from Business Opportunity Watch Rating Reviews, September 2008 Issue 19

Page Two

2. BOW Letter to Nigel Botterill

3. Nigel Botterill's reply

4. Enquiry about a refund

5. Update 9th March 2010 re Nigel Botterill's bio re Card Protection Plan, http://nigelbotterill.com, www.entrepreneurs-circle.co.uk

2. Review Continued
BOW Letter to Nigel Botterill

Dear Nigel,

Firstly, congratulations on your latest award -"Innovative Company of the Year 2008" - which I became aware of when I was asked by a reader to do a review of My Little Wrapper.

Secondly, I've got a couple of questions about My Little Wrapper:

When you say on the Guarantee page on your website, "My Little Wrapper is tried, tested and proven" - what precisely do you mean? Did you or your wife set up and run such a business, perhaps, and if so what period was it run for and is it still running?

Since you are requiring any of your customers who wish to call in the guarantee and receive a refund to provide you with certified accounts, can you provide certified accounts of this business?

This is obviously a very important point, because repeat orders from existing customers are a key feature of most healthy businesses, and with My Little Wrapper you say that "Children's birthday parties tend to be the mainstay of the business". That implies that a testing period of more than one year was required.

Also, I've got a question about how franchisees over-print the labels with the personalised text. The adverts you have on a number of franchise directory websites say that you over-print with a colour laser printer. However, your own website simply says that you over-print with a colour printer. Could you please specify whether a colour laser printer is required, or whether your view is that an inkjet printer could do the job? If the latter, then could you confirm that you have cleared this with Health and Safety officials, particularly bearing in mind the likelihood of contact from children's wet and/or sticky fingers?

You might also want to correct what appears to be an error in these adverts and also on your own site, in the reference to "real tip quality looking wrappers".

I turn now to your BestOf franchise, which we corresponded about earlier this year. It's good to see on the BestOf website (www.thebestof.co.uk) that you have amended your bio regarding your short career at Card Protection Plan - which previously said that you "moved to Card Protection Plan as managing director" - where you were head of their telemarketing division, before you left to start up your own business.

By contrast, it is worrying to see that your bestof websites at www.thebestof.co.uk and www.getthebestof.co.uk still carry false and misleading claims regarding their popularity with the public.

It can't be the case that these figures are a mistake or an oversight on the part of your company because I discussed them in detail in correspondence earlier this year with your Sales Director Mike Giles.

I had thought that Mike Giles was going to change these false figures because he replied to me on 24th December 2007 that " ... we are currently updating all our marketing material - something that we do as a matter of course every few months - to reflect the changes in the business".

However, the changes I discussed with Mike Giles have not been made, as follows:

1. False claim

The "What We Do" page on the website at www.thebestof.co.uk - which will be read by potential bestof advertisers - reads "With high exposure on the major search engines and thebestof consistently being ranked as one of the Top 100 most popular websites in the country (source www.Alexa.com)" - whereas the truth is that by the end of December 2007 www.thebestof.co.uk had slumped to number 273 in the UK, and now it has slumped further to number 541 in the UK.

As I pointed out in my correspondence to Mike Giles, it is doubtful that thebestof was ever in the top 100 UK websites so far as the public was concerned, because even in bestof's short days of glory in June 2006 when it was shown as being the UK's 48th most popular website, the Alexa statistics themselves showed that more than half of the traffic taken into account by Alexa in arriving at this statistic was not public traffic at all but was instead traffic from bestof franchisees visiting non-public pages on the site such as oldadmin.thebestof.co.uk (28%), forum.thebestof.co.uk (13%) webmail.thebestof.co.uk (8%), newsletter.thebestof.co.uk (1%) and devblog.thebestof.co.uk (1%) - all of which add up to 51%.

2. Misleadingly out-of-date claim

The"About Us" link on the home page of the website at www.getthebestof.co.uk - which will be read by potential bestof franchisees - bears the heading "The 48th Most Popular Website in the UK (Source: Alexa.com June 2006)". Further down the page says "It is already the UKs 48th most popular website, as ranked by Alexa, the online ranking specialists (www. Alexa.com)". Bizarrely, it appears that this page has not been updated for more than two years, since at the foot it carries the date July 2006.

Can you please explain these false and misleading figures?

Also, can you also please explain how the consistent downward trend shown by Alexa since June 2006 can be reconciled with your own figures of the fantastic growth in usage of the bestof site as per your website for potential franchisees at www.getthebestof.co.uk, as follows:

January 2006
140 franchisees and "more than 750,000 hits per month (independently audited)"

June 2006
210 franchisees and "more than 750,00 hits per month (independently audited)"

9th February 2007
210 franchisees and "more than 750,00 hits per month (independently audited)"

4th March 2007
in the space of less than one month, an amazing 43% jump in the number of franchisees to "more than 300 franchisees" and a mind-boggling 53-fold increase in the number of hits to "more than 40 million hits (independently audited)".

How can you be unaware that, whereas the bestof site was ranked as number 48 in the UK by Alexa in June 2006, it has fallen consistently since then?

The bestof site is now ranked as number 541 in the UK, and in the last three months it has fallen a further 10% in Reach (the percentage of global Internet users visiting the site), fallen by 2,458 in Traffic Rank (a combined measure of page views and Reach) and fallen by 32% in Page Views per user.

You persist in publicising false and misleading figures. For example, in the Guide which you currently send out called the "Guide to buying an Online Directory Franchise - 12 Questions you should ask the Franchisor" - you claim that "The bestof.co.uk is also ranked by www.alexa.com as one of the top 200 most popular website in the UK (Dec 2007)". The truth is that on 7th December 2007 the bestof site was number 246 in the UK and by 20th December 2007 it had fallen to number 273, reflecting a continuing downward trend of a decline of 30% in reach, and a decline of 22% in page views for the previous 3 months.

Also, as pointed out in my previous correspondence, nearly half of the visits to the bestof site used by Alexa in arriving at the site's popularity rating do not relate to public usage at all but to usage by the bestof franchisees: 44% of the visits were to non-public pages such as oldadmin.thebestof.co.uk, webmail.thebestof.co.uk and forums.thebestof.co.uk.

Please advise what you mean by the phrase "independently audited". For example, please advise who is the person or the body who carries out the audit and how often is this carried out?

Could you also please advise what information your bestof franchisees give to potential business advertisers about the popularity of your site?

On the basis of the Alexa figures, it would appear that the bestof advertisers have been getting an increasingly poor deal, because you have been recruiting more and more franchisees, which implies that more and more adverts are being sold ... but the visits to your site keep on going down.

I look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely
Marian Owen

3. Review Continued
Reply from Nigel Botterill (in italics with BOW's comments inserted):

Dear Marian,

I am in receipt of your 3 page letter which I received late this morning, shortly followed, just 30 minutes later, by a fax asking for an urgent reply because you are publishing tomorrow.

In answer to your points:

My Little Wrapper
We have over 200 people doing this now across the UK ( our 200th Wrapper came on board last week) and have sold over 85,000 chocolate bars since March 08. It is going well with many success stories amongst our purchasers.

That's 200 people recruited in 5 months. Let's discount the people recruited in the last 2 months because they might not have really got started with their business yet. So, on a straight-line basis, that's 120 people who have been running their My Little Wrapper business for more than 2 months. (This fits with a figure given on the Start Ups Live website at www.startupslive.co.uk at the beginning of June, when Nigel said that My Little Wrapper "already has over 100 people on board".)

On an average basis, that means each person has sold in total 708 bars (i.e. 85,000 divided by 120). Over the life of their My Little Wrapper business of between two and five months to date this would give each person on average a total profit ranging from £424.80 to £778.80, depending on whether they have been selling the bars for £1 or £1.50.

That's rather a long way from the example the company gives on its website of the sale of 1,000 bars PER MONTH, giving a MONTHLY profit of between £600 and £1,100.

Prior to launch we ran a pilot to trial the whole thing both here in Solihull and with some of our franchisees from our other businesses.

It's a shame that Nigel has not given any details about the period these pilot/s were run for, or the names of these businesses, or whether they are still running ... and has not made any comment about whether certified accounts are available.

Our chocolate bars are provided ready wrapped in foil and we took appropriate Health & Safety advice about all aspects of the business prior to launch.

So Nigel hasn't replied to the important question about whether My Little Warpper franchisees need a colour laser printer (which many people don't already have) or whether an inkjet (which many people do already have) will do.

I still reckon you'd need a colour laser printer to ensure that the outer packaging did not get messy, even if not required by Health and Safety regulations.

thebestof
I find your questions about thebestof totally perplexing.

Firstly, thebestof is a franchise, not a business opportunity.

I disagree with Nigel Botterill. In my book, a"business opportunity" is an opportunity to do business. A franchise is simply one business model you might use to do business. Examples of other business models often used for business opportunities which are offered to the public include network marketing (or "multi-level marketing"), agency arrangements, distributorships etc.

Anyone wanting to get involved with it has to go through a rigorous selection process which includes vetting, interviews and meetings here at our Solihull offices before they can become a franchisee. As part of that process we share with them detailed information about the workings of the business including all the latest statistics, right down to individual area level.

We turn down a lot of people that want to become thebestof franchisees. We certainly don't just sell a franchise to anyone.

thebestof is one of the most successful UK franchises ever. It has developed enormously since its launch and now has many offline elements to the proposition as well as the online presence.

You seem to be picking an issue with some of our traffic claims. The claims are clearly dated on the Site so I don't believe that we are misleading anybody and, as I explained above, anyone who gets anywhere near purchasing a thebestof franchisee has access to far more detailed and very current statistics. For instance, in August 2008 the site received over 1.2m unique visitors. In June 2006 this figure was less than 400,000. We had over 85 million hits in August but, as I'm sure you are aware, unique visitors is a much more meaningful statistics nowadays, particularly when comparing Sites. It means that over 1.2 million different people visited thebestof website in August. These figures are provided by Google Analytics - the industry standard for such measurement. To be clear, our traffic continues to rise month on month (not fall, as you suggest) and is now at almost treble the level it was in June 2006.

It's a bit of a mystery, then, why Nigel Botterill's website at www.thebestof.co.uk continues to quote figures which are more than two years out of date and, moreover, from a source - www.alexa.com - where the current figures show that usage of his site has slumped.

This traffic comes from a number of sources but one of the main ones is the fact that we have over 450,000 pages indexed on Google and 363,000 Top 10 search rankings across the six major search engines. These are industry leading figures. We have a very strong presence on the search engines - way better than any of our competitors.

All our franchisees get detailed stats each month for traffic to their individual sites, including detailed figures for each business that they feature.

Incidentally, I had a representative from Hitwise the global authority on web site traffic in my office only a few weeks ago and he was telling me that, based on their data, we were the 4th biggest directory site on the web. But this is all statistics and data. When measuring the success of thebestof I believe there are better ways to do it:

For instance, we have more than 50,000 UK businesses paying to be part of the Site. Retention and renewals are very high - as result of the great return on investment that our franchisees are able to provide for them. There are over 100 testimonials from businesses right across the country on the website and we have hundreds more available. How many of the Opportunities that you review have 50,000 current paying customers?

We also have several franchisees now earning in excess of £10,000 per month (net) and many more moving rapidly towards that figure. There are very few, if any, UK franchises that have this level of financial success amongst its franchisees. Incidentally, so far this year, 12 of our established franchisees have bought a second franchise area - again a good indicator of the success of this business.

As I mentioned above, the web element is only a part of thebestof's offering to our customers. There are lots of offline things that our franchisees provide as well.

Marian, I have invited you several times to visit us in Solihull and see our operation for yourself but you have repeatedly declined these invitations.

I had already told thebestof's Franchise Director, Mike Giles, the reasons why I don't go to visit companies.

For one thing, it shouldn't be necessary for me to visit companies to obtain information about the opportunity they are offering: it should be all there in black and white, either on their website and/or in their brochure. That way, the claims made and the information given can be relied upon by the purchaser. If, instead, the purchaser has to rely on verbal assurances and verbal information, then it's going to be difficult for him to prove what was said if things go wrong.

For another thing, it's only the more well-heeled companies with nice offices and plenty of staff who want me to come and visit them. This doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether the opportunity they are offering is valid. As a particularly unhappy example, about a year ago Robin Barton of UK Land Investments Group was very keen for me to visit him at his company's offices. I declined for the above reasons, gave his company a rating of Zero out of Ten, and on 4th June 2008 the High Court granted a petition from the Financial Services Authority to wind the company up on the basis that it was operating illegally.

I understand that you want to expose scam ...

(in fact, I also search for good business opportunities, and these are highlighted on the members' web site)

... and I applaud that but we have a staff of 38 here in Solihull, including the largest Franchisee Development team in the country (whose role is to help our franchisees to succeed); our own bespoke Training Suite, which is in use most days with franchisees from one of our brands receiving training. We have over 1500 purchasers of our products - and hundreds and hundreds of testimonials from them. We have been recognised by 9 separate prestigious awards, some of them amongst the top awards in the country. We have been independently vetted by Price Waterhouse Coopers before being included in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 last year, we have been trading for over 5 years now...I'm just not sure what more I can do to convince you.

We are about to launch a brand new version of thebestof website in October, one that has cost us over £400,000 to develop (not something that scam companies do I believe!). All the content about the business is being reviewed ahead of that launch so I will ensure that we take that opportunity to remove any reference to the Alexa stats.

Here at N5 we have a very progressive agenda to continue the development of all our products (we have just undertaken a survey of all our My Little Wrapper purchasers for example asking them how we can make the product better for them going forward and we have received some brilliant ideas and suggestions that we will be implementing in the weeks ahead). My focus, and that of my team, has to be on looking after our customers and focusing on the development of our products and I cannot promise that any future letters from you - especially those sent with less than 24 hours to respond - will receive such a full and open response.

Nigel Botterill is incorrect in stating that I gave him less than 24 hours to respond: the letter to which he replied was faxed to his office at 9.30 am on Monday 8th September. Because I had heard nothing - not even an acknowledgement - I sent Nigel Botterill a second fax at 11.30 am on Tuesday 9th September saying that I would be publishing my review with my letter on Wedneday 10th September and asking him to let me know urgently if he wanted to submit a reply to be published with it. Had Nigel Botterill then told me that he wanted to reply but needed more time, then he would have got it. I received his reply by email late on the evening of Tuesday 9th September.

I agree that giving only a couple of days to reply is a bit pushy, but the reason why I adopted this approach is because I had previously been given the run-around in getting any reply from Nigel Botterill's company regarding his franchise Have A Quickie. In that case, obtaining a reply required an initial fax containing my letter, a further fax 4 days later asking for an acknowledgement, a phone call to his secretary a further 3 days later to confirm the fax number (which was correct), a further fax which the secretary confirmed she had received and would pass to Nigel Botterill, and a final fax after a further 5 days - all of which took a total of 12 days - to get any reply. It was only the final fax (headed"Urgent" in very large text) which succeeded in obtaining a reply, and this fax stated that I would be publishing my letter to him without any reply from his company if I did not have a reply by the end of the following day.

So that's why I decided to wade in quickly this time with "publishing tomorrow".

In the interests of balance and openness I trust that you will publish this reply in full.

Your sincerely,

Nigel

Nigel Botterill
Chief Executive

P.S Mike Giles left N5 in April this year after more than three years with us. He has gone to live abroad.


BOW had also emailed its letter of 8th September 2008 to Mike Giles, in view of correspondence with him earlier this year regarding the Quickie franchise. It is surprising to hear from Nigel Botterill that he left the company five months ago, since he's still shown as a member of their team on the Biographies page at www.thebestof.co.uk.

With 38 members of staff, it's a pity that N5 can't keep their websites more up to date.

BOW's rating for My Little Wrapper is 2 out of 10

See also:

• Review of Sue Botterill's MyMag
  BOW June 2007
• Review of BestOf franchise
  August 2007
  
• Review of Have A Quickie franchise
  BOW December 2007

Rating:

●●○○○○○○○○

BOW Notice: A zero score or a low score means that in our opinion the business model or the investment model has flaws and/or that we have found inadequate evidence to back up claims about earnings, sales, profits etc. It doesn't mean this evidence does not exist and it doesn't mean that the opportunity is a scam and it doesn't mean that the promoters are unprofessional or dishonest. Questions arising are normally contained within the body of the review, and readers who are interested should contact the company with these questions and/or questions of their own.

__________________________________

4. Enquiry about a refund

P.S. BOW had an enquiry from a reader about whether she could get her money back from My Little Wrapper, and the following summarises BOW's advice to her.

In view of the statement in My Little Wrapper's Terms and Conditions that "no refunds will be available" and N5 Ltd's "full 100% Money Back Guarantee" which requires you to operate the business for a full year and produce certified accounts, it seemed like a good idea to clarify the position regarding refunds for other readers, too.

The true position is that anyone who bought this business within the last three months and 7 working days and regrets doing so has a statutory right to get a refund from N5 Ltd, without having to give any reason at all.

And N5 Ltd has to pay for the return of the goods.

The reason for this is because the purchase of My Little Wrapper falls under the Distance Selling Regulations and so N5 Ltd should have notified you that you had a right to cancel your order (without giving any reason) and receive a full refund at any time up to the end of the seventh working day after the day you received your order. This notification should have been given before you placed your order and should have been given again when the company confirmed your order to you.

Because N5 Ltd did not give this information it means that you have an extended right to get a refund under the Distance Selling Regulations, without having to give any reason, and this refund right lasts for three months and 7 working days from the day after the day on which the goods were delivered to you.

This refund right only applies to contracts concluded at a distance (by internet, by email, by telephone etc) and so it would not apply if you had visited the company or otherwise had face-to-face contact with them before placing your order.

Normally, you can't get a refund for videos or software if they have inner packaging (typically a sealed cellophane wrapper) which has been unsealed. But you should be able to in this case because the company did not inform you of your right to cancel at the time you made the contract, when the videos/software were of course sealed and when you therefore did have the right to cancel.

Of course, you could not get a refund for items which have been consumed (e.g. some chocolate and some of the wrappers).

Neither could you get a refund for any further purchases (e.g more chocolate or more wrappers) which you had made after your initial purchase of the business. Obviously, if you had made further purchases it would be unlikely that you were dissatisfied overall. But if you were dissatisfied, then the only refund you could claim under the Distance Selling Regulations would be for your original business purchase. The reason is because your subsequent purchases of chocolate and wrappers would have been made as a business i.e. you would have been purchasing supplies for your business. The Distance Selling Regulations only apply to purchases made as a consumer.

This contrasts with the position for your original purchase of My Little Wrapper, where you were a consumer purchasing a business. It's obvious from the My Little Wrapper marketing material that it's aimed squarely at people who are not currently operating a business and who have no business experience. For example, the first thing on the list of "Whats (ungrammatically) Included" is the Set Up Manual which:

"... takes you through the simple things you need to do to establish your business effectively ... Setting up your home office ...Setting up your e-mail account ... Opening a Bank Account ... Accountants - do you need one, if so, what to look for and how much to pay ... Why you need to keep adequate business records ... How to take your customers (ungrammatical) orders ... How to keep track of your customers" etc.

If, on the contrary, you purchased the My Little Wrapper business as an extension to an existing business (e.g. if you bought it in the name of an existing business with a business cheque or a business credit card) then you don't have any rights under the Distance Selling Regulations.

In conclusion, you should be able to get a refund from N5 Ltd for your original purchase of the My Little Wrapper Business, less whatever you have consumed, provided you have taken reasonable care of the goods. It is not a requirement of the legislation that the goods should be in a condition fit for resale.

Finally, please note that the editor of Business Opportunity Watch is a qualified accountant rather than a lawyer and please see the Terms and Conditions which apply to use of this website. The Distance Selling Regulations are a complex piece of legislation and the best advice is normally to seek the opinion of a solicitor. However, the Distance Selling Regulations are a special case because they are overseen by the Office of Fair Trading, who are given the statutory responsibility of receiving any complaints.

Therefore, if you are unable to resolve this matter directly with N5 Ltd and you are still unsatisfied then you should contact their local Trading Standards Office at:

Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council
Trading Standards and Licensing
PO Box 1833
Council House
Solihull
West Midlands
B91 3DZ

In fact, in view of N5 Ltd's confusing and incorrect references to "No refunds" and having to wait a year to ask for a refund, you may find that the Office of Fair Trading is sympathetic to the view that refunds should be given even after the period of three months and 7 working days.

__________________________________


5. Update 9th March 2010 re Nigel Botterill's bio re Card Protection Plan
http://nigelbotterill.com, www.entrepreneurs-circle.co.uk

Nigel Botterill's mysterious short-lived managing directorship of Card Protection Plan seems to be an error that just won't go away! It has appeared again on the "About Me" page on his new site at http://nigelbotterill.com promoting his new mentoring business Entrepreneur's Circle.

Here's what he says on his new site:

"In late 2001, I'd moved to Card Protection Plan as Managing Director, working closely with self-made multi-millionaire Hamish Ogston. In less than 2 years I transformed the business, sending turnover soaring from £3m to £35m."

We wrote to Nigel Botterill in 2007 about a similar claim on his website for the BestOf franchise, (as also referred to above).

Nigel Botterill replied to say that:

At no time was I, or have I ever claimed to have been, a Board Director - which is why there is no record of company directorships at Companies House.

You will be aware that it is common practice for senior executives in large companies across the UK to have job titles like Marketing Director, Operations Director, Managing Director etc., these people are not necessarily Statutory Directors under the Companies Act.  Typically, such senior roles will report in to the Board of the company where the Statutory Directors reside.

Card Protection Plan told me that they hired Nigel Botterill to set up a new call centre in the Midlands - which is why he moved his family from Yorkshire to the Midlands - and that he was certainly not Managing Director of the whole company and that - if he had "run" CPP as he claimed - he would surely have known that the turnover at the time he joined was more like £30 million than £3 million. 

I also came across a Press Report dated 7th June 2001 in the Evening Press on the website at www.thisisyork.co.uk in which Nigel Botterill gave an interview about job opportunities available at CPP and he is described as "managing director of the telemarketing division of CPP".

Now why couldn't he just have said that in the first place?

__________________________________

 

Go Back to Page One

1. Review
Extract from Business Opportunity Watch Rating Reviews, September 2008 Issue 19

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