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Cactus Language Training - Press

The Argus, 28th June 2005

Traveller With a Classy Idea to Keep on the Move

RICH AMBLER has got itchy feet. The founder and managing director of Cactus Language Training (CLT) in Brighton wants to open an office overseas and has set his sights on America's east coast.

"It's either Miami or New York," he says, gazing at an imaginary vanishing point. "We haven't decided yet but its going to happen next year. That's the big project.
"Purely from a business point of view it should be New York but the reason we are in Brighton and not London is because of the quality of life... so it could be Miami."
Rich is a passionate traveller with more than 50 stamps in his passport so it is a testament to Brighton and Hove's unique charms that he has been here so long. CLT's headquarters, it should be noted, will remain in Brighton.

The company is fast becoming one of the UK's leading suppliers of language training, with more than 3,500 freelance teachers across the world in its database. It is a buoyant market and, as the world shrinks in terms of International trading, more and more companies are keen to improve their workers' language skills.

Cactus clients range from individuals to corporates like Diageo, Bouygues and Kimberley Clarke which are eager to compete effectively on the global stage.
Last year the 18-strong firm trained 4,000 people in 15 languages, both in-house and at its training rooms dotted around the UK and abroad. Cactus also runs tours where people combine a holiday with learning new language skills.

Rich's business career began at Leeds Polytechnic where, together with three friends, he launched a travel firm called Victoria Real running skiing holidays for fellow students. From a profitable sideline in souvenir videos, the campus-based business went on to become a fully-fledged film production company producing niche sports footage for ITV. But after three years, Rich, along with another co-founder, split from Victoria Real to pursue adventures further a field. Victoria Real moved to Brighton and became an Emmy Award-winning pioneer of interactive television producing Channel 4's web site for Big Brother.

Rich ended up in Colombia. He says: "We had a choice, either to open a language school, which would probably make lots of money but would not be much fun, or open a cafe, which would be a lot of fun but not make any money. Within two weeks we had opened a cafe. We were two blokes in our 20s and opening a European
style cafe in Colombia just seemed too good an opportunity to miss, really.
"We sold soups, salads and sandwiches and my mum used to send out the Sunday papers. It was very popular with ex-pats and the locals used to come to practise English." The business was "technically illegal" but Rich had a blast anyway.
He adds: "Colombia has a bad press but it is not all laundered money. There is a lot of clean money and there are a lot of successful people, although maybe it's not somewhere to hang your hat." It was never meant to be a long-term project.
"After eight months we started to get the cocktail effect where people would come up to us an ask us to run their bar but we really wanted to go to Chile so we sold up."

After another year Rich left South America, returned to England, moved to Brighton to be near his friends, and opened a sandwich shop in Preston Circus. It proved to be popular with foreign language students, whom he discovered were often packed off to London, Canterbury or Winchester for the day.

Sensing an opportunity he visited one of the schools and asked the headteacher if he could be a tour guide on the next trip and, to his surprise, she said yes. The only problem was the next coach was leaving in two days. "Of course I agreed to do it," he says cheerfully. "You always say yes and worry about how you're going to do it later. That's business. You have to take risks. It's what I thrive on. So that Friday I closed the shop at 3pm and bombed up to London to work out where I was going to take them all. I was completely blagging it but it worked. That's how this business got started. We were an excursion firm. But businesses evolve and I suspect some of my staff have no idea what the origins of Cactus are."

Richard is passionate about lots of things, including football, rugby, and, of course, travel. But his overriding love is for business. "That's what I am - a salesman". And he has passionate views about what business is.

"Being in business is a lifestyle, a mentality that you buy into. You are in it because you love business and it's a journey that never stops. You have to be prepared to take risks and be prepared for things to go wrong and you must always have ideas floating in the air. It doesn't matter if those ideas don't work. The important thing is to try them. While I have my hang-ups about the States, they don't recognise failure in the same way as we do For them it's not bad to try something and fall. Over here we don't like failure. That's one of the reasons businesses fail - because people are not prepared to fail."