A GOOD deed to help a young mum and her son has escalated into a major business success for 49-year-old Colin Stacey.

It all began when Mr Stacey, of Trinity Place, Windsor visited old schoolfriend Holly Howse-Macbeth and her sons Spencer and Fletcher at their home in Old Windsor.

Spencer, now 14, has cerebral palsy. Mr Stacey – who is a builder – approached local suppliers to ask them to donate materials to create a garden and a sensory room for Spencer.

The campaign took three years, but was a huge success.

It struck Mr Stacey how many companies he approached were happy to let him have left-over stock from jobs they had finished, rather than have to pay to keep it in storage. He contacted old friend Mickey Brown – who was also in the business and had had to pay over the years to store left-over stock. fellow friends, Paul Cartwright and Mike Chapman, became involved and an idea formed. They set up an online market place they called Builders Bay for builders, DIY fans and renovators to sell excess stock – making money and saving the cost of storage. They then planned to sell it on at low cost.

Mr Stacey said: “We all agreed to grow Builders Bay organically as we had no funding and needed to create a business model through our own fact finding, speaking to builders DIYers, renovators. There was a lot of legwork from us all.”

Then they heard about a national start-up competition run monthly by the Worth Capital Investment Fund to reward people with new business ideas – with a £150,000 prize to the winners.

Entries were received from 84 businesses the month Builders Bay entered – and they won.

Mr Stacey said: “You would have heard our celebratory victory cries from our Old Windsor watering hole all the way over in Windsor Castle. Our site is operational and working well, We are selling end of line products at unbelievable prices.”