Mark Nutter, Managing Director and owner of Workforce management software provider Isys Group has won South West Entrepreneur of the year award having raised over £17k for Sue Ryder Care charity.

Isys Group was one of many companies across the south west including Teams from Airbus, Gala bingo, Ashford’s solicitors, Wards, Office Response and many more have spent the last 4 months raising funds for the chance of becoming the South West entrepreneur of the year.

Samantha Boardman, a fundraiser at Sue Ryder – said: “Our challenge to local businesses was to take the £50 note and, over the four-month period, prove just how good an entrepreneur they are. There were no rules to this challenge only that their activities were legal and the £50 was returned to us at the end.

This year’s star of the show was Mark Nutter, invested his £50 note along with some money of his own and took to the spread betting market. After a £4,000 loss and a few grey hairs later Mark successfully bet that the oil value would rise and managed to cash in just over £17,000. Mark was crowned this year’s ‘Entrepreneur of the year-individual’ and is over the moon at his contribution to Sue Ryder.

The original idea from the outset from Isys Group was for Mark Nutter to invest the money in what most of us would describe as a highly risky strategy and oil trade on the futures market.

“When it was suggested I could invest the £50.00 for Sue Ryder and make the charity money it seemed an obvious idea”.

Mark told us “I am absolutely thrilled to have raised this money for charity and in particular such a good cause as Sue Ryder, I ran a marathon 2 years ago and raised £2,000.00 .To think that took me months to train and I raised 5 times as much in a matter of hours seems incredible.”

Samantha Boardman of Sue Ryder added, “We are thrilled at the amount of money Mark has raised and especially as he has embraced the idea of showing some entrepreneurial spirit and invested the money with a 19100% return! The overall amount he has raised in just 30 hours is £17,047.00 including gift aid; this money will enable us to deliver over 600 hours of care! Never in my time at Sue Ryder have I witnessed such success. I only hope that this will encourage other entrepreneurs to take on the challenge and thank mark for showing it can be done! ”