Pet project clicks for family vet practice One of them involved capitalising on the "huge trepidation" with which John Cousins greeted a threat to the family veterinary practice in 2006. Anyone who has taken an ailing pet to the vet will know about the often eye-watering cost of animal medication. After a Competition Commission investigation, the law was changed to drive prices down by allowing pet owners to take a vet's prescription to someone other than the prescriber. Good news for consumers, but less so for vets such as Mr Cousins who had come to rely on profiting from a captive medication market to supplement professional service fees. "There was a lot of talk in the profession about it being a threat," he says. They thought local pharmacists would be doing it, as happens with human medication. Luke's take on it was, if you can't beat them, join them. Rather than idle away the long summer break between GCSEs and A-levels, Luke began formulating a plan for an online pet pharmacy that would use his father's professional qualification to check prescriptions. "A website sounded like a good idea, although I didn't really know what one was," says John. "He still doesn't," Luke jokes. I didn't know much about selling online either, other than through eBay. But that had given me the basics: provide a good service, get things out quickly and keep the prices down. Using open source ecommerce software, and plenty of internet research, he built a website in his bedroom and the family started to sell the practice's medication online. I didn't know about programming. But you could Google what you wanted to do and, chances are, someone else had done something similar and written about it. I was a copy-and-paste programmer. He dropped one of his A-levels, which meant he had more free periods than lessons - "half my time at school was spent on the site" - and when he finished school, he became only one of two pupils out of 125 in his year not to go to university. He's had plenty to keep him busy: the site quickly outgrew the veterinary practice, which was sold in 2010. Viovet, which now sells pet food as well as medication, had sales of £5.4m in its last financial year, although Luke, 21, says the company will only make its first profit this year. It's where we want to be. I don't want to be making loads of profit if it holds the growth back. The company typically undercuts vets" medication prices by around 30pc and is one of the larger firms in what remains a nascent market. "There's still an inherent fear with some people that they're getting something dodgy," says commercial director Philip Roberts. We need to assuage those fears. With no barriers to entry, the company tries to get ahead on service. Unusually for an ecommerce firm, it encourages customers to phone to order if they so wish. It also races to get its orders out quickly to win trust. Mr Roberts says "more competition is inevitable." Customer retention is going to be hugely important - we need to find a way of giving an online business a personality, which might sound a bit of a contradiction. To that end, Luke is about to embark on his next big project: rebuilding the website. We've scrapped every single part of the business we started with five years ago, apart from the website: It looks strange that we've left the part that everyone sees until last. Doesn't the company need a wiser head making decisions now it's maturing? Luke is the only person who understands the whole business. He's the person we go to with a big decision or [problem]," John replies. Luke admits he's still getting to grips with managing staff who are usually older than him, but the determination he showed three years ago when he insisted new warehouse software he'd built was used by the company's pickers and packers bodes well. "You go in, announce something and the whole room doesn't like it and tries to persuade you to abandon it," he recalls. After standing his ground for a week, the staff were converted, he says. I'm not confrontational, so I didn't like that bit of it and still don't. But I've got used to it and it's getting easier. Not all Luke's ideas are good, but it sounds as if they'll keep coming: "When we had Royal Mail problems, he said 'let's take them on and build our own national delivery network,"" John recalls. Luke's response? It's still possible.