WE all have moments of madness, but not everyone knows how to profit by them.

Peter Gibson does. In one of those mad moments almost five years ago he took ownership of a sole practitioner law firm in Northallerton.

Today, against all the odds, and using acquisition, natural expansion and unrelenting passion for his project, Coles Solicitors has gone from a turnover of less than £250,000 to almost £600,000 with ten employees and a second office in York. It says something for his style of leadership that staff turnover is negligible.

No surprises then, that Coles Solicitors wants to be considered for the Small Business Of The Year title – and that Peter is being looked at as a possible Business Personality Of The Year.

What is surprising is that Peter had never run a law firm until that “moment of madness” sparked by a small classified advertisement in the Law Society Gazette.

But he was armed with his experience at the well-known York firm of Corries, whose principles of growth were brought to his venture and he now describes his decision to launch the practice as “the best thing I ever did.”

His steadfast belief in marketing and brand development has occasionally attracted criticism from others in his profession. How ridiculous, they said, for a solicitor to man a stand at not one Great Yorkshire Show in Harrogate,but two.

Yet through occasions like that and other networking events across the region, his firm’s message has been spread from Hartlepool in the North to Selby in the South.