Sale of Net jobs site to 'Mail' publisher earns family £18m

Internet fortunes can still be made, Keith Potts proved yesterday. He and his family netted £18m in cash after selling his internet recruitment site to Associated Newspapers.

The deal values Jobsite.com, set up in 1995, at £35m. Manpower, which has a 49 per cent holding in the business, is also selling to Associated, part of Daily Mail & General Trust, the national newspaper publisher.

Mr Potts, the managing director, will continue to run the business, under a three-year employment contract, from its offices near Portsmouth.

He said: "I'm very happy that we've found the right partner for the company. They will be a huge resource and support for us going forward."

He added that, having been up all night negotiating the deal - signed yesterday morning - he was more "knackered" than elated. "We're one of the few dot.coms that have been profitable throughout. There were several hundred job boards [sites] at one point but we had first mover advantage."

Mr Potts, 39, used to write the software to create flight simulators for the likes of British Airways. His brother Graham, a recruitment consultant, asked him to produce a software system for him, introducing Keith Potts to the sector.

The three brothers (there is also Eric), plus Graham's wife Karen and family friend Nick Lutte started off an internet venture called Pinnacle in early 1995. By September that year, they decided to do an internet jobs site. Between them, these founding partners, who all work at the company, owned 51 per cent of the company before the Associated deal. "Jobsite was just supposed to be a spin-off, but it grew and grew very rapidly," said Keith Potts.

He said that "offline and online are very much coming together" in the sector, making for significant synergies between recruitment advertising in newspapers and on the internet.

Associated publishes The Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and London's Evening Standard. It will be a second attempt to crack the internet jobs sector for the company. Two years ago, Associated closed its recruitment portal, BigBlueDog.com.

Andrew Hart, the managing director of Associated's new media business, said: "This acquisition is a key element of our strategy to build specialist vertical services online which complement our broad-reach print and online content products."