James Layfield

James Robert Layfield, (b. 1974, Kingston upon Hull, England) is a British entrepreneur.

In 2007 Layfield was cited in the list of "Top 30 UK Entrepreneurs under 35" compiled by Growing Business Magazine. He has also been listed in the 2008, 2009 and 2010 editions of the Who’s Who of Britain’s Business Elite. In 2011 Layfield was cited as 'One To Watch' by Business Zone. In February 2012 Layfield was named 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year by EO UK.

Layfield's companies include a marketing agency, The Lounge Group. He is also Managing Director of Never Ever Limited, which was created to help establish new ventures, and he is the entrepreneur behind Inside Consultants Limited a business to business consultancy.

He also sits on the board as UK Membership Chair for the Entrepreneurs Organisation and is now the EMEA Membership Director.

Early career
Layfield started his first business, JayLay Eggs, a door-to-door sales and delivery service for fresh eggs in his neighbourhood of Kingston Upon Hull, at the age of 10.

Layfield joined Richard Branson’s Virgin Group at the age of 25 and became the youngest Managing Director of a Virgin business in the group's history. Layfield was Managing Director of Virgin Student, the UK's earliest mass student social networking site. In 2004, he was part of the Virgin Unite first Awakenings trip to South Africa with Sir Richard Branson, Dame Kelly Holmes and Jean Ollwange. The initiative sought to break down the barriers deterring private organizations from charitable endeavours. During the trip the group met with the Dalai Lama, and together laid the ground work for a collaborative effort that helped target young women between the ages of 15 and 24 (who comprise four of every 5 new HIV infections within that demographic) in South Africa. Virgin Unite subsequently received the 2005 Business Excellence Award for this work.

Businesses
With business partner Sara Gill, Layfield founded The Lounge Group in 2005, a marketing agency based on the premise that ‘the market knows the market’. Layfield ran Richard Branson’s D3 and realised that there was another way of understanding the youth market than, as he says, “wearing swanky jeans and getting a trendy haircut”. With a network of 10,000 UK consumers and a client list including Virgin Mobile, Samsung, Coty, Colgate Palmolive, Ansell, Alliance & Leicester Bank and Unilever, The Lounge has doubled its turnover in each trading year and now has established offices in Istanbul, Turkey and Madrid, Spain.

Layfield founded a consumer-facing business in 2006, Escape Airports Limited, which acquired a loss-making 10,000 square foot lounge at JFK airport, New York City, and turned a break even business into one that made a 30% profit margin, building relationships with c.30 airlines operating from the airport. In 2008, Escape Airlines was sold for an undisclosed sum.

Never Ever Limited is Layfield's development and management company functioning as an early-stage incubator. It is overseeing the delivery of the CityLounge Ventures Limited brand Central Working. A Layfield-conceived business looking to reinvent collaborative workspaces. The first site in Bloomsbury, London opened in May 2011.

In November 2011, Layfield was invited by UK television station, Channel 4, to chair a session of their Global Entrepreneurship Day. The session, titled 'Young, Dreaming and Driven ' was aimed at 16 - 21 year olds and designed to inspire young entrepreneurs to follow in the footsteps of those chairing the sessions.

Central Working
Co-founded by James Layfield and Steve Pette, the first Central Working space opened in Bloomsbury, central London, in May 2011.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Graham Snowdon suggested, "Central's emergence seems to be part of a wider evolutionary leap for co-working. Recent years have seen a sudden expansion of facilities: in Europe, the number of such spaces has risen by 19% since last October, with London and Berlin particular hotspots, according to recent research by online co-working magazine Deskmag."