How The King's Trust helped me build Motorhome Pig
In January 2024, aged 26, The Prince’s Trust - now The King’s Trust - gave me a start-up grant and a volunteer business mentor to start a business. The software I wrote with that support is the software Motorhome Pig runs on today. This is how it happened.
By Gary Lewis CheethamCo-Founder & Technical Director, Motorhome Pig · Supported by The King's Trust Enterprise Programme, 2024
· Last updated 9 July 2026 · 5 min read
Why I went to The Prince’s Trust
I had an idea I believed in and no idea how to get it off the ground. I heard about the Enterprise Programme from a friend who had used it to start their own business. The Prince’s Trust runs it for people aged 18 to 30 who want to start a business and cannot get started on their own. I applied in late 2023, with no savings and a business plan I had never written before.
The idea was straightforward. People who wanted to sell their car did not want the hassle of adverts, time-wasters and haggling, and local dealers wanted stock. I built the software to sit in the middle and match them. I called it GL Digital Car Sourcing.
What I did not have was any idea how to turn that into a business. I could write the code. I could not write a cash-flow forecast, and I had nobody to ask. That is precisely the gap the Trust exists to fill, and I had no idea how much I needed it until I was in the room.
What the Enterprise Programme actually gives you
The King’s Trust Enterprise Programme is the charity’s business start-up scheme for people aged 18 to 30. It combines a business-planning course, a start-up grant, an optional start-up loan, and a volunteer business mentor who meets you at least monthly through your first year of trading. It still runs today.
The sequence was: a course on how to write a business plan, then actually writing one, then presenting it and applying for funding against it. Nobody hands you money for an idea. You have to think it through, out loud, in front of people who have seen a lot of business plans and are not being paid to be kind about yours.
That process was worth more to me than the money, and the money mattered enormously. It was the first time anyone had made me justify the numbers rather than the technology.
What I received
- Awarded to
- Gary Lewis Cheetham (personally)
- Date
- 11 January 2024
- My age at the time
- 26
- Awarded
- A start-up grant and a volunteer business mentor
- Programme
- The Enterprise Programme
- The business it funded
- GL Digital Car Sourcing
- Motorhome Pig launched
- September 2025
The letter
On 11 January 2024 The Prince’s Trust wrote to confirm the award: a business mentor and a start-up grant. I still have the letter. For someone with no savings and no degree, being told in writing that a charity founded by the now King believed the plan was worth backing is not a small thing.
“I am pleased to confirm that you are now officially a Prince’s Trust Supported Business.”
The mentor was the part that mattered
The grant starts a business. The mentor keeps it honest. Mine was a volunteer, based out of the Trust’s Leeds offices, and the commitment in the letter was to meet at least monthly for the first twelve months and every two months in the second year - after launch, not before it. That is the part most people miss.
It is not a cheque and a handshake. Somebody experienced sits with you while the business is actually running and tells you the truth about it. When the business began to struggle, I did not have to pretend otherwise to a room of investors. I had one person, with no stake in flattering me, asking why the numbers were not working.
That is why the change of direction happened in the open rather than quietly, and it is why it happened early enough to matter.
How it became Motorhome Pig
GL Digital Car Sourcing worked technically. It had paying customers and dealers across Yorkshire and Scotland. What it did not have was a business model: I carried every pound of advertising cost, and dealers buy selectively. The software was sound. The market was wrong.
I could bring a dealer ten cars and they would want two. The margin on those two never covered the cost of finding all ten. The thing that changed everything was noticing what happened when we stopped passing vehicles to the trade and started selling them to the people who actually wanted to own them. The same technology, pointed at the retail buyer, produced a completely different result.
Meanwhile I had been going out with my dad on habitation checks. He has spent more than 30 years in the motor trade, is MCEA Registered and an AWS NCC trained mobile caravan engineer, and he buys and sells motorhomes on instinct built over a career. Motorhomes are a harder, slower, higher-value sale than cars, which is exactly why matching the right buyer to the right vehicle is worth doing properly, and exactly why trade knowledge is not optional.
He had the knowledge. I had the platform. Neither of us had a business until we put the two together. I told my mentor what I intended to do and he supported it. Then I spent over a year rebuilding and testing everything, because a platform that matches cars to dealers is not the same thing as a platform that can value, market, photograph, advertise and safely complete the private sale of a £60,000 motorhome.
Motorhome Pig launched in September 2025, about twenty months after the grant.
The grant was not a large sum of money. It was the difference between an idea and a business, and everything here grew out of it.
One thing worth saying plainly, because I am proud of the support and would not want to overstate it. The Trust backed me, in January 2024, as a twenty-six-year-old with a business plan. It did not back Motorhome Pig, which did not exist then, and it has no involvement in the business today. What it gave me was the start, and the start was everything.
What The King’s Trust does, and why it matters
The King’s Trust is a UK youth charity founded in 1976 by His Majesty The King, then Prince of Wales. It helps young people into work, education and enterprise, and says it has supported more than a million of them. It was called The Prince’s Trust until its 2024 rebrand; the charity registers recorded the new name on 5 March 2025.
It is the same registered charity either way - Charity Commission no. 1079675 in England and Wales and no. SC041198 in Scotland - both of which still record “Previous Name - The Prince’s Trust”. My letter is headed with the old name because that is what the charity was called in January 2024.
I think what they do is genuinely important, and I do not say that as a marketing line. I was a young man with no savings, no contacts in business and a laptop. There is no bank in the country that would have lent me a penny on that basis. The Trust did, and it sent someone to sit with me every month for a year afterwards to make sure I did not waste it.
Look at the Enterprise Programme. It is free, it is real, and it is still running. You do not need a degree, a business background or money to begin - you need an idea you are willing to be questioned about.
Frequently asked questions
Was Motorhome Pig's co-founder supported by The King's Trust?
Co-founder Gary Lewis Cheetham was supported by The King's Trust, then called The Prince's Trust. In January 2024 he received a start-up grant and a volunteer business mentor through its Enterprise Programme. That support was awarded to him personally, for an earlier business whose technology became the Motorhome Pig platform.
What is The King's Trust Enterprise Programme?
The King's Trust Enterprise Programme is the charity's business start-up scheme for people aged 18 to 30 who are unemployed or working few hours. It combines a business-planning course, a start-up grant, an optional start-up loan, and a volunteer business mentor who supports you through your first years of trading. It still runs today.
Is The King's Trust the same charity as The Prince's Trust?
Yes. It is the same charity under a new name. Founded in 1976 by His Majesty The King, then Prince of Wales, it rebranded as The King's Trust in October 2024. Both statutory registers record the change: Charity Commission no. 1079675 and Scottish charity no. SC041198 each list 'Previous Name - The Prince's Trust' until 5 March 2025.
The award date, the mentor and the wording quoted above come from the original Prince’s Trust award letter dated 11 January 2024, held on file. The charity is verifiable at kingstrust.org.uk and on both public registers linked above. The King’s Trust has not reviewed or approved this page. If anything here is inaccurate, tell us and we will correct it.
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