He set up Optisearch in his early twenties; now 27, Louis Riat-Bonello is up for Emerging Leader of the Year, with the winner named on 19 November.
Most people who start a business in their early twenties do it with little more than an idea and a laptop. Louis Riat-Bonello set up his search marketing agency, Optisearch, in 2022. Four years on, at 27, he is a finalist for Emerging Leader of the Year at the National Young Business Leader Awards 2026.
He is from Beckenham, on the Kent border, and the agency’s clients include the kind of firms north Kent runs on: tradespeople, care homes and professional services. The winners will be announced at the final on Thursday 19 November 2026 at Unity Place, Milton Keynes.
The gap he spotted
The business began with something he noticed rather than something he was trained for. In his words:
“I started Optisearch because I saw how many good local businesses were invisible online, losing customers to bigger brands simply because they weren’t showing up.”
For a Dartford electrician or a care home in the villages, that is the whole problem in a sentence. The work can be first rate, but if someone searching for it is shown a national name first, the phone does not ring.
From one founder to a team of six
Optisearch describes itself as a Google Ads and SEO agency helping UK businesses win more customers from search. In practice that means two things: paying for a business to appear in the adverts at the top of a Google search, and getting it into the ordinary results underneath.
The agency says it now has more than 60 clients, across the UK and internationally, and a team that has grown to six.
What it says the work produced in September
Optisearch judges itself on enquiries rather than clicks. For September 2026, across all of its clients, the agency says it helped small businesses “generate, track and attribute 3554 new enquiries from Google marketing”.
It says those enquiries “created around £5 million in quoted work, and £1-2 million in sales so far”. These are the agency’s own totals across its client list; we have not seen the figures behind them.
The award
According to Optisearch’s announcement, the National Young Business Leader Awards celebrate the next generation of business leaders driving innovation and making a difference in the business community. He says the shortlisting is not his alone:
“Being shortlisted is a real honour, and it belongs to my team and the clients who’ve trusted us to help them grow.”
For anyone thinking of starting out
If you are in your twenties in Dartford and wondering whether to go it alone, his route is worth a look: a single, specific problem, local businesses that could not be found, turned into a firm with a staff of six and a place in a national final. He says he is available to talk about the shortlisting. More about him and his work is on his own site, louisriatbonello.com, and the agency can be reached on 020 4572 2042.
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