“Initially we looked at venture capital but we didn’t want to do lots of work and end up giving a lot of it away,” Kershaw told our reporters. “Then we started talking to the high-street banks and specialist providers and it quickly became obvious that, quite frankly, anything under £2 million wouldn’t happen and anything over £10 million was deemed as a major investment, so we fell between two stools, as it were.”

This was when they were introduced to OakNorth, a relative newcomer lender established in 2015 which recently raised $440 million in funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund – putting its mission to “help the UK’s growth businesses and entrepreneurs reach their potential by providing them with bespoke, no-nonsense debt finance solutions” on the map.

Where the established banks would try and shoehorn the two Simons’ project into their categories, OakNorth took “a whole new approach, they looked at the project and people and feasibility to outline how to fund us from A to B,” Kershaw explained. “They knew the sector and what we needed to get open and trading and how to structure the funding around what was right for the business.”

With that money secured in October, the pair purchased the Mount hotel in Scarborough to be the first in its chain of Bike and Boot Inns, a new mid-range countryside leisure hotel concept aimed at cyclists and walkers.

Rhatigan made his name in five star accommodation, running Le Manor aux Quat’ Saisons in the 90s and the award-winning Faversham Arms in the noughties. Now, alongside Kershaw, the pair are looking to build the Bike and Boots brand across the UK, with another site in the Peak District already lined up.