40 Successful Entrepreneurs Reveal How They Made Millions

Preface

to the 2nd edition

A lot has changed since I wrote the original hardback version of this book five years ago. In that time entrepreneurship has enjoyed an extraordinary rise in visibility and popularity, thanks in part to television programmes such as Dragons’ Den and The Apprentice. A government initiative has even introduced enterprise education into secondary schools.

A lot has happened to the entrepreneurs profiled in this book too. Five years ago all of them were running incredibly successful businesses which they had started up with very little money. Five years on, nearly half the 40 entrepreneurs featured in the original book have sold their businesses, in every case for millions of pounds and in some instances for substantially more.

There can be few things more life-affirming than throwing off the shackles of paid employment and using your energy and talents to create a business of your own. But as every successful entrepreneur knows, starting up a business from scratch and turning it into a thriving business is actually only half the story. In order to really hit the jackpot the ultimate dream is to sell that business for a substantial sum too.

The people in this book have proved decisively that it can be done. Gerry Pack, for example, started up his business Holiday Extras providing airport hotel rooms and parking with just £100. He sold it in 2005 for £43 million. Darren Richards started up his online dating agency DatingDirect.com with £2,500 and sold it just eight years later for £30 million. And Mike Clare, who started up his bed retail business Dreams with £16,000, sold it in 2008 for more than £200 million.

So this completely revised and updated paperback edition is in many ways a glorious celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit – of the triumph of hope over negativity, self-belief over self-doubt and proof that following your dream really can lead to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

It is a truly incredible achievement to have created something from nothing and then within a few years sold it for a life-changing amount of money. Armed only with a good idea and a great deal of drive and determination these people have single-handedly changed their own destiny and in many cases that of their families, shareholders and employees too.

For some, selling their business has given them the time and space to indulge in other passions. Having sold his business Holiday Extras, Gerry Pack bought a boat and now spends his time sailing around the world with his wife, while Darren Richards has started up an online property business and bought a handful of bars in Tenerife since selling his business DatingDirect.com.

Others have seized the opportunity provided by selling their business to give something back to society. Lizzie Vann, who sold her business Organix for a substantial undisclosed sum,

Lizzie Vann

Founder of Organix brands

When Lizzie Vann first hit on the idea of making healthy organic food for babies, she decided to draw up a list of the most nutritional ingredients she could find and then mix them together to create the ultimate superfood.

Unfortunately, the three foods at the top of her list were blackberries, lean steak and peanut butter. The experiment was not a great success. She says: ‘I ended up with this horrid, grey, slimy mess that looked like a squashed slug.’

Happily her subsequent attempts to create healthy food for children worked rather better. Sixteen years later her company Organix sells £36 million of baby food a year, the company has won numerous awards for food quality and campaigning and Vann has been awarded an MBE for services to children’s food.

Brought up in the Midlands, Vann first became interested
in nutrition as a child when she suffered badly from asthma
and eczema and had to be treated with steroids. She says: ‘I
felt I needed to understand my illness and as I studied the
way the body’s system works, I started to see there were
links between food and health.’

She went on to briefly study biology and ecology at
Lancaster University, where she also became actively
involved in campaigning for social justice. This included
volunteering for housing action trusts and helping to set up
a wholefood worker co-operative.

Her campaigning took a temporary back seat as she
pursued a career as an investment analyst with a firm of
actuaries in the City. But after eight years she realised she
wanted to get back to the issues she believed in. She says: ‘I
have always wanted life to feel like it has a coherent pattern
to it and makes sense, instead of putting different aspects of
your life in different boxes. But life in the City didn’t feel
like that. It felt very glamorous and exciting and I felt very
important earning lots of money but it just didn’t feel the
right thing to be doing as I turned 30.’

She adds: ‘I had always had a very strong belief that
society needed to be run in a better way and that ordinary
citizens could change things. I started to think there had to
be more to life than this.’

Vann decided that the best way she could contribute to
making the world a better place was to give infants the best
possible start in life by creating baby food using organic products
and natural ingredients, without additives or chemicals.
She says: ‘Babies and children need good food because
their bodies are developing and growing and I wanted to
make food that would make a difference to their health. I
wanted to be a standard setter for the industry.’

Confident that success was just around the corner she
quit her job in the City and began experimenting with
recipes in her kitchen with the help of a friend. She says: ‘I
thought “Oh I can do this, it’s easy.” I decided I needed half
a million pounds and thought “I know people in the City so
I’ll just go and see them.” How naive can you be?’

Unsurprisingly her lack of any experience in setting up a
food company did not impress. After being turned down by
dozens of venture capitalists and merchant banks she was
forced to scale down her ambitions. She started up the
company with a more modest £50,000, raised through loans
from banks and friends. She was not even able to persuade
a British manufacturer to get involved and ended up
having to get the first batch of baby food made in Germany.
She says: ‘I visited lots of companies that made baby food
but they all said “Who are you? Have you ever done this
before? What backing have you got?” So there was a bit of a
credibility gap.’

Her belief in what she was doing started to pay off only
when she took a stand at an exhibition for health visitors in
Torquay. She says: ‘Baby food had a really bad reputation
for being beige and adulterated with maltodextrin and
cornflour, so none of the manufacturers would offer its food
at exhibitions because people would turn up their noses at
it. They gave away things like calculators instead. But we
put out bowls of our baby foods for people to taste. They
were bright orange and green and purple because they
were made with carrots or spinach or blueberries, and
people tried them and thought they were great. You could
tell what they were by looking at them and tasting them
rather than looking at the label.’

Orders from supermarkets quickly followed. Organix now produces around 50 varieties of food for babies and children up to 10.

Vann has meanwhile become a campaigner for better
children’s food and in 2003 launched a drive for a children’s
food bill after drawing up a code of practice for the food
industry. She has also set up a Food for Life campaign to
improve the quality of school meals which has generated a
huge response among parents and schools. It is contributing
to a major shift in the way the g

40 successful entrepreneurs

2. Darren Richards Founder of DatingDirect.com

Lovelorn sceptics seeking proof that internet dating really can work need look no further than Darren Richards, the creator of Britain’s largest dating service, DatingDirect.com. When Richards decided to try out the website he had created, he met the girl of his dreams on his second date. He says: ‘We got on really well, so at the end of the evening I told her I needed to tell her something. She didn’t believe who I was until I showed her my business card.’ They were together more than five years before amicably going their separate ways.

Bought up in Worcestershire, Richards always dreamt of setting up his own business. He admits: ‘I didn’t really pay much attention to getting good grades and certificates at school because I was so confident that I would be working for myself I thought I wouldn’t need to convince anyone else of my ability.’ When he left school at 16, however, he ended up getting a job as a waiter in a hotel restaurant for several years before going to work as a holiday rep in Gran Canaria. He continued to dream about setting up his own business, though, and was always coming up with potential moneymaking schemes, such as a loyalty card for high street shops.

He says: ‘My mind was always elsewhere, even when I was waiting on tables in the restaurant. I tried so many different things that my friends would say: ‘Oh here comes Darren, I wonder what new idea he has today.’

He was trying to make a living importing electronic toys from Japan when he hit on the idea of setting up a dating service while idly surfing the internet one evening at home. Aged 33 and single, having recently come out of a long-term relationship, he suddenly realised that the internet could be the perfect way of meeting other singletons in his area. But when he searched for an online agency to join he could only find companies based in America. Even worse, none of the sites seemed to take the idea of meeting a new partner online seriously, encouraging members to use silly nicknames such as Sexy Babe and Hot Pants.

He says: ‘It was frustrating. I thought I couldn’t be the only person who wanted to use the internet to find a serious date.’

Richards drew up a blueprint of what he thought a British online dating service should be like. Then he spent the next three months researching the market, conducting straw polls with people in the street and asking his friends for their views. Encouraged by their response he bought some software and a couple of website magazines. Then he built a simple site where people could post details of themselves.

He says: ‘It was a very basic service and didn’t work that well. But it was getting a lot of hits and it proved to me there were a lot of people out there who wanted to use it.’ Inspired by the success of his prototype, Richards decided to create a fully fledged dating website through which members could contact each other directly.

The first few website developers he approached told him it could not be done but he eventually found someone able and willing to do the job. Richard gave the designer a 20 per cent stake in the company in return for creating a new interactive website and it was launched in 1999 at a cost of £2,500. Within three months it had 40,000 members.

But Richards still had a big problem. In order to start making money he needed to get people to pay for using his service and the only way they would do that was if they could pay online by credit card. Barclaycard, however, was not interested in letting him use its facilities. He says: ‘It was a nightmare. I knew the company wouldn’t survive unless we could take credit card payments. But we were turned down three times by Barclaycard because they felt that a dating service was a high-risk area in the same category as gambling and pornography.’

Refusing to take no for an answer, Richards drove to Northampton to see the man in charge of applications in person and gave him a demonstration of the website. The man was so impressed that he agreed to grant credit card facilities on the spot. Barclaycard’s decision changed everything. Richards gave up his job importing Japanese toys to concentrate on his internet dating business full time and started charging £15 a month for members wanting to contact potential partners through the site.

He soon discovered that a great number of people were prepared to stump up the money. By 2004, just five years after it was launched, DatingDirect.com had 1.5 million active members and a turnover of more than £10 million, generating a profit of several million pounds. DatingDirect had also chalked up dozens of marriages and babies from people who met via the website. It began supplying a dating service to other websites including Channel 4 and GMTV.

By January 2007 the business had 5 million active members and Richards sold it to French company Meetec for £