Some of the individuals in this summer’s list of 20 top Yorkshire entrepreneurs, as judged by Insider, are not comfortable with being branded so. But it’s not just this title they have in common. Julie Hayes takes a look at the underlying qualities that set each of them apart.
Some business personalities may dislike the term ‘entrepreneur’, but to Insider that is exactly what they are. Some individuals in our list of 20 of the top entrepreneurs in the region, in no particular order, are famous, others are infamous, and some are little-known busy bees who have been working hard establishing either one or several businesses.
There’s one thing they all have in common – a drive to succeed – but a few of them flinch at the term ‘entrepreneur’.
“I don’t want to be seen as some ducking and diving sharp-suited entrepreneur. I don’t say when I meet people that I’m an entrepreneur,” says Carl Hopkins, while Kevin McCabe tells us he didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur, nor did he realise he was one until his 40s.
But they all agree on something else: the concept of the entrepreneur raises the profile of business, and good role models encourage people to believe they can do it, too. As Hopkins puts it: “It’s great that there are young people who believe you can aspire to be an entrepreneur as well as aspiring to be a footballer or a model.”
Born and bred at Bramall Lane, the property tycoon and Sheffield United chairman says sport has given him his business instincts. “I have always played a lot of sport, which meant I learned to compete and I learned different structures of play and different techniques,” he says. “I wasn’t great academically, but sport gave me confidence and made me think how to play better and make decisions.”
McCabe’s first job at a steel works lasted half a day. “It wasn’t for me. I made my first big decision, which was: ‘I’m going to quit this job.’” Then he worked for two years on a building site before qualifying as a surveyor by doing a correspondence course and night school.
He set up his first company in 1976, and realised the importance of using your character to differentiate yourself. “I was always trying to be creative and better than the guy next to me,” he says. “The other important thing to know is when to get off the train when markets gets too hot.”
McCabe felt the heat of the 1970s collapse and learned very quickly that markets can also go down. But the 60 year-old has no intention of slowing down.
“The more successful you are, perceived or otherwise,” he says, “the more opportunities are put to you, and you begin to diversify yourself, look at a market and tackle that market yourself.”
Luen broke away from his former employer with some colleagues to set up Martek Marine in 2000.
“We were frustrated by the reticence of the managers, shareholders and managing director,” he says. “There was a huge opportunity in the market, but the management culture seemed to be based on treating staff like mushrooms, which is the antithesis of what working in a company should be about.
I wanted to create a people-centric business that thrived on innovation and opportunity, and created opportunity where there was scope for creation.”
The company now turns over almost £6m, and through product development and market indications Luen believes the company could break the £10m barrier in 18 months.
Hopkins says he hit a turning point when he led the management buyout of marketing agency JDA. “It got me interested in lots of different aspects of business rather than marketing and eventually I got more interested in the businesses than the marketing,” he says.
“Once I sold JDA that gave me the time, money, contacts and the profile to meet lots of new businesses. The first two to three months away from JDA, I just spent meeting lots of different businesses.”
Within a few months he had made two investments, started his own consultancy and had taken up non-executive roles.
Hopkins is a non-executive director for Forward Ladies, he has set up recruitment agency www.agencybods.com; business angel and advice company Kloog; Joblink Systems, a web 2.0 application for recruitment; and is about to launch JumbleAid, an internet charity fundraising business.
“My background is as a designer, but I really quickly developed into a salesman,” he says. “It is great to have an idea, but to get someone else to buy into that is even better.”
When he was 18 Brook’s father, who ran a wholesaling business, offered to back him in a business venture as he had always shown an interest in business. Brook noticed Barnsley, his home town, didn’t have a nightclub and started the £21m Brook empire. The family acquired businesses, including nursing homes and wholesale foods businesses, before concentrating on nightclubs and a property division.
Brook said his father’s influence made him an entrepreneur from a young age. “I unwittingly started business studies lessons from a young age because the only time I could spend with my dad was as he worked. He explained to me why we were selling Coca-Cola below cost and still making money.” His father taught him that because wholesale is a high-volume, low-margin business, and because of high interest rates at the time, it made more sense to arrange to pay Coca-Cola later and put the money in the bank, so it would make more money than selling goods at cost price.
Straight fostered a career in sales and marketing by working in a call centre ten hours a week in the evenings only, and yet still managed to bring home a full week’s salary. After going on to head the department and being headhunted for other jobs, Straight found himself made redundant from a door-to-door sales job.
“I had no job, a bit of money in the bank and all these skills,” he says. “I researched all manner of different issues to find a direction for my career, and in 1988 there was this emerging green agenda.”
He was particularly interested in waste and realised the value of the material we throw away means we end up paying for it twice. “That was my Eureka moment,” he says. He started in an unpaid job as a consultant for a waste management company, but proved his skills, selling products the manufacturers had no idea how to market.
After building a portfolio of products, including the ‘twin bin’ and kerbside boxes, Straight established his own business. His character and agility as a small operation helped him compete on a global scale and, despite being advised against it, he was determined to float the business. After a conversation with a stockbroker over a MacDonald’s at London’s Liverpool Street Station, he floated the business in 2003. This gave the company the gravity to acquire Blackwell, it’s only major rival, in 2005.
Bounds set up ethical travel company i-to-i with £1,000 in 1994 and sold it to First Choice in 2007 for £20m.
Bounds says she knew she never wanted to work for a company. “My dad worked in a factory and my mum was a nurse, and all I was told to do from a young age was get a job for life,” she says. “But that was not even in my psyche. Then I became a lost soul.”
Bounds worked as a stand-up comedian, went backpacking around the world and taught English in Greece. On her return, she set up i-to-i.com to help fellow lost souls embark on meaningful travel projects.
Today Bounds is helping other entrepreneurs get businesses off the ground as a public speaker on enterprise and women in business and mentoring hopeful start-ups. She is also having her memoirs ghost written, while writing her own self-help book and taking time out at a house the family owns on an olive grove back in Greece.“I’m not sure I want to set up another business,” she says, although she admits that may not last long. “I don’t know whether it’s the sign of an over-achiever or a low threshold for boredom. Even in a year’s time I may be up to something else.”
The chief executive of Sheffield Forgemasters International Ltd (SFIL) led an management buyout (MBO) in 2005 when the 200-year-old company was only hours from closure because its US parent company had gone into administration.
The MBO saved 600 jobs and 1,200 supplier relationships, and Honeyman returned SFIL to profit within six months of taking over, increasing turnover from £35m to £100m in fewer than three years.
Honeyman said: “A lot of people were sceptical about whether it would ever work, and did not think we would survive, but I was absolutely certain. I didn’t think we were ever going to fail.
“You have got to have passion for your business. If it’s just to make money, you have not got enough.”
Ali returned to Bradford to help manage his father’s business interests in 2001 – the year of the riots – after getting a degree, an MBA and working in London. He didn’t think there were many opportunities for him in Bradford, but has since created his own. “I thought I would be better off going somewhere else where the opportunities were more diverse because the economic climate in Bradford wasn’t very good,” he says.
“But I was passionate about restaurants – I had been working in one from the age of 11 until I went to university, and saw a huge gap in the market.”
Ali bought a restaurant near the university and college, which, with the help of his friend Alam Zeb (a 42 under 42 in 2007) he transformed into the contemporary cafe bar the Lahore Cafe, addressing a neglected market. “There is a young affluent Asian population that nobody is targeting,” he says.
“They don’t drink so they don’t want to go to a pub or have to buy a four-course meal in a restaurant.”
Ali’s offer of chocolate fudge cake, socialising with friends or reading the newspaper over a coffee allowed him to increase turnover by a factor of 20. He now plans to expand the model to other cities and is setting up an online ordering and delivery system aimed at office workers.
At the same time Ali set up the Smart Moves group to manage his father’s properties more efficiently. He invested in the student properties his father owned, as well as those of other landlords who all faced competition from new accommodation. The group is now a major agent in Bradford, having gone into the city centre market, and also offers financial services and mortgages.
It was Allen’s own musical talent that set him on his way when he became associated with ‘Charade’, a jazz club in Rotherham, while playing the trumpet in a touring band.
The owner of the club was losing money and Allen suggested he hold a mobile discothèque with go-go dancers and take money on the door. His approach worked but the owner couldn’t stand the racket.
“He said he was going to sell it for £3,500, ‘which is more than you can afford!’ he said, but I went to see my grandma, mother and father and I got the money together and bought it,” says Allen. The Charade was the first of Allen’s many discotheques, which also included Josephine’s – “the best nightclub in the city bar none for 20 years”.
Allen added a number of casinos to the nightclub business and established the Napoleon chain, which now has two casinos in Sheffield and others in Leeds, Bradford, Hull and London.
His latest venture 11 years ago was to buy the Owlerton greyhound stadium. He has turned around its image of being dominated by men in flat caps to appeal to a wide audience, and he still has his sights on expansion with plans to build a 500-seat banqueting suite.
“You have got to have vision, you must be enthusiastic and have the capacity to work hard,” he says.
Kirkham founded the furniture retailer dfs in 1969 with £400 of his savings, realising that by cutting warehouse dealers out of the supply chain and selling direct to customers, he could achieve cheaper prices. It now has a £600m turnover.
Kirkham’s business, then called Northern Upholstery, bought Direct Furniture Supplies in 1983 when it went into administration and he renamed it dfs. Employing a cunning strategy that included matching his rollout plans to ITV’s regions – blitzing one area and saving on TV advertising costs at the same time – he floated dfs in 1993 but took it private again in 2004, claiming his competitors could see too clearly into the business.
When Cooper was thrown out of school at 15, he tried more than 20 different jobs and set up eight businesses. In 1989 he set up Cooper’s Coffee before the rest of the world had latched on to coffee culture. Cooper has increased sales by becoming the only UK distributor of Dalla Corte espresso machines, which sell for £5,500, and his latest venture includes expanding the company’s headquarters to build a warehouse and barista training centre.
Taylor founded TAL Eurospecial with one vehicle in 1999, which was the first building block of the TAL Logistics Group. Taylor, who has worked in the transport industry as a mechanic, been an HGV driver and built and sold his own transport businesses, has seen the group grow to more than 120 vehicles, and at a rate of more than 550 per cent over the past two years. This has been achieved witha a trail of acquisitions, the latest being the Northumberland haulage contractor Phillips (Seahouses).
Harrison showed an ability to handle the education system when she turned up at Bradford University and talked them into giving her a place. She also picked up a sponsorship from British Steel by dropping in on the way home.
Taking over her father’s training agency after university, she increased turnover to more than £1m in a year. He wanted to consolidate the business to fund his retirement, so she founded A4e, now a £100m-turnover business.
Harrison owns and lives in the Thornbridge stately home in Derbyshire. She provides advice and investment to other entrepreneurs and has created Novantia, an ethical company that imports Pearl Mountain Coffee from India, and invested in schools in the southern Indian region of Karnataka.
The chief executive of Spice joined Yorkshire Electricity’s graduate training scheme and ended up leading a management buyout of the company’s maintenance business in 1996 when it went private. The company, which Rigby renamed Spice to stand for: ‘society, people, innovation, customers and excellence’, started with a £3m contract and now has a turnover of more than £300m turnover. Rigby has lead an aggressive acquisition strategy, completing six already this year. As Insider went to press Spice was at the point of moving from AIM to the main stock exchange.
Showan moved to Bradford from India when he was 12 and learnt his business skills while working at his parents’ grocery shop, where he set up a delivery service for other immigrants.
He studied electrical engineering at college and worked as an engineer before founding Empire Stores in 1983 with Jaswant Singh. In 1996 the company bought six Miller Brothers stores as that company went into administration.
Kilburn set up MKM Building Supplies in 1995 after being made redundant. The Hull-based business is the largest privately-owned builders’ merchants in the UK. The company offers branch managers an equity stake in their branch as part of its innovative shared ownership scheme to build successful branches.
Port was headhunted by Minorplanet to be marketing director after building and selling his bakery business Kroustie in 1998. He tried to bring French entrepreneur Christophe de Pescara to iron out some of Microplanet’s problems, but the directors refused. So Port joined de Pescara in his venture Masternaut Three X, taking out a £500,000 loan to develop the French company’s product in the UK. Port has since acquired mobile technology company GE Mobile.
Eyre, an accountant driven to set up on his own so he could the feel the impact of his own decisions, set up the Opportunity Group Holdings as an acquisition vehicle in 2007. The group’s first project was rescuing steel spring manufacturer Turton Springs, where Eyre had worked seven years earlier, but left because of its financial difficulties because its parent group was pulling it down.
Allchurch, a graduate mining engineer, saw through the perceived demise of coal mining to create opencast mine operator ATH Resources. He acquired mines in France and Scotland and has turned these into a £70m business. He stands up bravely in a post-climate change world, saying the government must wake up to the fact that Britain must take advantage of its coal reserves.
Penny founded ghd in 2001 when a friend showed him a pair of ceramic straigteners made by a South Korean inventor. Penny created a cult movement in hairdressing that he couldn’t have predicted. In 2007 turnover was £115m. All this while having previously run an environmental consultancy for 25 years.