James Benamor started his business 12 years ago at the age of 21. His Bournemouth-based Richmond Group, which specialises in sub-prime and pay-day loans, is now valued at £220m and puts Benamor in the top tier of the richest people in Britain, ranked 315=. The firm also features among The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For.
Benamor began by employing a handful of family members and friends. In five years he was employing more than 100 people which was when the company started suffering severe growing pains.
“I realised that, apart from the original staff, most of the employees were not engaged with the business and some were just interested in taking their pay cheque.”
Reaching this crisis point prompted Benamor to reassess his role as employer, blaming himself for not properly motivating his staff. “If your job is to plug yourself into a headset and answer the same call 100 times a day with no incentive to achieve anything more, why would you be engaged?”
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Benamor pinpoints the failure to give staff a reason to care about the company as his biggest mistake. After learning this lesson, he believes that now only employing people who do care about their work is his biggest success.
Mike Clare has already cashed in on his success by selling Dreams, the bed retailer, to private equity firm Exponent three years ago for a reported £230m. As non-executive president, he still retains an interest in Dreams, which he founded in 1987, but now spends 12 weeks of the year travelling with his wife Carol on the luxury cruise ship The World, where the Clares have bought an apartment.
Clare, 56, from Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, attributes his business acumen to his three Ps – perseverance, people and passion. He has translated this formula to the Clare Foundation where he has recently set aside £5m to provide strategic support to other charities to make them more efficient and effective, an endowment that ranks him at 45 this year in The Sunday Times Giving List.
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“I don’t like paying more tax than I need to,” says Clare who prefers to help the needy through well-run charitable causes.