CEO Secrets: From Ordsall Poverty To Being A Billionaire
CEO Secrets: From Ordsall poverty to being a billionaire
24 November 2021
ByDougal Shaw
Business press reporter, BBC News
Peter Done talks about his journey from a deprived childhood in Salford in the north of England, to ending up being a self-made billionaire, for our business recommendations series CEO Secrets. He co-founded the betting chain Betfred with his bro Fred Done in the late 1960s, before taking the helm of HR firm Peninsula, which he runs today in Manchester.
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Peter Done has an abiding memory from his youth: a pillow being shoved in his face.
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The culprit was Fred, his older brother by four years. He shared a bed with him until he was 15 in the family's two-up, two-down in Ordsall, called the "slums of Salford". Their two sis oversleeped the room too.
"To this day I have claustrophobia from the pillow," chuckles Done junior. "I was probably a bit cheeky and he was bigger than me."
But it was the successful relationship with his sibling that would be the key to his success in life. The siblings found a route out of hardship by building up an empire of wagering stores, accumulating themselves a billion-pound family fortune, making them a routine fixture on the Sunday Times Rich List, external.
Both Done brothers left school at 15 without any qualifications.
However, they found employment in a chain of wagering shops in Manchester. Like bars, these facilities flourished in poor locations. They had only been legalised in the UK in 1961. There had been concerns about their social impact, in addition to the extremely morality of betting.
Done was managing a betting shop at 17 although he lawfully could not go into the facilities.
The owner valued him for his ability at maths. He looked after the books, mentally number crunching the stakes, revenues and losses.
In the late sixties these were daunting places to work - never mind if you were just a teen. They were controlled by guys and the design often resembled that of a prison. Things might turn violent, specifically after 3pm on a Saturday when people spilled in from the pubs, Done remembers.
"You could not reveal weakness," he states, "due to the fact that then these hard guys would acknowledge you were an easy touch."
Both Done and his sibling showed a flair for running these places and by the time Peter turned 21 in 1967, the two had their own shop. They purchased it from a retired bookie for ₤ 4,000 - ₤ 1,000 of which was a deposit Peter Done had conserved as much as purchase a house with his brand-new better half.
He was pleased to take this danger because he currently had six years experience in business behind him, and he constantly thought he could run a store much better than his employers, provided the possibility.
He had learned lessons at 21, that he still values today.
The key thing is always client service, Done describes, since that's what brings people back.
"We would call our customers 'Sir' and in them days that didn't occur.
"If a punter had a big win the bookie utilized to throw the yohaig code cash at them and say, 'don't return again!' whereas we 'd state, 'here's your cash, enjoy it!'
"They were shocked. But we understood they 'd come back and over time the bookie always wins."
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The bros likewise disliked the reality that bookies' stores looked like "hovels".
"We upped our video game, we had carpets."
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The formula showed effective and the brothers gradually bought more stores, with the very first few run by their sisters, cementing the household company. By the mid-1980s they had more than 70 Betfred shops.
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But it was an event throughout this steady expansion that led to Peter Done leaving the betting world behind. The brothers had to settle a case out of court with a worker at a brand-new store they were taking control of.
They felt bruised by the procedure. This led them to invest in a brand-new service that outsourced HR knowledge and covered legal costs on a membership basis.
This became Peninsula and Peter Done has actually been its CEO for 35 years now. Its newly-built headquarters are a shiny glass high-rise building and dominate the Manchester skyline simply north of Victoria station.
Done's workplace overlooks Ordsall, where he matured. Peninsula has grown steadily throughout the years, and now has more than 3,000 employees, serving more than 100,000 companies worldwide, 40,000 of them in the UK.
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Recently, the company's client base has actually grown by more than 12% throughout the course of the pandemic, as services worldwide rushed to upgrade their HR and safety policies, whether it's about working from home, social distancing or vaccination guidelines. In time, his profession gamble appears to have paid off.
However, in the mid-1980s, though the organization's future revealed indications of pledge, the chances on its success weren't clear cut, and the brothers needed to decide. Who would run it?
The choice about who should leave Betfred was chosen in true gambler's style, according to Peter Done.
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"Fred stated let's toss a coin, I won it, and he said 'you go', before I might say anything," he recalls, with a smile.
So Peter Done left the running of Betfred to his elder bro, though he stays a major investor.
Was the departure about stepping out of the shadow of his older bro, Fred, who's name, after all, was actually part of the service? Was it about taking a bet on himself?
"Firstly, from the early days when he put the pillow over my head, that was it for supremacy, I might stick up for myself," says Done, rapidly.
Was it then about a desire to leave behind the preconception of gambling, which blights lots of communities, and specifically, as studies, external have shown, the type of denied areas in which he matured?
Done states that wasn't the case. "Betting gets a bad name, but the vast bulk of people who go in a betting store do it for enjoyable and do it within their pocket."
Done's description for turning his back on betting stores is that he merely preferred the odds on the planet of HR insurance and he delighted in the obstacle of scaling a brand-new company.
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However, he still uses the lessons he found out as a teenager in the betting shops although his workplace these days might hardly be more various, he says. Peninsula's multi-level workplaces are those of a common call-centre, with banks of people talking on headsets. Everything is bright and glossy and the walls are covered with motivational slogans. And there are carpets.
"It's everything about renewals and recurring earnings," discusses Done, when it comes to the chances of business's success. The clients registering to Peninsula are no different to punters in a 1960s wagering shop, in that sense. Quality of service figures out if somebody comes back. And it's less expensive to restore a customer than to set up a new one.
A piece of service suggestions that Done has actually discovered recently, however, is that you only attain that great service at scale if you treat your workers well and incentivize them - so he aims for high personnel retention and makes it a policy to conspicuously reward those who bet9ja's welcome offer good service.
One of his own benefits for his business success is being able to combine with people from Manchester United football club, a group he has supported considering that youth. He is a routine at the Old Trafford stadium, together with his brother, mingling with senior figures from the club, both past and present.
One close friend is famous manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who provided him some when they shared a drink on holiday a few years ago, he states: "Keep control and make choices, even if they are wrong. The worst thing is not to make a decision."
Peter Done feels his time in business has actually followed those precepts, not least because his family have actually kept ownership - and therefore control - of all business they have created. And when it comes to decision-making, he waits the defining one of his career, even if it was validated by the flip of a coin - by his brother.
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You can follow CEO Secrets reporter Dougal Shaw on Twitter: @dougalshawbbc, external
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