Making Your Mark

How I built a fortune from £1.50 and you can too

Mark Mills

• Publisher: Harriman House
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780857197795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

"Cover me while I cut around that blue Mondeo and ambush the guy in the grey suit."There are not many successful entrepreneurs who will enthusiastically break off in the middle of a multi-million pound deal to have a huge snowball fight in the car park with their finance director.But then Mark Mills is not just any successful entrepreneur. Whether organising one of his infamous Summer Christmas parties, flying to New York to find a new business idea or staying up all night to celebrate a successful deal, Mark Mills has always believed in the absolute importance of having fun in business. And not just for him, but for his employees, customers and suppliers too.His brilliantly unique approach has more than paid off. Mark's infectious enthusiasm, relentless energy, can-do approach and spirit of adventure have powered him to the very pinnacle of entrepreneurial success, both in his own businesses and by helping others to do the same in theirs. Over the years he has won countless Entrepreneur of the Year Awards and been asked to give speeches at prestigious events around the world about his achievements. Making Your Mark tells the fascinating and entertaining story of Mark's extraordinary success in business, from selling broken biscuits at the age of 8, through his early years selling everything from payphones to post boxes, to his outstanding success creating Cardpoint, the cash machine business he founded at the age of 29 which at its peak was valued at £170 million.But just as importantly, it also tells the story of Mark's disasters along the way, about the times when things went badly wrong and when failure was more often the outcome than success.Along the way Mark shares his unique Golden Rules on how to achieve your own success in business, from learning how to think like an entrepreneur to creating a great business model, from understanding how to build a strong team to learning how to communicate effectively.

Mark Mills

Making Your Mark

How I built a fortune from £1.50 – and you can too

HARRIMAN HOUSE LTD

18 College Street

Petersfield

Hampshire

GU31 4AD

GREAT BRITAIN

Tel: [phone]

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.harriman-house.com

First published in Great Britain in 2019

Copyright © Mark Mills

The right of Mark Mills to be identified as the Author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85719-778-8

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85719-779-5

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that information in this book is accurate, no liability can be accepted for any loss incurred in any way whatsoever by any person relying solely on the information contained herein.

No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher, by the Author, by the Contributors, or by the employers of the Author or Contributors.

With thanks to my parents, John and Leoni, my brothers, Andrew and Nigel, especially my children, Oliver, Christian and Isabella, but most of all, my wife Angela.

About Mark Mills

Mark Mills has built and sold numerous businesses for himself and with other people.

He built Europe’s largest independent cash machine company, Cardpoint plc., which at its peak was dispensing more than £500m each month. Prior to Cardpoint, Mark was an early disruptor in the postal industry, developing an advertising-fronted postbox and installing 1,200 at petrol stations throughout the UK, making it the only other postbox network to rival the Royal Mail.

Mark is a committed family man and is married to his patient, understanding wife, Angela, and has three grown-up children, Oliver, and twins Christian and Isabella. They have all supported Mark in his efforts, whether successful or otherwise. Mark still lives where he was born on the outskirts of Blackpool and believes you should never forget where you came from.

Introduction

There’s a well-known phrase that I use all the time, adding my own twist at the end – been there, done that, got the T-shirt and the scars underneath. I think it perfectly sums up the experience of creating a successful business. It may seem easy from the outside, but if you look beneath the surface, achieving success usually turns out to have involved an enormous amount of effort – much of it painful.

There’s little better in life than making your mark. But it also leaves a mark on you.

While starting and growing a business from scratch can be extremely rewarding, it can also be a lonely struggle. A lot of the time you are on your own trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. Every day you have to make big decisions simply to keep the business moving forward, some of which will turn out to be right, others of which will turn out to be wrong. You can ask advice from as many people as you want. But at the end of the day, your business matters most to one person: you. Other people simply can’t care about it as much.

It is down to you, and you alone, to make it work.

I’ve been on that journey. I started out with nothing but eventually achieved fantastic success with my cash machine business, Cardpoint. At its peak it had 6,500 cash machines and 300 employees and was worth £170m. But my success didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t easy. It took me many years of hard work and persistence before I made it. And there were plenty of setbacks and challenges to overcome.

I decided to write this book because I wanted to tell the real inside story of my success – not just the glittering rewards and accolades at the end, but the hard graft along the way. I wanted to explain how I got from there to here, scars and all, in the hope that it might help and inspire other people to do the same.

The truth is that setting up and growing a business does not always go according to plan. In fact, it rarely does. There is no guarantee that it’s all going to work out well the first time, or even the second or third. Things are inevitably going to go wrong. But here’s the thing – that’s fine. It’s natural and to be expected, and it’s all part of the adventure. You just have to accept that – even embrace it – because it’s during the tough times that you learn the most important lessons and ultimately find out what you are really made of.

No matter what stage you are at in life or business, I hope that my story will help you understand that you are not alone, and that it is OK to take the long way round to success. You don’t have to get it right the first time. You just have to keep on doing the right thing until it produces great results. Success comes from persistence – and it’s worth persisting because success takes you to places you could never imagine.

For me, that has included a garden party at Buckingham Palace, meetings at the heart of government, a visit inside a top-secret nuclear submarine and trips all around the world, including to China, Thailand, India and South Africa. It has also provided me with many unusual experiences, including being on News at Ten, a hot air balloon landing in my garden, a court case in the High Court in London and trips on many private jets, to name but a few. Oh, and there was almost a near-death experience…

There is one more reason for writing this book. I have a letter on the wall of my office from Bill Clinton. I wrote to him to tell him how much I enjoyed reading his autobiography, My Life, and a few weeks later he wrote back, thanking me for my interest in his work and expressing his best wishes for finishing my own book.

There was no way I was going to let the former president of the United States down, so here it is.

I hope you enjoy it and find it useful.

1

How it all Started

Idiscovered the thrill of being an entrepreneur at the age of eight. My aunt worked in the Burton’s biscuit factory near where we lived and every Thursday she would bring round a large bag of broken biscuits to our house. I quickly realised that this could be an opportunity to make some money: I divided the biscuits into small bags and took them into school the next day to sell at break time for 10p a bag. My friends would wait anxiously all week to spend their pocket money on these biscuits – I would usually sell out by the end of first break on Friday.

I suppose I could have simply given the biscuits away, but to me it was much more exciting to try and make some money. I still remember the buzz. I made around £3 a week in sales, pure profit – and a fortune for an eight-year-old back then. My love affair with business had begun.

I grew up in Lytham St Annes, a seaside town in Lancashire, where I lived in a semi-detached house with my parents, my twin brother Andy and my older brother Nigel.

My dad ran a glazing business and would come home for lunch every day. He was quite content to keep his business small and local, and we would joke that whenever he left Lytham St Annes to go to Kirkham (the next town, five miles away) he would need to take his map, flask and sandwich box with him. Mum was a secretary and to our huge embarrassment worked at our primary school for a while. Fortunately for us kids, she moved on to another job quite quickly.

After the success of selling the broken biscuits, I was keen to try and make money by selling something else. I began to make bags of popcorn. I would give my mother the money I had made from the biscuits to buy the kernels and then I would ruin many pans perfecting my corn-popping technique at home, before sprinkling the finished product with sugar and putting it in small plastic bags. I also sold bags of broken rock after discovering a local rock factory based in an old St John’s Ambulance station nearby. None of my friends knew that the factory was there, so they also didn’t know that I bought the bags for just 15p each and then sold them for £1.

I was amazed at how much profit I was able to make on each bag, and kept on selling the rock all the way through junior school. The only downside was I ate so much rock myself that I ended up needing quite a number of dental fillings when I was older.

By the time I started senior school – a private school called King Edward VII’s in Lytham St Annes – I was constantly on the lookout for new ways to make money. It was not long before I came up with a really lucrative idea. At the time, my friend and I loved eating a snack called Wheat Crunchies, but the school tuck shop didn’t sell them because they weren’t stocked by their regular supplier. However, my father had joined the local cash-and-carry supermarket in order to buy cheap groceries for the family, so I managed to persuade him to buy boxes of Wheat Crunchies for me at the same time. I started supplying them to the school tuck shop for a healthy profit. There was an additional benefit to this arrangement– I became friendly with the caretaker who ran the tuck shop and he would give me a discount on anything I bought from him.

Additionally, I was tall for my age and looked older than I wa...