I guess I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was about fourteen. It started with wooden scraps, offcuts really, from my parents’ factory floor, which I’d make into things useful and sell at country fairs up and down the country. When I was 18, I had the bright idea of creating a board game for the launch of the Supertram in Sheffield. It failed miserably. The whole thing leaned on local retailers and businesses signing up as sponsors, and those businesses had been quietly decimated by the building of the tram route. I remember a very tense evening while pitching the local traders at a pub, I had to make a sharp exit about 5 mins into my pitch for fear of injury!

But it taught me some great lessons, and it networked me across Sheffield. More than anything, it gave me the bug. I wanted to create something for myself.

A couple of years prior, I started working for Next, selling ladieswear, and pulling shifts in pubs in the evenings, first as a glass collector, then behind the bar. I did a stint working for my parents as a bookkeeper and draughtsperson, and it taught me a great deal (double-entry bookkeeping was a blast…). They ran a great business and worked incredibly hard, but working for them just wasn’t for me.

I hadn’t gone to university (I failed all but one GCSEs). My parents had given me £3000, roughly the equivalent of what they’d given my brothers to go and study. A year earlier, at seventeen, I’d used money like it to buy a house (the condition of the gift), and I’d been renting out the rooms and living in the front room myself. That meant I could apply for a credit card, and I’d built up a decent credit limit. So when I heard that Hillsborough Baths, a derelict 18,000 sq ft swimming pool, was up for sale, I rang the pension fund that owned it and asked what the deposit was. £6000. Then I rang the credit card company and asked what my limit was, and they very kindly put it up. And I bought the building.