The Rags To Riches Story Of Britain's Thriftiest Multi-Millionaire

He’s just sold his business for almost $100million, but entrepreneur Mark Pearson isn’t about to get flash with the cash. Having made his money by helping ordinary people save a bit of their own, profligacy just isn’t his style. When I meet the man behind MyVoucherCodes.co.uk in an unassuming wine bar near London’s Tower Bridge, he doesn’t seem in the mood to take a holiday, despite his windfall. In fact, he barely seems willing to pause for breath, yet alone take a few days away from work.

“This is just the beginning for me,” he says, leaving his glass of wine untouched on the table as he speaks. “The real opportunities are ahead. When you’re starting a business for the first time, you can’t concentrate on anything else. But now I’ve ticked the box and it’s safe, it’s time to start helping other people do the same.”

 

Pearson’s own journey from council flat to country pile has made him famous in the UK, where having ideas above your station is becoming increasingly rare. Recently described as “deeply elitist”, this is a nation where social mobility has ground to a halt and a small, narrow group dominate all the top jobs. In this climate like this, a tale like Pearson’s seems almost astonishing; the sort of thing you hear about in America, but certainly not on these hidebound, class-bound shores. Today, he wants to share some of the lessons he’s learned along the path out of poverty, in the hope of inspiring a brand new generation of entrepreneurs to rise up, challenge the status quo and battle their way onto the world stage.

His business life started with the founding of a website called MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, which performed the simple task of offering Britons cheap deals. But he tells me the real moment his ambition sparked into life was on one fateful day before Christmas in a tiny council flat in a rundown area of Liverpool, where a 10-year-old Pearson was living with his mother, younger sister and a terrifying, violent step father.

“The one vision I have of that day is my stepfather throttling my mum and the Christmas tree falling over,” he remembers. “We had to spend the rest of the holiday in a women’s shelter. I remember the police coming to speak to mum and quickly realized I was the only man left in the house. It was up to me to work hard and look after my family. I think that was when the seed was really planted.”

It took a while for anything good to grow from this seed though, as Pearson struggled through a difficult adolescence. It was only when he left school aged 16 and took up a place at a local catering college that he excelled for the first time, winning a nationwide cooking competition. “I was a rebellious, angry child and took it out on teachers,” he confesses. “I’m not proud of it, but that was my outlet. Everyone was the devil to me. It was easy to see how I could have gone off the rails.”

After taking home the prize, the 18-year-old Pearson was offered a job at Claridge’s, a prestigious hotel and restaurant in the heart of London. He left Liverpool immediately, spending a few years working under Gordon Ramsay who at this point was better known as a successful restaurateur than a foul-mouthed television personality. Pearson then went on to manage his own chain of restaurants after taking out a small loan from his elderly grandmother, which was paid back in a matter of months. The trio of eateries were soon turning a healthy profit, with Pearson banking “rucksacks of cash” each day as he earned more money than he had ever thought possible. Little did he know that this would look like pocket change compared to what was to come.

“When I walked away from those businesses, I had more than £10 thousand in the bank,” he continues. “It was the most I had ever had.”

Claridge’s Hotel in Brook Street, London, England.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Aged just 23 and hungry for more success, the young entrepreneur decided to try and launch a digital business. “I laugh when I look back, because I wasn’t technical and didn’t have an understanding of the internet, but knew I wanted to launch a scalable business,” he says. “So I went on forums and actually asked other young entrepreneurs if they had a good business idea for me.”

When no good ideas were forthcoming, he decided to follow in the footsteps of his home city’s most famous export, The Beatles, by copying an American idea and then running with it. He started selling fresh rose petals with tiny messages written upon them, a “cheesy” idea but one which struck a chord with the British public. Business bloomed and both Pearson and his mother, a florist by trade, were soon working night and day to satisfy demand. Due to clever SEO and affiliate marketing, the profit from partners soon matched the money earned by the main business, before the flowering entrepreneur took another idea from across the Atlantic.

“My nan had this ugly fridge in her kitchen, covered with coupons offering ten pence off this or five pence off something else. This was a time when e-commerce was taking off and I thought the coupons were a very old-fashioned, paper based way of doing things. I looked over at America and there were coupon sites with huge traffic. Something clicked.”

He then outsourced the design of the site to a programmer in India, who charged just £300 (just under $500) to build a rudimentary page. It wasn’t pretty, but it started to bring in traffic and, crucially, advertising revenue. “I laugh at it now, because it was really ugly,” he jokes. “I’m going to frame that site on my wall one day. I always hate people who talk about their business without putting a product out there. It’s so important just to get something out before the market changes.”

Launched in 2006, just before the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the project struck a chord with austerity Britain. “We went from £300,000 turnover one year to £1million the next year. It was £3 million the year after, then £5 million and £10 million – all at a 50 percent property margin. Not bad.”

As business picked up, he formed a parent company called MarkCoMedia and made a series of canny investments, which included ploughing £1million into a ticketing firm called Last Minute Tickets and buying out a mobile rival called VouChaCha for £6million. In June of this year, MarkCoMedia was itself bought out by the digital transaction company Monitise, which provides its services to some 350 banks and payment services companies, as well as mobile customers including Telefónica, Samsung, PCCW Mobile, Turkcell and BlackBerry