Profile

Laban Roomes has been in the centre of a whirlwind of success over the last five years. After founding luxury gold plating company Goldgenie, he has gold plated phones and bespoke items for the likes of David and Victoria Beckham, Elton John and Denzel Washington. Although business is now booming for Laban, he’s the first to admit that it hasn’t always been this way…

Starting out originally in electronics, Vashi Dominguez began his career at 18 rather humbly – in a small shop in Tenerife. After realising that he would be able to earn more for his hard work on a commission basis, he quit to set up his own shop. One shop would soon become a chain.

She’s a corporate trendsetter and football business heavyweight, but Karren Brady’s settled position in the comfortable top ranks of the reality TV business was earned through much less glamorous graft.

For the thousands of business hopefuls who, each year, apply to take part in BBC1’s The Apprentice, Tom Pellereau is currently living the dream. Shaun Curran spent time with last years winner to find out what happens when the cameras stop rolling.

Levi Roots, the man from Jamaica who grew up writing songs in a Brixton squat before being imprisoned twice is now the owner and face of a brand worth an estimated £30m at retail prices and has more than doubled in the last 12 months.

We talk to Jo-are Bjerke, managing director of seating specialists HÅG, about what motivates and inspires him in business and the advice he would give to someone just starting out.

John Sandom is the founder and chairman of one of the UK’s leading branding companies 1HQ. Since setting up 1HQ in 1993, the agency have gone on to become award winning pioneers in their field working with international brand owners all over the globe.

Julie Meyer the founder of Ariadne Capital, First Tuesday and newest Dragon talks to Jon Card. As one of the foremost operators in the UK’s digital space she tells us about the web, who’s going to beat the recession and why being an entrepreneur is the best choice for the 21st century

We chat to Scott Hider, the successful head of Nationwide Media Group, who spends the weekend as an MC & DJ at local clubs. A difficult balancing act? Well one that Scott balances well as his exhibitions are breaking all records.

When it comes to thinking about careers and jobs, the pressure for students and graduates these days is immense. It is hard to imagine how you can achieve success without further education, and even though there are so many role models on TV of famous celebrities that have made an achievement in life without education, it is difficult to know how they got there and whether they just got lucky!

We talk to Karren Brady, who is set to take over from Margaret Mountford as Lord Sugar’s eyes and ears on The Apprentice. Karren became managing director of Birmingham City football club at the age of 23; the only woman to hold this position in the premiership and the youngest director of a UK plc. Now 38, she is married to retired footballer Paul Peschisolido and lives in Birmingham with her two children – Sophia, 12, and Paolo, nine. Once the takeover is complete of Birmingham City FC it is widely predicted that she will blow full-time on her career as the first lady of football.

Hannah Prevett talks to Apprentice winner Michelle Dewberry about life post-Apprentice and founding lifestyle portal, Chiconomise

Paul Jones chats to Simon Woodroffe about why he decided to start Yo! Sushi, his brush with the law, why having money makes him happy and what his investment plans are for the future in these difficult times.

Duncan Bannatyne talks to us about how it’s easy to become rich – and why women don’t want to be at the top in business

We talk to Michelle Mone, the Ultimo Lingerie founder about her philosophy for staying ahead when times are hard

They met at Anita Roddick’s funeral. Clive Stafford Smith, founder of Reprieve, had a word with Mo and Mark Constantine, co-founders of Lush, about the plight of prisoners held without trial in Guantanamo Bay. “He had a slogan, Buy one, set one free. It was too good to miss,” says Mo.

Canary Wharf is synonymous with men and women in suits, business and sky scrappers. And unless it is an evening in the pub after a hard day’s work, fun is not necessarily the word that springs into mind when one thinks about the business district which has over 80,000 workers and the tallest building in Britain – One Canada Square. But in the cold winter days, the site is totally transformed. Laugh, fun and, for some, a lot of skills are on show at the ice rink in the centre of it all. The businessman behind such enterprise is the Canadian Brian Jokat.

James Caan is not a man to let the grass grow under his feet. By the age of 40 he was a self-made millionaire, having created and sold two executive headhunting firms.

But rather than sailing off into the sunset with G&T in hand, Caan has since graduated from the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School, become a mentor for MBA students at London Business School, and set up a private equity firm, which currently has four companies in its investment portfolio. Oh, and become the latest dragon on Dragon’s Den, where on top of filming obligations, he has already taken three entrepreneurial charges under his wing.

Jack Petchey OBE is a remarkable self made successful business man and entrepreneur, giving away his millions to help young people because he believes passionately that we all have a duty to give something back to society.
Jack, aged 82, was born in London’s East End into a loving but humble family.  He left school aged 14 without any qualifications and after a stint in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, Jack went back to his job as a clerk but soon found that he was not rated very highly by his bosses and was told he would never make a successful businessman.  Undeterred Jack went on to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Britain and a prominent businessman and property developer.

His credentials are impeccable – Harvard, McKinsey, Bain Capital, Stanford Business School. A career as a consultant or CXO of a blue chip company beckoned. But following a dodgy encounter with a ticket tout intent on fleecing him for tickets to a Lion King concert, Eric Baker turned his back on the blue chips to enter the then murky world of secondary ticketing.

It’s said that Clive Sinclair, the man who developed the prototype of the Amstrad PC, once tried to explain the computer’s technical specifications to Alan Sugar. ‘I don’t care if they have rubber bands in them,’ replied Sugar, the Amstrad boss, ‘as long as they work.’

Jo Russell talks to Tim Richards, the CEO of the Vue Cinema group about how he left the Hollywood party world to start his own cinema group above a shop in Chiswick.

Grant Bovey was doing business over in Dubai when he spotted a market opportunity to sell properties to people interested in investing in the UK market.
Despite having no property experience whatsoever he decided to give it try. “I came back from Dubai and thought about buying a block of properties and market there. But clearly I needed to come up with something different.”