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CEO Secrets: From Ordsall hardship to being a billionaire

24 November 2021

ByDougal Shaw
Business press reporter, BBC News

Peter Done discusses his journey from a denied youth in Salford in the north of England, to becoming a self-made billionaire, for our service advice series CEO Secrets. He co-founded the wagering chain Betfred with his brother Fred Done in the late 1960s, before taking the helm of HR company Peninsula, which he runs today in Manchester.

Peter Done has an abiding memory from his childhood: a pillow being pushed in his face.

The perpetrator was Fred, his elder sibling by 4 years. He shared a bed with him up until he was 15 in the family's two-up, two-down in Ordsall, called the "slums of Salford". Their 2 siblings oversleeped the space too.

"To this day I have claustrophobia from the pillow," laughs Done junior. "I was most likely a bit cheeky and he was larger than me."

But it was the yohaig code effective relationship with his sibling that would be the key to his success in life. The siblings found a route out of poverty by developing up an empire of wagering stores, collecting themselves a billion-pound household fortune, making them a regular fixture on the Sunday Times Rich List, external.

Both Done brothers left school at 15 with no credentials.

However, they discovered employment in a chain of wagering stores in Manchester. Like clubs, these establishments thrived in poor areas. They had only been legalised in the UK in 1961. There had actually been concerns about their social impact, along with the really morality of betting.

Done was handling a wagering shop at 17 despite the fact that he legally could not enter the premises.

The owner valued him for his ability at maths. He looked after the books, psychologically number crunching the stakes, revenues and losses.

In the late sixties these were daunting places to work - never ever mind if you were just a teen. They were dominated by men and the decoration frequently looked like that of a prison. Things could turn violent, particularly after 3pm on a Saturday when people spilled in from the pubs, Done remembers.

"You couldn't reveal weak point," he states, "since then these goons would acknowledge you were a simple touch."

Both Done and his bro revealed a flair for running these places and by the time Peter turned 21 in 1967, the 2 had their own store. They bought it from a retired bookie for ₤ 4,000 - ₤ 1,000 of which was a deposit Peter Done had actually conserved up to purchase a home with his new better half.

He enjoyed to take this promotion code danger due to the fact that he already had 6 years experience in the business behind him, and he always believed he might run a shop better than his employers, offered the opportunity.

He had discovered lessons at 21, that he still values today.

The key thing is constantly client service, Done discusses, because that's what brings people back.

"We would call our consumers 'Sir' and in them days that didn't happen.

"If a punter had a big win the bookie used to throw the cash at them and state, 'don't return again!' whereas we 'd state, 'here's your cash, enjoy it!'

"They were shocked. But we understood they 'd return and in time the bookmaker always wins."

The brothers also disliked the reality that bookmakers' stores looked like "hovels".

"We upped our game, we had carpets."

The formula proved effective and the bros slowly bought more shops, with the first couple of run by their siblings, cementing the household service. By the mid-1980s they had more than 70 Betfred shops.

But it was an incident throughout this consistent growth that caused Peter Done leaving the betting world behind. The brothers had to settle a case out of court with an employee at a brand-new shop they were taking control of.

They felt bruised by the process. This led them to invest in a new business that contracted out HR expertise and covered legal fees on a subscription basis.

This became Peninsula and Peter Done has actually been its CEO for 35 years now. Its newly-built head offices are a shiny glass skyscraper and control the Manchester skyline just north of Victoria station.

Done's workplace ignores Ordsall, where he grew up. Peninsula has actually grown steadily throughout the years, and now has more than 3,000 staff members, serving more than 100,000 companies worldwide, 40,000 of them in the UK.

Recently, the company's customer base has actually grown by more than 12% during the course of the pandemic, as organizations worldwide rushed to upgrade their HR and security policies, whether it's about working from home, social distancing or vaccination guidelines. In time, his career gamble appears to have settled.

However, in the mid-1980s, though the organization's future showed indications of promise, the odds on its success weren't clear cut, and the brothers needed to choose. Who would run it?

The choice about who needs to leave Betfred was decided in true bettor's design, according to Peter Done.

"Fred said let's toss a coin, I won it, and he stated 'you go', before I could state anything," he remembers, with a smile.

So Peter Done left the running of Betfred to his senior brother, though he stays a major shareholder.

Was the departure about getting out of the shadow of his older brother, Fred, who's name, after all, was actually part of the company? 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 domination, I could stick up for myself," says Done, quickly.

Was it then about a desire to leave the preconception of gambling, which blights many neighborhoods, and specifically, as studies, have shown, the type of deprived areas in which he matured?

Done states that wasn't the case. "Betting gets a bad name, however the vast bulk of people who go in a betting shop do it for fun and do it within their pocket."

Done's explanation for turning his back on betting stores is that he just chose the odds on the planet of HR insurance coverage and he relished the difficulty of scaling a new service.

However, he still uses the lessons he discovered as a teen in the wagering stores despite the fact that his workplace nowadays could hardly be more various, he says. Peninsula's multi-level offices are those of a common call-centre, with banks of people talking on headsets. Everything is intense and glossy and the walls are covered with inspirational mottos. And there are carpets.

"It's everything about renewals and recurring earnings," explains Done, when it concerns the chances of business's success. The customers signing up to Peninsula are no various to punters in a 1960s wagering store, because sense. Quality of service figures out if someone comes back. And it's cheaper to renew a consumer than to set up a brand-new one.

A piece of organization recommendations that Done has learned recently, though, is that you just 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 give great service.

Among his own rewards for his organization success is being able to blend with people from Manchester United football club, a group he has supported since youth. He is a routine at the Old Trafford stadium, along with his bro, joining senior figures from the club, both past and present.

One buddy is legendary supervisor Sir Alex Ferguson, who gave him some remarkable recommendations when they shared a beverage on vacation a couple of years ago, he says: "Keep control and make choices, even if they are wrong. The worst thing is not to decide."

Peter Done feels his time in organization has followed those precepts, not least since his household have kept ownership - and for that reason control - of all business they have actually produced. And as for decision-making, he waits the specifying among his profession, even if it was validated by the flip of a coin - by his bro.

You can follow CEO Secrets reporter Dougal Shaw on Twitter: @dougalshawbbc, external

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