Profile: Chris Rycroft

Chris Rycroft first found success selling calculators. Now he’s turned his hand to the care industry. Suzan Uzel met him.
Chris RycroftChris Rycroft
Chris Rycroft

IT is not often that you hear the words ‘Ritz-Carlton’ and ‘nursing home’ in the same sentence.

But as far as Chris Rycroft is concerned, Vida Hall, his newly opened care home for people with dementia, signals the start of a new era of care providers.

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“We have no need to become the Hyatt of nursing homes where we have thousands and thousands of beds, I’d rather the analogy that we want to be the Ritz-Carlton of nursing homes, we will only have a few beds but we will do it right.”

His vision is to have a third 70-bed home up and running within five years and work is already underway to find a site for the second. Vida Hall, a £5m purpose-built facility in Harrogate, will have created more than 70 jobs when fully occupied.

Twenty years ago it would have been hard to conceive that Mr Rycroft would later be running a care home. But the Yorkshire-based entrepreneur, who left school at 15 and started his career as a salesman in a camera shop in Leeds, stressed the importance of “not compartmentalising” oneself.

And Mr Rycroft has certainly lived by his philosophy. Currently chairman of Vida Heathcare and property investment business Winston UK, his first business venture Adam Imports, which he co-founded with Les Kenyon, become the single largest supplier of calculators in the UK by 1974.

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Later, the firm sold television games under the brand name Grandstand, with products including the first ‘ping pong’ TV game, along with the first hand-held video games including the Kevin Keegan football game and Invader from Space.

For a few years, Adam Imports was part-owned by George Bassett, the confectionery firm, but was re-acquired by Mr Rycroft in 1980.

In 1983, when Adam Leisure Group, as it was then known, was listed on the unlisted securities market it had become a leading supplier of electronic games in the UK and was turning over £25m with 300 employees.

Mr Rycroft, who disposed of his personal holding in the group in 1987 but remained deputy chairman for another year, then formed Lindam. The firm designed and distributed baby products, including the first radio baby monitor brought to the UK market. It also became the world’s largest supplier of baby safety gates in 2009 before being sold to American company Munchkin Inc.

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Mr Rycroft’s first foray into the care industry came in 2003 when, along with son James, Mr Rycroft designed, built and started operating a 102-bed residential care home in Harrogate, called Belmont House.

“We had seen a niche that was not being catered for correctly. Nursing homes have had a lot of bad publicity in recent years and I’m not saying it wasn’t justified.

“But as a general rule the industry does have a lot of compassion, there are some bad apples in the barrels, there’s no question about it, and there’s a lot of good people who are badly managed. If you take those good people and manage them properly then you can have a great business.”

Belmont House was sold to Southern Cross for £14m in 2007, a decision Mr Rycroft says he regrets.

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“We then made the decision we would do it again but this time we would not sell,” he said.

The focus of the new home also changed slightly to cater particularly for people with dementia.

“We recognised that dementia was almost at epidemic levels. When you look at it, 20 per cent of people over 80 have got dementia. It’s frightening. But the facilities haven’t grown at the pace of this epidemic.”

According to the Alzheimer’s Society, the number of people with dementia, including those diagnosed and undiagnosed, is nearing 100,000 in the Yorkshire and Humber region. It expects the cases of dementia in the area to increase by 32 per cent in the next decade.

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Vida Hall, which has been open since February, is “committed to improving long-term wellbeing and freedom of choice”, said Mr Rycroft, and is a keen advocate of the use of alternatives to anti-psychotic medication.

He is also keen to ensure the facility is seen as “a home from home”, an approach that he said was taken at Belmont House.

“We instilled in everybody that when you were living in Belmont House you were in your home and that we just assisted them in their home. We didn’t want them to feel abandoned when they went into a nursing home.

“We had a chef from a well-known Leeds restaurant, we had a pastry chef from Bettys and we used to have high teas and we used to invite the family members so that they could visit their loved ones in the home and it would be home from home,” he recalled.

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Vida Hall has recruited an operational manager to run the building, allowing the registered manager, Bernadette Mossman, to focus on her healthcare duties.

“So our philosophy was that we would have a hotel manager and a registered person and the hotel manager would remove all the stress and strain of running the building and leave the registered person to do the thing they did best, to look after the residents,” said Mr Rycroft.

Running a nursing home is no different to running any other of his businesses, he claims. “It has the same set of skills, it’s organisation, you have to be able to make sure the product you are selling or the service you are giving is right and you’ve got to maintain it, and you’ve got to put in the systems and organisation to ensure that happens.

“You’ve got to have good accounting and you’ve got to keep the financials good and strong and that means not taking too much out of the business.”

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Equally, it is important to “do a lot of window shopping”, he said. “I look at what’s available, I look at what the trends are, I look at what’s on the market, I think I’ve always done that and I think that’s been part of the success.”

Mr Rycroft said: “Once I started in business on my own with electronic calculators, that took me through to digital watches, that took me through to video games, that took me through to hand-held games, and the electronics side took me through to nursery monitors, which took me into gates.

“If you turn around to anybody and say, what’s the next product you’re going to develop, you might struggle. They happen. They happen in the subconscious.”

But what motivates Mr Rycroft? Not the bottom line, he says, but the sense of achieving goals he sets himself.

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“I think I was always different. The school I went to was not the best school in the world. I always wanted to have creases in my trousers, silly isn’t it? I always wanted something better all the time.

“I always set myself a goal. I recall I wanted to earn £1,000 a year by the time I was 21. That was a lot of money then and I did it when I was 20. I’m not motivated by the bottom line particularly, but the bottom line is my measure of success.”

Chris Rycroft Factfile

Title: Chairman of Winston UK and Vida Healthcare.

Date of birth: 05/05/1944.

Born: Middlesbrough.

Lives: Harrogate.

Education: Left school at 15.

First job: Shop assistant in a camera shop in Leeds.

Car driven: Mini Cooper S and Bentley Continental GT.

Last book read: The Cuckoo’s Egg – a book about internet hacking.

Favourite film: Kelly’s Heroes.

Favourite song: Evergreen, Barbara Streisand.

Favourite holiday destination: Mauritius.

Most proud of: My family.

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