Bernard Ginns: There’s always a price to pay on the rocky road to the top

YOU have got to be prepared to sacrifice something if you want to make it big in business.

That’s according to Lord Kirkham, the self-made billionaire founder of retail chain DFS.

“There is a price to pay. Whatever it may be,” he told me last year, sitting in the expansive boardroom of Black Diamond Investments, his office in the outskirts of Doncaster.

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His words came to mind last Wednesday when I was interviewing Nicola Horlick, the fund manager who became known as ‘Supermum’ for combining a high-flying City of London career with the demands of motherhood.

Her 1998 autobiography posed the question, Can You Have It All?

I put the question to her again during a visit to Yorkshire; as a businesswoman, it is possible to have it all 15 years later in 2013?

Ms Horlick said: “The reason I wrote the book was because I feel you can’t have it all.

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“In my particular instance, it annoyed me that people said I was just the girl who had it all because I had a very sick child with leukaemia who ultimately died.

“I thought how can anybody think I’ve got it all? My daughter is dead and why are they all so materialistic and obsessed with money?

“As far as I’m concerned you can’t have it all. I had a very good demonstration of not being able to have it all, whether it’s divorce or losing a child or losing your own health or whatever.

“How many people truly have it all? How many people are really happy when they have lots of money anyway? I think there is not such a thing as having it all.”

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Based on my extensive interactions with successful entrepreneurs, I would have to agree with her.

I struggle to recall anyone in the Yorkshire business world who has health, wealth, happiness and is 100 per cent satisfied with what they have; people always want more. They might have millions of pounds in the bank, but very few will have made it without sacrificing something very significant along the way.

Surprisingly for someone who is so closely associated with the insular world of the City of London, Nicola Horlick is a strong advocate of the northern regions.

She said: “I come from the North of England and it really irritates me when people say they have a dim view of the North of England. It drives me crazy.

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“Where is the manufacturing base of this country, such as is left post Thatcher? It’s up here. When I was researching companies when I started out as an investment manager I used to spend an awful lot of time looking at small textile and engineering companies.

“Our business is about financing companies. We don’t want to just finance a whole load of internet start-ups or financial services companies, we are interested in real businesses that have a future longevity and there are lots of businesses up here that have that. Indeed, three of our six first investments were in the North of England.”

She hopes Rockpool, her new private equity fund, will complete 8 to 10 deals in the coming year.

She said many entrepreneurs want to invest some of their wealth in the next generation of wealth creators and risk takers.

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“We have just under 130 members in our network at the moment, most of whom have built businesses and either still own them or have sold them.

“I do sense that there’s an element of altruism but also I think they just find it more fun investing in a private company.

“With a private company, you are allowed to know everything that’s going on. If you have a portfolio of shares managed by a big investment house, that’s just giving it to someone else and you don’t know what’s going on.

“There’s insider dealing legislation which means you can’t know what’s going on in a public company.”

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Ms Horlick said she sold all of her quoted investments in 2007 and has not invested in a quoted stock since.

“I only invest in private companies, partly because I can know what’s going on, partly because I can be on the board and help guide the business and partly because I don’t like the idea of being removed from my money in that way and not really knowing what’s going on.

“And quoted companies don’t generally need my money. A lot of them are buying back shares. They don’t need capital, whereas these companies need capital; they are desperate for capital.

“I just think it’s making a difference, so there is an altruistic element, but also I think ultimately you will make more money if you get it right.”

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There you have it, readers. Move your money out of the stock market and lend it to those Yorkshire SMEs with the most growth potential.

They need your investment much, much more than the big global corporates listed on the FTSE 100.