The £200m mum of f ive
Huge pay packet of betting boss with four adopted girls to keep her feet on the ground
TAKING home £200million last year as one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, you might have expected her to be a household name.
But many might be surprised to find that Britain’s highest earning businesswoman is in fact a mother of five children – four of them adopted – who shuns the limelight.
Denise Coates, 50, is joint chief executive of the online bookmaker Bet365 after starting it from a portable cabin in a car park in Stoke-on-Trent, her home town, 16 years ago.
She took home nearly £200million in the 2016/2017 financial year, double the previous year’s pay of £100million, bringing her net worth to around £3billion.
The Bet365 boss’s pay puts superstar Taylor Swift in the shade – the American singer pocketed a mere £129million last year.
The gulf with her female peers in the UK is also vast, with the bestpaid woman in the FTSE index of Britain’s 100 biggest public companies – Alison Cooper of tobacco company Imperial Brands – earning £5.5million.
It takes just ten days for Miss Coates – who is number 22 in the Sunday Times Rich List – to earn this amount.
Miss Coates and her husband Richard Smith, who is Bet365’s group property director, married in 1993 and have a child of their own as well as adopting four girls from the same family a few years ago.
She rarely gives interviews, saying she ‘doesn’t really enjoy’ public attention. But despite her wealth, she said in 2012 that ‘my family is what’s important to me’.
And in an interview the following year she said: ‘I am very pleased with the decision Richard and I made to adopt the girls.
‘It has been hugely rewarding for both of us and has given us a great deal of pleasure.’
Miss Coates, the eldest of four children, went to a comprehensive school before graduating from Sheffield University with a first class degree in econometrics. Home is now a £1.3million farmhouse in Cheshire.
While still at school she would spend the weekends working as a cashier in small chain of betting shops owned by her father Peter. After graduating in the 1980s she returned to Stoke to train as an accountant in the family firm.
It was there that she noticed the rise of gambling websites, persuaded her family to mortgage the betting shops to go online and started Bet365 with her brother John, the joint chief executive.
Working from a cabin in a Potteries car park, they bought the Bet365
‘Hugely rewarding’
domain name for less than £20,000 and by 2005 had ditched the shops altogether.
Since its launch in March 2001, Bet365 has grown to become one of the biggest private companies in the UK.
It is also a global operation, operating in 18 languages and with 21million customers around the world.
According to the latest company report, Bet365 customers wagered almost £47billion in the last financial year – up from £37billion the year before.
Miss Coates, who was awarded a CBE five years ago, has been praised for keeping the majority of the 3,000 jobs in Stoke-on-Trent.
Asked why she had kept the company’s headquarters in her home town, whose local economy has suffered due to the decline in ceramics, mining and steel industries, she told the Financial Times in 2015: ‘Why Stoke? It’s a simple answer: It’s where I’m from.’
She also set up the Bet365 Foundation in August 2012 and it has donated millions to 20 UK charities to help support projects at home and abroad.
Bet365 owns the Premier League football club Stoke City – a passion for Miss Coates’s brother John, 47, and for their 79-year-old father Peter, who is club chairman.
Her pay packet is more than twice as much as the entire Stoke City wage bill.