I want to give it all away
Billionaire John Caudwell on a rags to riches story and need to help others
IF you want to see how far John Caudwell has come from the terraced streets of 1960s Stoke, you need to look above even his £250 million London mansion – and up to the cranes spiking the Mayfair sky that proudly bear his name.
When Caudwell was a car dealer in 1980s Stoke-on-Trent, his obsession with mobile phones won him the nickname Motorola Man.
But he had the last laugh 20 years later when Phones4U, the phone chain he built into a household name, was sold in a deal that made him a billionaire.
Now he’s published his autobiography, Love, Pain and Money, a fastpaced story through his journey from his Birmingham birth, to Stoke, Mayfair and Monaco.
From that London mansion – which includes a river flowing under glass and a 1 ballroom – Caudwell keeps an eye on his “ultra high net worth” development nearby.
The house isn’t lavish for the sake of it and it’s not some rarely-used luxury bolthole.
The busy mansion is designed not only as a base for Caudwell’s property business but also as a beacon for the activities of Caudwell Children to promote and attract funders for its work helping disabled children across the UK.
In his book, Caudwell writes about a childhood dream where he saw himself being driven through Stoke in the back of a gleaming RollsRoyce handing out £5 notes from a big bag of money to his friends and neighbours. It’s a vision that sparked “an emotion of pure, spiritual joy” and made him feel that someone, somewhere, was telling him his destiny.
Years later, at an ice-cold auction lot in Stoke, destiny called – in a rival’s mysterious suitcase.
At every auction visit, he had to battle with other buyers for the use of a payphone so he could call brother Brian back in the office to do deals. But that day, another regular called Richard arrived with a suitcase – inside which was a mobile phone that allowed him to beat the queues.
In the days after that first sighting, Caudwell kept using the payphone and realised mobile was the future. So he asked his assistant to find one – which took her three days in that era before ubiquitous phone shops.
He said: “When I asked the shop how much they were, it was £1,500 for one. I said ‘what about for two?’ And then it was £1,350 each.
“I sensed a massive profit because I got a ten per cent discount for two without even trying. That suggested big margins.”
Caudwell became a Motorola dealer, bought 26 phones and got to work printing flyers and spreading the word about mobile phones.
It took a while – for the first two years, their new business lost £2,000 every month. Caudwell kept pushing, subsidised by car sales, until he became one of Motorola’s best UK
Let’s make the world a better place for everybody rather than just hog the money to ourselves
customers. But he became too reliant on Motorola and, when it decided to take distribution in house, he was left high and dry.
He swiftly did a deal with Nokia, quickly sold his first 3,000 phones, and rapidly became the Finnish phone giant’s key UK contact.
“Within the space of a year of doing that first deal,” he said, “I’d taken Nokia market share on my own from one and a half per cent of the market share to 20 per cent which really did Motorola an immense amount of damage and which was very satisfying to me, given that they’ve been so utterly ruthless in the way they treated me.”
Caudwell is great company and full of stories but it’s easy to see the core of steel that made him so successful in business. Don’t, though, call him ruthless.
He mused: “If somebody goes out to win the 100-metre sprint and they do everything in their power to win, that’s not ruthless. If they tried to trip somebody up, that’s ruthless. And I’d never do that. I’ve always wanted to win by fair means.
“What Motorola did was ruthless because they just decided that I’d done a great job for them. I was too powerful – ‘now let’s kill him’. And they did. If I’d not found solutions to it, I’d have lost 95 per cent of our revenue. That’s absolutely, utterly unsustainable.”
Those solutions included doing deals with all the major phone suppliers, becoming a massive service provider selling airtime on behalf of companies, including Vodafone and Cellnet, and building up Britain’s biggest team of phone repair specialists.
It’s clear that Caudwell enjoys leading from the front as he did when growing Phones4U’s retail business into a household name with stores on every high street.
His book tells of how he once
stunned his top team by banning most internal emails after making a flying visit to a store and discovering the manager was so busy replying to emails that he couldn’t sell phones.
To avoid that complacency, Caudwell was always trying to look several steps ahead. From the outside, the early 2000s looked like a boom time for the mobile phone sector. But as Caudwell tells it now, he could see the writing was on the wall.
“I think other people don’t spot things because they can’t face the consequences of spotting them,” he said.
“And in 2002, we were starting to get towards saturation of mobile phones. That means a move towards consolidation and a reduction of margins in the marketplace.”
He added: “I felt there was a bit of a race against the clock to sell the whole business, to put it in the best condition it could possibly be in to sell it.
“And of course that’s then what happened and I managed to finalise the sale in September 2006.”
The business was sold for £1.46 billion to private equity firms Providence Equity Partners and Doughty Hanson and Caudwell walked away from the mobile industry that made his name.
Phones4U was sold again in 2011 and collapsed in 2014 after mobile networks finally decided to stop selling through the chain.
But Caudwell was never tempted to get back into the mobile industry or indeed to pay attention to it at all.
“I always move on,” he said. “And I focus my attention on the new life.”
That new life includes running his charity Caudwell Children, which has helped thousands of disabled and autistic children, and supporting research into Lyme Disease and into acute neuropsychiatric conditions PANS/PANDAS.
He hosts glamorous charity events in the UK and Monaco and is often photographed in striking jackets, some of which are on show in the reception room of his Mayfair mansion.
“I keep fighting for more,” Caudwell said. “There’s not really room for me to be complacent or proud because there’s so much more to be done. There’s millions of children out there that need the help and we’re only at the moment helping 15,000 a year.”
When he’s in his Staffordshire mansion near Eccleshall, Caudwell’s days tend to focus on charity while in London he focuses on his property development schemes.
His group has luxury housing developments under construction in Mayfair and on the Riviera.
Caudwell is pleased to be one of the UK’s largest taxpayers and privileged to be able to support his own charity.
Now he is urging other billionaires to do similar by supporting the Giving Pledge, where wealthy philanthropists pledge to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes.
“Let’s make the world a better place for everybody rather than just hog the money to ourselves.”
Asked how his suggestions have been received by other tycoons, he laughs – “I’m a pariah!” – and says he hasn’t persuaded any other billionaires yet.
“But then,” he smiled, “I don’t know that many rich people.”