£10 advert in a newspaper started the business I sold for £10m
Accountant and motorsport fan tells how he built his empire from scratch
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE motoring fanatic Simon Dolan made his fortune by selling the business he founded in 1992 – SJD Accountancy – for a nine-figure sum in 2014. He now owns his own airline, Jota Aviation, and created his own racing team, Jota Sport, in 2008. In 2014, he won Le Mans with team-mates Harry Tincknell and Oliver Turvey. Now 46, he lives in the tax haven of Monaco with his wife Sabrina, 36, and sons Bowie, 14, and Enzo, 11. Q What did your parents teach you about money?
A THAT you have to go out and earn it. From the age of ten, I was pushed to be self-sufficient. We were a normal middle class family. My dad Jim was an accountant and my mum Barbara was an occupational therapist. We lived in a threebed semi in Chelmsford, Essex.
Q What was the first paid work you ever did?
A DELIVERING newspapers to patients in the local hospital when I was ten. It took me a morning and I was paid £3. I still can’t stand the smell of hospitals.
Q Are you a saver or a spender?
A I AM the world’s worst saver. I can’t save money at all. I’m much better at spending it. I think of money as a tool. You convert it into something you like. I have never saved any money for a rainy day.
I am not like my parents who were of the generation that believed you should save up for something you wanted to buy – instead of getting into debt. The first thing I did after I turned 18 was get a loan from the bank for £2,000 so I could buy some music equipment. I have never had any qualms about borrowing money to buy something and I don’t mind being in debt – but I make sure I can pay back whatever I borrow.
Q Have you struggled to make ends meet?
A YES, when I was 21 and 22. I had been working as a salesman but then I got caught drink-driving and I was not allowed to drive for 18 months. I couldn’t do my sales job without a licence. I thought: ‘Ah well, I’ll just hang around on the dole waiting to get my licence back.’ That plan didn’t work out. I was living hand-tomouth on £40 a week and racked up debt out of necessity – I had a £200a-month mortgage to pay and I had to buy food. I had nothing. A I GOT desperate. I went into a newsagents around the corner from where I lived in a grotty part of Manchester, and asked the owner if he had any paper rounds. He asked: ‘For your son?’ I said: ‘No, for me.’ He shook his head sadly and said: ‘No, sorry.’ That was a pivotal moment. It was straight afterwards that I had the idea to put an advert in a local newspaper offering to do end-of-year accounts for people. Spending £10 on that advert in 1992 was the best money decision I ever made. It was how my business SJD Accountancy was born. Twenty-two years later, in 2014, I sold it for more than £100 million.
Q What was your best year in terms of money made?
A IT WAS 2014. But it was not like one day we were living a ‘normal’ life and the next day we had £100 million in the bank. By then, the business was earning between £8million and £9million a year in profit. We had enough money to do whatever we wanted. So when the sale proceeds came in, it didn’t make a blind bit of difference to our lives. We never got the time to celebrate it.
Q What is the most expensive thing you have bought for fun?
A IT HAS to be a 2010 Ferrari F1 car. It cost £1.4 million and I drive it maybe four times a year. Around corners, it can easily do 185 miles an hour. It will probably go up in value in time but that is not the reason I bought it. I just wanted to have it.
Q What is the biggest money mistake you have ever made?
A IN 2001, I lost £100,000 investing in CFDs [contracts for difference]. It was the stock market equivalent of gambling away £100,000 in a casino.
Q Do you save into a pension or invest in the stock market?
A I DO not save into a pension. I do invest in the stock market via my bank but in a conservative and balanced way. Ironically, having a lot of money creates a whole load of stress. You get next to no interest on it, inflation is eating away at it, and what happens if your bank goes bust? You have to think about what you are going to do with it. It can’t just sit in the bank. I don’t think a pension is a good way to invest for your retirement. You can put money away for a long time and, if it isn’t invested wisely, be left with nothing. I think you are far better off putting your money away in a cash savings account.
Q Do you own any property?
A YES, I own 12. They include two houses in England, which are both rented out; an investment property in Monaco; a chateau in the Dordogne – which has got another four houses with it; an apartment in Amsterdam; and an estate on Mustique in the Caribbean. I don’t know how much they are all worth, but in total, I have invested between £40million and £45million in property. We spend eight months of the year in Monaco, a couple of months in the chateau and six weeks a year in Mustique. The estate there is unusual, it used to belong to David Bowie. It has seven bedrooms and about 14,000 square feet.
Q If you were Chancellor of the Exchequer, what is the first thing you would do?
A I WOULD introduce a flat rate of income tax at 18 per cent or 20 per cent above £10,000, and get rid of VAT, capital gains tax, inheritance tax and the rest of the millions of different taxes there are.
This would make the tax system simpler. It would also allow you to get rid of a whole load of civil servants and encourage investment. I did not move away from the UK because of tax, but a lot of people do. That takes businesses and jobs away. It has been proven time and time again that the lower the tax rate, the more wealth it brings into a country.
Q Do you think it is important to give to charity?
A I THINK it is a personal choice. I don’t very often. I think a lot of charity giving merely appeases your conscience rather than doing good. Not much of the money you donate ends up in the hands of the people who need it. There is one charity, Starlight, which I think does some good. It arranges for the wish of a child who has life-threatening illness to come true, so that child has something to look forward to at the end of a horrible treatment.