BUSINESS EMPIRE STARTED WITH JUST £20 OF PRAWNS
SHELIM Hussain was just a teenager studying for his A-levels when he drove to London with £20, picked up six boxes of prawns, and sold them back in Cardiff for £150.
His motivation to make money was mostly down to love and to convince the woman of his dreams, and her family, that he could look after her. But those prawns were also the first move for a business which was turning over £40m within 10 years.
Shelim got the girl – Bobi – and went on to grow his business which would become the UK’s largest supplier to the Asian food market with a £105m turnover and 1,500 staff worldwide. Today he’s got depots all over the UK, in the US, and Bangladesh.
“I started with nothing,” said Shelim, who came to the UK from Bangladesh when he was just 11 years old.
“In Bangladesh I was poor but I was happy. I was running around jungles finding fish to eat. It was a fantastic childhood but now I get really scared when I think about it.” He’s referring to the times he stuck his hands in holes looking for woodpeckers but risking a snake bite.
It’s a far cry from the life he’s built for Bobi and their three children, who today live comfortably in their Newport home.
“It’s like Slumdog Millionaire,” he chuckled as he recalled his early life. “Basically my family paid £3,000 for me to come here with the people I was told to call mum and dad.”
His real parents stayed in Bangladesh while Shelim had to make a new life in Cardiff. He went to Cathays High School and finished his GCSEs at Trowbridge. It was the “worst childhood ever,” he said. “I used to save up the dinner tickets and sell them to buy clothes from Oxfam,” he remembers.
Life changed for Shelim when he fell in love aged 18 with Bobi, who was just 15 at the time. Wealth was the main thing to create, he said, if he wanted to marry her.
“I couldn’t stop looking at her each day but I had nothing to give her,” he said. He supplemented his four paper rounds at the time with work as a waiter at the Indian Ocean restaurant in Cardiff.
When the restaurant’s prawn supplier went out of business the business-minded teen spotted an opportunity. Shelim drove to London and came back with six boxes of prawns. His business was born. Six months down the line he was making £600 every week.
It’s taken three decades to get where he is today but he very nearly didn’t make it and there were moments where he was on the cusp of losing everything he’d worked for since he was 18. He’s had “four years of hell” which has only now just come to an end. First he tried to take on internet ordering with Kukd.com, which ended in an alleged fraud case. Then there was a tax investigation, then one of his main suppliers was banned from the UK for corruption and, finally, there was Covid.
It all started in 2015 when Shelim had his eyes on recreating what Just Eat were doing and created Kukd. com. He was dreaming big – promising 300 new jobs in Wales, the Welsh Government agreed to offer £2.7m grant funding. But then it all fell apart: “I had no experience of running an online business,” Shelim said. “I’m just a food importer and distributor. I knew the restaurant business but not the IT business.
“I realised if I didn’t stop this monster it would take me down.” He drew down £1m of government money and pumped £1.5m of his own money into it but, even so, he was losing £350,000 every month.
He called in the Welsh Government and told them what was happening. “This has failed – help me out here, what do I do?” he asked.
He couldn’t close it down because there was so much invested into it. So he decided to take it over and get rid of staff where he could in a last-ditch effort to save it. Jobs promised to Welsh people were outsourced to Bangladesh. That’s when the counterfraud team got involved.
With his business shrouded in an ongoing fraud case Euro Foods Group found their credit insurance withdrawn, and with it its £30m buying power. Shelim dug deep into his own pockets and sold his assets abroad where he could and pumped his own cash into it to keep the company going.
Thanks to some restructuring – selling off Kukd.com to the management team – he’s still here today, having paid back half of what he took from the government grant and with an arrangement to pay back the rest in monthly instalments. The Welsh Government confirmed “the company continues to make repayments”.
Just when things were falling back into place Covid came along with an unlikely boost. “Straightaway I realised we needed to focus on takeaways,” Shelim said.
It meant 2020 would be one of their most profitable years yet and 2021 is proving to be even better, he said. Even better, those banks and insurance companies which were quick to pull the plug just a few years earlier started offering to cover him once again, which is somewhat ironic, he says.
“EFG is the most profitable it’s ever been in my lifetime,” he added. In 2019 they made £500,000 and that’s set to increase tenfold in 2021 to £5m: “That’s from me sacrificing my health for my business,” he added. “The last three years have been really bad. I’ve saved my company but it’s affected my health.”
His shrewd business operations means he has a diverse portfolio of interests - he owns all the premises he operates in and even rents some to the NHS. He retained a windfall agreement in Kukd.com and is looking forward to finally enjoying life with Bobi.
“I want to travel the world with my wife,” he said. “My job has taken me around the world but all I ever saw was the airport lounges, the inside of a taxi, and the hotel rooms - never the country I was in. It was factory, hotel, factory.”
Looking after family is clearly important to him and he won’t let me leave without popping my head in to see his daughter, who oversees digital marketing from her rather pink office.
“Nobody is poor anymore,” he said about his extended family. Home might once have been Bangladesh, and he’s clearly not forgotten about where he came from, but now his real home is “wherever Bobi is”.