Yorkshire business giant tunes in to his musical talent
Graham Leslie hasn’t rested on his laurels since selling his business for £68m. He’s now releasing a charity Christmas song to help poorly children. Ann Chadwick reports.
GRAHAM LESLIE saved UK households £500m a year and the NHS £3.5bn with his store brand pharmaceutical business, Galpharm International. Today, he explains how his own medicine is music.
It’s apt that entrepreneur Graham Leslie’s favourite Christmas movie is It’s A Wonderful Life. In the film George Bailey realises the biggest wealth in his life is his family, his community – as he puts people before profit. There can be few Yorkshire businessmen as renowned as Graham for putting his heart into his community.
“It’s about the community, nothing else matters,” Graham says. “Real entrepreneurs as far as I’m concerned are driven by wanting to achieve, wanting to contribute – it’s not about money – it’s not about praise or being on a pedestal because you’ll fall off. I’ve always had a great passion to share.”
After selling his business for $88m (£68m) in 2008, Graham didn’t follow the cliché of retiring on a beach. He’s a Resident Professor of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at Huddersfield University, and in 2017 received a CBE from the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William for his services to entrepreneurship.
Graham was the founding chairman of Kirklees Stadium Development Ltd and with Sir John Harman, created
Europe’s first ever all-seater stadium in Huddersfield.
He grew up kicking a block of wood around the council estate in Middlesbrough, with Brian Clough his idol, a footballer who ‘gave back’ and worked in the community. Graham’s oldest son set up the Leslie Sports Foundation in Huddersfield to continue that spirit and put kids – some at risk – on a positive path. “Unless people give back” Graham says, “the whole thing will implode.”
He is still a serial entrepreneur with a wide investment portfolio, but one thing that may be a revelation about Graham is that he is a prolific songwriter. As a working-class lad, growing up against the music revolution of the late ’50s and early ’60s, he played drums in the boy’s brigade and sang in a rock band, covering Buddy Holly, Elvis and Cliff Richard tracks. After leaving school at just 14, he had dreams of becoming a designer, but couldn’t draw. Being dyslexic, he learnt to channel his creativity through oratory, and went into sales.
“When I went home and told my mother I was going to be a salesman, she cried. I said, ‘Why are you crying mother I get a free car?’ She said, ‘All salesmen are liars and you’ll get eaten alive’. I said, ‘okay, I’ll prove you wrong. Don’t worry’ mum’. Thankfully she lived to see the formation of our own company, Galpharm.”
While trailing a blaze in the business world, his first marriage ended and he picked up a guitar again – “for my own sanity more than anything else”.
He has now been working with Sheffield’s Grammy award-winning songwriter and producer Eliot Kennedy to create an album about wedding songs. But Graham’s debut will be this Christmas with a charity single in aid of the Sheffield Children’s Hospital. On the video shoot for the single, Graham invited his nine grandchildren and four children.
“The song is all about making sure you’re back home for Christmas. It’s all about families coming together. I chose this charity because I once had the experience of not being able to be with my children one Christmas, so I went into the children’s hospital and basically entertained the kids with cards and tricks and my guitar. I know how very, very upsetting and frustrating it is when you’re separated from your children, but if your child is ill in a hospital it’s of course devastating. That visit really opened my eyes.”
■ Graham Leslie’s Christmas Song is launched on November 29.