Mark Mills has to be one of my favourite and inspiring entrepreneurs of the times. From a young age of six Mark was making money selling boxes of broken biscuits to his mates that his aunt brought home from the factory she worked at. He then moved into crisps using his fathers cash and carry card and selling them on at school under cutting the tuck shop!

By the time Mark was 18 he was organising parties in nightclubs and making a £1,500 profit each time. Mark left school when he was 18 just as British Telecom was being privatised and Mark hit upon the idea of selling pay phones to pubs. After selling the phones he realised the venture wasn’t a successful as originally thought so Mark expanded his telecoms venture into mobile phones.

Unfortunately for Mark every man and his dog was also in this field and Mark hit cash flow problems and decided to close down the business at a personal loss of £20,000. This took Mark a further two years to pay off and as he closed down his business the mobile phone market took off.

Still in telecoms Mark had another idea of producing a booklet of dialling codes, but that led to Mark having some grief from BT. He then moved onto his next idea which was a business referral system that would put insurance companies in touch with local tradespeople. This venture didn’t really take off and so in 1997 Mark hit upon his best idea yet.

His idea was to sell advertising on the side of Royal Mail postboxes. Naturally his first call was to Royal Mail and was told he was only the 50,000th person to ring up with this idea and told him to go away. But undeterred Mark really believed in his idea and didn’t want to exhaust it there.

Mark still couldn’t get anywhere with Royal Mail so enrolled himself at night school so he could use the law library and figure out if his idea could be done. After many late nights Mark soon discovered a loop hole in the Telecommunications Act that allowed someone to produce a private postbox, provided it had a lock bought from Royal Mail, which was paid a fee to collect from it. Mark had cracked it.

Mark created a prototype mail box and then contacted the big oil companies to see whether they would be interested in having these postboxes on their forecourts. They were very interested and agreed. He then approached Nestle to see if they would be interested in advertising on the side of his postboxes, they said yes also.

Mark had not only conquered Royal Mail but he had also secured the locations for the postboxes and even a huge advertising deal - the next problem he faced was he had no money left to make this all happen. Mark managed to scrimp to get 6 postboxes installed before he had to sell the business, Postal Facilities Ltd to More Group UK Lt the advertising group.

Mark stayed on as a consultant to see another 1,200 boxes be installed, but when More was taken over this part of the business was put up for sale and was bought by … Royal Mail who quickly replaced them with their own postboxes. This might have been a shame but Mark had cleverly negotiated a clause in the contract so if it was sold on he would receive a fee which was around £1 million from the deal.

Mark then headed for America with his new found fortune to think of his next idea, while over in America he noticed the amount of people using cash machines everywhere he went. Upon his return to the UK Mark again started researching the idea of operating his own cash machines.

Again Mark found himself deep in the legals of the financial world this time. Mark found out that only financial institutions were allowed to become a member of the Link cash machine network. So Mark hit the phones and rang loads of Banks with his idea, all said no except Woolwich who were very interested in Marks plans. Marks first cash machine was installed in March 2000 and two years on the company Cardpoint was floated on the AIM.

At the end of last year Mark had a fall out with fellow shareholders after Cardpoint received an offer valuing the business at £1 per share, Cardpoint floated at 43p per share and Mark thought this would be an excellent opportunity but his fellow shareholders disagreed.

So Mark left leaving a  company that started with his passion turning over £98 million with £19 million in profits. Using his earnings Mark carried on with his property portfolio, the Cardpoint offices are included in his portfolio.

Mark is now onto his sixth business venture called Startback. Nobody knows what this is yet but it will involve a huge retail rollout starting Jan 2008 and then a trip to the AIM again!

Marks favourite quote which hangs above is desk:

“Failure cannot live with persistence” that sums Mark Mills up, what an inspirational entrepreneur!!!

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