Chris Dawson, 57, is the kind of man who could smell a fiver in a force nine gale. The son of a market trader, he gained his first sales experience aged seven, when he took charge of a jumble stall at a church market in his home town of Hooe in Plymouth. "It was a piping hot day and this guy came up, took off his plimsolls" and gave them to Dawson for jumble. Dawson tossed them in the pile, and an hour later, the man returned. "I sold him his old ones back for six pence," says the founder of £150m-a-year discount superstore The Range. "I remember thinking, bloody hell, I'm good at this."
He left school at 15 with little to show for it, and helped his father flog cockles and mussels from the back of a van, before trying his hand at motocross riding. Unfortunately, he didn't have the talent, he says. "World champions can see and hear differently from the rest of us. I couldn't." However, he could sell a suitcase full of jewellery and perfume better than anyone else on the markets. "At 18, I became quite a successful street trader. My mates were giving the same spiel, but I was taking double the money." Dawson, it seemed, was hearing and seeing things differently.
By his mid-20s he was making £10,000 a week, "telephone numbers", he says, because of the inventive ways he used to sell his products. Underneath a side door on a large white van, he started putting down straw in muddy fields and shining spotlights down on it. "So on an overcast day when most market traders would pack up and move on, I'd look nice and homely, and take more money selling china and dinner sets than anyone else."
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But while he enjoyed the salesmanship, "once you've had all the rounds of applause, you think I want to achieve more". So in 1988, after "blagging credit from everyone I knew", he opened The Range, a 15,000 sq ft discount superstore outside Plymouth, kitting it out with everything from toys and homeware to DIY equipment and jewellery. One of Britain's first giant outlet stores, it competed directly with high-street stores, "who had a different set of overheads" at the time, and didn't negotiate hard enough on getting prices down. Dawson saw the gap and, without "one bit of planning permission and no banking facilities", opened the store in the Sugar Mill industrial estate. A Lidl-type operation, everything was sold out of boxes. "People used to come up to me and criticise what a mess the store was, but they'd be buying stuff as they were saying it."
Within four months, turnover hit £1m, and in the first year he made £250,000 profit. Within 14 months, he opened up in Exeter and by 1994 he had six stores across the southeast. Today, he has 40 branches and unlike many businesses, he remains unfazed by the recession. In fact, he says, "there are so many opportunities out there right now that it's like being an alcoholic in an off-licence". For example, he is the new owner of £68m-worth of goods from bankrupt furniture store MFI, which he is selling via www.tradingbargains.co.uk. But as to whether he'd ever sell The Range, the answer is a definite no. "You know, life's full of prizes and challenges, and this is my prize. You couldn't give me enough money to replace the fun I'm having."
