A MAN who grew up in a council house with no carpets is now a millionaire – with his firm making a whopping £2.3MILLION last year.
Robin Skidmore’s family fell on hard times after his dad lost his job and was forced to take on menial work to help pay the bills.
Despite his tough upbringing, Robin – who was brought up by his sisters in North London – made it to Leeds University, where he studied business.
Robin maxed out three credit cards as a student to help pay his way while up north.
He bagged a first job with NatWest, but had to pack it in after he failed a set of professional exams.
He then started his career in sales, working for a fledgling web development firm called Chapter Eight.
Robin, now 43, soon became fascinated in search engine optimisation (SEO) which enables websites to rank higher in search results.
In 2005, he and a colleague, Shane Quigley, decided to strike out on their own with a specialist SEO firm Epiphany.
The pals had £10k between them and a tiny office in Leeds, which was their HQ.
The specialist SEO firm quickly took off and the start-up began hiring hungry young graduates.
The pals later sold the business to marketing agency Jay Wing for £18m.
After the deal went through Robin and Shane stayed on as employees but the two men later moved on to do their own thing.
Robin has now launched a second start-up called Journey Further.
The business has an office in New York and is focused on the US market – making a whopping £2.3million in profit last year alone.
Robin, speaking to The Times, he said his tough childhood helped instil him with the ‘drive and determination’ that underpinned his success as an entrepreneur.
He said: “We didn’t have any carpet in our house for two years — we just couldn’t afford anything.
“My dad never really got another job that paid the same salary so he was doing multiple jobs, which meant he wasn’t around a lot.
“So I was … brought up by my older sisters and self-sufficient from a really early age.
“I don’t think I would have had the drive and determination that I have in business … without that.”
After Robin sold his first business he was able to take his family on a world holiday.
He recently moved to New York with Laura, and their two children, to spearhead the company’s US expansion.
He now hopes that Journey Further can replicate the success of his first start-up all those years ago.
Last year Journey Further made pre-tax profits of £2.3million on sales of £13.3million. “I set myself a goal to get to the same profit number within five years that we did in ten years [at Epiphany].
“We hit that on the fifth anniversary,”
He has hired ten people in the US and is about to sign the lease for an office in New York.
He said: “We want to emulate the success of the UK, and a big part of that is people and culture — and we think that culture is fostered a lot better when you get people together.”
