Nicholas Charles Tyrwhitt Wheeler started shirt specialist Charles Tyrwhitt in 1986, while he was still a student. In the 27 years since, he has built it into a £160m turnover business that employs more than 700 people, weathered two recessions, one administration and has carved out a niche for itself in a fiercely competitive market. Here he outlines the key lessons from his 27 years in retail.

1. Start small

Wheeler started his business part time while still at Bristol University, and carried on running it while working at consultancy Bain & Company.

He worked part-time at the business for its first four years, and Wheeler says it meant he learnt everything about running a retail business.

“It was tiny, great for learning the ropes,” he says. “It was literally trial and error. I left the consultancy in 1989 and about a year later persuaded Peter Higgins, who was also at the consultancy, to join me. We did everything - answered the phones, packed the boxes, marketing, merchandising, finance.”

2. Forget funding and be prepared to make sacrifices

“People get worked up about the funding [to start a business] but you’ve got to make sacrifices if you start a
business,” Wheeler says. “It’s possible to live on not very much. Don’t go out. Just knuckle down. Eat a lot of baked potatoes.”

He adds that if entrepreneurs don’t have much money, they can’t lose much. “I have always thought of entrepreneurs as either a hare or a tortoise. Hares raise money, build up businesses quickly, sell them on. A tortoise plods along each year - compound growth is an amazing thing. You don’t need a load of money in the beginning. You need to learn and understand what you are doing at the beginning.”

Outsiders with money, he says, bring a different agenda and potentially mean control of the business can
be wrestled from the founder once it takes off.

3. Learn from your mistakes

Wheeler says: “We have had some blips. In 1994 we went bust, that was a bit of a shock to the system. Things were going well - we were doing £2.5m with £250,000 profit, it was a great little business. I decided this was easy.

I got a bit bored. I felt it was all running quite easily, and I went and bought a chain of children’s clothes shops.

God knows what I was thinking. It was a real lesson in how not to be successful in business.

“We were a well-focused, men’s mail order business, there were no synergies at all. I lost more money in those three months than I had made in the previous three years. I purchased the business back off the receiver for nothing, rather bruised and battered. Experiences like that teach you a hell of a lot.” Since then he has worked hard to ensure the business remains focused on the market it serves so well.

4. Choose the team carefully

“You get to a point as an entrepreneur where the only decision you have to make is who is the right person to run the business. For a long time, it will be the entrepreneur, but that’s not the right answer forever,” Wheeler says.

When Higgins decided to leave, Wheeler brought in Ashley Potter, a former vice-president of sales for Europe for Ralph Lauren, as managing director. “In 2006 we were doing £40m in sales making £3.5m to £4m profit, it wasn’t a small business anymore and it needed a different person and structure.”

But the partnership didn’t work out. Potter introduced womenswear and children’s clothing lines, and Wheeler says: “We lost sight of what we were.” The business breached a covenant and Wheeler came back to the business to refocus it once more between 2007 and 2009. Charles Tyrwhitt is now run by chief executive Greg Hodder who Wheeler says is “fantastic”, adding: “It’s going great guns.”

He says: “It’s about bringing people on who are much better than I was at all the things they’re doing.”

5. Be passionate - from a distance

Wheeler says he never wants to give up Charles Tyrwhitt. “I will never sell this business. It’s like my fifth and eldest child. I would sell any one of the other four children before this one. It’s 27 now, and when a child gets to 27 you don’t tell them what to do, but you guide them and give them advice.”

6. Persevere

“My wife [White Company founder Chrissy Rucker] and I both started businesses when we were quite young, and basically what we both did was stick at it,” Wheeler says. “You have to have complete belief in your business - often, it’s an irrational belief. When I went bust everyone said give up - you need to have that blind faith in the idea and know deep down it’s going to work. Too many people give up too early.”

7. Be patient and don’t do it for the money

Wheeler says: “Too many people meet someone in the pub that they like and after two weeks give them 50% of the business. It’s very easy to give away your business too early. If you can, you should grow slightly more slowly and not take the money - people sell too much too quickly. Then the business takes off, and they get chucked off.”

He adds entrepreneurs need to be patient. “I used to work every hour, every weekend, but I loved building up the business. It has to be a passion. If you are doing it because you can’t think of anything else, or you want to make a lot of money, forget it.”

8. Be creative

“You do have to be creative in every sense of the word,” Wheeler says. “You have to adapt as you go because the one thing you can guarantee is that nothing happens that’s supposed to happen. You’ve got to be creative to get out of it. Plus, of course, you’ve got to make a product that people want to buy.”