News - Midlands
A man of leisure
Like most entrepreneurs it took one giant wake-up call to turn Mo Chaudry into the self-made millionaire he is today.
Mo's flash of light came when, having fluffed his O-levels, he ended up in a Telford wheel factory with his father. "No disrespect to the old man but I could see us both being here in 30 years. I thought that's it, time to move on."
It was a fall from grace for Mo's father too who had left Pakistan to seek his fortune in the UK in the 1960s. After building up a successful grocery business it then hit the rocks. "It was a terrible, really dire time. My dad spent years paying people back, but he insisted on paying every last penny."
The tale of how Chaudry senior arrived on these shores is worth telling. Within five minutes of sitting down in Mo's cubby hole, inside the Waterworld leisure complex he owns in Stoke, he is recounting with passion the story of how his dad found his way out of the Pakistan army. "He couldn't afford to buy his way out, but the one thing he did have was great strength. One day he was in a convoy deep in the mountains when a jeep got stuck in mud and he helped pull the vehicle out. The commanding officer asked him what reward he wanted. His answer was a one-way ticket out. He got his wish and never looked back," he says.
Mo and family followed his father to Britain in 1969. "I always remember starting school just before my ninth birthday. I couldn't read or write and it was terrifying. Some of my earliest memories were of white flakes falling out of the sky and no sunshine. I wondered where on earth I had been brought to," he says.
I had a similar feeling of sorts on entering Chaudry's cramped and chilly office on this admittedly freezing winter day. Files are strewn across his desk, while directly facing him is a wall of TV screens showing various locations within the water park.
But back to the wake-up call. "With my O-levels I believed in my own hype, I thought I could just turn up," he says. "Looking back though, you have to fail like this, it's good for you. You either cope with it or carry on falling, it's your choice. I said to myself that I would never fail again and if I did fail it would not be through lack of trying." Chaudry moved into door-to-door insurance and started making good money. "I upped my game. I realised that most people go through life on cruise control, but that wasn't for me," he says.
Chaudry, now 46, is frustrated that too many young people - and young Asians as much as anyone - have the cruise control attitude today that he himself once had.
"The first generation of Asian migrants like my father knew exactly what they wanted, to better themselves. For my generation things were a bit tougher because we perhaps didn't have quite the same drive, although as a young Asian you didn't have the same opportunities of today, which made you still work hard to achieve," he says. "For the third generation it is almost too easy for them, they have everything they want now. There are issues for them over who they are and what they are, and in that situation, if all else fails, I suppose you go back to your roots, go back to your religion."
Chaudry doesn't confess to having any easy answers for the disaffected, but he knows that education is the key: "As I learnt to my cost, education is so fundamental. I also feel there are not enough positive role models for young Asians today, even though there are far more opportunities." He goes on to attack the culture of positive discrimination towards Asians. "I don't agree with it, it's political correctness gone mad. Employers or whoever need to give equal opportunities full stop to everyone," he says.
Like so many Asian entrepreneurs of his generation, Chaudry has benefited greatly from the UK property boom of the last decade, not least because he began ploughing any spare cash he had into bricks and mortar from an early age - and most of it just after the early 1990s property slump.
Today his MIC Properties business has, according to the man himself, some £315m to £316m of net assets on the balance sheet. The figure compares very favourably with only a few years ago, when Chaudry admits he wasn't pushing his portfolio hard enough. "My accountant told me the business was actually a bit sleepy and needed waking up," he says. As such, Chaudry has been busy expanding his portfolio and now has around 50 commercial properties in the North Staffordshire area. For instance at Festival Park, where Waterworld is based, he has 41,000 sq ft of offices and industrial land.
Chaudry could easily have been just another faceless property tycoon who hid behind his wealth. But you quickly get the impression that this could never be his style. He wants to make development exciting, a sexy business.
At Waterworld Chaudry has certainly made his name. One of the few private owners of a water park in the UK, he bought the business from Rank in 1998. How did it come about? "Oh, I read it was up for sale on the front page of the local paper. I thought to myself, I'll have a bit of that. My wife told me I was crazy. She said what could you possibly want with that. Have you not got enough on? But I wanted to do more. It was an impulse," he says.
Chaudry bought the park for a snip at just £31.5m, borrowing money from MIC to finance the deal. Given the high start-up costs of such leisure attractions Mo knew it was a tasty deal. "I didn't even get a survey done of the place," he says. "I just went for it. Rank spent close to £39m on building the place and you can double the cost and more if you were building it today."
Chaudry says he simply did "basic things" to make the park more profitable. Cancelling all contracts with national suppliers, who he says were charging inflated prices, saved £3100,000 a year. Getting the rateable value of the building down from £3425,000 to £3115,000 was a particular pleasure (and he gets the files out to prove it).
Fine, plenty of cost-cutting there, but what about future growth? "At the moment we are averaging around 370,000 visitors a year and I know we can improve on that." Chaudry insists he is not just grooming the park, which could be worth anything up to £320m, for a sale. He points to the fact that he has just spent close to £35m redeveloping the front of the building to provide more retail facilities, while he has a string of plans for new rides.
But it is the area in which the park sits that is of most interest to Chaudry, who owns a prime chunk of 12 acres around it. The area was the site of the Stoke Garden Festival in the 1980s and if you look hard enough you can still see fountains and colonnades from that era.
Chaudry is on the verge of submitting a detailed planning application for a mixed-use scheme, that will also include housing alongside the neighbouring canal. He also plans to sell some of the land to fund expansion at Waterworld itself. "The aim is to make Waterworld a premier league national player, but there is also a fantastic opportunity to develop Britain's first urban leisure resort in this area," he says.
Given that Waterworld also sits opposite a dry ski slope and one can see the attractions. Chaudry says he is talking to the slope's owners to get them on board with his wider plans, which could include a snowdome.
He also thinks there is scope for an ice rink and the total cost of the redevelopment could stretch to £360m.
As he escorts me around the site the need for redevelopment is self-evident. "I tried to get the fountains working again when I first came here but they kept getting vandalised. People think this whole site is developed, but it isn't," he says.
For Chaudry, the big challenge now is getting the city to embrace the proposals: "I am sick and tired of people talking negatively about Stoke. The pottery industry is largely history. Here is a great opportunity for us to move on and really put the city on the map in a different way."
As we move on to share a spaghetti Bolognese in the canteen, I ask how Chaudry thinks he's viewed in the city. "No one will say I lack integrity or am dishonest or lack principles. I am very principled. I am dedicated, disciplined," he says. "I quite like myself actually. I think I am a decent guy."
Mo's flash of light came when, having fluffed his O-levels, he ended up in a Telford wheel factory with his father. "No disrespect to the old man but I could see us both being here in 30 years. I thought that's it, time to move on."
It was a fall from grace for Mo's father too who had left Pakistan to seek his fortune in the UK in the 1960s. After building up a successful grocery business it then hit the rocks. "It was a terrible, really dire time. My dad spent years paying people back, but he insisted on paying every last penny."
The tale of how Chaudry senior arrived on these shores is worth telling. Within five minutes of sitting down in Mo's cubby hole, inside the Waterworld leisure complex he owns in Stoke, he is recounting with passion the story of how his dad found his way out of the Pakistan army. "He couldn't afford to buy his way out, but the one thing he did have was great strength. One day he was in a convoy deep in the mountains when a jeep got stuck in mud and he helped pull the vehicle out. The commanding officer asked him what reward he wanted. His answer was a one-way ticket out. He got his wish and never looked back," he says.
Mo and family followed his father to Britain in 1969. "I always remember starting school just before my ninth birthday. I couldn't read or write and it was terrifying. Some of my earliest memories were of white flakes falling out of the sky and no sunshine. I wondered where on earth I had been brought to," he says.
I had a similar feeling of sorts on entering Chaudry's cramped and chilly office on this admittedly freezing winter day. Files are strewn across his desk, while directly facing him is a wall of TV screens showing various locations within the water park.
But back to the wake-up call. "With my O-levels I believed in my own hype, I thought I could just turn up," he says. "Looking back though, you have to fail like this, it's good for you. You either cope with it or carry on falling, it's your choice. I said to myself that I would never fail again and if I did fail it would not be through lack of trying." Chaudry moved into door-to-door insurance and started making good money. "I upped my game. I realised that most people go through life on cruise control, but that wasn't for me," he says.
Chaudry, now 46, is frustrated that too many young people - and young Asians as much as anyone - have the cruise control attitude today that he himself once had.
"The first generation of Asian migrants like my father knew exactly what they wanted, to better themselves. For my generation things were a bit tougher because we perhaps didn't have quite the same drive, although as a young Asian you didn't have the same opportunities of today, which made you still work hard to achieve," he says. "For the third generation it is almost too easy for them, they have everything they want now. There are issues for them over who they are and what they are, and in that situation, if all else fails, I suppose you go back to your roots, go back to your religion."
Chaudry doesn't confess to having any easy answers for the disaffected, but he knows that education is the key: "As I learnt to my cost, education is so fundamental. I also feel there are not enough positive role models for young Asians today, even though there are far more opportunities." He goes on to attack the culture of positive discrimination towards Asians. "I don't agree with it, it's political correctness gone mad. Employers or whoever need to give equal opportunities full stop to everyone," he says.
Like so many Asian entrepreneurs of his generation, Chaudry has benefited greatly from the UK property boom of the last decade, not least because he began ploughing any spare cash he had into bricks and mortar from an early age - and most of it just after the early 1990s property slump.
Today his MIC Properties business has, according to the man himself, some £315m to £316m of net assets on the balance sheet. The figure compares very favourably with only a few years ago, when Chaudry admits he wasn't pushing his portfolio hard enough. "My accountant told me the business was actually a bit sleepy and needed waking up," he says. As such, Chaudry has been busy expanding his portfolio and now has around 50 commercial properties in the North Staffordshire area. For instance at Festival Park, where Waterworld is based, he has 41,000 sq ft of offices and industrial land.
Chaudry could easily have been just another faceless property tycoon who hid behind his wealth. But you quickly get the impression that this could never be his style. He wants to make development exciting, a sexy business.
At Waterworld Chaudry has certainly made his name. One of the few private owners of a water park in the UK, he bought the business from Rank in 1998. How did it come about? "Oh, I read it was up for sale on the front page of the local paper. I thought to myself, I'll have a bit of that. My wife told me I was crazy. She said what could you possibly want with that. Have you not got enough on? But I wanted to do more. It was an impulse," he says.
Chaudry bought the park for a snip at just £31.5m, borrowing money from MIC to finance the deal. Given the high start-up costs of such leisure attractions Mo knew it was a tasty deal. "I didn't even get a survey done of the place," he says. "I just went for it. Rank spent close to £39m on building the place and you can double the cost and more if you were building it today."
Chaudry says he simply did "basic things" to make the park more profitable. Cancelling all contracts with national suppliers, who he says were charging inflated prices, saved £3100,000 a year. Getting the rateable value of the building down from £3425,000 to £3115,000 was a particular pleasure (and he gets the files out to prove it).
Fine, plenty of cost-cutting there, but what about future growth? "At the moment we are averaging around 370,000 visitors a year and I know we can improve on that." Chaudry insists he is not just grooming the park, which could be worth anything up to £320m, for a sale. He points to the fact that he has just spent close to £35m redeveloping the front of the building to provide more retail facilities, while he has a string of plans for new rides.
But it is the area in which the park sits that is of most interest to Chaudry, who owns a prime chunk of 12 acres around it. The area was the site of the Stoke Garden Festival in the 1980s and if you look hard enough you can still see fountains and colonnades from that era.
Chaudry is on the verge of submitting a detailed planning application for a mixed-use scheme, that will also include housing alongside the neighbouring canal. He also plans to sell some of the land to fund expansion at Waterworld itself. "The aim is to make Waterworld a premier league national player, but there is also a fantastic opportunity to develop Britain's first urban leisure resort in this area," he says.
Given that Waterworld also sits opposite a dry ski slope and one can see the attractions. Chaudry says he is talking to the slope's owners to get them on board with his wider plans, which could include a snowdome.
He also thinks there is scope for an ice rink and the total cost of the redevelopment could stretch to £360m.
As he escorts me around the site the need for redevelopment is self-evident. "I tried to get the fountains working again when I first came here but they kept getting vandalised. People think this whole site is developed, but it isn't," he says.
For Chaudry, the big challenge now is getting the city to embrace the proposals: "I am sick and tired of people talking negatively about Stoke. The pottery industry is largely history. Here is a great opportunity for us to move on and really put the city on the map in a different way."
As we move on to share a spaghetti Bolognese in the canteen, I ask how Chaudry thinks he's viewed in the city. "No one will say I lack integrity or am dishonest or lack principles. I am very principled. I am dedicated, disciplined," he says. "I quite like myself actually. I think I am a decent guy."