The bookseller
As with most successful entrepreneurs, Tim Waterstones career is an epic series of buying, developing and selling, and even famously buying the same business back again years later.
Best known for founding Waterstone's Booksellers, Waterstone has most recently become the chancellor of Napier University.
Though his new role is primarily an honoree position, Waterstone is hoping to financially advise the university to propel it towards its target of becoming the best modern university in the UK by 2010.
“Well it is an honoree position, on its most basic level,” Waterstone explains. “But you can make a bit more of it than that; I certainly hope to do so in my 7 year term as chancellor of Napier."
He'll be involved "a little bit regarding the strategy, and encouraging everybody and acting as a figurehead for Napier to raise its profile a little bit.”
Waterstone's entrepreneurial life began when he started Waterstone's Booksellers in 1982 with £6,000 of redundancy money after he was fired from WH Smith.
“I wasn’t very happy at Smith’s and it’s quite right that they got rid of me. I niftily started Waterstones to my great pleasure,” Waterstone chuckles.
Subsequently, Waterstone sold the company to WH Smith for £47 million in 1993, which was also, he says, “a great pleasure”.
“Smith’s was the enemy we had all been aiming for at Waterstone’s. I mean enemy in a good humored sense. They were the opposition we were aiming at and there was a certain humor in that they rang up and said ‘we give up, here’s your share” says Waterstone.
In 1998 Waterstone bought the company back, with HMV, for 400 million.
“[We bought it for] hugely more, but the reason for that was they had put two other book groups into Waterstone’s by that point… they had added huge amounts of spores to it” explains Waterstone.
“I shared that for three years and then sold it three years later. I like the entrepreneurial life; I don’t particularly enjoy non-executive chairing of companies, which is what I was doing back then.”
As well as founding children’s store Daisy and Tom and building up businesses such as Chelsea Stores, Waterstone has written several books on entrepreneurship. His most recent Swimming Against the Stream, published last year, focuses on how businesses can succeed, and how they fail.
Waterstone explains that the entrepreneurial mindset requires an ability to handle high stress as well as make serious decisions under pressure. Most importantly though, it is through an acute sense of ambition and a keen desire for risk.
“Most people shouldn’t be entrepreneurs and if you’re not naturally of that mindset than it’s just too dangerous. And you’ll hate it, you’ll hate the risk. Those who are natural, once you start entrepreneuring- if that’s a word- you can’t stop. Which is exactly what happened to me” says Waterstone.
“I was working in corporations when I started Waterstones and I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t worked for myself my entire life.”
Waterstone describes being fired from WH Smith as something of an awakening into the world of entrepreneurship.
Married three times with eight children, Waterstone explains an element of entrapment by being financially dependent on debt.
“I should’ve known anyway actually. I had so many children and so many wives and so many mortgages to pay that you get trapped in corporations through economic inertia” says Waterstone.
“But I was never, never happy and I was only happy when the act of firing me enabled me to say ‘well I’m never going to work for anybody again, I’m going to work for myself from now on.
“And that was an instantaneous source of happiness to me.”
Now Waterstone resides in London mentoring young companies, as well as giving public lectures on business.
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