MANY PEOPLE would think that if your name was Getty and your family had a billion-dollar fortune, you would be bound to succeed in business. But while Mark Getty found it easy to get the seed capital to start Getty Images, he discovered he needed a lot of skill to build it into a $2 billion (£1.2 billion) company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Like Stelios Haji-Ioannou, who received a few million from his family to start Easygroup, Getty wanted to prove that he could create a substantial business. He has. Today Getty Images owns the rights to the largest collection of photographic images in the world.

Getty, grandson of John Paul Getty, the oil billionaire, has been determined to build a new empire since his family sold Getty Oil to Texaco in 1984.

He says: “I knew I wanted to go into business from an early age. I wanted to be measured by it. The last thing I wanted in life was to be measured by what I had inherited as opposed to what I had done.”

In 1994, Getty and his business partner and friend Jonathan Klein saw an opportunity in photographs. He persuaded his father, the philanthropist J P Getty II, two uncles and several cousins to back the venture.

He then created critical mass with a string of acquisitions, buying Tony Stone Images in 1995 and merging it with leading brands such as Kodak’s Image Bank Collection, VCG, PhotoDisc and Art.com.

Getty says: “At the age of 22, I wasn’t getting anything from my family in any event. It’s not as if there is a big strongroom and you walk in and take what you want.

“I wanted to resolve some conflicts in the family. Every family has someone who wants to rule the world and someone who wants to walk the dog.”

The Gettys have suffered more than most from scandal, illness and infighting. His elder brother, John Paul III, was kidnapped by the mafia in 1973 and his sister Aileen was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1985.

Getty insists he had a normal upbringing. Born in Italy, he lived in Rome until the age of 14, when he was sent to boarding school in England. Later, he read politics and philosophy at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

He says: “I am one of those people whom everyone hates because I had an idyllic childhood. There are no skeletons in the closet. I even loved boarding school.”

His first job was working on an oil rig. It did not come through the family, however, but through a chance meeting on an aeroplane with Scott Smith, president of Gold Standard, a small mining company based in Utah.

Getty says: “I knew I would go into business but it wasn’t necessarily going to be oil. I met a guy on a plane and we talked and got on. He told me to be at Salt Lake City airport on July 1 and to bring boots and Levi’s. That was the job spec. He didn’t know I was the grandson of JP Getty because I tended not to advertise that.”

After nine months, Getty went to New York and took a job in investment banking at Kidder Peabody. A salary of $50,000 gave him the independence that he craved.

He helped sell the family oil business and moved to London, taking a job at Hambros, where he met Klein. Today Klein is chief executive of Getty Images and takes care of the day-to-day running of the business from its headquarters in Seattle. Getty is based in London and concentrates on strategy, development and growth.

During the past two years, the pair have been busy consolidating the company after the acquisition spree, trimming the number of offices worldwide from 88 to 44 and the staff from 3,000 to 1,600.

Over the next 10 years, Getty sees the company developing new tools so that it can distribute its images faster.

Later this year, the entire family will meet up in San Francisco for the first get-together in more than a decade. Getty is philosophical about whether they will be proud of what he has achieved.

He says: “Some are proud, some are disinterested and I think some would feel a certain amount of pleasure if it doesn’t work out.”

Jason Corcoran