JOSEPH YUSSUF was dyslexic and left school at 15, fearing he wouldn’t get the qualifications to succeed academically. He decided to learn about business so that one day he could start a venture of his own.
Suffering from dyslexia at a time when the condition was not fully recognised made school life difficult. “What tends to happen is that you are in a class with kids of a far lower ability than you. It is frustrating and, unless you are academic, you don’t get the opportunities,” said Yussuf.
His parents had come to Britain from Cyprus after the second world war and he and his brothers were brought up in Peckham, south London, with little money to spare. His father worked in a factory.
So aiming to become an entrepreneur was a radical departure for Yussuf. “My father’s family are quite academic, but they were never able to cope with failure,” he said. “I think that if you are used to failure then you become conditioned and just pick yourself up and have another go.”
Rather than going into a factory job like his father, Yussuf went to work for a Volkswagen dealership as a trainee fitter. During his 18 months there he decided that the automotive industry presented an opportunity to make money. “During the 1960s everything went from dull brown to bright technicolour. People were making money, and people of my age group were starting to buy cars,” he said.
Yussuf’s idea was to start his own garage, but before he could do so he needed to gain extra skills, so he moved to Bondmill, a coach-builder, to learn about body repair.
“If you owned a garage you didn’t need a lot of money – just your own tools – and you had something that you could build on. But I had to gain the skills first,” he said.
He first tried running his own garage from a small lockup when he was 21. But he had chosen an unsavoury location and customers were wary about bringing their cars in. After a few months he had to close it down.
He was determined not to give up, however, and decided to start again. He borrowed £250 from his father to lease an old railway arch in east London and opened a body-repair centre. When he saw a busy garage on the Old Kent Road doing a brisk trade fitting clutches, though, he decided to try a different angle.
“They seemed quite busy and I thought it was a good idea. I made a deal with a spares shop that would deliver to me some products fairly quickly at a good price,” he said.
Yussuf’s idea was to rebuild clutches and fit them while customers waited. It was at this point that Yussuf’s younger brother, Will, joined the company. His brother was also dyslexic and was much more comfortable working with cars than with people. And so in 1979 Mr Clutch was born.
As Mr Clutch’s reputation grew, Yussuf decided to buy larger equipment so he could rebuild more clutches and pass on the savings to customers.
He said: “Someone could buy a clutch for a Ford Cortina, for example, for £28.80. But we could supply and install it for less than £28.80 and that was the magic ingredient.”
With the business model in place, expansion was rapid. Yussuf moved to larger premises, keeping his east London arch as a rebuilding warehouse. Within a year of moving he had opened two more centres, in Dulwich and Croydon, and had 20 staff.
Although the business was growing, Yussuf and his brother were still not making much profit from the venture. His break came when the leaseholder of his Croydon garage decided to sell up.
“We managed to get a loan to buy the leasehold, and then all of a sudden the property market was starting to boom and we were able to borrow against the property,” he said.
It was at this point he decided to turn Mr Clutch into a franchise operation, after speaking to a client. “A customer used to work for a brewery. He said that the company used to produce the beer, own the pubs and had tenants who were like franchisees, and it was a very good formula,” said Yussuf.
After reading about other successful franchisers in America, he took the plunge – and the business started to do even better. “It was at the end of the 1980s and we grew dramatically because we were so competitive.”
Mr Clutch now has 40 auto-centres nationwide and turnover this year will be £18m. Yussuf still heads the company, with his younger brothers Will and Sef helping with the operations. One of his two sons runs a franchise.
Although Yussuf, now 54, has come a long way, he never forgets the people who work for him, remembering that he, too, was once in that position. He thinks that looking after your staff is the best thing anyone in business can do.
“Whether someone has cleaned the floor for me or given me financial advice, I have always given them the same level of respect. You’d be surprised – your cleaner knows a lot more about what is going on in your business than a lot of your senior people.”
