WHEN your father is a highly successful businessman who made his name by leading one of the biggest employee buyouts of a nationalised industry during the 1980s, it can be hard to know how to make your own mark in life.

This was the problem for Michael Thompson, son of Sir Peter Thompson, former chairman and chief executive of National Freight Corporation.

After doing business studies and marketing at City of London polytechnic, Thompson joined NFC and started to work his way up the ladder. At the age of 26, however, he quit because he was fed up of being in his father’s shadow. He came home one day to tell his wife, who was pregnant with their second child, that he had resigned without having another job to go to.

“It was quite difficult at times because people recognised that I was doing what I was doing because of what my father had allowed me to do,” he said. “So I just decided one day that it had to end.”

Thompson was born in Buckinghamshire but moved to Surrey and then Hertfordshire as a child. At the age of nine he was sent to boarding school. It was not an easy period in his life.

“I was very upset at the time. I was very close to my mother and my father and suddenly one night I was dropped off at school and all that changed,” he said. “It had a big effect on me.”

After quitting his job at NFC, Thompson searched around for something else to do. “I looked at all sorts of things, from manufacturing trailers to trying to buy the odd company here and there, and looking at ways of funding it,” he said.

But just two months later he started up a business running children’s nurseries - with his father as an equal partner. The opportunity came about because the owners of the nursery, where Thompson Sr was sending his daughter from his second marriage, were looking for a business partner. The Thompsons started a new company and bought a 50% share of the nursery in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, with Michael Thompson investing £70,000, which he raised by remortgaging his home. He became joint managing director of the company along with the original owner of the nursery. His father became chairman.

The new company, Child Base, began to open more nurseries in the area. But after four years it became clear that the partnership with the original owners was not working and so Thompson and his father bought out their 50% share, with Thompson remortgaging his home for a second time to fund the move.

The business grew and now has 35 nurseries across the country, including a nursery for the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford whose expansion was a pioneering Public Private Partnership project.

Thompson has, however, deliberately chosen not to brand his chain of nurseries, preferring instead to call each one by a unique name.

“I always think that the higher you get, the harder you fall,” he said. “It works for some companies if the brand image is very positive, but I didn’t see that this was the case for childcare. “Nurseries live on their own reputation and if you have a government Ofsted [Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills] report that is outstanding, that is what sells the nursery and the people in it, not the fact that there is a corporate man behind it.”

Thompson has also made his mark on the business in other ways, notably by being an enthusiastic supporter of employee ownership. Seven years ago he started inviting his staff to buy shares in the business, often on a “buy one, get one free” basis, with the result that his personal stake in the firm has fallen from 50% to 18%.

“It is a hard exercise to persuade the people you are working with that this is their company as much as yours. But I would like to think that in 20 years’ time I will have achieved all the things I want to with Child Base in terms of making it an employee-owned company,” he said.

This year Child Base will have a turnover of £22m, making it the largest private childcare provider in Britain.

Now 46 and married with three children, Thompson, who has received an OBE for his work in childcare, has this advice for budding entrepreneurs. “Empower the people round you. Believe in them and make the best of them. If you develop them, the response you will get from them will shatter your original illusions of what you thought they could achieve, without question. Success and recognition is never about the individual, it is about the people round you.”

Despite Thompson’s success, however, he would not advise anyone else to go into business with a parent. “I have been very fortunate with my father, who is a very good man. Having a family business has worked for us, but it is difficult to live in the shadow of someone, even in a family business, who has achieved as much as he has done.

“My experiences have been good, but I think for my children to be operationally involved with the business would be a mistake. It brings it all too close and it is difficult when the emotions get high for it not to have an impact on people’s lives.”

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