Tom Dudderidge honed his salesman’s abilities early. While at boarding school he would buy CDs and videos in London and sell them to his classmates. He even sold noodles to his Chinese friends, having discovered a way of smuggling them into the school without being spotted.

One of six siblings, he was born in London. His father used to be a sound engineer for the rock band Led Zeppelin and had started his own electronics business making sound-recording equipment.

“I never saw my dad apart from when I went down to his factory,” said Dudderidge.

After getting good GCSE results, he had planned to stay on at school to do A-levels and apply to Oxford University.

During the summer holidays, however, he changed his mind after working for a synthesiser company. When the boss offered him a job with a start-up venture selling computers he jumped at the chance.

Dudderidge ended up staying with the company for five years. He left in the hope of getting a job with a firm specialising in 3G mobile-phone technology. Without an MBA or a degree, however, he couldn’t find a business to take him on. So he joined an events-management company, running a new division.

He did well, but when the market collapsed three years later in 2001 — and with the arrival of his first child — Dudderidge realised that it was time to make a change.

So he took a job as sales manager with a European technology company — but it was still not where he wanted to be.

“Throughout all this time I always held an ambition and a belief that I would start my own business, but I was going about it the wrong way,” he said.

“I would try desperately to have an idea and then when I had an idea I would try desperately to prove that it would definitely succeed. And always in that process I would manage to convince myself that it wasn’t worth doing or that it carried too much risk.”

After 18 months with the European company, Dudderidge took a job with a company based in Dublin — commuting to work by plane every day from his home in Buckinghamshire.

“A good day was getting the red-eye to Dublin and being back in time to see my wife before she went to bed — and then being back at the airport in the morning.”

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