Britain’s top entrepreneurs revealed: Sir Jim Ratcliffe tops list

They are the entrepreneurs who have built multi-billion pound businesses from scratch and kept going.

A list of 56 of Britain’s most successful business founders has now been compiled and ranked by the value of the companies they created.

At the top of the list is chemicals king and Manchester United co-owner Jim Ratcliffe, whose Ineos is worth £29bn. He only started trading Ineos when he was 45, proving that it is often never too late to make a fortune.

“Every great company was once a small company,” says the report’s author, Robert Watts.

There are two women in the top ten. Denise Coates started her online betting company Bet365 from a mobile phone booth in Stoke-on-Trent. Today it is valued at £6bn, putting her in seventh place.

Coates, 56, pioneered “live” betting, where punters place bets on a match after it has started.

Poppy Gustafsson built Darktrace into a £4.1bn cybersecurity giant, partly on the belief that expertise can be overrated.

The 41-year-old cites the fact that it was a young graduate rather than a veteran who asked why it took Darktrace three months to prove a concept when it could be done in three weeks.

Sharing ninth place with her is Richard Harpin, 59, who sold his emergency repairs group HomeServe for £4.1bn last year.

It now fosters the next generation of entrepreneurs through its Growth Partner fund and Business Leader, the magazine it owns, which publishes the research tomorrow on businessleader.co.uk.

Harpin lists the ability to “copy and pivot” as the first of his secrets to business success.

“Everyone is in a hurry to be first,” he said. “Second-place finishers have an advantage. You have to observe, correct and adapt.”

The hardest part is “hiring your replacement,” he added.

“It was a mess in the day-to-day running of the business,” he also revealed. So he hired a managing director to run HomeServe’s UK operations while he focused on overseas expansion. The rest, as they say, is history.