No one could be more amazed by Penny Streeter’s rags-to-riches story than the multi-millionaire entrepreneur herself
No one could be more amazed by Penny Streeter’s rags-to-riches story than the multi-millionaire entrepreneur herself. ‘Sometimes I have to pinch myself,’ she says.
Twenty-five years ago, the former beautician was a penniless, pregnant single mum living in homeless accommodation after her failed recruitment business left her with £20,000 debts and a broken marriage.
Today, she heads a £157 million business empire and last week joined the rest of Britain’s highest earners in the Sunday Times Rich List.
‘It still feels quite surreal to me to see my name there,’ laughs the 50-year-old mother of four.
‘I used to look at those rich lists and think ‘I wish’. When you start out, you never think you’ll get there.’
These days the fruits of her success are evident. A tasteful wardrobe and softly highlighted blonde hair have replaced the sensible suits and neat helmet ‘do’ she sported on her dogged climb out of poverty.
But it is fear of failure that drives her on.
Each time Penny fires up her £30,000 orange Ford Mustang convertible, she is reminded of her little Fiat Panda which was repossessed when her first business crashed in 1989.
Dining in one of the gourmet restaurants she owns, with a glass of wine from her vineyard, she remembers how she once scoured markets for cheap meat and veg, and car-boot sales for children’s clothes.
Burned into her memory are the weekends she and her mum, Marion, spent running children’s discos to earn a living (not to mention the lyrics to Agadoo).
Married at 19 to former coach driver Douglas Streeter, she could hardly have imagined, when her seven-year marriage collapsed and she was left homeless, that one day she would own homes in West Sussex and South Africa, plus a commercial property portfolio that includes a Grade II-listed mansion.
‘I felt a complete failure,’ says Penny, recalling the day when, eight months pregnant with their third child, she had to ask Croydon council for help.
Twenty-five years ago, the former beautician was a penniless, pregnant single mum living in homeless accommodation
The impoverished Streeters had been living with Penny’s mother in her cramped house in the South London suburbs as an emergency measure, after losing everything.
When their marriage collapsed under the strain, Penny ended up in temporary homeless accommodation for two years.
‘The council had just two places available. One was in high-rise block in a concrete jungle. I know beggars can’t be choosers, but it was absolutely horrific and I wept at the thought of navigating 20 flights of stairs with three small children.
‘The lady in the council office took pity on me and gave me the other one, which was like Buckingham Palace in comparison.’
The dingy two-bedroomed, top-floor flat in a low-rise concrete block may have been less grim than the first but it still meant dragging a double buggy up and down three flights.
‘I had nothing, not even a bank account. I had no furniture, so my mum lent me two deckchairs from her garden and I had a beanbag for the baby. She helped me buy second-hand beds.
‘It was a horrible time. But I’ve always been optimistic and I thought: ‘Right, how am I going to drag myself out of this rut?’
‘I’d had a fantastic childhood and I wanted the same for my children. Living in homeless accommodation is the last thing you want for your kids.
‘I felt I’d let them down. You think: ‘How am I going to change things, because now the buck stops with me.’ I had no choice but to look up instead of down.’
These days the fruits of her success are evident
Today, Penny Streeter employs between 500 and 600 staff. Her main business is the A24 Group — a medical recruitment company which provides staff for the healthcare industry — but she is branching out into hospitality and property development.
Dividing her time between the UK and South Africa (A24 moved its HQ there in 2004), Penny now owns Benguela Cove vineyard in South Africa, four restaurants and a hotel on the Western Cape’s Garden Route.
In Britain, she owns the 400-acre Mannings Heath golf club and resort in West Sussex, where she is establishing a vineyard to produce English wines.
This July she is planning to reopen to the public the 200-acre Grade I-listed Leonardslee Gardens and manor house, near Horsham, which she bought last year, complete with a restored 18th-century doll museum.
‘People are always saying to me: ‘Why don’t you relax and go lie on a beach?’ says Penny, who is happily married to second husband Nick Rea, 63, who also works for the business and is the father of her youngest child, 17-year-old Tilly.
‘But I’m a control freak. Even on holiday I take my laptop and phone and never switch off. I think I’d go crazy if I did. I know what it’s like to have nothing and that means you’re always scared things could go wrong.
‘You can’t be complacent. You’ve got to stay ahead of the game. My kids are always telling me that work is my first child.’
For all her fortune, Penny Streeter admits the hardship years have left her rather bling-averse for a multi-millionaire.
Apart from her Mustang and art collection, she struggles to think of an extravagance on which she is tempted to blow her hard-earned money. She lists hiking and sailing as her hobbies — but forget the superyacht.
Married at 19 to former coach driver Douglas Streeter, she could hardly have imagined, when her seven-year marriage collapsed and she was left homeless, that one day she would own homes in West Sussex and South Africa
She is up at 6am and each day is filled with meetings, plans, conference calls and emails until late into the night. But she says she thrives on the risk and challenge of her new ventures.
Nor will you find her four children lazing around in the Med, topping up their tans.
Son Adam, 31, married with three young children aged five, three and one, is general manager of the Mannings Heath golf resort. Giselle, 26, is an Early Years teacher and Bonnie, 24, a midwife. Tilly is still at school.
‘I never had the choice to be a stay-at-home mum. I never even took maternity leave,’ says Penny. ‘I had to work to survive. I took the view that it was a great role model for them and they would grow up with a strong work ethic.’
Remarkably, despite the trauma of their divorce, ex-husband Douglas also works for the firm, as a facilities manager on the vineyard estates.
‘It was very difficult when we broke up. But he was the father of our three children and we managed to keep things amicable,’ says Penny.
Her ex-husband remained a committed father and when Penny first relocated to South Africa with the children 14 years ago, he moved there too, to be close to them.
The children all returned to the UK to study at university, while Douglas now works at new venture Mannings Heath.
Penny says she and husband Nick get on well with her ex and his partner, and jokes: ‘I’m not sure what he makes of my success but he has never given the impression of being bitter and twisted about it.’
The youngest of four children, Penny was born in Zimbabwe to Londoner Peter Stiff, who moved to Rhodesia — as it was before independence — at 18 to join the British South Africa Police. His British wife Marion Hammons joined him from Bromley in Kent eight years later.
When Penny was 12, her idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end after Robert Mugabe came to power. Peter, fearing for their safety, fled back to the UK with his family and just a small sum of money in savings.
The Stiffs’ marriage did not survive the upheaval and Peter moved to South Africa, where he became a renowned author, while Marion and the children stayed in the UK.
Living first with her mother before moving into a series of council flats, Marion supported her children by working as a legal secretary and then in HR and personnel, but it was a turbulent time. Penny admits she was a difficult ‘naughty’ teenager, dropping out of school when she was 15 or 16.
‘My parents were tearing their hair out,’ she says. ‘It’s not that they expected me to go to university, but they did say: ‘You have to get a job, you need to do something.’ ‘
At 16 she was earning £25 a week on Margaret Thatcher’s Youth Training Scheme, then trained as a beautician before falling into recruitment, for which she had a talent.
Penny set up her first business, Elite Personnel, at the age of just 22, with her mother Marion and a colleague, who each secured an £8,000 bank loan, plus money borrowed from Penny’s grandmother.
The company got off to a flying start but within weeks recession began to hit the British economy, leading to large-scale redundancies and job cuts.
When Penny was 12, her idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end after Robert Mugabe came to power
‘We had the most fabulous candidates turning up on our doorstep looking for jobs — but there weren’t any,’ Penny says.
They then launched a second business called Elite Diners — a dinner club for dating singles — but with debts spiralling to £20,000, Penny, who was living in rented accommodation with her husband and young family, was forced to shut up shop.
‘It was horrible. We felt like criminals,’ she says. ‘£20,000 doesn’t sound like much but it’s a fortune when you’ve got nothing. When debt collectors turned up at our colleague’s house, she told them: ‘But I’ve only got a hairdryer.’ ‘
Penny says she ‘ran away’ from the humilation. With their air fare paid by her father, the family moved to South Africa. There, Penny worked for her older sister, who owned a cabaret restaurant in Johannesburg.
Two years later, however, they returned to the UK to escape growing violence, squeezing into the small house that mum Marion shared with second husband, former Olympic middle-distance runner Brian Hewson.
‘Just before we came back, my daughter Giselle was so ill with bacterial meningitis that I thought we’d lose her. My marriage was breaking up and I was pregnant,’ says Penny.
‘I don’t know what I would have done without Mum’s support, but there was no way we could all stay in her small house, so we ended up in homeless accommodation.
‘I was offered a couple of jobs in recruitment but I really wanted to run my own company again. When I asked my mum if she’d join me, she said: ‘No, don’t do it’, but I was determined.
‘My parents had brought me up to believe I could achieve anything if I put my mind to it. I didn’t want to live on benefits and wasn’t afraid of hard work.
‘No bank would lend us money so we started the mobile disco, doing two or three children’s parties back to back on Saturdays and Sundays to raise the funds to start up.
‘An old schoolfriend offered me a desk in the corner of the office at her husband’s car park business for my new recruitment company. I worked one day, hitting the phones to get clients, while mum looked after the children, then she worked the next day while I did.’
Calling her company Ambition, Penny was soon the main supplier of financial staff to NatWest bank, which enabled her to set up her own shop in Wallington, Surrey.
She then found a niche supplying short-notice nursing and care staff to the healthcare industry, later setting up her own training scheme to supply qualified carers.
Ambition became the fastest-growing company in the UK.
‘While other recruitment firms closed at 5pm, I worked all hours of the day and night, diverting the office phone to my house. The children grew up hearing me saying ‘Ambition’ every time I answered the phone,’ says Penny, who received an OBE from the Queen in 2006.
‘They’d sit on the floor with their toy phones, going: ‘Ambition, Ambition!’ It wasn’t unusual to be woken at 3am by a call from a prison or a care home saying they urgently needed a nurse.’
Penny’s success has not been without some controversy.
In the past she has been accused of ‘cashing in’ on the NHS staffing crisis, but she says: ‘The NHS is a small part of our business. A huge amount of it in the UK is private.
‘We’re not advocating that the NHS should ever have full-time agency staff but we can provide cover when there’s a winter flu crisis and the NHS has to flex staff up or down.’
When she moved A24’s operations to South Africa, one newspaper headline ran ‘Lazy, plundering and hung over — entrepreneur’s verdict on UK workers’. Reports spoke of Penny’s exasperation with staff throwing ‘sickies’ on Mondays and Fridays.
She says now that in fact there were several reasons for the move. ‘This was my business that I had worked night and day to build up and I had a massive amount of theft going on,’ she says.
‘Some people would work in the industry, pick up databases and move on, taking them with them. I’d been to the courts but at that point there was little protection for intellectual property.
‘It was a risk moving offshore, but we work in a global world now and you’ve got to be a global player.’
Despite her Rich List ranking at No 744, Penny still has no intention of taking her foot off the pedal.
If anything, she is working harder than ever. Having lost everything once, she has no intention of allowing it to happen again.