Who is the richest person you know and how did they become rich?

Hello SPIers, today we ask...

Who is the richest person you know and how did they become rich?

The richest person I know is my old boss, Harry, who runs a massive food factory with 600+ employees. I worked there for six years as a bakery department supervisor. Despite having a CEO and managers in place, Harry—now in his 70s—still works five days a week, driven by his passion for food.

We weren’t friends, but we chatted often, enough to know about each other’s backgrounds. He frequently called me into his office to discuss ideas or share stories, sometimes for 30–40 minutes. Other supervisors joked that I was an ass-licker, but I assumed he interacted with all departments—until I learned from my senior supervisor that he only ever spoke with us. Harry had little interest in managers without bakery experience; he simply loved the craft.

I later discovered that bakery staff earned more than other departments, and my senior supervisor and I had freedoms others didn’t. Many factory supervisors resented us for it. Eventually, the factory manager on a work night out, admitted that Harry overruled most of his bakery decisions based on our input from the chats he had with us. He told me bluntly, “You two can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you don’t fuck up, so don’t fuck me and I’ll not fuck you.”

So thats the richest guy I know and he got rich from mixing cabbage, onion and carrot with mayonnaise.

(Harry in a blue shirt and his brother in white) Funny story, this photo was taken in Harry's office and yes that is a tracker in his office, welcome to Northern Ireland.

Networth = £180M+ (drives a Skoda)

Harry worked from the age of 14 with his father and older brother on the family farm until his father passed away when he was around 25. When this happened and the 2 brothers inherited the farm, they decided 1 brother would run the farm and the other would use the produce to start a factory while splitting everything 50/50.

So in 1965, they started their company, Avondale foods with 1 employee and Harry started out testing batches of coleslaw from the vegetables his brother grew. After nearly 2 years of back and forth with potential customers and investing money they borrowed against the farm to buy equipment they landed a huge contract to produce white-label coleslaw with a grocery store called Marks & Spencer (M&S).

The brothers hired a bunch of local people and ramped up production. Marks & Spencer is like maybe Wholefoods in the US where everything is the best quality, organic, sustainable, ethical, complete farm-to-fork flow tracabilty etc. Getting a contract from M&S increased the company's reputation by about 1000x and they were soon supplying most UK national grocery stores each with their own recipe and branding.

They aggressively created new products and grew the business into what it is today with probally over 1000 products and annual turnovers of over £120M per year.

What about you?

Who is the richest person you know and how did they become rich?