Introduction

I was born in July 1975 at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey and grew up in the neighbouring town of Farnborough, which is around 30 miles (about 48 km) south west of central London.

After a life that took me around the world, including spending time living in China and New York City, I have ended up living a few miles from where I was born.

My sister, Suet Lee, who is ten years older than me, was born in 1965. At this time, my parents lived in a tiny one-room studio flat in Bayswater. They were given the opportunity to move to a two-bedroom council house in Farnborough as part of the GLC's efforts to relocate people from overcrowded central London to the growing surrounding suburbs. So I spent the first ten years of my life in a terrace house on a council estate that my parents eventually bought. They managed to save up and buy it for a few thousand pounds when tenants' opportunities to buy their council homes became more popular and widespread in the 1970s, a trend mostly driven by Sir Horace Cutler (Conservative leader of the GLC from 1977-1981) and then heavily pushed by Margaret Thatcher's first Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine.

I did well at primary school. I was an all-rounder at a time when school kids tended to fall into one of two camps: you were sporty and popular or you were academic and nerdy. I benefitted from the popularity that comes with being good at sports, as well as pleasing my parents and teachers by doing well academically. I was made aware of this when one of the very popular boys came up to me and said, "I wish I was more like you because you're popular and good at sports but also academic." Maybe this played a factor in helping me avoid the bullying some of my less sporty/popular friends received. Being the only Chinese boy in the school, I was definitely targeted once or twice - particularly at home - with insults coming from other kids on the estate; but I defended myself vehemently and so it always died down.

A huge life lesson I was fortunate enough to learn early on was: you always stand up to bullies, no matter how scared you might feel.

Back then, a lot of racial abuse and ridicule was tolerated. People would openly say they were going for a "chinky" when they meant they were getting Chinese food. When people called me a "chink" I just firmly asked them not to. I never tolerated it. Unfortunately, I did see some of the popular boys I was friendly with bully others, but I never got involved. I stayed on the fringes of that group; I managed to be their friends without getting involved in everything they did.

My sister had experienced bullying, too, but had managed to grow a thick skin and defend herself. As the only Chinese family on the estate, we wore our Chinese heritage with pride, not fear or shame. Even when one of the older boys on our estate called me rude names, and chucked bricks and mud at our garden gate, I didn't take it - I chased him down with the help of other, non-Chinese friends, and we fought him off with big sticks!

I am sure that my ability to stand up to the bullies came from the security I felt within my family. My parents taught me self-respect, and my sister was a hugely positive influence on me. Being ten years older, when our parents were working long hours, my sister helped out a lot with getting me ready for school, teaching me how to dress and helping me with my homework. She taught me plenty of life skills, even "how to be cool"! She was, and has always been, a very principled and self-respecting person and if any one person was my mentor growing up, it was probably her. We are still close and speak most days.

I was still a teenager when my sister moved to Singapore. She was around 25 years old and had bought a round-the-world ticket. She had been intending to travel around the world, but during her very first stop in Singapore, she met the man who would become her future husband and decided to stay there. Knowing how much I would miss her, she cashed in her ticket and bought me a return ticket to go and visit her. I'd only been to Malaysia a couple of times, once when I was 6 and then again when I was 13, so I was very excited. Since then, I've visited my sister and her family on average once year. She has two boys who are now both at universities in the UK. It's great to see more of them now. Suet Lee has always been very wise about life. Even when I was setting up my business I would go to her for advice. She's not a businessperson - although she's actually a qualified accountant with two MAs and is now an award-winning local playwright doing a PhD in creative writing - but I've always valued her good judgement.

I was very supported at school. One of my teachers really helped me believe in myself. I particularly excelled in sports and ended up captain of almost every sports team in the school, including football, cricket, basketball and athletics. I believe this helped me develop the leadership qualities I built on later in life. I am sure it also helped that, even though we moved house when I was 10, I was allowed to go to the same secondary school as my friends instead of the one closest to us - the type of choice that is not always available to people these days. It really helped with my sense of confidence and security to start secondary school with people I knew.

In order to afford the big mortgage on our new house, Mum and Dad both worked two jobs. During the day, Dad worked as a computer operator at AA (the car breakdown service). In the evenings, he did domestic work. Mum had a position as an accounts clerk at a Swiss engineering company and worked in the evenings as a factory worker packing perfumes. For at least ten years, from the late 1980s until the late 1990s, they both worked 9 am to 5 pm and then 6 pm to 10 pm, Monday to Friday. I will never forget my mum cycling home from her day job, in the summer months, via the park where I played cricket. She would never have time to come over and watch, but she would always wave, and I was always aware that she was dashing home for an hour before going off to her evening job, cramming into that hour eating her own dinner and making a meal for us when we got in later. The reality of that always struck me.

Their motivation was to give my sister and me a better life, to give us the best opportunities they could. We never wanted for anything. If I needed the best Michael Jordan trainers for basketball (which I was really into), I got them. We weren't spoilt, and we were expected to be grateful and hardworking ourselves, but we were given the tools we needed to do our best. For that, my sister and I are eternally grateful to our parents.

I don't think it was the material things that our parents gave us that most inspired my sister and me, it was watching them work that hard and yet still maintain a happy relationship and a good circle of friends. That set an example that we never lost sight of. In fact, it inspired one of my first true goals in life: to earn enough money to allow my parents to retire and move back to their native Malaysia. I wanted to make them proud of me, but I also wanted to ensure that they got a return on their investment.

I had a Saturday job at the local ASDA while I was studying for my A levels (which were Accountancy, Economics and Computing) at Farnborough Sixth Form College. I was one of the lads collecting supermarket trolleys from the car park and stacking them up in the trolley parks for new customers. (Later in the book, I will share the details of an incident during this time that gave me a great lesson in life.) What I didn't know until many years later was that my mother used to come and watch me work, feeling sad that I had to work at 16; not that I was doing it because we were desperate for money - it was my own choice to earn some extra cash so that Mum and Dad were not so stretched - but she still wished they could earn enough so that I didn't have to work. When I found this out, I reassured her that the ASDA job gave me some great life lessons, including the value of hard work and the feeling of satisfaction you get when you get paid. Indeed, it wouldn't have mattered how much they earned, I wanted to earn my own money as soon as I could. I've always had that independent and self-sufficient streak.

I got into Kingston University to read a BA (Hons) in Accounting and Finance and led a typical student life, full of parties. I will never forget the frantic scrambling to get work assignments in on time after a night out having too much fun.

During my university years, I had several part-time jobs but two in particular really changed my life. One summer, I applied to work at Chessington World of Adventures, one of the UK's oldest and most popular theme parks. It was one of the toughest interviews I'd ever had because it was filmed so that they could see if we were outgoing enough to be public facing. Of course, this was at a time well before smart phones, so we were completely inexperienced at being in front of the camera and it was rather nerve-wracking. I got through it somehow and must have done okay because I ended up being one of the first people to work on the new "Rameses Revenge" ride (still one of their most popular rides to this day). But the reason the job was life-changing was because I met my future business partner, Tanveer.

There was also the summer job working at Stella Artois Tennis Tournament. We were paid partly in cash and partly in beer; we were allotted four pints a night....