Chris Dawson, founder of the £150m retail empire The Range and Britain's boldest retailer

A great meeting is taking place and shows that great things will happen during tough times

Chris Dawson says that Allied Carpets is a place people visit to commit suicide. When MFI went bust, he bought £68m-worth of its stock, piled it onto 2,400 lorries and made an instant fortune. To him, recession is an opportunity to hire "first division managers for third division prices".

STOP PRESS>>>ENTREPRENEUR Chris Dawson has pulled off another massive coup – buying £29million worth of electrical goods from a failed national wholesaler.

Chris Dawson, 57, is the kind of man who could smell a fiver in a force nine gale. The son of a market trader, he gained his first sales experience aged seven, when he took charge of a jumble stall at a church market in his home town of Hooe in Plymouth. "It was a piping hot day and this guy came up, took off his plimsolls" and gave them to Dawson for jumble. Dawson tossed them in the pile, and an hour later, the man returned. "I sold him his old ones back for six pence," says the founder of £150m-a-year discount superstore The Range. "I remember thinking, bloody hell, I'm good at this."

He left school at 15 with little to show for it, and helped his father flog cockles and mussels from the back of a van, before trying his hand at motocross riding. Unfortunately, he didn't have the talent, he says. "World champions can see and hear differently from the rest of us. I couldn't." However, he could sell a suitcase full of jewellery and perfume better than anyone else on the markets. "At 18, I became quite a successful street trader. My mates were giving the same spiel, but I was taking double the money." Dawson, it seemed, was hearing and seeing things differently.

By his mid-20s he was making £10,000 a week, "telephone numbers", he says, because of the inventive ways he used to sell his products. Underneath a side door on a large white van, he started putting down straw in muddy fields and shining spotlights down on it. "So on an overcast day when most market traders would pack up and move on, I'd look nice and homely, and take more money selling china and dinner sets than anyone else."

But while he enjoyed the salesmanship, "once you've had all the rounds of applause, you think I want to achieve more". So in 1988, after "blagging credit from everyone I knew", he opened The Range, a 15,000 sq ft discount superstore outside Plymouth, kitting it out with everything from toys and homeware to DIY equipment and jewellery. One of Britain's first giant outlet stores, it competed directly with high-street stores, "who had a different set of overheads" at the time, and didn't negotiate hard enough on getting prices down. Dawson saw the gap and, without "one bit of planning permission and no banking facilities", opened the store in the Sugar Mill industrial estate. A Lidl-type operation, everything was sold out of boxes. "People used to come up to me and criticise what a mess the store was, but they'd be buying stuff as they were saying it."

Within four months, turnover hit £1m, and in the first year he made £250,000 profit. Within 14 months, he opened up in Exeter and by 1994 he had six stores across the southeast. Today, he has 40 branches and unlike many businesses, he remains unfazed by the recession. In fact, he says, "there are so many opportunities out there right now that it's like being an alcoholic in an off-licence". For example, he is the new owner of £68m-worth of goods from bankrupt furniture store MFI, which he is selling via www.tradingbargains.co.uk. But as to whether he'd ever sell The Range, the answer is a definite no. "You know, life's full of prizes and challenges, and this is my prize. You couldn't give me enough money to replace the fun I'm having."

Meet Chris Dawson and other confirmed Speakers

• Rohan Blacker & Pat Reeves, founders of Sofa.com, on how they turned the furniture industry on its head
• John Pickup, founder & CEO, Amputees in Action, on overcoming obstacles to build an award-winning business
• Chris Dawson, founder of The Range who bought £68m-worth of MFI stock, piled it onto 2,400 lorries and made an instant fortune, on his extraordinary entrepreneurial journey
• Barak Robinowitz, chief executive of one of Britain’s buzziest businesses Amuso, on the next generation of mobile business.
• Simon Calver, CEO of LOVEfilm, on building great British brands.
• Karen Darby, serial entrepreneur and founder of Call Britannia, on social entrepreneurship and job-creation.
• Obi Felten, technology guru at Google, will show how SMEs can make search engines work for them
• Chris Giles, Financial Times economics editor, will chair the debate on the future of the UK economy.
• Professor Russell Griggs, chairman of the CBI SME Council, on how Britain’s SMEs will raise finance in the future.
• Nigel Hammond, co-founder of Vespa Capital, will discuss how private equity is adapting to support SMEs.
• Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman will chair our debate on the next big technology trends
• Michael Jackson, the man who took Sage to the FTSE 100 and a truly legendary business leader, will talk about how the UK will create its next great businesses.
• Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI, on how the British economy might look in the future.
• Tom Savigar from The Future Laboratory will paint a vivid picture of the future of UK business.
• Stephan Shakespeare, Britain’s top pollster and co-founder of polling company YouGov, on what entrepreneurs can expect from a new government.
• Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec Private Bank, on the forces shaping the UK economy.
• Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of EasyGroup and the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation, on keeping Britain a great place for entrepreneurs; and how entrepreneurship has the power to change lives.
• Tim Weller, the utterly inspirational CEO of Incisive Media, on building an international media giant.
• Jos White, co-founder of MessageLabs and Notion Capital, on where the next great UK companies can be found.

Bookings

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Venue: London Marriott Hotel Grosvenor Square

Date: Wednesday May 12, 2010

Dress code: Business attire

Prices:

Early bird rate: £345 (+ £60.38 VAT) = £405.38

(book before April 14, 2010)

Standard rate: £395 (+£69.13 VAT) = £464.13

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Cancellations received in writing before midday on Tuesday April 13, 2010 will be subject to a 20% administration fee. All fees are forfeited thereafter.

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