He happened to be walking past a former hat shop in Weybridge – no-one was buying £400 hats at the time – and was viewing it later with an estate agent when he noticed a large safe at the back.
“I asked the agent why there was such a big safe in a hat shop and he said that in the Eighties it used to be really successful pawnbrokers!” laughs James, the excitement of the moment coming back to him. It was almost like fate. He said the guy had been one of the first in the country to start doing vehicles and he did very well with warehouses full of cars on Brooklands Industrial Estate. I thought it was too good to be true, but played it down a little bit. Within a couple of days we’d sealed the deal and were ready to get going. I’d never had a business with a website so I didn’t know anything about them. I’d never needed to promote myself to the public before because I’d always worked for myself and never sold any of my goods to the general public.”
“I was wondering how to get traction in the marketplace because it was all well and good offering wonderful services to people who needed them, but how do you let those people know? I sent relatives out with handfuls of leaflets and even got a few nasty letters from the local council telling me that if I didn’t pack it in I was going to get a rap across the knuckles.”
“We tried everything, and for the first few months I thought what the Hell have I done? I’d never owned a shop before, I was in my forties, and now I had a lease wrapped round me, and I was lucky if I was getting one person a week popping their head in the door. But once people saw what we were doing and I realised that graphics were important, we plastered the front of the little shop in Weybridge with really eye-catching graphics of some really nice assets. It’s all very well putting a Prestige Pawnbrokers sign outside, but when people are driving past they don’t know what that actually means. So the graphics and the visuals gave people an understanding of what we do.”
“After that, they were driving past and you’d see their heads turning. I could see them thinking ‘What’s that shop? It’s got pictures of Ferraris and wine outside’.
“Gradually, we started getting a lot of clients coming in with cars. They told their friends, and they were coming in to me with their Ferraris and their Bentleys.”
“They’d been rejected by the banks and found they could walk in to me with their V5 and the details of their cars and within half an hour they’d have a hundred or two hundred grand transferred into their account. They weren’t used to it – or they weren’t used to it in recent months, anyway. In the good times, they’d pop along to their bank managers and get them to transfer thirty, forty, fifty grand on a handshake without a problem. But from early 2009 that was no longer the case. Word got around quickly. People were telling each other stories of misery and suffering and saying pop down to see James.”
“We were getting paintings brought into us by Munnings and Lowry, Picasso prints, wine collections, vintage and classic cars, watches, gold, bullion, jewellery, all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff coming through the door. We started getting calls from abroad from people saying ‘I’m Russian, I have some jewellery I wouldn’t mind borrowing against, I’m trying to purchase a house on Park Lane, and I’m short of a quarter of a million quid…’.”
“Sheikhs’ advisers come to me and say I’m working for so-and-so, I can’t disclose the name, he’s got a £5 million art collection, he’s looking to do something. We’ve seen some amazing assets – things you’d only dream about coming into contact with – and we actually get to hold some of those items.”
“They might be really rare manuscripts, books or letters by Churchill, Lawrence Of Arabia, hand-written manuscripts, even a page of the Koran worth £800,000, and a first edition of Jane Austen.”
Although James didn’t realise it at the time, his big break came in the form of a visit from a TV researcher who was looking for an alternative lender to feature on Channel 4.
“They came to me and asked me if I’d be interested, but I thought it all sounded a bit dodgy and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be on TV,” he recalls. The chap came down and asked if he could sit here for half a day. I thought it would be boring for him, but we started talking and we were having a laugh. There’s humour involved in this business. If I were to sit here all day being serious about moneylending, I don’t think I’d carry on.”
“They made the pilot, the first show got great viewing figures, and they haven’t left me for about four years. I don’t know what it’s like to not have a TV crew here. It’s just become a normal part of the business. In fact, they’re downstairs right now.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.