Great British Billion-Pound Businesses

Reference: Found here

Meet Britain's entrepreneurial elite. Here are the leaders who have managed to create a UK business worth £1bn – and kept going. These are people who have built ventures spanning everything from artificial intelligence and virtual reality to hoodies and craft beer.

You'll find discount retailers and a diamond dealer, bookmakers and the woman behind a world-leading cybersecurity outfit. The 56 businesses are listed in order of our valuation.

Some of these founders left school without a qualification, others have PhDs. There are those who toiled away for years and are still in charge of their company after more than half a century.

There are others who have catapulted their way onto this list within just a few years by developing tech for which investors have been willing to write out very large cheques in the hope they are buying into the next Apple, Google or Facebook. One thing unites them all. At one point it was just them, perhaps a co-founder or two, an idea and a desire to try their luck.

Every big business was once a small business. A few years ago, I asked the man who tops our list of billion-pound founders, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, whether he was surprised by the growth of his chemical giant Ineos.

"Completely," he said with a chuckle. "Look, these are extremely big numbers, but I've been doing this a long time. With the exception of 2008, we've been successful every year. So you do kind of get used to it."

The UK needs more of these billion-pound entrepreneurs with the energy and hunger to keep building. It needs more businesses that employ people by the thousand, not by the dozens or hundreds. The profiles may be of truly exceptional people, but their stories have lessons for businesses of every size.