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Leeds millionaire businessman fears for Kirkgate Market future
BUSINESS SENSE: Millionaire Jeff Cains began his working life on Kirkgate Market.
Millionaire businessman Jeff Cains reckons he owes his success to his early years on Leeds Market. Now he tells Grant Woodward why he fears for its future.
When Jeff Cains quit Leeds in the early 1970s he left with just a few quid in his pocket and had to thumb his way down the M1.
Three or so decades later he returns to his home city as a multi-millionaire with six houses, a fleet of luxury cars and a string of lucrative businesses to his name.
But despite his fortune, the 65-year-old Hunslet-born tycoon remains true to his roots.
And he reckons all his success can be put down to an apprenticeship served on the stalls of Leeds’s famous Kirkgate Market.
“When I was a lad I used to love to go fishing and to subsidise my hobby I went down to the market looking for work,” recalls Jeff, whose company British Crown Security Services rakes in £80,000 a month.
“I was taken on by Vince and Ray Brooksbank who had a fruit and veg stall. The pair of them were market gurus in those days.
“The queues at their stall would start forming at 8.30 in the morning and were still there at six at night. I was just a gopher, but they taught me everything I needed to know about how to run a business.”
After leaving St Joseph’s School in Hunslet at 15 with no qualifications Jeff started working full-time on the market.
“It was a proper market back then and they respected the youngsters coming into the trade,” he says. “They fed you and gave you enough to take some home to your family.
“I was taught how to ‘flash up’ a stall, the importance of spending a couple of minutes with each customer and how to ‘shout off’ your wares.
“The place was run by market people for market people. Everything I have I owe to that place.”
When Jeff left Leeds he headed to the Midlands where he married and raised a family.
His business breakthrough came in the early 1990s when he set up a security firm. The contracts started rolling in and he hasn’t looked back since.
“I remember being called into my bank and sitting there with four of these blokes in suits looking back at me across the desk.
“I was worried I’d gone overdrawn but they told me there was £1.5m sitting in my account and asked me why I wasn’t investing it.”
He subsequently snapped up a chain of pubs and went back to his roots by operating a string of stalls on markets around the Midlands.
Now back in Leeds, Jeff lives with second wife Claire at their home near Wetherby which was formerly owned by a Leeds United star.
He also has homes in London, Warwickshire and Northern Ireland, along with two hotels, while a Bentley and Rolls Royce are parked in his garage.
But since his return to his home city he has grown more and more concerned about the future of the place that he credits for launching him in business.
Jeff believes time is running out to save Kirkgate Market, which he describes as an ‘icon of Leeds’.
Councillors are set to meet tomorrow to discuss proposals to cut the market’s size by a quarter.
They are also expected to agree that £500,000 from the market’s annual profit be put towards improvements.
While welcoming the much-needed investment, Jeff believes much more could and should be done in order to restore the market to its former glory.
“I’m a market man through and through and we have a gem in this city and yet it has been left to go steadily downhill,” he says.
“The market should cater for normal working class people who can go in there and get what they need for the week on a budget.
“When I worked there it was tightly regulated and every market had the same format so you knew where everything was.
“Now the stalls are all over the place. We need to go back to having a proper Butcher’s Row, a Fruit and Veg Row and so on.
“I remember there being a Pets Row where they sold budgies and pet food which families used to come down for on a Saturday as a day out.
“The market had a tremendous atmosphere back then that it hasn’t got now. And when you take the atmosphere out of something it dies – and that’s what’s happening at the market now.
Families
“There is still some semblance of it there with stalls that have been handed down through families.
“But I remember when there was a 30-year waiting list for a stall and the only way to get in was to start outdoors, you couldn’t get a spot indoors for love nor money.
“Now if you ring up asking for a stall they tell you to come down and take your pick.”
Jeff says current traders are frightened to speak out but the time has come for the council to hand the reins over to someone else and give them the chance to make the market a success.
“I’ve been down there and spoken to the traders and many of them are hanging on by their fingertips.
“The trouble is that all the tradition has been taken out of that market.
“When I was a lad working down there I would get a clip round the ear if I didn’t shout out.”
Jeff says parking facilities near the market must be improved and calls for more publicity aimed at getting shoppers back into the market.
“If a supermarket had a car park in the state the one at the back of Millgarth police station is in they would soon be out of business.
“It cost me £8 to park there and it’s full of craters. Make it free for people using the market and put on coaches for people in the suburbs so they can have a day out at Leeds City Market.
“There are any number of hotels around the city centre – why not advertise it there and get more visitors that way?
“At the end of the day it’s got to be run by someone who has a background in markets and knows what they’re doing.
“I know you can’t turn back the clock and things change but this is a jewel in the crown we’re talking about and it’s part of Leeds’s heritage.
“If you put the right person or company in charge it would take them three years to get it back to how it should be.
“I still believe it can be brought back from the brink, but something’s got to give.”
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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