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Starting with a small business selling fast food, Tim Knowles has built up a property empire that has more than doubled in size in the past year - and pilots his own helicopter. Now he's moving into development.
A man, a plan and a helicopter.
This, seemingly, is all it took for Lancashire property entrepreneur Tim Knowles to put together one of die most peculiar investment deals of the year.
The £350m deal required Knowles to hand-assemble a portfolio of 349 separate buildings spread over 37 different sites across the UK. All the properties had to be inspected individually by Knowles' team, which visited them by helicopter - usually flown by Knowles himself.
Based in Chorley, the Lancashire town recently made famous as the home of a spoof radio station created by comedian Peter Kay, Knowles is adamant that his £500m property empire is no joke. He is now looking for development partners to expand the portfolio to more than £1bn.
His company, First Investment, was formed last December as an umbrella to manage his property interests. It manages 6m sq ft of mainly industrial property across the UK, let to around 1,000 tenants. Until last year, the portfolio was worth less than £200m, but dien Knowles decided he wanted more.
"For the past 24 years, I've always bought one property a month. The £1m, £2m, £5m deals - they're easy," he says from behind his laptop on a cluttered desk at Botany Bay, the converted Victorian mill he owns overlooking the M61.
"But if the company is going to expand in my lifetime to be worth £lbn, we need to be doing deals of £10m each month. So that's what motivated us. We decided to do 10 years' work...