COVE R FE ATU R E
A
sked to pinpoint
the moment he
first knew he
was destined
to be an
entrepreneur,
Mike Racz
doesn’t hesitate
in recounting a proud memory
from his primary school in a poor
part of Hungary.
The pupils were rewarded with
stickers for good behaviour and
Mike was such a good boy that
he had more stickers than he
needed.
Even as a six-year-old, he saw
the opportunity to sell stickers to
naughty boys so they could take
them home and impress their
parents. “I made a bit of money
– enough to buy sweets – and I
think that was the start of it,” he
smiles.
Speaking from the smart
headquarters of the Racz Group,
on Wynyard Business Park, Mike
can take justifiable pride in how
far his entrepreneurial spirit has
taken him since then.
Having arrived in the UK with
no job, he is now one of the
country’s largest owners of
franchised businesses with an
unashamed ambition to grow the
group into the largest company
in the North-East in terms of
turnover and employees.
It is a truly inspirational story
that began when he was born
in Puspokladany, a small town
of 17,000 people in the poorer,
eastern part of Hungary. He lived
As he looks ahead to his latest
expansion plans, Mike Racz
talks to Peter Barron about his
incredible journey, from his home in
communist Hungary, to building a
multi-million pound business nearly
2,000 miles away in the Tees Valley.
PICTURES BY GRAEME ROWATT
in Lenin Street and his parents
were hard-working people – his
father a plumber, his mother a
clothing factory worker.
“It wasn’t easy, but I was happy.
I can’t say a bad word about my
childhood,” he says.
And yet he always wanted
more. After the initial success
of his school sticker business,
he spotted another opportunity
when he was 10. He would
sometimes buy magazines, called
Bravo and Popcorn, that featured
posters of pop stars. He realised
that by cutting out the posters
and selling them separately, he
could make a decent margin on
the price of the full magazine.
Next, he was quick to spot the
growing popularity of washable
tattoos, so he started selling them
to schoolfriends until his school
put a stop to that particular
enterprise.
“That was the first time I ever
got into trouble,” he recalls.
By now, his business instincts
were really sharp and visits to a
Chinese flea market in Budapest
saw him return home with bin
bags full of fake sportswear
products that he sold to a wide
audience, including his teachers.
His biggest success, however,
came at university and it would
have been literally hard to spot
for most people because it
involved invisible ink. A friend on
the Chinese market was selling
magic ink that could only be seen
when a light on the end of a pen
was shone on it. Mike bought the
pens in bulk for the equivalent
of £1 and sold them for £5 to
fellow students so they could
make secret notes to help them
in exams.
“It was a ton of money 20 years
ago in Hungary,” he says with
another smile.
In 2004, at the age of 21, a
failed romance led to him making
the momentous decision to leave
his homeland. His girlfriend had
left him broken-hearted and he
was persuaded to join a university
friend in heading to England with
a job agency. Hungary had just
joined the EU, the borders had
opened and Mike took his chance
of a new life.
He found himself in London, in a
room crammed with around 1,000
job-seekers from every corner of
Europe and it was “utter chaos”.
He was put on a bus to Wales and
started to panic when he checked
his library book about Britain and
saw the strange street names.
The destination was Cardiff,
where he shared a house with
eight others and got a job
inspecting TV screens at a glass
factory, earning extra money as
a “crowd controller” at football
matches and other big events.
But it wasn’t until a friend
handed him a number for
Domino’s and he started working
at the Pontypridd branch of the
pizza chain that he discovered
his vocation. “It was love at first
sight,” he says. “I enjoyed making
pizzas and everything about it – it
was the perfect fit.”
The voice of business in the Tees region | 17