
One Friday night I got a call from an Estate Agent saying he had a client who wanted to rent a property that we owned and as it was complicated would we be able see him ourselves that night. The client wanted to turn one of our properties into a tearoom/cafe and he wanted to live above it with his family. I said ‘great so I told him that we would to draw up the paperwork, he replied, ‘it’s a bit more complicated than that I need to sell my house before I can move, so I agreed to buy his house.
He said, ‘there’s a slight problem as I’m in arrears with my mortgage the house will be repossessed next week if I don’t pay £3,000 by this Monday, so could I give him the £3,000 and take it off the price of the house when we buy it?’ I said, ‘of course’.
Thanks that’s great he said but there’s another problem I cannot sell his house for 3 months. He bought his house cheap as a sitting tenant and if he sold it before June, it was April, he had to pay back the discount he got’. I said, ‘that’s fine and rang the agent, we’ll organise the paperwork and then complete in the June’, the Agent said, ‘that’s not legal so you would have to take it on trust’. I said, ‘ok’.
The Agent then said has he told you there’s a further problem he’s getting married in a week’s time and he needs £1,500 to pay the caterers on Wednesday or they won’t do the catering’. I said, ‘I would pay the £1,500. I said would there be anything else that’s a problem? Ha! Ha!
He said yes there is another thing, before I get married on Saturday I need to get divorced but my wife will not sign the paperwork unless she has £3,750’. I said, ‘ok, so as I see it I am going to buy a house in three months’ time, I am going to give you £3,000 for the arrears, £1,500 for the wedding catering and £3,750 for the ex-wife they both said, ‘yes, that’s it’.
I said, that’s fine on one condition. ‘I will also give a year’s lease valued at £11,000 for the commercial property that you want and take it off what we agree the house is worth’.
We started our Window Cleaning 26th September 1974, then, in just one year what we were doing had changed out of all recognition as we had moved onto being a Decorating and Property Maintenance business so we thought it better have a name so, Wrightway Decorating was established.
Then over the next few years we realised that name wasn’t conducive to what we were now rapidly getting into, which was buying renovating and selling our own houses, along with the thought of building a large portfolio of Commercial premises so, we needed to review the name again.
With the business being aa 50-50 partnership Marville properties became our new name which came out of Marilyn and Neville, then adding on the end with a tagline of residential and commercial investments.
We had traded properties from 1975, buying and selling one or two at a time, we started to go into estate agents and ask what they had in our price bracket at the time, they would bring out 6 or 8 properties at a time and we would bid for them all.
I would make ridiculous offers on all 8 properties even though I had not seen inside them, the price of a virtual rebuild, thinking any condition above this was a bonus.
I used to be thinking there was no way that all of these people would accept my offer but just in case they did I was confident enough that I would find the money from somewhere and the chances were quite slim that I would get any at the prices we had offered but if we were lucky then we would probably end up with one, and one a month was good.
Our number-one goal was establishing financial freedom as quickly as possible, but at the time it seemed hopeless to us, but an outsider would have seen it differently, they would have seen the substantial number of properties we were working on at any one time.
Marville was growing but we just hadn’t got to the tipping point of keeping investments; we had properties that could produce 20% income but of course, this would have meant keeping them for 5 years to get our money back, which we couldn’t do.
Sometimes you have to give up what’s good in the short term to get what’s great in the future!
When it does get valuable don’t be afraid to capitalise on your hard work. I was always aware of this trap. Very often people will work all of their lives and close the business without having thought about selling it. So, if you want to capitalize on your hard work in the future, a strategy needs to be implemented, a 5-10 year plan beforehand so you can sell and then maintain your lifestyle until you pop your clogs.
The 4th letter and word of ‘keep it simple’ is ‘S’ and I am an expert on this😊
The Last ‘S’ is for Stupid!

So, which would you take?
Answer now – 1 million or 1 penny?
Now think about this; if, after working and saving for thirty years, you find out a thief has been stealing a bit of your savings every week you would be very angry, so why are you not angry about inflation doing the same thing every week?
Inflation is just robbing you so that your money deflates, leaving you unable to buy what you could have just a year ago. So I say that your money is being stolen. Most people don’t see it like that, and, if they do, they don’t understand just what it’s doing to their savings and the diminishing returns they can get on their money.
Another question for you, in 5 seconds please.
Who is the winner when it comes to money?
- The person who saves their money in a bank?
- The bank which lends that money to a customer?
- The person who is the borrower of that money?
The answer, in the vast number of cases, is the person who borrows. You see, different times call for different strategies, but the person who puts their money into the bank, usually to protect it, loses out to inflation in two ways; £100k today in the bank, with inflation, say, at 10% next year, is worth £90k which, in 5 years’ time, will be worth under £62k.
Meanwhile, the person who borrowed their money has an investment worth just over £161k, which they can leverage against, say at 90%; that’s an extra £54k of investment that they can buy and reinvest, making a £215k investment that can buy passive income for them.
At the present time, the net passive income would be £12.5k, plus the appreciating asset would keep up with inflation, whereas the money in the bank would have an income of £500 and would be eroded by inflation.
Money makes money, but only if it is invested with caution. Most people don’t give this a thought.
If you don’t believe me, ask any business person
– an extract from my book, page 185
Oh yes, the answer. A penny doubled every day for 31 days is worth £10.737.418.24 yes you are seeing 10 million, that’s the basics of compound interest.

Although my dad told me this on day one of opening our first shop it took something like 5 years for us to implement the strategy, and only when we got our third shop!
The more we gave, the more we received, a win-win situation.
What win-win can you create in your business today?
If the government had given me enough money I would have stayed on the dole for all of my life.
If I could have sold my house I wouldn’t have gone into self-employment.
If I hadn’t been penniless I would not have had the courage to go into business.
If I didn’t set and re-set goals along the way I would have had the fear of losing all our money.
What’s your if’s that have got you where you are today?


If life was harder, it would be easier to make the sacrifices needed to become rich.
Security was my number one priority so all decisions were made with that criterion in mind.
Will this decision take us nearer to, or further from our ambitions and goals in life? As we wanted to be secure in the long run, I repeat, the long run, it didn’t matter about the short run.
So my priority was to prove to myself that I could, so working harder and longer became normal. The more I did, the more I wanted, it was like I was hooked. I just could not stop myself from working, then investing the money into the business without a thought of easing up on myself. Every day push, push, pushing myself and I found that everyone around me did the same.
Goals are a normal part of life, aren’t they? If anybody said no, I would be lost for words; my goals may be different from yours, but the categories should be the same – goals relating to: family, friends, work, money, lifestyle, home, location, hobbies, leisure, food, education, etc., etc., etc.
Goals are like juggling balls – you have to keep practicing; and just because you drop some doesn’t mean that you’re no good. Don’t give up, just do it again. If you have a goal, it means you will have already made an effort. To achieve a goal, you have to give something of yourself – effort – and the more you give to the world in the way of effort, the more the world gives back to you in the form of abundance. But, most of the time, the world tries you! So it often takes a bit longer than expected.
I am where I am because of what I have done in the past. If I want to be somewhere else, it’s simple; I must change and do things differently to alter the future. (This was written before the global re-set was implemented)
What would you change to alter the future?

Both come to mind in the early days when we started to build both our property maintenance and retail businesses. To be quite honest I probably worried about it more in the early days, but after the excitement set in it became a normal part of growing a business and I can’t say that it ever stops. Or rather, I wouldn’t want it to stop! Metaphorically speaking, after smashing so many plates along the way, we did get a bit cynical, and therefore I ended up using plastic ones….
Every Job Was Another Plate
One plate spinning, that’s fantastic; then another; it’s no problem to get a third one spinning, you cope, you add the fourth. You go back to the first, second, third and fourth but you get ambitious, so you add a fifth, but back you go again to number one. No time to rest, no time for holidays, no time for lunches.
This was us so after a while we were there spinning eight or nine plates. It got easy, we got used to it, it’s so easy thinking we were invincible, piling on ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen but realistically in business to get up to this number quickly you would have to involve the bank.
In the early days we were leveraging our assets with the bank and had no problem giving them everything, including our house; we extended our credit that we had with suppliers; many times. If our suppliers wanted to sell us their surplus stock we would want to pay for it once we had sold it. This amounted to leveraging our souls, which I became uncomfortable with as I liked to pay for goods when we received them, as the other way round is risky business to say the least.
Rob Peter to Pay Paul; Then What?
Every growing business goes through this at some stage, if you know that you will sell more stock, say in January you have to buy it in December, but the supplier wants you to buy in October and pay him at the end of January. Of course there are many scenarios and two are, firstly that you sell the goods by December but take your credit time and then secondly, you find you have used the money on other stock when it comes time to pay. In the event of you not achieving the anticipated sales, panic sets in, and you sell the stock at a loss to make way for new stock, which then leaves you short of money. We were no different, constantly juggling.
Having reps that knew our business, and who knew us personally as friends, could fight our corner so as to provide us with more stock to trade out of the situation. It really would have been hard for us to expand at times, without the faith that everybody had put in us. Many suppliers would give us ten times our insurance limit because of our payment track record, most also knew that we had property that we were not afraid to sell if it came to the crunch. Our suppliers also knew that we had a team around us that understood the business in terms of what the businesses needed to achieve and why, which was found to be invaluable.
Well Done Everybody; Now Let’s Get On to 2021
On top of all that I was a ‘dyslexic‘‘. . I didn’t have any certificates for painting and decorating, so I thought no one would give me work.
Setbacks didn’t upset us; in fact they gave us a boost, propelling us to the next level. We actually thrived on them, whereas we saw others give up along the way after one failure, after seeing others fail we never saw ours as failures; we saw them as just another way not to do things. Imagine if inventors gave up on their first attempt – we would still be in mud huts with no electricity – not too dissimilar to the caravan we lived in at the same time as we became self-employed.
Looking back, I think that it was not a certificate that I needed, it was just confidence.
– an extract from my book, page 38

What’s your definition of Passion in Business?
I found that one of the secrets of success is to share knowledge with other people. I have worked in so many places where staff, and even bosses, would not tell anyone their little secrets of how to get the job done more easily or quickly. In my eyes, they were unfortunately insecure; I thought that if they told someone else, that would make their job easier for them, the company, and ultimately, the customer would benefit as there is nothing more infuriating as a customer when no-one knows what to do or can’t make a decision when someone Is not at work.
Whatever business I have had, I have encouraged staff not to be afraid to show others how to do the job. It opens up opportunities for them to expand their own knowledge, and at the same time, become more valuable in the company, freeing them to take on more interesting roles in doing things that they wouldn’t normally have time to do if they had not shared their secrets.
Now, I’m not talking about giving away a secret scientific formula that belongs to the company, only a basic sharing and overlapping with the teaching of jobs to make it more interesting, productive, and inspiring for all. In our Kiddicare business we had staff that thrived on responsibility; they were making decisions themselves without any fuss or delay for the customer.
I think the responsibility of Management is to provide a safe and secure job for their workers by helping them create a working environment and life of stress-free happiness, although it’s seldom achieved in the ever-changing competitive world of today; but that must be the aim and, although our business seemed to change every day, it was always with the thought of these principles, striving to make a better place to work in.
I can hear some people saying, ‘what a load of old ????’, but there you are, staff didn’t know everything that we were thinking in our hearts and heads.
Very often people that are born and raised in a poor family do better than people who are brought up in a rich family. They seem to have an overwhelming desire to get themselves, and their family, out of the low-income trap. They strive to become secure in all aspects of their lives, very often accumulating unimaginable wealth.
‘every hour of every day’Keeping our eyes and ears open for opportunities that just seemed to be everywhere if we looked for them, we have always had the passion and desire to look for and seek out deals where there didn’t appear to be any; we didn’t know or realise that at the time, we were on a journey of highs and lows, and everybody knows that a journey of 1000 miles starts with one small step. That’s where we all procrastinate so, very often, we will not make that first step until someone pushes us to do it.
Don’t say ‘I could have’ ‘I should have’ ‘Don’t be frightened to become a Millionaire
So, just to summarise; for me to get more I had to motivate myself to do more and when I did more, that motivated me even more to have more.
‘Understand and know why you are doing it’
That kind of thinking is common in people telling themselves that they are not worthy to be successful.
Well, we had to force those thoughts out of our heads. We did this over time by telling ourselves that everyone, deep down, has the same opportunities as everyone else; we just had to believe in ourselves and not continually compare ourselves to everyone else. I did this until that deep-seated fear of not being as good as everyone around me had gone. Back then, apart from those things, I personally did not know what I liked; I had to figure that out over time. One thing I learned was to tell myself that the job that I was doing that day was the best job in the world; I had to do the job, so I might as well enjoy it – the day went quickly and it gave me a positive mind.
Everybody has different agendas, priorities and commitments at different times of their lives. Although not all of my dreams come true, a lot more than I had expected did, and many more would have if I had made more effort in that direction, but that’s down to me not seizing opportunities when they appeared.
What are yours?
12 Ways to succeed in 2021
1 You are either going forwards or backwards in life. So, in 2021 constantly drive your mind to always go forward.
I found that the only way to go forward for me has been to get off my backside and do something, anything that I am capable of doing
My Book
Absolutely fantastic!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Absolutely fantastic! A truly inspirational read. Written with such passion demonstrating all the life long hard work, sheer determination, love and care plus having the essential ability to think outside the box.
Must read book… ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A must-read book if you are in business, retail, dealing with the public or just want to understand what it takes…
Inside is so much knowledge from the man who sold his business at the height of the recession for £70mil, no mean feat.
The fact that all the proceeds go to charity is just an added bonus.
What a lovely, kind man with a great philosophy. So many high street stores could learn so much from this book.
Available to download
2 Set goals for 2021 – big ones, small ones, short-term, long-term, minute to minute – even the 50-year goals.
All successful people have goals, it’s so easy to do, so why is it that most people ignore the basics of setting goals
3 Decide to love what you are doing in 2021 – whatever you have to do in life love doing it – you will find amazing opportunities will come your way.
Whatever you do in life never become complacent and never take anyone for granted
4 In 2021 have more pride in what you do – more than you have ever had before in your life.
My Dad my hero. He taught me to have pride in everything that I do
5 Do more in 2021 than you get paid to do, then eventually you will get a lot more for what you do.
To receive more I had to motivate myself to do more and when I did more that motivated me to have more
6 Learn a great deal more in 2021 about what you want to be, do, and have, in fact, make it more than you have learned in the last 5 years.
I told myself not to be a mental loafer all of my life, not even for one minute
7 If you do the same thing today as you did yesterday you will get the same results – if you want different results in 2021, then change what you are doing right now.
You and business should change every day, so embrace it
8 Listen more to others in 2021 that have been there and done it successfully, you may already know what they are telling you but one day you won’t and that’s when you can make a fortune.
Read and listen to non-fiction books, motivational speakers, find a mentor but you must take it in
9 Take total responsibility in 2021, in-fact, you are responsible for everything in your life.
Once I became responsible I had a paradigm shift to success
10 In 2021 focus more on what you desire – in every aspect of your life.
Focus on what you can do today that will build passive income in the future
11 Become more aware of time in 2021, everyone has the same amount of it, don’t waste it as once it’s gone it’s gone.
I must do the most productive thing possible at every given moment
12 Don’t procrastinate in 2021, don’t wait until all the lights are on green before heading for town this year.
Just get on and do it, yes, do it now
– an extract from my book, The Answer is Yes Now What is the Question by Neville Wright
From the moment we started our business there hasn’t been a wasted moment. I advise everyone to get out and live, prove to yourself, and I really do mean prove to yourself, that you are worth something. Don’t go with the crowd, grasp life, it’s the only chance you will ever have, don’t let it go, don’t let yourself down, don’t be an ‘If only, I had done that‘ type of person.

Available to download
Thank you Jay Britton, narrator and well known UK voice actor and acx.com the, audiobook creation exchange, for helping me to achieve another life-time goal.
‘There is lots of emotion, highs, lows, how to succeed – my dyslexia and ADHD is highlighted as you listen. Due to this I often get sidetracked and have to go back to the original part of the story; again, this is highlighted. I also use some unsavory words, not in a malicious way merely showing my frustrations when not everything goes my way. The book took me just over three years to finish.
If anyone has any comments, feedback or questions please feel free to get in touch.