Peter Waddell, Founder – Big Motoring World
Laurie Stone
“GO big or go home” says motor market powerhouse Peter Waddell – a motto that has already earned him a £500million fortune, identical luxury mansions in the UK and Spain and a personal fleet of limos and supercars.
His road to the top was founding the nationwide award-winning Big Motoring World car supermarkets, but he’s still going big, having just taken over and expanded a haulage company, re-named Big Transport:
“Because I aim to make it as big as the Eddie Stobart group,” said 58-year-old Waddell.
Within three months of buying and re-branding the once ailing Kent haulier last year, he had trebled its business and hopes to announce two further acquisitions soon to grow operations even faster, plus the opening of a new five-six-acre headquarters site near Maidstone with parking for up to 150 trucks.
The same ‘think big’ philosophy applies to his fast-growing property ambitions: “I buy big because I agree with Mark Twain’s famous quote ‘buy land, they’re not making it anymore.’”
He is particularly proud of the £11million luxury apartment complex he has just completed, offering 34 homes including four penthouses on a former eyesore site in the centre of the cathedral city of Canterbury, Kent.
But Peter Waddell’s extraordinary journey disguises a tough start in life. Deaf and dyslexic, he grew up in a children’s home in Fairlie, North Ayrshire, Scotland, after terrible abuse from his own mother when he was just four years old – he hasn’t spoken to her for more than 50 years.
He resolved: “You can’t change the past, but you can change the future. So, that’s what I did.” Leaving care at 16, he slept rough in a bus before moving to London where he started work as a mini-cab driver. His incredible rags to riches story then started when he used some of his wages to buy and sell cars.
Working day and night, Waddell then moved to Kent and scraped together money to buy a small car showroom and found Big Motoring World at Teynham, Kent, in 1986. That company is now a UK Top 10 dealer with more than 1,000 staff nationwide and numerous awards including naming as one of The London Stock Exchange’s ‘1000 Companies to Inspire’.
It operates 12 jumbo-sized sites to go with its name including Enfield and Wimbledon in the London area, Cannock in the Midlands, Norwich in East Anglia and Leeds and Sheffield in the North. Waddell retains a sizeable holding in the company but is currently pursuing a High Court claim of unfair dismissal.
Big Motoring World’s ‘secret sauce’ was to buy used BMW company cars in big quantities and sell them at keen prices to meet voracious secondhand demand from private buyers. Big Motoring World followed up with similar deals on other prestige marques.
“BMWs were my favourite cars, so I specialised in them, big time,” grins Waddell. That simple philosophy has delivered a breathtaking lifestyle.
In 2015, he bought Holwood House near Bromley, Kent, a Grade 1 listed building once owned by 18/19th century Prime Minister William Pitt and said to be where he and campaigner William Wilberforce first vowed to outlaw slavery.
It sits in 50 acres of parkland and Waddell said he loves the 56-room property so much he had its twin built near Marbella, Spain, where neighbours include tennis star Novak Djokovic and TV personality and entrepreneur Simon Cowell.
Holwood now includes a swimming pool, gyms, cinema and tennis court and Waddell is adding a showroom for his multi-million pound car fleet, after winning a long-running planning battle with the local council.
Waddell owns 20 limos and supercars including Rolls-Royces and Ferraris, though he now flies a £4million Airbus helicopter to get around his nationwide business empire.
He has also gifted supercars to his partner, Gabby Nita, 40, and their seven-year-old son, also called Peter. The latter has a Ferrari which he drives around the Bromley mansion grounds under Dad’s supervision.
But Gabby gained an addition to her own fleet of cars recently: a £500,000 Ferrari Purosangue, plus the registration plate ‘VIP 1’, valued at five times that amount and once owned by uber-wealthy Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and used on Pope John Paul II’s ‘Popemobile’
“Gabby absolutely loves Ferraris and had been on at me to buy her the new model,” Peter chuckled. “Adding the plate ‘VIP 1’ was perfect – she thinks she’s a queen anyway.”