by Real Business - Thursday, 30th August 2007

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Lloyd Dorfman runs the most global business you can imagine. From some angles, the balding, bespectacled businessman looks more like a provincial chartered surveyor than the head of a company that turned over £25bn last year. But look again and you'll see the monogrammed shirt, the manicured nails; the prosperous sheen of the man who built the world's largest foreign exchange provider - American Express and the big banks aside. All from a single London kiosk called Travelex.

It's a fair bet that "Mr D", as his staff call him, will become better known once his much-speculated plan to take Travelex to the stockmarket becomes a reality. Britain's eventual decision on whether to join the euro - and its impact on the frequency of continental currency exchange - is perhaps the last remaining barrier to fame and quoted fortune in an entrepreneurial career of audacious deals punctuated by sheer bloody-minded persistence.

Earlier this year Dorfman celebrated 25 years in business with the £440m acquisition of Thomas Cook Financial Services, adding a huge slice of corporate trade to Travelex's more tourist-focused operations. The deal more than doubled the size of the business, which provides foreign-exchange payment facilities for big business as well as spending money for overseas travellers. Travelex employs nearly 6,000 staff in 31 countries and last year made pre-tax earnings of £70m. Last August the company issued its first quoted bond issues, raising £75m.

Isn't that meteoric growth a bit scary? "In January last year neither was so much as a glimmer in my mind. If you'd have told me 18 months ago that we'd be where we are today it would have been incredible. The phrase quantum leap comes to mind," says Dorfman. "But we are nothing if not opportunistic. You have to seize the moment when it comes. When an opportunity presents itself, you'd be crazy to tell them to come back later when you're ready."

A quarter of a century ago, when Dorfman was sitting in his only bureau de change kiosk in London's Holborn, he must have wondered if such a moment would ever arrive. He ran the operation himself for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, including one particularly miserable Christmas. "It was a one man and no dog story," he recalls. "I had to close the shop to go to the loo in the Bonnington Hotel across the road."

For the first few years the business grew slowly. Trade took a knock when the high-street banks started opening on Saturdays. Dorfman was stumped as to how get Travelex into the southern ports where he thought the next opportunity would be. Breakthrough number one came when he stopped at a service station on the M2 and saw hordes of foreign coach-party tourists stopping off to stretch their legs. Over 20 years later, there is a Travelex bureau in scores of motorway services.

Dorfman's really big break came in 1985 when Travelex won the bid for an outlet in Heathrow's new Terminal four. BAA was less than impressed with his repeated requests to be considered for a unit and Dorfman had to campaign hard just to be allowed to tender a bid. He had to persuade Hambros Bank to provide the heavyweight financial backing and the credibility that the clearing banks, with which he was competing, categorically refused to give him. Toughest of all, he had to make a bid based on a percentage of turnover with absolutely no previous airport trading experience and no way of predicting how much traffic the new terminal would carry.

Winning the Terminal Four unit was desperately important for Dorfman's self-esteem. "By the time you get to 34 you want to feel like you're doing something worthwhile with your life and not just beating your head against a brick wall," he says. "So we got a gang of boys and girls and sent them down to Heathrow to pick up discarded receipts off the bank's floors and bring them back to the office. The finance director sat down with this enormous pile of receipts and then totalled them all up and we got our number," Dorfman remembers. "As it turned out the estimate was quite accurate."

When the news came through that his bid was accepted Dorfman called the team in to share the news. "In truth we were a bit scared. I knew that if we made a mess of it we'd be out on the street. But that was 15 years ago." Today around 1.3 billion people a year or 40 per cent of all air passengers pass through terminals where Travelex has a bureau.

A fair proportion of that figure comes from the Travelex business in Australasia. Dorfman spent a long time trying to work out how to get a foothold in a market dominated by big banks. Eventually he took a trip down under to talk to as many contacts as he could muster in a search for inspiration. "Half way through the week I had a blinding revelation that the thing to do was get into domestic terminals," he says. How does he know whether these projects are worth the risk? I can't give you a magic formula or a timetable, but I suppose it's a combination of financial analysis and intuition. And sometimes financial analysis doesn't come up with the right answer. When I stood in Melbourne airport and saw the sea of Japanese tourists waiting for their baggage, I just knew it was a good idea." It was entirely counter-intuitive. He put the thought to Quantas. "They loved the idea to the extent that instead of being our landlord they wanted to be our partner."

Dorfman took the counter-inuitive route when he cast aside national allegiance and put sponsorship money into the Australian cricket team, winners, as usual, of the latest Ashes series. "We are a global business and it's given us a great profile in Australia and around the cricketing world," he shrugs. "And at least I'm getting into cricket."

Besides, there are bigger things to worry about as Dorfman faces up to the challenge of integrating the Thomas Cook business with his own. The deal has added around 4,000 staff to the Travelex operation, and for the first time this year the company is expected to make more from corporate customers than from its retail chain. But Dorfman is determined that the expansion will not destroy Travelex's corporate philosophy. "Until now our flexibility and speed of decision-making have been very much part of our competitive edge and so the challenge going forward will be to maintain that, bearing in mind that we are now as operationally and geographically stretched as it's possible for a business to be," he says.

To be the best, Dorfman will have to tackle the long-term uncertainty surrounding Britain's adoption of the euro which, according to the company's own best forecast, could finally happen in 2006. "Everyone talks like we should be in mourning but really it's one of the most exciting opportunities in history," says Dorfman. As the big banks merge, they will concentrate on their larger clients and leave Travelex to sweep up the mid-sized corporate customers, he reckons. While profits might dip, they will certainly not trough. "We will end up with a bigger slice of a smaller cake," he predicts. "And if you believe in the long-run exponential growth of travel then the size of the cake will resume its growth."

Clearly the venture capital group 3i shares Dorfman's vision because it bought a 33 per cent stake in the business just days before the euro was launched at the start of 1999. Its involvement in the business is further grist to the rumour mill that believes Travelex could soon float - a suggestion Dorfman will neither confirm nor deny. On enquiries about further acquisitions he is equally unforthcoming. "Our closest competitor is Amex," is the inscrutable response. Dorfman owns 63 per cent of the remaining interest so his will be the final word: "There's nowhere that we can't really go."

TRAVEL SIZE

On starting Travelex:
"If you're going to begin in business the most important thing is to start and to get involved, because then things happen, people come along and opportunities multiply."

On creating a nation of entrepreneurs:
"If schools did more in the sixth form they could stimulate kids with entrepreneurial aspirations. Commercial life touches their world more than people give them credit for."

Pet hates:
Corporate mission statements. "I hate them. They always say the same thing. My inclination is always to be the biggest or the fastest so why should I have to pin it up on the wall?"

Catherine Wheatley is a business journalist and regular contibutor to Sunday Business.

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