“Even in a small environment like a kiosk you still have to worry about cash flows, the profit you’re making, the merchandise you’re buying and where you source it from. You have to work out how best to present your proposition to the consumers who were passing by in the street who would just look at the merchandise with one glance.”The kiosk business went well, with the young Haghighi the family’s sole breadwinner in his early teens. When he was 17 he had enough money to start a shop, a clothes boutique on the spot where his father’s dry cleaning shop had been, which he says “did very well”. He bought a house for his family and saved up for his studies, as he still wanted to pursue his childhood dream of becoming a doctor.In 1979, when Haghighi was 19, Iran erupted in revolution. Although his family had been in opposition to the Shah, Haghighi decided to leave the country, leaving his family – and his money – behind.

“I thought it was a good time to come to Britain and try and pursue my studies as a doctor,” he says, diplomatically, when asked why he left.In those days Iranians didn’t need a visa to come to Britain, so on 20 May 1979 the 19-year-old Haghighi found himself blinking at the damp hubbub of south London. He arrived in the country with a little cash in his pocket, two words of English (“yes” and “no”) and one contact, an Iranian expatriate with whom he lost contact after his first week. He found a space in a bedsit in Croydon, got a job as a kitchen porter, and enrolled in an English course at the local higher education college.”I really wanted to become a doctor but in the first year of my arrival I realised that the fees were very high, the cost of living was very high and it would be impossible. So I considered what to do with my life, and the only thing I knew well was retailing.” Needing to earn money anyway, he quit his kitchen job and became a part-time shelf-stacker at a Thresher’s off-licence in Croydon.

Haghighi says his manager “had an autocratic style” and would not listen either to customers’ requests or suggestions by his own staff. Meanwhile the young charge was observing what customers asked for, and which brands and kinds of wine were the most popular.After a few months, the manager went on sick leave for four weeks and Haghighi was asked to run the shop “I made a great success of it,” he says. “What I had learned from an early age was to consider what customers wanted, look at what we had and work out how we could enhance it. The merchandising was very poor, so I enhanced it, and the shop had a high working capital, which I reduced.” In those four weeks, Haghighi says, he made “a big difference”, and when the old manager came back he was sacked and Haghighi was given his job.There followed a stellar rise within the off-licence group. Within 18 months he was asked to be regional manager of the west London area, and moved the area’s profits from being bottom of the list of 43 regions to top within six months “It was very simple,” he says. “It was about understanding what the consumers wanted, and we ensured through training, delegation and coaching we actually got the management to respond.