The wife of Martin & Co founder Richard Martin, who is now the chairman of The Property Franchise Group, has cashed in some of her shares.
Kathryn Martin yesterday sold 810,000 at 138.6p, raising £1.22m.
Following this sale, she and her husband between them have a total interest in 10,189,950 shares, representing in total approximately 39.5% of the company’s issued share capital.
Richard Martin, who formerly worked in local newspaper sales, founded Martin & Co in 1986 as a single-office letting agency in Yeovil, Somerset.
In 1995, he decided to turn it into a franchise operation, with a vision of centralising some of the admin processes for agents, and planning to grow the business without recourse to the banks.
Yesterday was not the first time that the Martins have profited from his remarkable foresight. At the time of Martin & Co’s £15m flotation on the stock market in 2013, he and his wife owned 95% of the company.
Comments (3)
I met Mr Martin a few times, but spoke to him properly only once.
It was a business dinner, and I learned more about advertising, marketing and “business” in about 20 minutes than I ever learned from ******** marketing specialists and tedious networking evenings.
He told me I was wrong. He dispelled myths, and he told me the important of delivery. If you don’t deliver, you’re wasting your own time and money, he said.
The takeaway for was him saying: “I’ll pay you double what you ask for if you get results. But I’ll give you nothing if you deliver nothing.”
Mr Martin said, offered this deal, most marketeers would ditch the job, because they don’t know what they’re doing, and they know they can’t deliver results.
I was terrified.
But I was also very impressed. Richard was a thoughtful, friendly man with time for a quick hello to everyone he met. And he gave me a crash-course education that would have cost me a couple of grand if I had gone to one of those awful conferences.
Many many years of hard work, sacrifice and huge risks paid off for Richard and Kathy.
I wish I had the dedication to do what they did!
A lot of people have told us what they are going to do, very few people have done what they reckoned. Richard Martin, Mike Goddard, Jeff Doble are 3 that I can think of from personal experience and they’re the benchmark I use when I’m so under impressed by those who run up and flog the finest suits, with the finest cloth and finest threads to investors they regard as greedy sheep.
The hard work, honesty and integrity of this achievement commands sincere and genuine respect but the best bit is the ability for them to capon*-a-snook at those who dismissed and mocked what was being attempted.
Brilliant. Well done all!
*Happy now Mx Whitehouse filth** filter?
**Obviously not
Well done. They’ve worked hard and put the time in, they deserve to benefit.
Ben
http://www.Lancasters.org
Fts