Entrepreneur Of The Week – Mark Smith, The Car Finance Company

There's a good reason most of us hold entrepreneurs in such high regard; they have the power to change the direction our lives go in and the influence to adjust the way we work. When the ideas entrepreneurs produce are fruitful, their creations have the ability to improve every aspect of our existence. When we look through history we see that it is littered with astounding examples of how entrepreneurs helped to enhance the conditions of the societies they belonged to.

The formation of the automobile has arguably shaped the modern world more than any other invention and has given a platform for entrepreneurship to blossom. From seat belts that were invented by English engineer George Cayley in the early 19th century to the pneumatic tyres invented by John Boyd Dunlop in 1887; automotive and transportation has and always will be a hot space for entrepreneurs in Britain to produce more than their fair share of game-changing inventions.

To this day British entrepreneurs are still driving innovation within this enormous market, so we've decided to pay homage to some of the UK's greatest entrepreneurs within this space.

With a short series of blogs we will profile the lives of some of Britain's most inspirational entrepreneurs. To start, we've decided to focus on Mark Smith, the Managing Director and Founder of The Car Finance Company – one of the leading vehicle finance providers in the UK.

Born in 1969 and raised in The New Forest until the age of 16, Mark joined the Royal Navy as a junior mechanic before transferring to the Royal Navy Police. 14 years later, injury forced him to leave and Smith worked for 10 years in specialty consumer finance for two FTSE companies. In true entrepreneur fashion he founded The Car Finance Company from his spare bedroom in 2007 and has since grown the company to an annual lending sum of $150m, with an impressive turnover of $45 million. He now oversees a workforce of more than 350 people, and even gained second place in 2014 The Sunday Times Fast Track 100.

Smith really is a great example of a successful entrepreneur; he funded The Car Finance Company with a mixture of personal loans, credit cards and through re-mortgaging his house (we wouldn't advise the last one, but it obviously worked for Mark). Once the business had been set up, Smith secured structured financing from a bank in Germany to maintain the company.

The Car Finance Company has been a phenomenal success and has won a score of awards since its founding, including The News Business Excellence Awards. Smith himself won Small Business Entrepreneur of the Year in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards 2013.

Every entrepreneur has a future plan, and Smith evidently isn't adopting the habit of thinking small anytime soon. He plans to grow the business to an annualised lending figure of $1bn by 2019.

So what advice does Smith have for other entrepreneurs? In an interview with Business Matters 2014 he admitted that many people doubted him and questioned his ideas, but he stuck to his vision. He told the SME publication: "My advice would be do not tell anyone what you are about to do (apart from necessity) and just do it. If your business is your only distraction and occupation you will make it work because you have to!"

From an early set back, Mark built a highly successful business that continues to grow and is just one example of how the desire of the entrepreneur can produce astronomical results. With recent news regarding a deal to sell The Car Finance Company to the New York based investment firm Pine Brooke Partners (which could be worth tens of millions of pounds) Mark Smith's achievements are living proof that there is no room for thinking small when you're an entrepreneur!

What do you think are the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs? If you're a business owner and have a similar story to Mark, share it with us on our Facebook and Twitter pages.