The luxury shoe CEO took over his first store at just 19 years old and had to fire all the stealing staff. Kurt Geiger now leads, worth $432 million a year

Neil Clifford, head of Kurt Geiger, one of Britain’s leading shoe brands, began his career in a world far from the glitz and glamor of fashion.

Growing up, the CEO failed almost all of his exams due to dyslexia. After leaving school with only one art qualification, Clifford went to the job center and found work at a Fiat car dealership, where he was paid £25 ($33) a week.

“That was my first job in August of ’83, so I guess I did well,” Clifford said. wealth.

He’s done well indeed: The now 57-year-old went from car dealerships and cleaning toilets for extra pocket money to running a £330 million-a-year ($432 million) business Kurt Geiger – and did so more than twice. decades.

His career trajectory shifted gears after a friend landed him an interview for Burton’s menswear at Debenhams in his hometown of Portsmouth.

“Suddenly, we were going from delivering paraffin to selling suits,” he recalls. “I realized at that point that I was really good at selling things because I could convince people how great they looked.”

There Clifford received the great opportunity that launched him into the world of fashion.

The defining moment of Clifford’s career

A few months into working at his local store, Clifford noticed that Burton’s then-CEO and Topshop founder Ralph Halpern made a habit of walking through the store most Saturdays.

To stand out from the hundreds of other workers in Britain, Clifford knew he had to seize this opportunity. His plan? He had the courage to present his ambitions directly to the boss.

He waited for the right moment, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce—when his manager was away on vacation.

“I knew, right, if he comes today, I have the speech lined up in my head,” he recalls. “I knew it was a moment for me. It was a bit like being a footballer, brought on as a substitute and having to give a penalty.”

“I had the opportunity for half an hour to talk to the big, big, big, big boss,” he adds. “I knew I wanted to ask for advice, but also express my excitement, express my ambition, my energy… So, yeah, it was a moment for me where I knew we had to perform.”

The advice that stuck with Clifford was “There are lots of jobs, but you have to move to London. You won’t make it in Portsmouth.”

It was the push he needed to leave his sleepy hometown and embrace the hustle and bustle of the city.

The move to London changed the course of Clifford’s career

“I immediately applied for a job that week in Woolwich,” Clifford recalls of the key moment in his career. “I didn’t know where Woolwich was to be honest, but it had a London postcode.”

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The role gave him the chance to run his own boutique store instead of a concession stand in a department store – it was a big step up and, to his surprise, he was immediately offered the job.

“I was the only applicant,” he laughs. “No one else applied for the job because, as it turned out, Woolwich in ’86 was a bit old fashioned.”

And just like that, Clifford swapped the safety of Portsmouth for one of the toughest parts of London and never looked back.

“All the staff were stealing, so I had to change all the staff,” he says, adding that this gave him the opportunity to change the business and make a name for himself.

By the end of the year, Clifford, who was just 19 at the time, says the store was the most profitable and top performing.

“We won this big award, Store Manager of the Year; I earn £9,000 ($12,000) a year. I was the king.”

The experience put him on a fast track to success that led to promotion after promotion of Clifford bags before being poached by Kurt Geiger in 1996.

“Eventually, within 18 months I was running the company’s biggest store in Bromley, with 40 staff, (making) £4m ($5.2m) a year at 21 – I was the youngest flagship store manager in the entire Burton group.”

Walmart’s CEO won his big break the same way

Like Clifford, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon came from humble beginnings. He started his career in the company’s warehouses in the summer of 1984, at the age of 17.

Since then, he has risen through the ranks of the retail giant, from unloading trailers for $6.50 an hour to becoming the company’s youngest CEO since founder Sam Walton with a $25 million salary to show for it.

And he got his big break by making his mark when his boss was on vacation.

“One of the reasons I got the opportunities that I got was because I was raising my hand when my boss wasn’t in town going to the shops or something,” McMillon recently revealed.

“I then put myself in an environment where I became a low-risk promotion because people had already seen me do the job.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com