Mario Carrozzo:

So, I've been asked to come today to talk about my journey. Hopefully I can inspire some of you about how I started, how I started in Croydon, and just to show that anything's possible.

So, yeah, I'm Mario, and I'm a professional sandwich maker. Crazy as it sounds. You're probably looking at me and thinking, why has a sandwich maker come to a property summit?

Look, I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not a politician. I'm not a planner. I don't have a university degree. But what I do have is 35 years of experience developing property, building businesses, and working in partnership with so many boroughs. And they all started here. Croydon.

Now, we're talking about vision today, but for me it's about what it takes to deliver that vision.

So, my background. I grew up in the restaurant trade. Literally from the age of eight I was behind that kitchen sink. Luckily social services weren't around at the time, so I was okay to still work. But I think I learned a lot about food, and about our business. About discipline. About customer service. And generally, if you look after people, they come back.

At the same time, my dad used to take me to property auctions. I was only 11 years of age, and I was hooked the first day I went there. Not just about the properties, but more about the deals that were done, and how you could leverage. So I became an investor, not at 18, not at 16, but at 11.

I left school with just four GCSEs, and my school report said Mario won't amount to much. But I didn't believe it, thank God. When I was 18 I bought my first property. I found a clever way of leveraging, or maybe it was just a product of the 90s, where the market was very, very different.

So when I moved to Croydon 20 years ago, it was natural for me to go into food. I opened a little sandwich bar just by East Croydon station. I had to get up in the morning, bake the croissants, do the fillings, wash the floors, and go home. I didn't set the world on fire, but it was my first start in Croydon. I was only making about 50 sandwiches a day, and I was lucky if I took £100 at the end of the week.

But my luck changed. I saw an opportunity with Croydon Council, where I went for a tender for the catering. Most people looked at the tender and thought, no chance. But I went for it. And against all odds, I won the tender.

Now, overnight, I went from making 50 sandwiches a day to catering for thousands of people. It's crazy. Thousands of people. That was in the town hall, the magistrates courts, and it did very, very well. And Croydon gave me belief. I think when someone believes in you, it gives you the ability to believe in yourself.

At the same time I was building a small property portfolio. I was working hands on. I worked on site for many years to try and learn the trades, not behind a desk, but just to try and learn anything I could. So the sandwich bar taught me about customer service, but construction and development taught me how property investment worked. Together, I managed to understand the real fundamentals of how to scale any business.

So life was good. I thought, I've made it. What could go wrong?

And unfortunately, the crash of 2008 came. Everything I'd worked for, 15 years, gone. Literally overnight. Wiped out. The council decided to save costs and do in house catering. And I was exposed to the property market. I had £20 million of bridging loans and personal guarantees. Everywhere.

I'm not going to lie. There were mornings I couldn't get out of bed. I had a three year old and a five year old at the time, and I remember sitting in my car thinking, how am I going to go and tell my family I lost everything. And those memories, they never leave you.

But failure doesn't define you. It's what you do next that counts.

So what was the turning point? It was a friend of mine who was street homeless in 2009. And I helped him. And by helping him find somewhere to live, I made £50 a month. It wasn't going to change the world.

But it wasn't about £50. I could see there was a gap, that especially from the private sector, no one wanted to help homeless people. And it wasn't about me just giving him a roof. I wanted someone to begin to believe in themselves again. And it made me remember what it felt like when I had someone believe in me.

So that was the first time I really realised that business doesn't have to be just about creating profit. You can create purpose.

So I started working in Croydon, developing a concept, and pioneering a lot of the rent guarantees that you see today. I started off converting a lot of empty buildings, and I think I developed around 300 properties personally in Croydon. And really, I was housing people that the system had written off. This was my own money. No grants. No government funding. Just the belief that if there's a problem, someone needs to solve it. And I guess, why couldn't I solve it?

So 2014 came, and I thought, you know what, I can take this to another level. So that same sandwich maker from Croydon walked into a hedge fund boardroom in Mayfair with a little business plan, but a real social purpose. And I still find it hard to say this, because of where I come from. I walked out of that hedge fund with over £300 million of investment. Now, this time, it wasn't for sandwiches. It was for housing.

So today I'm proud to say that Caridon is an award winning, internationally recognised group. We recently presented CSR at the House of Lords and St Paul's. We've achieved Outstanding Ofsted results in our children's homes. We've created hundreds of jobs locally, and we've housed over 20,000 people, most of them homeless.

So I want to leave a few things with you today. For me, every opportunity I started with didn't have the perfect plan. It started with a problem that someone else had given up on. Homelessness. Empty buildings. A broken system. A lot of people saw the obstacles, but I saw opportunity. Not because I was any smarter, but because I realised that the value is almost always hiding where others just don't see it.

And I still believe that Croydon is one of the greatest opportunities in London. Not just because of the transport links, the regeneration. It's about the people who are working here, the people who build here, and the people who stay when things go wrong.

So I want to leave you with this, and it's not because Croydon is where I built my business. It's because it rebuilt my life. Literally.

Croydon's future won't be defined by the opportunities it has. It will be defined by the people willing to take them.

Thank you for your time.