Meet the Yorkshire entrepreneur behind Britain's third fastest growing business

The group, which has grown its turnover by 268 per cent to £194.6m in the last three years, shot up the list from the already impressive number 22 slot but Turner admits he is a ‘high achiever and very competitive’.

“First or second would have been better,” he says on a video call from his office at Bowcliffe Hall in Bramham, Wetherby.

Since starting life as a coal merchant’s business founded by demobbed soldiers in 1919, the group has launched, merged, acquired and sold more than 30 firms.

Despite his competitiveness, Turner, who took over the firm after completing a family management buy-out in 2004, insists his focus isn’t on ranking high in lists. He’s just doing what he does best.

Many adjectives used to describe one of the biggest personalities in Yorkshire business over the years, including ‘swashbuckling’, ‘chaotic and ‘Tigger personified’. Turner is the ideas man with seemingly no limits. If he’s determined to do something, there’s no stopping him.

"By turnover we’re one of Britain’s biggest private companies and we have been for a while but then I’ll sell something and start something from scratch and then we drop off the lists, and then we come back and people say ‘wow, how did you do that?’ and I say, ‘the same way I did it last time’. It’s just what we do,” Turner says.

The company, which traditonally made its money from fossil fuels, is now focusing all its efforts on green energy.

Six years ago, Bayford launched Dutch company Gulf Gas and Power, which Turner says is now the third largest energy supplier in Holland.

It acquired the energy supplier E Gas and Electricity in 2020 and the following year it made a “multimillion-pound” investment to take a majority stake in RAW Charging, an electric vehicle charging infrastructure business, which he merged with a similar EV charging installation business that he started from scratch.