How a Cheese Factory in Somerset Got Me to a Villa in Greece

Martin Howard, founder — Vernon Property Group

I was thirty years old, packing cheese in a factory in Somerset.

Wrapping it. In plastic. On a production line. Eight hours a shift.

Two years before that I’d been running a cleaning business with nineteen staff. A year before that I’d had to walk away from it because of a family situation I’m not going to get into on a website. Some things aren’t for public consumption. Short version: I couldn’t fight it, I couldn’t stay near it, so the whole family moved back to my parents’ house in Somerset and I started again from zero.

If you’d told me then that six years on I’d be writing this from a villa in Greece, having built a thirteen-point-seven-million-pound property portfolio with a partner I hadn’t yet met, I’d have laughed in your face. Then probably gone back to wrapping cheese.

Before I tell you what PropInvestUK is and why I’m building it, let me tell you how I got here. Because it matters.

Stubbington

I grew up in a village called Stubbington, just outside Portsmouth. Three-bed house. Mum, dad, little brother. Normal.

I was top of the class. Worked hard. Got the grades.

Then, when I was ten, my dad got leukaemia.

Six months in hospital. He came home a different person. Different face. Different hair. Different presence. I didn’t have the words at the time for what had changed in him. Only that something had.

And something shifted in me too.

The grades slipped. The rebellion started. The whole do what you’re supposed to do programme — go to school, get the grades, go to uni, get the job, forty hours a week, forty weeks a year, forty years of your life, retire on whatever’s left — stopped making any sense to me.

The forty-forty-forty trap. I couldn’t see who it was for. It wasn’t for me.

I didn’t have the language for that at ten. But the system never quite got me back.

The Factory

We moved to Somerset when I was fifteen. Mum’s side of the family was up there. Stubbington had been a proper town — Portsmouth one way, Southampton the other, buses everywhere. Somerset was fields. Took me a while to settle.

That first summer I was doing cleaning work at my grandfather’s precision engineering factory in Frome. He’d built the place himself. He was the brain behind it — the designer at the drawing board. He’d just retired and moved on to designing medical components. The factory was being run by family. But without him at the table, the engineering side wasn’t really viable any more.

I was sweeping the back rooms. Bottom of the ladder. Fifteen years old.

I asked how the business was going.

Engineering side: losing about ninety grand a year.

Rental income from the rest of the building, leased to other companies: about ninety grand a year.

I was holding a mop. I’d been there an hour. And I said it out loud.

Close the engineering. Rent the whole place out. You’d make a hundred grand a year instead of breaking even.

Nobody acted on it, and fair enough. You don’t tear down something the family built because some teenager with a mop spotted a number on a spreadsheet. There’s emotion in a family business. I get that now. I didn’t really get it then.

But something landed in me that morning that I’ve never been able to un-land.

The value isn’t always in the obvious thing. Sometimes the asset is hiding in plain sight, and the people closest to it are too close to notice.

That was my property origin story. Took me another seventeen years to figure out it was a property origin story.

I also worked something else out that summer. I’d been watching football my whole childhood and I’d never once wanted to be Beckham. I wanted to be the owner. The chairman. The one whose name went on the team.

I don’t know exactly where that came from. But it was already in me at fifteen, and it hasn’t left since.

The Lost Years

I went to university to study business. Lasted four days.

Day four, they started teaching us French. Because we might want to work in a French company one day. I didn’t want to work in anyone’s company. I wanted to work on my own. I packed up and left.

What followed wasn’t pretty.

My early twenties were a write-off. Raving every weekend. Ecstasy, MDMA, whatever was about. Skin and bones. Hair receding at twenty-two. My joints ached like I was a pensioner. I was burning through a body that should’ve been at its peak and pretending the burn was freedom.

It wasn’t freedom. It was a young man with real drive in him who hadn’t found a vehicle for it. Settling for the wrong rooms and the wrong company.

Eventually I got a call-centre job at CCL — car hire to the insurance industry. A guy called Richie spotted something in me there. Took me on as his assistant when he moved branches. First time in my adult life someone had looked at me and seen capability instead of chaos.

Within months I was assistant manager. My partner was pregnant. We needed somewhere we could actually afford to buy. Moved to Caerphilly — council estate, ex-Local-Authority house. First home. First child. Twenty-two years old.

Then 2008 came and took CCL out from under me. Redundancy. Six months of insurance to live on. Landed at Ecolab next, working national accounts — McDonald’s, Whitbread, brands you’ve heard of. Under the national accounts manager. Office-based but, for the first time, a proper look at how grown-up businesses actually ran.

The First Climb

My wife was doing a bit of cleaning on the side. A couple of houses. Nothing serious. We decided to grow it.

I jumped in and immediately realised I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Website was rubbish. Marketing was non-existent. I had drive but no skill.

So I went and learned marketing. Properly. Books, courses, anything I could lay hands on.

And the moment that knowledge clicked was the moment everything else started. Because once you understand marketing you realise something most people never figure out:

It’s not a cleaning skill. It’s not a property skill. It’s a business skill. The unlock. Once you’ve got it, you can deploy it anywhere.

We took the cleaning business from two people to nineteen staff. Real revenue. Real customers. Building something proper.

And then the family situation hit. The thing I’m not putting on a website. I’ll say this much: I’m a fighter, I like to face problems head-on, and this was a problem I couldn’t fight. When you can’t fight a thing and you can’t stay near it, the only option is to step back from it entirely.

Whole family back at my parents’ in Somerset. Same way I’d arrived at fifteen. Only this time I had a wife, two kids, and the wreckage of a business I’d built with my own hands.

And that’s how I ended up wrapping cheese.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you because every founder story I’ve ever found credible has a cheese factory in it somewhere. The ones who don’t have one are usually the ones selling courses about a journey they didn’t actually make.

The Vehicle

By 2017 I was thirty-two. Redundancy behind me. Cleaning business behind me. Family crisis behind me. Cheese factory behind me. But the drive from fifteen — the I want to own the team drive — was still there. Hadn’t gone anywhere. It was just looking for the right vehicle.

I booked onto a three-day property training course with Progressive Property in Peterborough.

It wasn’t a dramatic decision. It was the obvious next move. I’d learned marketing. I’d run businesses. I’d seen the rental insight at my grandfather’s factory at fifteen. Property was where everything had been pointing the whole time. I just hadn’t joined the dots.

The course itself wasn’t life-changing. But it pointed me at an asset class I’d been circling for seventeen years without realising it. Went home and got to work.

First attempt was service accommodation. Awful business. Spend a week making a place beautiful. Take the photos. List it. Then you’re sat there on a Friday night refreshing your bookings page hoping for a weekend reservation. Promise of luxury, reality of admin and stress. Knocked it on the head quickly.

Then came sourcing — finding properties for other investors, charging a fee, helping them through renovation and refinance. Picked an area: Swansea. South Wales. Massively underutilised at the time. Strong rental demand. Prices that still left margin. The fees came in. Business grew. For the first time in my life, I was building something that fit me properly.

James

In 2020, when I was thirty-five, a man called James walked into my world.

James had made a lot of money in cryptocurrency and wanted to deploy it into property. He offered me a deal. Twenty per cent of his portfolio, plus a salary, in exchange for building it for him. Exclusive — no sourcing on the side.

We shook hands on it. I trusted him.

Over the next twelve months I built four and a half million pounds of property for James. HMOs, conversions, the full range. Real work. Real assets. Real returns coming through. When the portfolio was complete I went back to him to formalise the shares I’d been promised.

James disappeared.

Crypto crash had hit him at the same time. Instead of facing what he owed me, he walked. No goodbye. No conversation. No phone call. He just stopped existing in my world.

I had no paperwork. No share certificate. Nothing that would stand up in any court in the country. Just a handshake and a year of my life on someone else’s portfolio.

A million pounds of value. Gone.

I made myself a millionaire and lost it inside twelve months.

That’s the moment that defines how I operate today. Not the loss — losses happen, and anyone telling you they haven’t had any is lying. The lesson. Never again on a handshake. Never again without paperwork. Never again trusting that a man’s word will carry weight when the money stops.

Every investor partnership I now structure. Every JV agreement. Every share certificate. Every quarterly report. Paperwork or nothing. Paid for with a seven-figure loss at thirty-five.

It’s the most expensive lesson I’ve ever learned. It’s also the most valuable thing I bring to the table now. Every investor who’s ever wired money into one of my projects benefits from what James cost me.

Freddie

Back to the drawing board. Rentals business was still ticking over, keeping the lights on. Put the sourcing ads back out. Wasn’t expecting much.

A man called Freddie answered.

Knew from his accent he was from Somerset. We met up, had food, talked properly. Within an hour I knew. A click that’s hard to put into words — the kind you only recognise after years of having met all the wrong people.

We did our first deal together. Freddie honoured the structure to the letter. Shares delivered. Paperwork in place. Every commitment met without me having to chase a single one.

That was six years ago.

Freddie was already running Vernon Property Group — small at the time, smart structure, the kind of operator I should have been working with all along. I came in as a partner. The portfolio when I joined was six-figure.

Today it's worth thirteen point seven million pounds. Live projects across the South West, South Wales, and the M4 corridor. A structured, paperwork-first, partnership-led developer that bears no resemblance to the handshake-and-hope world I came out of.

What came next for me was a way of operating I'd never had before. Paperwork-first. Structured partnerships. Independent legal on both sides. Not in spite of what James did — because of it. Every protection an investor in one of my projects gets today is paid for by what James cost me at thirty-five.

Greece

Eighteen months ago we moved the family to Greece.

Several reasons. Some are personal and belong on a different platform — I’ll talk about those on podcasts, not on the company website. Two belong here.

The first was lifestyle. We wanted a different environment for the kids. Different pace. Different relationship with the year. Long summers, the sea, a slower pulse. Greece offered all of that.

The second was a deliberate test. If the operation I’d spent a decade building couldn’t run with me three thousand miles away and Freddie on the ground in the UK, then it wasn’t a business. It was a job I’d been doing for myself. I needed to know which one it was.

Turned out to be a business.

Portfolio kept growing. Investor relationships held. Deals kept landing. Vernon Property Group operates today as a structured, partnership-led developer — Freddie running execution in the UK, me running strategy from a villa in Greece. The model works because of how it's structured.

Stubbington three-bed. Council estate in Caerphilly. Cheese factory in Somerset. Greek villa with a pool.

Twenty-six years from the first crack in the system to the proof that you can do this on your own terms.

I mentor a handful of people a year. You have to apply.

I've never advertised it. It happens because people ask — investors who turn out to be operators at heart, newcomers who've read everything I've written and want someone in the water with them, not a course to watch.

I take very few. I choose them myself. And I've been known to let people go if they don't do the work — because my time is the one thing I can't refinance, and there's no point spending it on someone who won't move.

For the ones I take, I hold nothing back. Every structure I've used, every route I've taken, every contact, every script, every hard-won lesson from nine years and eighty-plus properties — it's theirs. I don't teach from a slide deck. I teach from live deals, mine and theirs.

I do it because the operators who taught me changed my life, and because — honestly — teaching sharpens the teacher. Every person I bring through makes me better at the thing I actually do: build and deliver real projects for the people who back them.

If that's you, you can ask. I don't promise a place. But I read every application myself.

Why PropInvestUK Exists

People kept asking how I’d done it.

Investors wanted to understand how the deals were structured. Aspiring developers wanted to know how to start. Friends-of-friends wanted to know how someone from a three-bed in Stubbington ended up in a Greek villa via a cheese factory. I kept telling the same story over and over. Eventually it made sense to put it somewhere people could find it.

PropInvestUK exists for two audiences.

For investors: a curated route into the same property-backed development partnerships I’ve spent a decade structuring. Not the public deal-board model — those projects fill from our investor list before they ever reach a website. The list is by application and it’s deliberately small.

For aspiring property operators: an honest education in how to do this work properly. Not the guru model — come to my seminar, I’ll show you how I made a million in property — because the guru model is, more often than not, a tell that the property itself doesn’t make money.

I’ve built a thirteen-million-pound portfolio from zero. With real losses on the way. The teaching is a separate choice, and I’ll be completely open about why I do it.

If I help enough people, some will end up investing alongside me. Which grows the portfolio. And I’ll make cashflow income teaching people who’ll go on to earn far more than they ever spend on the education.

Open goals. Win-win. No clever angle behind it.

What I Refuse to Be

I’m not the gatekeeper who tells you property’s only for people born into it. I started with nothing and built thirteen point seven million pounds of assets with my hands.

I’m not the landlord-trap operator who tells you property means chasing tenants and fixing boilers. My investors deploy capital into structured development partnerships and never touch a void notice.

I’m not the traditional-ladder believer who tells you you need thirty years in law or finance first. I dropped out of university after four days and ended up here.

And I’m not the guru who teaches property because the property itself doesn’t make money. The property makes money. The teaching is a separate choice, made deliberately, because I believe in opening the door behind me as I walk through it.

If any of that lands — whether you’re an investor looking for a structured way into UK property, or you’re earlier in the journey and trying to work out how to build something real — you’re in the right place.

The list is open. The door is open. Come and have a look.