The entrepreneur Hilary Devey, who has died aged 65 from complications following a severe lung infection, built up personal wealth of more than £80m from a distribution company turning over £100m-plus a year. She was not only a trailblazer for women in business, but made her fortune in a male-dominated industry after setting up Pall-Ex in 1996 by selling her home and car to fund it after banks refused to lend her the money.
When the self-made millionaire joined the panel of investors on the BBC TV show Dragons’ Den in 2011, her straight talking, glamour and power suits seemed at odds with the image of logistics, lorry drivers and muddy yards. Kirsty Young, the Desert Island Discs radio host, remarked when she interviewed Devey in 2012 that she looked like she had “walked straight off the set of Dynasty – blood-red nails, killer shoulder pads and enough bling to make Alexis Carrington fume with jealousy”.
Devey said her best investment in the Den was a Yorkshire couple’s ingenious cross between a duvet, mattress and sleeping bag aimed at caravanners.
Her fame spread to popular culture, with the comedian Vikki Stone releasing a sketch on YouTube titled Dragons’ Den Hilary Devey: Get the Look with Vikki Stone. As a result, the entrepreneur became a fan and gave her a guest spot in a Dragons’ Den special, The Hilary Devey Story (2011).
Devey left Dragons’ Den after two series (2011-12), moving on to present The Intern (2013), a six-part series on Channel 4 giving young people a trial in the job of their dreams – although it failed to have the same impact.
She then took her theory that “employees often know better than the boss” to Running the Shop (2015), where staff took control of their businesses for several weeks while she offered advice – although the Guardian’s TV critic Rebecca Nicholson considered Devey to be “bafflingly underused” after turning up in her Rolls-Royce to give employees a pep talk.
Nevertheless, she was used to greater effect when she took her no-nonsense approach to the talk show Loose Women for several months in 2015.
Hilary was born in Bolton, Lancashire (now Greater Manchester), to Minnie Kay (nee Ingerson, who had a son, Gary, from a previous marriage), and Arthur Brewster, with whom Minnie already had a son, Stuart. Only after Hilary’s birth did her mother discover that Arthur was married with four children. Although she left him briefly, they reunited and married when Hilary was three.
Later, before Hilary’s marriage to Ed Devey in 2003, history repeated itself after she entered a relationship with a Turkish business executive, Hussain Ahmet, and gave birth to their son, Mevlit, in 1986. She received a phone call from a woman who said she was Ahmet’s wife and had five children with him. He denied it at first, but she left him in 1990 after his brother confirmed the truth.
Hilary’s own introduction to financial realities came when she was seven and bailiffs arrived at the family home to repossess everything after her father’s central heating company went bust. The experience of the family living with her grandmother in a cold, two-up, two-down house with an outside toilet gave her the drive to make something more of her life.
Her parents then managed pubs together and moved around frequently, leading to what Devey described as an “incredibly nomadic” childhood that took in 13 schools. By the age of 11, she stood in for her parents in running a pub when they took days off. A year later, she told no one after going through the ordeal of being raped, revealing the trauma more than 40 years later in her 2012 autobiography, Bold As Brass: My Story.
On leaving school, she served with the Women’s Royal Air Force before working at Littlewoods, then switching to the logistics industry, in the distribution departments of Tibbett & Britten, Scorpio Logistics (part of United Carriers) and TNT.
She spent two years as a consultant before spotting a gap in the market and forming Pall-Ex, operating from a Leicestershire hub. It was one of the first palletised goods distribution networks operating across Britain, then Europe, bringing together dozens of regional hauliers.
The impact she made on the freight industry was recognised with a string of accolades. She was the first woman to win the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport’s Sir Robert Lawrence award (2009) and was presented with various honours for female business executives. She sold Pall-Ex in 2019.
Devey first came to the public’s attention when she was featured in an episode of Channel 4’s reality series The Secret Millionaire in 2008, donating money to the Back Door Music Project and the Syke Community Centre, Rochdale. This led to her presenting The Business Inspector, a 2010 series in which she gave advice to struggling companies.
In 2009, a stroke left Devey with one arm paralysed, a weak leg and impaired vision.
She was appointed CBE in 2013 for her services to the transport industry and work for charities such as the Carers Trust, the Stroke Association and Fresh Start – New Beginnings.
Devey insisted being ruthless was not a prerequisite to her success, but she could “take the compassion out of a business decision”.
She was married and divorced three times, to Malcolm Sharples (1976), Ed Devey (2003) and Phillip Childs (2011).
She is survived by Mevlit, who cared for her in her final illness.
• Hilary Devey (Hilary Lorraine Brewster), businesswoman and television presenter, born 10 March 1957; died 12 June 2022
