Thirty-six-year-old Tallat Mukhtar swapped his fast-paced life as a city trader to set up his own business eight years ago and has never looked back.
A former equity derivatives trader for Commerzbank, Tallat co-founded the Islington-based tiling firm Tiles Etc with his brother in 2002.
The business, which imports high quality tiles to its two retail outlets on Holloway Road and Shillingford Street, Angel, has gone from strength to strength and has supplied tiles for the Emirates Stadium and the Gherkin Tower.
Although Tallat enjoyed work in the city, he has no regrets leaving the trading floor.
“It was great work in a dynamic and fast-paced environment,” he says.
“It’s quite thrilling on a trading floor; there’s lots of action going on around you. Thinking on your feet and doing big deals, the pressure and pace of it is exciting.
“Ultimately it’s an office though and I have never been into offices.”
After graduating from Hull with a degree in economics in 1997, Tallat took his first job in finance with Citibank. After a year of travelling, he secured a job at the Dutch bank ABN Amrose’s London base before joining Commerzbank.
While at the German bank, Tallat started to buy and develop property in fashionable Shoreditch, East London, until one day it came to a point where it was “one or the other”.
“For me it was an opportunity to follow my heart, which was in design and property development and to have my own business,” he says.
The young developer’s talent for turning old industrial properties into high-quality apartments brought Tallat attention from the Channel 4 television programme Property Ladder, who trailed him for six months for the show.
“When that aired it gave me a lot of publicity for the design work I was doing. That show changed my life.
“People contacted me through the TV company to do consultancy work for property development. They asked where they could get the tiles I was using from, and I realised there was a niche for them.”
The current economic climate hasn’t hit Tiles Etc badly, Tallat says, yet he has scaled back his property development work, though still owns and manages several properties.
He explains: “It’s a funny time with the current economic climate, but you’ve got to be clever about the way you do things. There’s not a lot of money in the property market so I’ve focused on the tile business.
“The idea for me is to grow the business and not just be a shopkeeper. I plan to open more branches but don’t want to have any debt, it’s very important not to have debt in this climate.
Setting up his own business has also given Tallat time to pursue his passion for music, which has led him to perform as a DJ across the world, in countries as far and wide as Spain and Thailand.
“I used to DJ electro and breakbeat music at university but when I started working in the city I wasn’t able to pursue that,” he says.
The entrepreneur says there is no way he would return to the trading floor.
“I feel I am my own man now. Sure you work hard in your own business, but whatever you do in life you’ve got to put effort in.
“The flipside of having your own business is that you have to work hard but you can control yourself.
“I’m not confined to the job and I can turn my attention to anything now. When you have got a business it’s not like having a job any more, it’s your life and you manage it yourself, but you still have to work hard.”
Photo: Richard Partington
