Star of the green screen

Grounded: Sally Wilton with Lickers the cat

We all make assumptions, and one of mine is that if an entrepreneur has sold a business for £21m she will live in a swanky house. So why am I standing outside a pleasant but ordinary Edwardian end terrace in London’s Kensal Rise?

The clue is in the shy woman who opens the door, and the quirky building a few hundred yards away that announces on its front wall, “I AM CINEMA, LOVE ME”. This is The Lexi cinema, a thriving art house centre that serves as a focus for the community around it, and sends its profits to Lynedoch, an eco village in South Africa. Sally Wilton is the chief executive, although these days she works for nothing. Or at least not for personal gain.

That this is no sacrifice becomes evident as we settle in the comfortable room she calls the heart of her home. Her cats have clawed the sofas, and double doors lead into a kitchen that is as far from designer as you can get. “Home for me is about community and family,” she says. “I’ve lived in this area a long time, I have a lot of friends here. Material possessions – well, if I lost them I wouldn’t be devastated because I would start again. It’s people that make a home. I bought this house 10 years ago after my mother left me some money, and my father came over from Ireland and fixed it up. So I’ve got a strong emotional attachment to it. It’s very homey, a family home for my son and daughter. It’s not remotely flashy but I don’t want to move anywhere else.

“It was thrilling to have some success but I’ve never been interested in spending money. When I sold the company, one of the directors bought a Mercedes and one bought a Porsche. I bought a VW Fox. Everybody giggles about that.”

Wilton grew up in Nigeria where her father was in the colonial service. At eight she was sent to boarding school in Belfast, which she found grey, miserable and regimented. She was expelled for disruptive behaviour. This puzzles her as she can’t remember what she did wrong. A softly spoken woman of 55, she seems too modest for a rebel, although in conversation it’s clear that she is an independent thinker who refuses to compromise on her egalitarian and ethical values. She picked these up from her father, she says; he retrained as a solicitor in his mid 40s and made her realise anything is possible.

Having managed an EU programme for worker co-operatives, Wilton founded her first company, Etc Venues, as an employee share ownership trust in 1992. She had spotted a gap in the market for affordable temporary training and conference facilities in London, and her approach was pioneering. Employees who had great ideas that met her “better faster cheaper” agenda were rewarded at mini-Oscar ceremonies, and the directors regularly took part in “back to the floor exercises”. By 2006, when Wilton sold her share to a management buyout, the company had an annual turnover of £10m. “My aim was to have fun and to be independent. I had a strong belief that if you treat people who work for you as you would want to be treated, you will have a good business.”

The move to full-time philanthropy was logical. Armed with her share of the £21m, she heard about Lynedoch, a mixed-income, mixed-race farming village near Stellenbosch run on ecological principles by The Sustainability Institute. She visited, and recognised a community that matched her principles. “It’s a really beautiful area, but pick beneath the surface and there are some very fundamental needs. The farmworkers were traditionally paid in alcohol, which meant they became alcoholics. So you have several generations of alcoholics and with that comes domestic violence, child rape – an underbelly that is foul. It’s one of the most unequal areas in the world in terms of income disparity. That makes the project really special because we’re helping children to move beyond those low aspirations and getting them into work so they have a chance of a decent life.”

Wilton had long harboured a dream of running a cinema. Working from her living room, she set up The Lexi to raise money for The Sustainability Institute, and to galvanise the people of Kensal Rise. The building, a former Edwardian theatre, opened two years ago as a glamorous 80-seater. Run largely by volunteers, The Lexi sent £10,000 to Lynedoch last year, and this year’s budget projects a £30,000 donation. Wilton has also sunk £500,000 of her own money into The Lexi, which screens short films about Lynedoch before every show.

She is well aware that, mid-recession, philanthropy is regarded as a politically acceptable way of redeeming yourself when you’ve made a lot of money, and it’s to her credit that she isn’t pious. “I wanted to give something back to a community I feel part of and to forge a link with another part of the world. Running The Lexi is exactly the same as running any other business because we respect people, we make sure our business meets our better faster cheaper principles, and we try to make as much money as possible.

“But you can see the difference it makes and in that respect I feel privileged to be able to have my dream come true. Somebody once told me that money is like water. You can store it in a dam and enjoy it yourself, or you can let it out and watch everything grow around it. Watching the growth – that’s the thrill.”

Sally Wilton is a Women of the Year champion

www.womenoftheyear.co.uk

www.thelexicinema.co.uk

www.sustainabilityinstitute.net