When Khalid Hussain collected his young entrepreneur award at the Institute of Asian Businesses gala dinner last November the joke at the ICC was that this was the first night in memory that PAK Supermarket had closed.

If not strictly true it reflects an approach that has seen this 36-year-old businessman rise from stacking the shelves of a small corner shop grocery store to boss of a chain of supermarkets that has just opened a new £8m superstore.

Like many before him Khalid arrived from Pakistan in the 1970s with little more than the hope of a better future. After initially working on the track at Land Rover, his father together with an uncle opened a small butcher’s and grocery shop on the Lozells Road.

It went well but the first faltering steps towards expansion could hardly have been less auspicious as Khalid explained: "They brought a bigger shop a few doors away and that was the real start of PAK Supermarket but it was in a terrible state and was almost burned down in the first Lozells riots.

"It was a terrible time when no one could do business in the area because people were too scared even to come into the shop."

But persistence and a refusal to be driven out paid dividends and the family started opening other small stores, including one in 1998 in Alum Road that until a few weeks ago was the national headquarters for PAK Supermarket.

The growth also included an expansion out of the group’s West Midlands heartland into South Yorkshire, where a store was opened in the autumn of last year, by which time the business was providing direct employment to about 100 people in the most deprived parts of the region.

By this time, Khalid had long since become the head of the family business. Whilst at school he worked in the stores on Saturdays and during holidays and began working for PAK immediately after finishing his education, initially on the shop floor.

All this changed at just 19 when his father returned to Pakistan for a number of years leaving his son at the head of things: "It was a huge responsibility and there was plenty to learn and more than a few mistakes along the way, but I was always ambitious and had a vision."
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