Alec Reed
Sir Alec Edward Reed was a British business executive and philanthropist who founded the Reed Group Ltd, one of the UK's largest private businesses. Knighted for services to business and charity in 2011, Reed was a high-profile charity donor and organiser. Initiatives he founded have collectively raised over £427 million, often in support of women, addiction recovery, overseas development, education and the arts.
Reed founded seven charities, several companies, two schools and was the author of four business books. His final job title at Reed was Founder at Large. In 2023, The Times newspaper described him as "...the man who revolutionised philanthropy".
On receiving his knighthood, he remarked, “Without business there would be no charity - but without charity, what’s the point of business?”
Early life
Reed was born in Hounslow, Middlesex on 16 February 1934. His father Leonard was a lithographic artist for the UK's Ministry of Information during WWII, supervising the production of a number of government information posters, including the original version of the Ministry's "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster. Reed's mother Nancy was a housewife and former employee of the Prudential Insurance firm. In his autobiography, Reed writes that his earliest memory is listening with his family to Neville Chamberlain's 1939 speech declaring war on Germany, a speech that alarmed his parents into fleeing London in a neighbour's car the same day, thinking invasion imminent, only to return "...before teatime" after concluding that nowhere in the country would be safe.A child of The Blitz, Reed described his childhood as generally "secure", though he also said that much of his early motivation came from feeling overshadowed by his older brother. Along with a milk round, Reed's first business venture was started alongside his brother while both were still children: the pair made and sold toy soldiers forged from lead that had been salvaged from local bombed-out houses.
Reed attended Drayton Manor Grammar School. At the end of his first year his school report said: "Conduct very unsatisfactory. He is lazy, inattentive and exerts himself to prevent his neighbours from working. He could do much better if he were more ambitious". Reed failed his 11-Plus exam; he left school aged 16 to work for a motor vehicle exporter in London's Fenchurch Street, having also failed to get the grades to enter agricultural college and pursue his ambition of becoming a farmer. Reed's mother encouraged him to study a Chartered Secretary's course in the evenings during his day job at the exporters.
He was called up to National Service in 1952. He tried for a commission with the Royal Engineers but was rejected after his Brigadier deemed him to be a "...muddled thinker". Reed left the army in 1954 to work as a trainee accountant for Gillette in Osterley, having passed his Chartered Secretary qualification the year before, at the third attempt.
Keen to be self-employed, Reed pursued a number of sideline businesses while still at Gillette, including making his own brand of aftershave that he brewed in his mother's kitchen and sold door-to-door. Reed also began working evenings and weekends in an estate agency in Hounslow, again while still at Gillette. The agency’s premises were split into two businesses, with one side selling property and the other side selling carpets. Noticing that the carpet business was struggling, Reed approached the owner and offered to rent the carpet portion of the premises for his fledgling employment agency, funding the launch with £75 taken from his Gillette pension fund. On 7 May 1960, the 26-year-old Reed opened the first branch of Reed Employment. It went on to become one of Britain's largest privately owned businesses, now employing over 4500 people.
Career at Reed
Reed held the positions of Chief Executive, Executive Chairman, non-executive Chairman and Founder at Large during his career at Reed Group Ltd. In 1997, he stepped down as chief executive to become chairman, handing control of the company to his son James; to mark the handover, Reed presented his son with a conductor's baton in a glass case. Reed became non-executive chairman in 2000 and Founder at Large in 2004, a position he assumed after his son James succeeded him as chairman in the same year.Reed remained a significant minority shareholder, through both his personal holding and that of the Reed Foundation, to which he donated 18% of all shares in the company.
Other business ventures
In 1970, Reed founded Inter-Company Comparisons with Anthony Jewitt, now ICC PLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of a Swedish business group. In 1974, he also founded Medicare Limited, a 50-branch chemists chain with 500 employees, now part of Superdrug. Reed would later write that he started Medicare simply to smooth out the cash flow performance of his then-publicly quoted companies. He is a noted critic of the administrative burden of running public companies, and has compared his experience of running the Reed group as a public company to being an "...unpaid greyhound on a racetrack called the stock market". He would later blame the stress of running Medicare for his diagnosis of colon cancer; the business was sold as part of his recuperation, at his wife's insistence.From 1985 to 1989, Reed was the honorary chairman and chief executive of Andrews and Partners Estate Agency. He took the business from a loss of £297,000 in 1985 to profits of just over £1m in 1986. The profits were used to buy out the existing shareholders and transfer ownership to three Christian charities. He writes in his autobiography that "Most of the non-executive directors were also devout Christians who prayed before every meeting. Despite this, I found them extremely difficult to deal with in subsequent negotiations...that episode may have been the beginning of my disillusionment with Christianity".
Philanthropy
Reed described encouraging philanthropy as his “…main mission". In 2007 he launched The Big Give, now one of the UK's foremost charitable initiatives. He founded several other charities, including Womankind Worldwide, Ethiopiaid, Reed Restart at Holloway Prison, Women at Risk, and the Alec Reed Academy.In 1985, he established The Reed Foundation, a charitable foundation that provides much of the seed funding for his charity work.
The Reed Foundation
The Reed Foundation is the main vehicle for the Reed family's philanthropic activities. Originally established in 1972 as the Reed Charity, it was later reconstituted in 1985 with Alec Reed’s £5 million personal proceeds from the £20 million sale of Medicare. The Foundation owns 18% of the Reed Group, prompting Reed’s remark that the company’s employees “work one day a week for charity.” In an October 2024 interview, Reed said that he was encouraging other firms to copy this model: “If they give away 20% they’ll never regret it. The return they’ll get in respect of clients and staff is enormous.”As of 2023 the Foundation reported total assets and investments in excess of £25 million.
The Foundation has financed numerous charitable initiatives, including:
The Big Give
Founded in 2007, The Big Give is a non-profit, charitable website which enables donors to find and support charity projects in their field of interest. Reed referred to it as “…a Wikipedia for big givers" and his "biggest success". The Big Give has raised over £427 million for UK-registered charities and aims to raise £1bn by 2030. It has supported 15,000 ongoing charity projects via more than 600,000 donors. It hosts £1.3bn worth of projects in need of funding. In forming The Big Give, Reed created an advisory Board of Philanthropists including Lord Bell, Lord Gavron CBE, Lord Haskins, Sir Adrian Cadbury, Sir Charles Dunstone, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, Jon Snow and Michael Spencer.The Big Give inverts the traditional model of charity funding in which donors are contacted by charities, to a model in which donors effectively "compare and shop" for charity projects, and then have their donations matched by other donors. Reed founded the site in response to receiving an unmanageable number of appeals from charities seeking donations from high-profile philanthropists. The project was designed to encourage wealthy philanthropists seeking to make donations between £100,000 and £10m. Having attracted few donors at that level, Reed switched to a match funding model, in which he put up £1m and requested other donors to match him; reportedly the site’s users matched Reed’s £1m within 45 minutes of it going live. The site now makes use of "challenge matching", in which donors compete to be the first to kickstart a given charity project.
In addition to projects uploaded by charities, the site also runs emergency appeals—such as those responding to natural disasters like the 2014 Philippines hurricane, humanitarian crises such as the 2013 Syrian refugee crisis, and domestic emergencies including the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. Separately, it operates the annual Christmas Challenge, in which Reed’s funds, together with those of external foundations, are combined with pledges from charities’ major donors to double public online donations. The 2025 Christmas Challenge raised £57.4 million for over 1500 charities.
The Big Give also helps charities to find trustees and runs educational programmes in schools in order to raise children’s awareness of philanthropic giving.