Who is Joseph Valente?
What a difference a decade makes. At 15, expelled from school. At 25, taking the top job after an appearance on BBC One’s Apprentice, and now, at 35, a seven figure success and founder of Trade Mastermind which launches its All Business Academy this quarter, broadening its remit beyond tradespeople
In 2015 and given just a few weeks notice, Joseph Valente told his team that he was taking a few weeks of leave. His aunt in Italy had fallen ill and Joseph was going to help out by running her goat farm for a bit. As stories go it was absurd… but absurd enough not to be questioned. In fact he had been chosen to take part in the 2015 series of The Apprentice.
In 2005 Joseph was expelled from school. In 2015 he won BBC television’s The Apprentice. And now, in 2025, he is thirty five years of age, a father, and the founder of Trade Mastermind, a business that has moved from one man’s idea into something that has already pumped half a billion pounds into the economy.
And now, he says, it’s time to go beyond trades and offer the same service to other business sectors; retail, hospitality, estate agencies…
The idea of Trade Mastermind is so obvious that it’s incredible that nobody has thought about it before. Tradespeople are essential. From good electricians, and plumbers to builders and roofers, the sector accounts for 14.1% of all business in the country. A tradesperson’s job is learned at college, but they tend to be taught the trade itself, not how to go self-employed and thereafter grow their business from a one-man business to one with more staff, and by extension, more reach. For the consumer that’s advantageous too. Growing the sector’s business sole traders into larger firms means you’re more likely to contact a local firm with better availability to one of several people working for them, instead of relying on the availability of a single person.
For the business owner, growing the business successfully means better profitability and expansion, plus a better work/life balance; being able to spread work around and being able to take holidays. And for the country as a whole, more tradespeople are needed if the country is to get anywhere close to achieving its ambitions to build more new houses.
Joseph was “born and raised in Peterborough,” brought up in a “working-class family,” and his mum “worked three jobs to keep the family moving.” From a young age, he said, he realised that if he wanted to achieve big things and get the life he imagined, it would be down to him. He would have to learn how to create success.
“I hated education as a young teenager. I saw no value in it,” he told me, before turning the idea on its head with the line that now underpins everything he does. “Education, in success, the right education is absolutely everything.” He is a big believer that “success leaves clues,” and that “there is a blueprint to everything.” As he put it, “you do not have to reinvent the wheel.”
His entry point into business was as an apprentice in the truest sense. He says he went to work for a local plumber in Yaxley “for free for a year,” with a deal; work for free, learn everything. “By the time I’m 16, he puts me into college,” Valente recalls.
By 18, Joseph was a qualified plumber; at 19, a qualified gas engineer. And crucially, his motivation wasn’t abstract ambition—it was personal. “I wanted to put my mum into retirement,” he says. “So I needed to get out of employment and start a business.”
What Joseph ultimately now offers is not training in how to fit a boiler or rewire a house – that provision already exists in the further education sector. Instead, he offers training in how to run and grow a business. In Joseph’s words, it is a blueprint for “how to market, how to sell, how to hire, how to scale.” The reason he keeps returning to that language is that he sees business as a learnable skill. He is not dismissive of hard work, but he is uncompromising about the limits of hard work without structure.
He is also clear that this problem is not unique to the trades. In his view, most small business owners start a business because they are good at the job, not because they are prepared for the roles that suddenly appear on their shoulders.
“Everybody goes in because they are great at the job first and foremost,” he said. A hairdresser starts a salon, an accountant starts a practice, a plumber starts a plumbing business, and then they find themselves stuck with responsibilities they have never been trained in. As Joseph put it, “they find themselves stuck with all of these new roles and responsibilities they have not got any experience in, they have not trained in.” Being a good technician, he said, is completely different from being a managing director with broad business management skills.
Trade Mastermind exists because Joseph lived that gap. He founded ImpraGas at 22, and what followed was rapid growth, from a one-man tradesperson to a business with a seven-figure turnover. And he did so not with tuition or coaching, but like any other business owner; by making mistakes and experiencing success.
He recognised the need for something like Trade Mastermind, but by that time he was already running a large business. Also, he’d need a public profile to get the message out… something like, an appearance on TV.
The Apprentice sits right in the middle of his story, and his explanation for why he did it is blunt, practical and revealing. “Money, attention and mentorship,” he said.
“If you want to grow a business, you need attention first. To accelerate growth you need cash flow. To be successful you need a good mentor. The Apprentice offered all three.” At that time, he said, he had hit his ceiling. “I was working seven days a week, 18 hours a day, and I had hit my ceiling,” he told me. “I had run out of minutes.” He realised he needed a new operating system, something beyond sheer effort. He needed to learn to work smarter.
Then he described the moment he decided to apply as if it were fate. “I walked into my kitchen in January the 9th, 2015, and Lord Sugar’s page came up, final call for The Apprentice,” he said, and in that moment he believed it was a sign. He was 25 when he won, and the prize was an investment for ImpraGas. But he is clear about what changed afterwards. “It was The Apprentice that got me thinking like a CEO,” he said, “because I had a billionaire business partner for two years.” Before that, he admitted, he was “running my business like a plumber,” doing everything from his head with “no organisation,” just “working super, super hard.” When I put it plainly and suggested he had been working hard rather than smart, he did not hesitate. “Yeah, absolutely spot on,” he said.
Looking back, he called the experience “the best thing that ever happened to me,” and described it as “life-changing.” It was also a huge risk. He had to disappear for weeks while his company kept running. He handed the business over, gave up his phone and wallet, and could not tell anyone where he was going… hence is trip to ‘a goat farm in the mountains, with no signal and no wifi.’ Once filming began, he said, they lived in a bubble in London, working long days on unfamiliar tasks, with no access to the tools most of us rely on. He described it as intense and as a kind of compressed business education, pushing you across situations you would not normally choose, while every decision is scrutinised.
There was camaraderie, there was pressure, and he did not pretend the competitive edge was ever far away. He spoke about the mindset he took into it, and it sounded much like the mindset he tries to teach. Focus on what you can control. Deliver something you can defend. Do not obsess over other people’s mistakes. In his view, too many contestants spend their time pointing at others rather than building their own case.
Trade Mastermind began to form as an idea when Joseph reached 29 and had to sell part of ImpraGas and shut part of it down. He described the story of that company as half good and half bad. They scaled fast and achieved major success, but he also made mistakes. When he stepped away, he looked back and asked himself what he did right, what he did wrong, and what he would have changed if he had known then what he knows now. The answer was straightforward.
You do not know what you do not know. He then asked himself how many other trade businesses were like him, tradespeople who started a business but never learned business. In his words, there was “nothing like Trade Mastermind” when he started, and he made it clear that if it had existed when he was building ImpraGas, he would have wanted it.
Trade Mastermind started modestly. “That business started in my apartment in March, in lockdown, on my coffee table with a shoebox and a laptop pitching to five people,” he said. Five years later, he describes it again in big terms, calling it “the largest education provider for trades businesses in the world,” with a team of nearly 70 people and almost 1,000 students on one year and three year programmes. The growth is extraordinary, but he speaks about it as a proof that the need was always there. Tradespeople were not short of ambition. They were short of a structured route.
When I asked what the organisation offers now, he explained that it blends in-person events with structured training. They run around 30 events in Peterborough and have about 500 trades businesses coming through the door every month. The programme is designed to feel serious, and he called it “a university-level education programme.” The investment reflects that. Courses start from £10,000 and go up to three year programmes that cost £75,000. There is also a deliberate entry point. It is for established business owners and, he said, they need to be doing at least £100,000 a year in turnover.
“The courses are not cheap,” he told me, and people need money available to invest. For now Trade Mastermind does not offer their courses for startups, though he talked about a future route for people moving from employment to self-employment, precisely because that early stage is when the wrong habits harden.
The people who come to them now, he told me, are often not young. Some are 25, but many are in their forties and fifties and have been working for ten or fifteen years. They have been grafting and working hard, yet cannot understand why they are not making money.
In Joseph’s view, the reason is simple. “They do not know their numbers,” he said. They are busy, but they are not necessarily profitable, and they have never been shown a better framework.
He quoted Lord Sugar as the moment the message crystallised. “If you do not know your numbers, you do not know your business,” he said, and he does not soften what follows. If you are stacking jobs and simply grafting from one to the next without understanding what the figures are telling you, then “you are a busy fool.” It is harsh, but it is often a recognisable trait: a diary full of work can hide weak margin, poor pricing, sloppy systems and cash flow problems.
Joseph believes most owners know deep down what needs to change, but they need confidence, guidance and education that is structured. Building a business is hard, he said, because the uncertainties pile up. Do you focus on marketing first? Do you hire your first person? What happens if work slows? What happens if cash flow dries up? Their programmes aim to turn those questions into a plan that people follow.
He also thinks the scale of the opportunity is huge. Construction includes hundreds of thousands of small businesses across trades, many one or two person operations, and many capped not by skill but by the absence of a business framework.
That is why his programmes are called the Seven Figure Academies, including the Seven Figure Boiler Business Builder, the Seven Figure Solar and Renewables Business Builder, and the Seven Figure Construction Business Builder. Seven figures is not just a motivational headline, he insisted. It is a practical threshold.
At around a million pounds a year in turnover, with the right margin and cash flow, a business can pay the people it needs and buy the owner’s time back. In his words, it means “enough sales with enough margin and enough cash flow to be able to pay the people that they need to effectively get out of having to run the business.”
He came back to the reason people start up in the first place. Most want “more freedom, more choices, more time and more money,” he said, yet most self employed owners do not get those things. Instead, they become trapped as the owner operator who does everything. The route out, he believes, is scale, because scale allows delegation, systems and leadership.
“If you can make yourself redundant from the business, then you have a choice,” he said. You can let it run and enjoy the profits, or you can sell it because it is no longer dependent on the owner. For some people, he told me, the goal is not to stay in the trade forever. Some want to move into property or new ventures, but before they get proper structure and performance into the business, exiting is not even something they imagine is possible.
Joseph’s ambition extends beyond trades, and that is where the next chapter begins. He spoke about education for all businesses and even about the country’s approach to entrepreneurship. By the time he is 45, he told me, he wants to lead “the first ever department of entrepreneurship in the UK,” and in that role he would want to make education “free for all businesses.”
He even floated the idea that registering a limited company could involve passing a competency test, so people understand what they are getting into and have some grasp of marketing, sales, operations and finance. Too many people start businesses without knowledge, he argued, and basic insights from day one would make all the difference.
That big picture is now becoming a concrete plan. In 2026, he said, the business will expand beyond the trade sector and begin running sessions for all business from a new 20,000 square feet headquarters in Peterborough. The same challenges exist, after all, for a jobbing chef who dreams of opening a place of their own, because the admin, the accounts, HR, compliance and marketing become your job overnight. Joseph agreed, and he set a clear timeline. They will launch the All Business Academy in the first quarter of 2026, and he described it as imminent.
Numbers matter to him, and he offered his own. He said they have had “5,000 students” through their programmes over the last five years, meaning thousands of business owners. On average, he claimed those businesses have grown “370-percent,” and he believes the work has driven a significant increase in revenue across the construction businesses they support.
Towards the end of our conversation, I mentioned his Instagram and the lifestyle content, the cars and the pictures of yachts, and asked if he ever worries it comes across as showy. His answer was candid.
“That is what Instagram is for,” he said. “Showcasing success and lifestyle.” But he also said he is changing how he showcases success as he gets older. Rather than “here, look at me,” he wants it to become “here is what you can learn from me.” He spoke about humility and understanding that “at any minute you can lose it all.” He said you have to be grateful, and that success can become an emotional rollercoaster if you let it. His aim now, he said, is to stay calm when things go well and calm when things go badly.
Fatherhood, he told me, is central to that calm. “Having a little boy, he is my number one focus,” he said. He spoke about legacy, making sure his son has the things he never had and learns the things he never knew. His son is four years old, and when Joseph spoke about him, the tone softened.
For all the language of scale, performance and ambition, the most human part of his story is still the simplest. A working class childhood. A mother working three jobs. A teenager who could not see himself in school. A young man determined to learn a trade, then determined to learn business, then determined to teach others what he had to teach himself.
What stays with you after speaking with Joseph is not just the television moment, but the clarity of his message. Being good at the job is not the same as being good at the business. The difference between the two is education, structure and the willingness to look at your numbers without flinching. “Success leaves clues,” he says. The question is whether you are prepared to follow them.
Joseph Valente is the founder of Trade Mastermind, which will be expanding its provision of business training in Q1 of 2026 with the launch of the All Business Academy. Joseph’s autobiography, ‘Expelled From The Classroom To Billionaire Boardroom’ is available online at www.josephvalente.com or call 0330 058 7100.