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My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

My parents were immigrants and janitors.

The business of being told to earn a dollar, that no one is going to give you anything - that was kind of my mantra throughout my childhood, and now it's in my adult life. I find that people really tend to relate to the immigrant father, whether he be Italian, Greek, Spanish or whatever.

My dad worked all sorts of jobs when I was growing up and finally ended up as a surveyor; my mum delivers meals to old folk around where we live. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, but I had a very happy childhood.

I received most of my business education around the dinner table. Whether I listened to my father or brothers, or we had business people as dinner guests, I learned from everyone.

Although they arrived in New York penniless, my parents scraped together enough savings to establish the first of several small businesses just after I was born.

My family was in two businesses - they were in the textile business, and they were in the candy business. The conversations around the dinner table were all about the factory floor and how many machines were running and what was happening in the business. I grew up very engaged in manufacturing and as part of a family business.

In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.

My parents were immigrants.

Both my parents were migrant workers who came to the U.K. in the Fifties to better themselves. The culture I grew up in was to work hard, save hard and to look after your family.