Though the sprawling mansion we’re in, on a private road in a gated community in Sevenoaks, Kent, probably provides a clearer indication of his success. There are six cars on the drive when I arrive, including a top of the range Bentley and Range Rover Sport. The mild scent of chlorine as you enter gives away the indoor swimming pool nearby. The large hallway leads on to an enormous kitchen, which takes you through to a snug, a spa, another kitchen (for the chef who looks after the family on weekends), and a small underground nightclub/bar, which, despite its size, has entertained some of the most famous names in Britain. (His celebrity mates include Idris Elba and Rio Ferdinand.)
With Danielle and their children, from left, Dean Jr, Deanne and Darcy, at the Powerlist awards
@FORBESFAMILYGROUP/INSTAGRAM
Taking the lift (a lift!) to see some of the remaining 15,000sq ft of living space, there’s a beauty salon for his wife, Danielle, a cinema, a gym and a dual-floor main bedroom suite. “The first flat that my wife and I owned in Penge was smaller than this room,” Forbes reflects. “Our whole existence — kitchen, bathroom, everything — was in 25 per cent less space than here. I always come back to this when we’re thinking about how life has changed.”
This feels like an understatement. Forbes’s life hasn’t just “changed”; it has flipped around entirely. As the CEO of software company Forterro, Britain’s sixth largest privately held tech firm, his days are spent managing 3,000 employees in 14 European locations, and the task of turning a company recently valued at €2 billion (£1.7 billion) into a €4 billion concern by 2026. But the 46-year-old grew up poor on a rough estate in Catford, south London, as the eldest of three sons in a single-parent household. His mother has muscular dystrophy, which meant that as a child he was caring for her, putting his siblings to bed, making dinner in the evenings, doing the shopping, cleaning, washing and sorting out medication when necessary. On two separate occasions the family found themselves homeless.
It gives Forbes satisfaction to reflect on how far he has come, but he talks down the intensity of the struggle. “Catford was great,” he says, taking a seat in a front room that is about half the size of my flat, as we leave his head of staff, PR, wife and excitable cockapoo behind. “Was it dangerous? Yes. Did I see a lot of things which I hope my kids don’t see growing up? Of course. Did we experience economic hardship? As an adult, I now understand it was extremely difficult. But I enjoyed it. I made great friends. I learnt a lot about community. I learnt a lot about helping people.”
I recognise this: there’s a cosiness to poor communities that the middle classes struggle to comprehend. It comes from people needing one another. Also, his Caribbean mother, now aged 64, sounds as incredible as my own. She worked hard to shield her children from the fact of their poverty: turning making pizza into a game, for example, to disguise the fact that they could sometimes only afford flour and tomatoes, and insisting they always looked presentable, even though they often only had their school uniform to wear.
Medical advice told her to stay off her feet, but she insisted on walking when she could and had several administrative jobs, giving her children an example of someone who, in Forbes’s words, “made no excuses for their situation, no excuses for her disability”. He adds, “I was more scared of my mum than any other authority on earth. We celebrated a lot when we got the grades. The one time I got suspended from school for three days — for some kind of football-related fight in the playground — I had to get up at the same time in the morning as for school and had to do schoolwork for the entire day.”
This effort was enough to result in ten GCSEs, but there was also a limit to what his mum could do. With no father on the scene to help (when I ask if he has passed away, Forbes responds only that he “passed on parenting”), the family found themselves homeless, on one occasion because of a difficult family situation (“Something was happening that meant the best way to change our situation was to flee that household pretty abruptly”), and again when his mother got a job and a mortgage, but then lost the job and became unable to pay the mortgage (“We were evicted… and at that point it made more sense to break the family up because I was 17”).
His brothers and mother ended up in one hostel and he ended up in another, an experience without merit. He found himself living next to drug dealers and stumbling across men threatening each other with guns in the hallways. But there was still hope for him and his family: he was one of the most promising young footballers in the country. On trial at Millwall, QPR and then Crystal Palace, he was playing alongside the likes of Rio Ferdinand and Jimmy Bullard. “I was clearly above average at this thing, plus it was nice to be out of the house. It took me away from all the other responsibilities.”
Agonisingly, this beautiful dream gradually fell apart. He got injured. The physical advantage that had marked him out between 12 and 15 was eroded by the relative growth of other players. Also, he says, with a brutal frankness that suggests he might be a rather demanding boss, his work ethic “was off”. “I was complacent. For most years I’d been one of the best players on the pitch and I hadn’t connected it to practice, commitment, endeavour. As [football] got more serious, I didn’t get more serious.”
With his friend Idris Elba
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This was a disaster, not least because he had got into £90,000 of debt keeping up with his footballer friends, buying Gucci watches, pitching in for tables in nightclubs with four-figure minimum spends and purchasing a yellow convertible Renault Megane. “I got it because Jason Euell, who was playing in the first team at Wimbledon and probably had £6,000 coming in a week, had a convertible yellow Escort and he was a good friend of mine. And what was the next car up from the Escort? That’s the one I went for, without thinking, ‘He can afford four of those. I can afford none of these.’ ”
When he was released by Crystal Palace, his agent got him a sales job at a call centre for Motorola in Hounslow. The manager there was merciless: “High volume, very aggressive, very insulting.” Forbes cried most days in the toilets. His colleagues mocked him. “It was a nightmare. Football didn’t feel like work at all. Here, you were in your seat by eight, making 80 outgoing calls per day. At football, you laughed for three hours a day. There wasn’t a smile or a window in this place. You could see them talking about me; you could hear the condescending comments.”
There is a pause in our conversation at this point as his wife enters the room bearing a plate of croissants. Like everything here — including Forbes, who comes in at over 6ft, works out four times a week, rises at 5.30am every day after five hours’ sleep (without an alarm clock), and sometimes fasts for three days at a time — they’re massive. In his manner, however, Forbes is quiet, even introverted, by the standards of CEOs. This introversion is echoed in his recent decision to renew his wedding vows on a private rented island, in his stated ambition to buy an island of his own, in his general aversion to TV gigs and in his tendency, when relaxing, to turn off entirely. “Any micro-responsibility causes extreme adverse reactions in me. The absence of responsibility — that’s when I’m most relaxed. I recently spent eight days in the Maldives and I didn’t move outside a 70-yard square. My normal Sunday consists of zero. I’m comfortable being in charge because that’s how I’ve lived the majority of my life. But to escape, to refresh, to relax, I need the complete opposite.”
With his mother, centre, and Auntie Pauline at the Powerlist awards
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He tears a corner off a croissant; I dare not copy him and risk spilling crumbs over the immaculate white furniture. We return to the subject of his failure at football, and how he kept himself going at that call centre. “I remember wondering, if I don’t do this, what might happen to me? Like, if I didn’t go in for a day, then two days and then three days and then a month? So I was forcing myself to go in every day. Also, while I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be ridiculed by this set of people I didn’t respect.”
He got the hang of the work eventually and it turned out, in the months and years that followed, that he had a real talent for business. Forbes spent some five years working in sales, a time that enabled him to develop skills that would prove useful for the rest of his career. And joining the tech firm Primavera Systems in 2000 supercharged his progress. Not least, a cluster of bosses rated him and coached him into taking one senior position after another. Before he knew it, he was running the private equity-backed firm’s business outside the US. Oracle ended up buying the firm for $550 million in 2008. Having played a key role in its expansion, lots of other businesses wanted to hire him to achieve something similar.
Since then Forbes has led a bunch of tech companies through comparable transformations and large deals. As well as running Forterro, which offers highly specialised software to help businesses, he is also a partner at Corten Capital, where he has a stake and has helped raise a €1 billion fund to invest in promising businesses. Not that this success has made him immune to racism, as one of the rare black executives in private equity. He is often the only black person in the room, and while he is reluctant to apply the word to “tons of situations where the energy didn’t feel right”, he recalls one incident “that was explicitly about race”.
An executive in eastern Europe refused to take part in a meeting if Forbes attended, despite Forbes being the senior decision-maker. The meeting was to agree a seven-figure deal, and Forbes let colleagues go ahead without him. “I still think about that to this day. Did I do the right thing in allowing the meeting to take place? I could have made that a big issue for the company he was working for, which is a fairly big household name. I would never accept that now. Today, if that were to happen, I would address that pretty ferociously. But the other side of me says we got the deal done, the deal was helpful to my career and a chain of events since.”
One of the events in this chain was a massive payout. When Oracle bought Primavera, Forbes netted millions for his share options. It was a surreal and disorientating time for a boy who grew up with so little. He bought his mum a house a few miles from where he lives now — “One of the greatest moments of my life.” And he admits to going a little crazy, buying every car he ever dreamt of. “I was finding it difficult not to buy cars.” He struggled to invest the money because he felt the need to be able to see what he had made. “If I had it in my bank, I could log on and look at the amount, which was incredibly satisfying.” And he admits that the wealth differential within the family caused problems. “You give family a lot of money because you want everybody to have a positive experience, but over time that has proved not to be the best way to help people.”
I am struck, not for the first time, by Forbes’s openness. I’ve never interviewed a businessperson who is willing to let me in their home, let alone to show me around and discuss their personal finances. Needless to say, he has a better handle on money now. He has two cars, rather than six. He invests actively in a range of assets, from art to technology, property and watches: “I’ve probably got 50 or so.” Rather than dishing out money to family, he has “brought family members into investments”. And if he credits his mother for his work ethic, he credits his wife, whom he met when he was just 18, with providing the structure for this new life. “The other night my two daughters said they thought I’d still be homeless if it weren’t for their mum.” He laughs. “They might be right. She met me when football was coming to a crashing end. I had no money. I was struggling to afford my rent. So she met me at my worst. That’s helpful, because I don’t lose any sleep about her motivations for being here.”
Their mutual devotion is something to behold: on a TikTok video, Danielle describes him as the “perfect” husband and father, while he tells me, off the top of his head, the precise date they met at a party in a club in Vauxhall.
He adds that Danielle has been relentlessly supportive of his career, even when it meant weeks of travel when they had a young family. Which raises the question of how they are bringing up their three kids, a son aged 17 and twin daughters aged 16, in a very different socio-economic setting to his own. “We talk about it all the time. Recently, I took my son back to show him where I grew up.” Do they get it? “Yeah, I think they really do. I see evidence of it in the way that they conduct themselves.” The children attend state schools because Forbes wants them to learn what he did, the art of “getting on with different people”, and their parents are careful about how they disburse money.
When they were younger, they only got pocket money in exchange for performing basic chores. Now, they’ve extended the principle: they can have whatever they want, from designer clothes to cars, as long as they come up with half the money. But when they travel with their parents, they do so first class. Does he worry it will spoil them? “There have been moments as they’ve grown up that we’ve seen a bit of brattish behaviour. And we are so scared of that, we are aggressive when we see it.” He says that he is resisting lobbying from his daughters to go away for Christmas, when they had two months in Mykonos over the summer. “But their family is still their family. They’ve got aunts and uncles and cousins who don’t live in places like this.” One of his brothers has a commercial role at a tech startup, the other is a musician and teacher.
One of his daughters wants to go into fashion, another wants to be an influencer (“I haven’t managed to talk her out of that yet”), while his son, Dean Jr, is following in his father’s footsteps as a footballer and has been signed up by Millwall. “He came back from a spinal injury and broke his nose three weeks later. It’s been brilliant watching him deal with what life throws at you. And for that, I’m really grateful. He’s much better than me and he deserves, for his talent, a career in the sport. But I couldn’t care less if he does or he doesn’t.”
Forbes at home. “I don’t ever want to be promoted or advantaged because of my colour. I will react very badly to that”
TIM JOBLING FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE
I believe him: you won’t find anyone more unimpressed by football careers than Dean Forbes. When he looks back at the desperate efforts he made to enter the sport, he almost shudders. “I probably could have had a below-average professional career, but thankfully I didn’t.” He also shudders when he recalls the difficulties the family faced when his youngest daughter, Darcy, suffered from acute myeloid leukaemia when she was two years old. She needed multiple blood transfusions. As a result, her parents are keen blood donors and sit on the board of the African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust.
The couple have also set up the Forbes Family Group for their philanthropic work, and it recently raised more than £400,000 in one night for the trust. It also runs a number of social mobility programmes, which have helped 3,000 young people across Britain, has provided subsided childcare to 1,700 low-income families, operates projects to break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage in “underserved communities”, and works to give young people positive role models. He has said that the only successful black people he could see as a kid were in sport, entertainment or criminal gangs, and that he wants to make business more “relatable” in part through networking and mentoring projects.
It’s a difficult time to be an advocate for increased diversity in business. Only 22 of around 1,500 senior investment bankers in Europe are black, but there is also a backlash against diversity schemes, with Elon Musk calling “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) the real racism, and many large American companies closing down their DEI departments. “If the narrative is we should put down these programmes because they are adversely affecting white people, then I can’t subscribe to that mentality,” he responds. “If we’re putting down these programmes because we’re saying they’re not the right way to promote equality and to promote diversity, then I’m supportive. Statistically, they haven’t worked. As a leader in business, I don’t ever want to be promoted or advantaged because of my colour. Do not ever do that to me, because I will react very badly to that. But I do want to be given equal opportunity. I want to compete with everybody else.”
The hands on the face of his large Rolex watch tell me we are running out of time. As we wrap up, he tells me that he wants the Forbes Family Group to help people in the way he was helped, through mentoring and coaching. As for his burgeoning media profile, he is only interested if it shows young people that “black achievement is happening” in business and that you can remain true to yourself as you achieve. He adds that one of the defining moments of his career involved being sent to a presentation specialist who was supposed to polish his communication skills. The coach, a female consultant from Texas, refused to go along with the idea that there was something wrong with the way he said “ain’t” and carried himself. “It endorsed me to carry on talking the way I was, and I was quite conscious of that at the time.”
Furthermore, he is proud that when he celebrated heading the Powerlist 2025 at a party attended by friends including Idris Elba and the rapper and actor Kano, he did so at Silks nightclub in Catford rather than one of the top London venues that had not been “welcoming” when he was younger.
“Silks is 500 yards from the house I lived in for the longest and one mile from the hospital I was born in, and a place I went to often as I was growing up. Maybe the thing I’m proudest of, and maybe my greatest achievement, is how unashamedly myself I now am in work. I’m in this environment dominated by people who were educated in a very, very different way. Some of them still are economically ahead of me. But fewer and fewer of them are now. With every day that passes, I am more and more myself.”
