Hairdressing champ, former Latics chairman, hotelier, pie-maker and brain injury clinic boss - meet fascinating Wigan entrepreneur Bill Kenyon

In fact, if entrepreneurs weren't difficult or demanding - of themselves as much as anybody - we'd be living a lot less advanced lives than we do.

So far as the Wigan area is concerned, had it not been for one particular entrepreneur then we may not now have a football club, standard-setting brain injury rehabilitation centres, hundreds of jobs created, discovery of 16th century building techniques, or put a pie in space.

Bill Kenyon can put all those credits – and more – on his CV.

And his energy and ambition isn't waning.

"I need more staff, whether for our acquired brain injury rehabilitation centres, my hotel, restaurant or pub, or pretty-well any other venture I go into," he said.

"I was a Brexiteer, but it's been a disaster. I've changed my mind. We were promised huge benefits, but it's been the opposite, and while the pandemic has been blamed for the state of the country, in truth it has exposed big weaknesses in both our Government and in Brexit.

"Hospitality and healthcare have been hit hard. I'm in both. The common factor is people. Both sectors relied massively on employees from overseas. That I can't fill vacancies is because I can't recruit from outside the UK. It would be the same pandemic or no pandemic. Covid is too easy an excuse."

Mr Kenyon has long been passionate about giving something back, and helping the vulnerable. The Kenyon family-owned TRU Ltd Acquired Brain Injury Rehabilitation centres, established in 1992, which provide specialist services to health authorities nationwide, could be helping even more patients at its four facilities in Haydock and Ashton-in-Makerfield, if it could find more staff.

"We know people are out there, but they can't easily get through the Brexit bureaucracy. Regardless of Government claims that they're driving an environment in which people in the UK train up to fill UK jobs, there's actually nobody to train.

"TRU could get many more people through rehab and back into the community if it could resource the staff: we need vocational instructors, care support workers, and hard-working sociable people."

Vocational instructors with a "care worker mentality" run skills development classes helping people going through rehab back into jobs like car maintenance, catering and technology.

Meanwhile, Mr Kenyon's current project, Holland Hall Hotel, Pub and Restaurant, is scouring ever further afield for staff.

"Whether it's kitchen porter or highly-experienced classically-trained waiter who can cook 'gueridon' style - cooking certain dishes actually at the diner's table - they're all equally important cogs in the machinery of a business like Holland Hall," he said.

"As well as within the current regional workforce, I'm looking at people who have those skills or experience so badly needed in hospitality who may have recently retired: porters, front of house, bar staff: these sorts of experienced people also have the can-do attitude that means they can step into a range of roles - sometimes on the same night..."

People like Bill Kenyon get where they are or where they want to be by setting their own route: they don't go by the handbook, because the route created by such handbooks are usually cluttered with everybody else trying the same thing.

His life route is full of detours on a roadmap of opportunity started when life was tough in a region hanging on to the last days of the Industrial Revolution.

He grew up in a terraced house in Skelmsersdale, his father a baker, his mother a millworker. His elder sister became a hairdresser, and so Bill's first lateral move was made.

"At 13 I became a Saturday 'lather boy' washing hair in a salon in Ormskirk, then helped at my sister's salon. Six years later I opened my own salon; we worked hard - 8am to 8pm, four hairdos an hour," he said.

So the second paragraph on Mr Kenyon’s CV would have read "British Hairdressing Champion 1967". Genuinely.

Twelve years later came another direction change on his map: he'd amassed enough collateral to set up an international travel agency with one of the then big tour operators. Then the route changed again - literally - in 1990 when he became one of the first travel agents to organise holidays in Florida in partnership with tour operator Meridian.

En route, in 1985 he also stepped in to save Wigan Athletic from collapse - selling up in 1992 to establish TRU Ltd.

"I could have done anything I wanted, but stayed local and built TRU - we still have three of the original staff - and more recently refurbished Holland Hall Hotel, discovering all sorts of 16th century architecture in the process, creating a successful weddings and events wing, The Pub, in which we've created both a great atmosphere and a brilliant menu; we'll soon open The Restaurant, with its fine dining - after the inevitable pandemic delays.

So the sky remains the limit?

"Space actually. Tony Callaghan - who owns Little Fifteen and Harry's Bar among others in Wigan - and I put one of my pies in space a few years back."

So at 76 Bill hasn't finished drawing his map - and he's still looking for people to join him on even more business adventures. Get your applications in.