Meet the Lancashire lad who is giving away Rolexes, mansions and Ferraris for pennies

Lancashire lad Alex Beckett is living the dream - and making them come true for thousands of others.

As the founder and chief executive of Elite Competitions, he has given away prizes worth more than £129m in the 10 years its been running.

“It blows my mind, you do pinch yourself”, said Alex.

“A recent winner was very emotional and thanked me for changing his life, but I had to say thank you to him for playing, because that has changed my life.”

Recent prizes - with tickets costing only pennies - have included a £1.8m bundle including a mansion in Penwortham, and another £1.8m bundle including a dream home in Goosnargh, a luxury villa on the Orihuela Coast in Spain, a 2022 Audi RSQ8, a 2023 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, plus £50,000 tax-free cash.

It’s all a far cry from where it all started, and wouldn’t have been possible but for 35-year-old Alex’s tenancity, can-do attitude, and in-built ‘wheeler dealer’ instinct.

“I was always that kid selling crisps in the playground, with a backpack full of sweets from a discount shop”, he said. “I was definitely not the cool kid, but I was the kid everyone went to when they wanted something.”

The youngest of two boys from a normal family in Carlton, he went to St Bernadette’s Primary School in Bispham and then Cardinal Allen Catholic High School in Fleetwood. “I never really enjoyed education”, he said. “I did okay, but it wasn’t really for me. It was always in me to make some money and I got a kick out of it.”

After high school Alex tried Blackpool and Fylde College, but left a short time into his course, working different jobs to save up for a car. He said: “At that time, all I cared about was getting a car. When my 17th birthday came, it was a Monday and I sat and passed the practical test that day and started a three-day intensive crash course. I passed the practical three days later.”

He began working full time on the tills at Somerfield in Poulton - “I didn’t like it, but it was money” - and riding his motorcross bike in his spare time. It was his passion for bikes that would eventually lead him down the path to forming Elite Competitions, but there were some road blocks in the way first.

Having secured some money from a sidle hustle buying and repairing cars from eBay, he moved onto camper van coversions in his early 20s - only to lose £15,000 he had borrowed from a cousin to an online scammer. Then his venture into the watch business - by sending his designs to a factory in China - came to an end with a Cease and Desist letter from luxury Swiss brand Audemars Piguet, who claimed his ‘Deranged Looks’ brand bore more than a passing resemblence to their time pieces.

“If anything happens, I just forget about it and move on tomorrow”, said Alex. “It’s weird. Some people would be seething, but I’m like no, just get on with it.”

It’s this attitude that served him well when his next venture - selling motorcross bikes via eBay - fell foul of Gambling Commission rules.

One weekend, he stumbled across an idea of raffling off bikes when he wanted to replace his own, but didn’t have the money. On the spur of the moment, he offered 20 lads he knew the chance to win his bike for £50 and ended up making a £500 profit on what it was worth. Knowing he was onto something, the next bike to be sold was his best friends - live on eBay - which 2,000 people tuning in.

Alex said: “It was a lucky break to get that many people, you wouldn’t get that now. But I’d shared it into motorcross groups on Facebook and I could have sold the tickets five times over.”

Making up to £1,000 a month, he began repeating the formula and started earning more than his salary then as a CAD engineer at a turbo manufacturer, where he completed a Btech in mechanical engineering over four years. He said: “I was on my phone all the time and my manager was falling out with me. My head wasn’t in it. So at Christmas time, I left my job to pursue the competitions full time. But by January, my PayPal account had been suspended because I wasn’t operating legally.”

Still undeterred and recognising the appetite for online competitions, Alex set up a website - the first of its kind - and was advised he needed a skill-based game to meet regulations. Only his ‘Splat The Rat’ game was deemed not skillfull enough and the Gambling Commission shut it down - along with £100,000 of Alex’s money.

He said: “It was a big blow, but I had too much passion for it to let it fail. I just needed to find a way to make it legal and started wondering how TV and radio competitions managed to get around this.” It turned out that it was because they offered free entries via the post - and so Alex was off again, but needed some support.

Weary by his checkered history, when he sent out a WhatsApp request for investment, only one of 15 friends came up with a £5,000 investment, borrowed from his dad. This bought him a third of the Elite Competitions business, which he cashed in for £2.3m in May 2023 when the company bought the shares back off him.

Alex is now the sole owner of the company, and Elite is the biggest competitions company not to be owned by a conglomorate.

Expansion

After starting off with small cash prizes, the company branched out into luxury cars and gained more momentum when they appeared on Dragons Den in 2017. Despite attracting offers, they decided not to go ahead with them, but the exposure lead to 8,000 sign-ups. “Since then it’s just snowballed with more and more customers”, said Alex. “We invested in better technology, better premises, more customer service staff and bigger and better prizes.

“We’ve gone from nothing to a £100m turnover. Last month we saw £9.2m revenue. In the past 12 months we’ve gone from 30 to 55 staff.”

And his staff are crucial to Alex. He said: “I treat this company as family - everyone’s the same in my eyes, from the car valeter to the CMO - and in 10 years, we’ve never had anyone quit.

“We’re not doing anything special to celebrate 10 years, because we celebrate our staff all the time. In the past 18 months, we’ve all been out to Vegas, Dubai and Marbella on a private jet.”

Alex also runs private gym classes for his staff, and enjoys simple catch-ups at the pub. He said: “I like to keep it positive, I don’t want to run something people dread on a Sunday night.”

New dad Alex is also determined to give back and has set up Elite Contributions, which has so far given away £250,000 to charitable causes in the UK and internationally, including funding a £20,000 makeover for the sensory "Sunshine Room" at Charles Saer Primary School in Fleetwood, delivering a new defibrillator to a local primary school following community fundraising effort, and surprising a five-year-old local boy born with Moebius Syndrome with a £2,500 cheque to cover travel and treatment costs .

He says he has come to appreciate the simpler things in life, such as going for a pint with friends, and while he owns a fleet of supercars, a new Rolls Royce Cullian and a yacht, still spends most of his time driving round in a van.

He said: “I’m just a very, very normal lad who has managed to build a company, but I’ve been dedicated to it completely for 10 years. I tell my mates that anyone can be successful, so long as that’s all they want to do for a long time.”

Next steps

Alex is keen that the competition industry is responsible and is able to regulate itself, and has been working with others and the DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) to form a volunrary code of conduct to set minumum standards for operators.

He said: “We want it to be fun, but we don’t want it to be a dopemine hit. I want to be able to offer someone the chance to win £1m for a couple of quid, I never want to be taking £1,000 a month off someone who earns £3,000 and they don’t win anything.”

And are there any prizes he wishes he’d have kept for himself?

“All of them!”, he jests, before picking out a £700,000 Lamborghini Aventador SVJ. He said: “I was hoping the winner would go for the cash alternative, but sadly not!”