Bill Holmes joined Esso Petroleum as part of its sales and marketing graduate scheme in 1986. As it turns out, it was also a crash course in running a petrochemical business. Just four years later, Holmes swapped the corporate ladder for his own business, founding UK Fuels, a diesel-bunkering and fuel-card distribution business. By 2013, after merging with over 20 European fuel-card companies, the business had become what it is better known as today: Radius Payment Solutions.

Today, Radius has expanded into telematics, insurance, vehicle solutions, telecoms and EV charging, growing into a global mobility-services provider spanning around 19 countries with sales hitting just under £5bn in the financial year to March 2026.

In October 2023, Holmes stepped up to executive chairman, handing day-to-day leadership to group CEO Lee Everett. But he still retains a strategic hand in the business and makes a point of interviewing every single graduate before they are accepted onto the graduate scheme – a tenet of his leadership that surely harks back to his early days at Esso.

Certainly, after 36 years, Radius isn’t just ticking along. In 2026, it opened a new US telematics hub in Atlanta and was named among the Sunday Times' Best Places to Work (great news for its 3,000-strong workforce). Holmes also published a business memoir, It's Not Rocket Science, drawing on his three-decade journey to chairman of a multibillion-pound group.

Beyond Radius, Holmes is a trustee of The Helvellyn Foundation, a family-run charity he set up with his daughters Lauren and Becky, focused on expanding opportunities for young people.