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When asked to advise young people on business success, Kanya King singles out perseverance as the key ingredient. “I have always said if you do whatever it takes for as long as it takes and refuse to quit, success is only a matter of time,” says the founder and chief executive of the Mobo Organisation.  Kanya might as well have been describing her own rags-to-riches story. Born to a Ghanaian father and an Irish mother as the youngest girl in a family of nine children, she failed to live up to early expectations. “My parents wanted me to become a teacher, instead I left school at 16 and became a parent,” she laughs.

King always harboured an ambition to start her own business, even if the expectations for her at school were low. “Whenever I talked passionately about what I wanted to do in careers advice sessions I was always told that I needed to be more realistic and that if I worked really hard I could maybe one day become a manager in Sainsbury’s,” she says. “Not that it wouldn’t have been an honourable career, but it just wasn’t what I wanted.”


Today she has plenty to smile about. At Mobo she employs hundreds of people, staging the largest urban music awards show in Europe, attracting 250 million viewers worldwide. She founded the Mobos in 1996, having noticed that there was nowhere for artists, who played the music she loved, to showcase their talent. “I was surrounded by great musicians who weren’t getting the recognition they deserved, so as a hobby I was organising gigs and music events in my spare time and the turnout was incredible,” she explains.

Later, while working as a television researcher, the opportunity to stage the first Mobo awards came along. She had been knocking on many doors seeking backing for her idea of an awards show for music of black origin, but was repeatedly turned away by people who claimed there was no audience.

When, in 1996, she finally got a broadcast slot on Carlton Television but was given just six weeks to set up the event, she jumped at the chance. “I knew that when you get opportunities like that you just have to grasp them and run with them. It wasn’t a question of whether I should do it, it was more a question of, how can I do this?” She remortgaged her house, set up an office in her bedroom and enlisted a group of friends to help prepare the event.

Proving just how much can be done in six weeks, when the first Mobo awards show took place at the New Connaught Rooms in London, Lionel Richie headlined and Tony Blair, then leader of the opposition, was in the audience. The event was a massive success and a year later the awards moved to the Royal Albert Hall. It has since become a fixture in the music industry and has featured performances from many leading artists, including Tina Turner, Justin Timberlake, Kanye West and Amy Winehouse.

More than a decade after setting up the Mobo Organisation and with an honorary fellowship from Goldsmiths in the bag, King is still determined to prove people wrong. “Many people had written me off as a young single mum. They thought ‘well… you are not going to achieve anything’. There are a lot of young people who feel the same—that because you come from a council flat and you have no money your chances of achieving your potential are limited. Well, no, you don’t have to have extraordinary talent to achieve things, you have to be committed and focused.”