Dean Forbes: ‘I was homeless at 16, now I’m a successful CEO’

At the age of 16, Dean Forbes was “broke and homeless”, but 11 years later “we were selling the software company I worked for to Oracle and my life and my family’s life financially changed in a way we never imagined,” he said.
Now the 45-year-old chief executive of Forterro, a private equity-backed company that makes software for industrial manufacturers, Forbes has worked for and led technology companies that have been sold for a combined total of more than €2 billion (£1.67 billion).
The trajectory of his career in the tech industry is all the more remarkable given that it was not a path he had considered or had any exposure to in his early life. When he became homeless as a teenager, it was because his mum was in a “very difficult economic situation and the fastest way for my two younger brothers to be re-housed was to break up the family,” he explained. At that time, his ambition was to become a professional footballer, and he was on the books at Crystal Palace, in southeast London.
Yet by 17, he had been told he wasn’t going to make it as a professional, a turning point that he now calls “the best thing that could have happened.” His agent helped him get a job doing telesales with Motorola, and from there he went to Primavera, a private equity-backed US software company, as a sales rep. Primavera had set up an office in London to expand internationally and Forbes ended up leading the London operation. When Oracle bought the company for $550 million (£420 million) nine years later, the international business was almost the same size as the US business and Forbes was an equity holder and a board member.
The success of the exit for Primavera’s private equity backers put Forbes in demand, and he was hired as chief executive of KDS, a venture capital-backed travel management software company based in Paris, at the age of 29. It was bought by American Express seven years later, and Forbes went to lead CoreHR, an Irish software company, until it was bought by Access Group in 2020.
He joined Forterro as CEO in early 2021 and is carrying out “investment pit-stops” to help the company reach its goal of €4 billion in sales. The company was owned by the private equity firm Battery Ventures when he joined, and was sold to Partners Group, another private equity investor, for €1 billion in 2022. Forbes said Forterro will look for a new investor in 2026.
Before speaking at this year’s UK Black Business Show, Forbes said he regards it as “an honour and an obligation” to share his experiences with black entrepreneurs and professionals who may have come from a similar background to him. Scaling a company and taking leaps of faith is far harder for people who lack a network of experienced or well-connected contacts, and he has established a not-for-profit organisation, Forbes Family Group (FFG), to offer just that. FFG works with people from under-represented backgrounds at every stage of their career, from finding work experience placements for school leavers to offering mentoring to executives who are unsure how to advance to the next level.
“For the majority of my career, my network was inferior to that of my peers, colleagues and sometimes my competitors, so your ability to be successful is disadvantaged because you are less able to make a call to a colleague, or you don’t go home to a social environment where you can say, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with this deal at the moment’,” he said. “We’re bringing people into a network, and I’m able to say, and people in our network can say, ‘when I was at that point, here are the choices I made,’ and it resonates so much better because we’re like them, we have the same lived experiences, we look like them.”
Forbes says that throughout his own career, he has been well supported by leaders and mentors who, in the vast majority of cases, were white. He has faced only one incident “that was explicitly about race,” when an executive refused to take part in a meeting if Forbes attended, despite him being the senior executive and decision-maker.
The meeting was to agree a seven-figure deal, and Forbes agreed that his colleagues could go ahead without him, something he said he would not go along with now.
“In that situation, I was quite young,” he said. “Part of me wishes now that we had stormed out in protest. But I did allow the meeting to take place, and we did get that deal done. It was a huge transaction, it played a huge role in the company I was growing at the time, and it’s probably heavily contributed to my journey since.
“But if it happened today in this role, with all this experience, and my career and CV cast in stone, I would never have that meeting. I would take my team away.”
He also says he is very aware that his own experience is not universal, and “while I don’t have deep-rooted racially biased experiences, I don’t want that to be misconstrued, or to be the voice saying, ‘it doesn’t exist’. I never want to be that voice.”
Dean Forbes is a speaker at the UK Black Business Show on October 19, where The Times Enterprise Network is hosting a panel discussion