Tom Grogan’s first job paid him just £30 ($40) a day lugging bricks and hauling cement on a Birmingham building site. His latest payday? A £400 million ($532 million) takeover deal for the UK arm of Wingstop—the American fried chicken chain with celebrity fans like Kylie Jenner—that he cofounded with Herman Sahota and Saul Lewin.
And it’s all thanks to a chance encounter that traces back to when he was just 18 and not sure what he really wanted to do with his life. Like many Gen Zers today, the millennial decided to skip university and try his hand at the trade industry when he turned 16 years old.
He had been working as a labourer on a building site for 2 years when he met a property developer. Like Grogan, he hadn’t gone to university either and made his way from the bottom to the top, so he began to mentor the teenager.
“You meet certain people in life that change the direction of it,” Grogan exclusively told Fortune, adding that the mentorship led to an internship at Dragon Den (the UK equivalent of Shark Tank) star James Caan’s private equity firm in central London.
“So I started to understand how deals were put together. I was surrounded by a number of entrepreneurs, and that really quickly drove my fire to do something more with my life.”
