HAIRDRESSING entrepreneur Graham Webb has been awarded the MBE for services to business and charity in Kent in the New Year's Honours list.

The styling guru, from Sevenoaks, has revealed that his life has been a rags-to-riches story -- and that his move into hairdressing was the result of what seemed to be bad luck.

He opened his first salon in Sevenoaks in 1967 and launched academies in England and America during the 1980s. He now has 11 salons, four academies and a range of haircare products.

Mr Webb said: "I was born with spina bifida and I was a school drop-out, at 15. My self-esteem would have best been described as catastrophic.

"The companies I tried to get a job with, nobody would take me because of wretched personnel people who probably assumed I was thick. The only job I could get was as a trainee barber -- and thank goodness."

He added: "I was a council flat kid, a no-hoper. It is incredible to come through that and build a successful business and, more importantly, to have four children that neurosurgeons thought I wouldn't have."

Mr Webb said that his charity work has mainly included "energy and initiatives" rather than just cash donations.

He helped raise £25,000 for the Save The Children Fund while chairman of the Institute of Directors, and he was honorary appeal chairman of the NSPCC Full Stop Campaign.

He is also a trustee of the Kent Spina Bifida Association.

When he collects his MBE, it will be his second visit to Buckingham Palace as his father was also presented with the same honour.

Mr Webb said: "He was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, he had the lowest job in the Ministry of Health and was never promoted due to them always being worried that he would not be able to come to work.

"After 30 years of struggling to London every day with hardly a day off he had the shock of getting the MBE. It is just a shame that he died in 1980 and my mother died earlier this year so they won't know about me.

"I shall be thinking of them when I go to the Palace."