Phillip Carter was one of Britain’s most promising younger businessmen. He built Carter & Carter, the training company he founded from his bedroom 15 years ago, into a business worth half a billion pounds.

His own share of the company was worth about £100 million, and last week he was placed 770th on The Sunday Times Rich List, up 174 places from last year. In March he was named Entrepreneur of the Year for 2006 at the PLC Awards.

Carter drove the heady growth rates of his Nottingham-based company through a string of acquisitions and skilful exploitation of the Government’s focus on training and skills, particularly for school leavers. He broadened the scope of the business from its roots in the automotive industry towards other areas of vocational training, such as health, engineering, manufacturing and retail.

Carter & Carter’s initial success with big corporate clients came through its ability to offer a “one-stop shop”, handling training for every aspect of a business. In addition, the company agreed that its payment would be directly related to measurable improvements in the client’s performance.

“The underlying driver behind the growth is the whole need for UK plc and all the companies in the UK to upskill the workforce in order for the UK to be competitive,” he said last month. “We’ve already lost the battle in unskilled labour to China and India.”

Carter’s recent strategy was based on the insight that government responses to this challenge, along with others such as the need to get the long-term unemployed back into work, could create new openings for companies offering to address this skills gap. “That general climate is creating a real change in the way education is being approached by government,” he explained. “All those things create a substantial market opportunity for Carter & Carter.”

Since its flotation in February 2005, Carter & Carter has experienced a fivefold rise in the value of its shares and it now employs 2,000 people. Last spring it won New Company of the Year at the PLC Awards. In December Carter & Carter’s purchase of three training companies for £23.4 million gave it the potential to benefit further from Train to Gain, a programme heavily backed by Gordon Brown.

“The market is huge,” Carter said two weeks ago, unveiling a 25 per cent rise in first-half profits. “And we are benefiting from the government apprenticeship programme and the push to get people off incapacity benefit.”

Although the company has only about 5 per cent of the market, it is the biggest player in government-funded training, and better placed to expand than many of its privately owned competitors.

Three quarters of the company’s revenue currently comes from government programmes, although Carter said recently that he expected revenues to be split 50-50 with the private sector within ten years.

With Gordon Brown keen to open up further education budgets to tenders from the private sectors, the deal Carter agreed last summer with Castle College in Nottingham could offer a model for the future of the sector. “The most significant thing about it is that it is almost certainly the first strategic partnership between a private sector partner and a college,” Carter argued last year. “It has created a huge amount of interest.”

The idea was controversial, and the college’s principal, Nick Lewis, admitted last year that “some people are bound to have an opinion that this is colluding with the devil”.

But the unassuming Carter was an unlikely Mephistopheles. Although he grew to appreciate the trappings of wealth, he did not like to show them off, and he remained an approachable and friendly figure to his staff.

Phillip John Carter was born in Paddington, West London, in 1962, and studied chemistry at Southampton University. His early career was spent at ICI, where he worked in sales, marketing and business development, before becoming business development manager of the paints division.

The idea for a support services company came to him when he was at home one day in 1992. Still in his pyjamas, he wrote down the whole business plan at his kitchen table. With his wife Judith, he established Carter & Carter as an outsourcing provider to the car industry, running government-backed mechanic apprenticeship schemes. It won contracts with major carmakers such as Daimler, Vauxhall and VW.

“I started it in my bedroom and it gradually grew from there,” he said in 2005. “It’s been a long road.”

Over the next few years Carter took the decision to expand into the US and Australia, and to focus increasingly on training. In 1997 he won the contract to run the training academy for Audi in Britain. Sensing opportunities, in 2001 he sold a 47 per cent stake in the business to a venture capital firm, Bridgeport, to raise money for expansion.

In 2003 he led Carter & Carter’s purchase of the automotive training group Emtec, which doubled the size of the company and, crucially, allowed it to offer its clients the technical training it had previously struggled to provide. “It completed our ability to outsource a car company’s entire training requirements,” Carter said.

In February 2005, just a month before listing on the London Stock Exchange, Carter & Carter bought the AA’s technical services divisions.

After Carter took the company public, he quickened the pace of acquisitions. In September 2005 Assa Training & Learning was added, taking Carter & Carter deep into the government-funded learning market.

Last year Carter snapped up five more businesses, one of which, the Fern Group, gave Carter & Carter a lucrative slice of the Jobcentre Plus “New Deal” providing training to unemployed and disabled people.

In March his attempt to buy BPP, which provides training for accountants and lawyers, was repulsed. But he vowed recently: “We have no intention of backing off.”

Carter had a passion for Chelsea Football Club. He held a season ticket for many years before buying a box, and five years ago was made one of eight honorary vice-presidents of the club. He was on his way from watching the team’s Champions League semi-final defeat at Liverpool when his helicopter crashed near his home, Thornhaugh Hall Estate, near Peterborough. He was killed, along with his 17-year old son, Andrew, his friend Jonathan Waller and the pilot, Stephen Holdich.

He is survived by his wife, Judith, and his daughter.

Phillip Carter, entrepreneur, was born on May 16, 1962. He died in a helicopter crash on May 2, 2007, aged 44