Derek Hunt - Telegraph Originally Mullard Furniture Industries, MFI was founded in Wembley in 1964 by Noel Lister and Donald Searle, who had started out trading in Army-surplus goods. They branched into mail order flat-pack furniture and large showrooms on "out of town" sites, but Searle died young and Lister was more of a product man than a retailer; it was Derek Hunt, as managing director from 1981, who drove MFI's emergence as a household name with more than 150 stores across Britain. A strongly built northerner, Hunt deployed a leadership style described by one observer as "like a very successful football manager, but more polite." He would eyeball bankers and suppliers across the negotiating table with the intensity of the tight head prop he had been until his retirement from rugby at the age of 45, and was particularly robust in defence of MFI's value-for-money offering. "We're doing 80,000 flat-pack units a week," he told one interviewer. You don't do that level of sales with a crap product. He took over as chairman in 1984, and in the following year led MFI into a merger with the northern supermarket group Asda. This appeared to suit all parties: as a chance for Lister to cash in his MFI stake at a good price; as a defensive move for Asda, which was losing ground to Tesco and Sainsbury; and as a career move for Hunt, who became chief executive and deputy chairman of Asda-MFI. But the cultures of the two companies did not mix well, and their combined finances were overstretched. In 1987 Hunt drummed up City support for a £718 million management buy-out, the largest of its era, in which MFI also took over one of its major suppliers, the kitchen manufacturer Hygena. Another kitchen maker, Schreiber, was acquired, and profits briefly boomed. But the onset of recession brought tough trading conditions for the debt-laden group, and Hunt's plans for re-flotation on the stock market were deferred until 1992, when he had to accept a valuation below the buy-out price of five years earlier. Thereafter, performance was perpetually unstable as consumer tastes changed: MFI faced growing competition from the likes of the Swedish chain Ikea, which Lister and Searle had used as a model before it arrived in Britain in the late 1980s. Hunt handed over as chief executive in 1994 but remained chairman until 2000 - and despite the challenges MFI faced, he never lost investors" respect for his straightforwardness of presentation and muscularity of response. Derek Simpson Hunt was born on June 9 1939 at Darlington, where he was educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. He described himself as having been "brought up as a Victorian": his father was a railway engine driver who died when Derek was nine, and both parents were staunch Methodists. Derek carried in his diary, all his life, a copy of John Wesley's exhortation to "Do all the good you can." He left school to become a police cadet and enjoyed the camaraderie of police life but not the pay, so at 23 he became a trainee manager at British Home Stores. He then moved south to work for a South African-owned retailer which became part of the Fine Fare supermarket chain, and was put in charge of a large, loss-making Fine Fare outlet at Perry Barr in Birmingham - which he swiftly turned round. In 1972 he moved to MFI as an area controller, joining the board in 1976. Within a few years of Hunt's retirement, MFI was in terminal decline. In late 2008 it went into administration, and its remaining 111 stores were closed. Derek Hunt was a supporter of the National Children's Home charity (now NCH Action for Children). He married, in 1967, Sandra Jones, who survives him with their two sons. Derek Hunt, born June 9 1939, died January 19 2012