When the alarm goes off at 7am I head downstairs and get out the juicer. I throw in three carrots, four florets of broccoli, some cucumber, celery, an apple and a tiny piece of ginger. After reading Jason Vale’s Juice Master book a couple of years ago, I’ve become a complete convert. Not only is the juice a natural multi-vitamin but, unlike the ones you buy in the shop, it hasn’t been standing around or exposed to light — apparently vitamin C deteriorates after 30 minutes. I haven’t had a cold or cough for ages, so it must be doing me some good. I also make my own muesli with oats, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, nuts and raisins, and I eat that while I’m reading the FT. Then I’ll shower, get ready and jump in my Porsche.

Our offices are just inside the border of north Wales — a place called Ewloe. It’s about 15 minutes down the dual carriageway, so I’m usually in by 9, checking e-mails and reading the stats for our site, which tell me things like how many online visitors we had yesterday. Right now, we have 6m visitors a month.

In total, the site has 25 different channels, including mortgages, flights, mobiles and insurance. A lot of my day is taken up with meetings, discussing everything from the success rate of a new service to why customers might drop out of an application. On the technical side, we’re making constant improvements — of our 600 employees, 300 are internet developers. Nothing stands still in this industry. In the industrial age change happened in a year or a decade — in the internet age it happens in a heartbeat.

Most days I bring in my own sandwiches. I make them in the morning — usually either toasted rye bread or toasted pitta with goats cheese or tuna, together with loads of organic salad. But I still like to get out of the office, so maybe I’ll go for a coffee with a couple of my colleagues. A favourite place is the Glasfryn in Mold, a pub with great views over north Wales. The landscape in this part of the world is breathtaking.

With the recent flotation of the company, I was able to raise some money. One of the things I’m planning to do is invest some of that in property.

I’ve just bought a seven-bedroom beach property in Abersoch, on the Lleyn Peninsula, which has the most beautiful beaches. My plan is to turn it into a luxury villa with a spa and home cinema.

I suppose when you find something you love doing, you excel at it — and you reap rewards. It’s something I realised at uni when the opposite happened. I was doing accountancy, but my heart wasn’t in it so I dropped out. Of course, as soon as I got back home, my parents had the job section of the Chester Chronicle outside my door. The worst thing, though, was that when I was 19, Mum died. And when your mother dies it feels like your safety mechanism has gone, that you’re out there on your own. I think in a way it was a catalyst — it made me more independent, more ambitious.

I initially got a job as a mortgage consultant, but I got so frustrated having to keep ringing up banks for mortgage prices that I bought myself an Apple Mac and set up a trade magazine supplying all these figures to other mortgage consultants. Thousands of them subscribed, so it was a huge success.

By the time I was 21 I’d had my first taste of being an entrepreneur, and it just spurred me on.

It was the early 1990s and people were starting to buy computers. I knew I had to stay one step ahead so I hooked up with my ex-business partner, Duncan Cameron, who’d just done a degree in IT. We transferred the magazine to a computer program, launching Mortgage 2000 in 1993. Of course, it soon made sense not only to provide mortgage comparisons but comparisons in other areas, so we set up moneysupermarket.com in 1999. Despite our success, there’s no room for complacency.

I spend at least 20% of my time looking at competitors’ sites.

By about 7 I like to call it a day in the office. Most nights I do some exercise — a game of squash or a run along the river. I also have a gym in the house. With so much focus on work, it’s easy to forget about healthy eating, so I make a point of going to the local supermarket every other day to buy fresh, organic food. I’m big on fish, but it’s got to be caught from the sea; I won’t eat farmed. A typical meal is cod or dover sole with steamed broccoli, carrots, brown rice and a tomato or cream sauce — I’ll also juice more raw vegetables. I usually drink green tea or Tick Tock, which tastes like tea but has no caffeine.

My laptop’s always on in the evening, so admittedly I’ll often end up surfing the web at some point, at the back of my mind always thinking about what we need to be doing — now and 10 years from now. If you think of our industry as some kind of treadmill, it feels like the speed just keeps getting turned up.

By about 10.45 I’ll head upstairs to bed with a book or a magazine. I love travel, so I enjoy reading things like Condé Nast Traveller and thinking about where I want to go next. It’s one thing being 100% focused on work, but I still like a bit of escapism, I still like to dream.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s the secret to any success.

Times recommends

• The Boxing Day tsunami: five years on
• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?