John St. John, chief executive of EO
(EO's business model relies on developing partnerships with traditional securities firms. The banks can tap EO's retail subscriber base, and receive some of the commission from shares distributed by EO. EO recently acquired its rival, EPO and now operates in six countries.)
6.30am I wake up to Classic FM. It feels like semi-retirement after working for an
investment bank. My wife gets up before me to start looking after our six-month old girl. I wake our other three children a little later.
7.00am Breakfast with the children. One of the good things about doing this job is
seeing them every morning and regularly in the evening and weekends.
They are all under six years old, and they change so fast! My time with
them has risen substantially and it shows in our relationship.
7.20am The taxi arrives to take me to Sevenoaks station - the same chap has been
driving me for 8 years. It's the same cost as running a second car and a lot less hassle.
7.33am Train to Charing Cross, and I walk to the office at Piccadilly Circus. It's an
easy trip. The taxi journey and the train mean I have read the papers,
picked up my voicemail, read the printed-off e-mails.
8.30am I'm a great believer in daily morning meetings. This one is a conference
call with our other offices. Since we launched the site last June, we have
gone from being in no countries to six, servicing approximately 1 million customers, through EO, EPO, our broking partners and our joint venture partners in France and Germany.
9.00am We are a democratic, flat organisation in an open-plan environment. There
are no individual offices. We talk about new issues going on the site. Someone mentions they are seeing one of the big UK brokers regarding product and distribution partnership in the afternoon. Someone else mentions a hedge fund we are launching on our site. The compliance officer needs to act on a number of fronts to upgrade our licence and give us the ability to operate in other countries.
9.45am Chat on the phone with Lynn Dukes, one of our non-executive directors.
I'm looking for guidance on which technology path we should choose. No one has built a platform like this before and it is an immense help to have someone who's been at the cutting edge of investment banking technology for 15 years to advise us.
10.30am Meeting with Michael Page, our relationship manager at UBS Warburg, which is one of our product partners. We have been talking to the bank's Nordic team about the Statoil deal in Norway.
11.10am Phone call from CNBC. They have a weekly IPO slot on Tuesdays and
want me to feature. I follow it up by making calls to finalise details on
other speeches and conferences coming up. I've been asked to give the
keynote speech on the downward spiral in the tech sector at a conference
in Munich (what do I know about this?!). There is also an ECM conference at the Waldorf soon.
12.15pm Discussion in-house on hiring. We need senior people in France and
Italy. We are also talking to someone about establishing our business
in Asia.
1.00pm It's lunchtime. Every week I lunch with Mike Whitaker and Tom
Teichman. Mike is the chairman of EO and also CEO of NewMedia Spark, while Tom is the chairman of NewMedia Spark.
Mike Whitaker, Glasshouse Associates, NewMedia Spark and Globalnet, the e-commerce company, together own over 75% of EO and are all located in the building - it means we make decisions quickly.
2.45pm Internal meeting with our CTO to strategise about our technology
platform development. Our purchase of EPO has bought us some
breathing space to go and build the next phase of the platform. The trouble is, it needs to perform like a Ferrari but integrate with Model T Ford technology in the rest of the world. We are constantly discussing it.
3.15pm Due diligence with a major investment bank looking at us as a vehicle
to roll their e-business into - as a 'neutral' ongoing platform we have a number of dialogues like this.
4.30pm Phone call to arrange another meeting with Vassos Vassulou, CEO of
Ezeehelp. They have online support services and we are talking
about links. Vassos is ex-Lehman Brothers. It still surprises me how small the investment banking circle remains.
4.50pm Call from someone at Barclays Stockbrokers. They partnered with us to
launch an IPO centre aimed at enabling their retail investors to gain access to European IPOs.
5.15pm Interview potential CEO of our French subsidiary.
6.00pmIt's a special evening. We are celebrating the successful delivery of a co-
branded site for Charles Schwab Europe and Barclays Stockbrokers in time for the Orange IPO. We are starting with a Virgin Wines wine tasting in our office and then going to a local bar for tapas and cocktails.
7.45pm I head home. The children will be asleep but I know I'll see them in the
morning and the next evening. I love the fact that each
day we are building a business and platform which connects issuers and investors in a way that has never been done before. That has to be good as well as exciting.
