A week in the life of Alex Connock

Friday, July 31, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Media sector | Tags: Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, statistics, diary, annual report, Ten Alps, Digital Britain, Companies Act, Bob Geldof, Rachel Johnson, David Steel, business development, Toby Young, Michael Lyons, Entrepreneur’s Diary

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps : Development, development. This week – to paraphrase the Fast Show – I have mainly been doing business development. In the year of a Plc with March year-end, May is about results, June is roadshow, but July and August are free to just really grow the business. It’s the steak of entrepreneurship with no fries, it’s hard work and it’s fun.

September usually serves up mixed grill again – some investor meetings, some deals maybe, some press maybe. From September’s RTS convention in Cambridge onwards, I have four speeches already booked just to discuss local news plans under Digital Britain – a very hot topic.

Development, development
But anyway, this week:

• In numbers: well over 1,000 emails, and 1,000 miles on trains (London twice, Newcastle and Manchester). I sat opposite David Steel, the former Liberal leader, along the way. He was doing the crossword and talking to someone about giving lectures on cruise ships. It sounded very nice – but for everyone who’s not in retirement, being in business in 2009 is not so much Carnival Cruiselines, as riding the rapids in a bathtub.
• Mobile phone calls this week: hundreds – Macclesfield, Mexico, L.A., our Belfast office, New York, and London every ten minutes.
• Plans discussed: TV ideas with old Oxford friends Toby Young (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) and Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris) who’s just taken over as editor of The Lady – a documentary idea so obvious I turned out to be the third person to have had it. I showed an exciting Geldof web project to Google at the half-way-built stage. Their office is great; admittedly the red phone box is a touch theme-pub, but if you’re Google, you can do anything you want in my book. And I swapped ideas with documentary colleague Roger Graef for films in the wake of his latest BBC crime series success.
• Executive catering: not much to be honest. A no-time-for-food lunch (albeit at the Ivy) with Raoul Shah who runs a brilliant global branding agency called Exposure, and who I want to work with on sponsored mobile TV content. And a fascinating breakfast with Michael Lyons, Chairman of the BBC Trust. I had scrambled eggs.

Challenge everything
Those are the random details – but really it’s systematic. Clever colleagues Adrian Dunleavy and Nitil Patel are working on renewal of every unit in our ten-year-old business for a very uncertain economy.

Our job is to find, sell and make more high-quality factual media projects, from TV to contract publishing to online, beat the competition at it, and make it more multiplatform and cost-efficient than ever before. Easy to say, tough to deliver.

And next week?

We send our annual report to the printers. The Companies Act says it must be printed, so 10,000+ companies print reports, despite investors almost universally reading them online. So we have the irony that our front page says ‘driving online’ and ‘increasing margins’ – when we are forced to print the report and that costs money.

But if we can drive online, increase margins, and develop next-generation, 360-degree content, it will be a summer well spent.

You can catch up on Alex’s previous posts from our Entrepreneur’s Diary series, in which we follow a male and a female CEO to discover what life is like behind the scenes of their business.

Read what a week in the life of VIE at home CEO Ros Simmons is like…