£35m float is music to ears of Ten Group’s Alex
A PERSONAL concierge service that promises to secure tables in exclusive restaurants and tickets for coveted music events plans to raise up to £35 million on the stock market this week.
Ten Group, whose 60 million members include customers of private banks Coutts and Investec, was launched in 1998 and now has 700 staff.
Co-founder Alex Cheatle said: ‘Lots of successful people used to have their own one-toone personal assistant. But the big shift for us came in the 1990s when more people started sharing a PA and it became much more difficult to ask them to take care of all those issues not work-related.’
Cheatle said people catch on to the service when they find themselves asking: ‘How come my friend managed to get a last-minute seat at a top London restaurant or tickets to see Adele when I couldn’t?’ The float is a reversal of fortune for Cheatle who saw Ten Group come under severe financial strain after the collapse of the dotcom bubble. ‘I didn’t pay myself for nine months because I had to make payroll for our staff. I was pretty much eating Weetabix for breakfast and dinner,’ he said. The majority of the money raised by the firm, which operates in more than 30 countries, will be invested into overseas growth. Cheatle, 47, will cash in 5 per cent of his 20 per cent stake as part of the float. Co-founder Andrew Long, chief executive of the firm’s Asia business, will cash in about a quarter of his 10 per cent shareholding.