Meet the British billionaire who still works harder than anyone he knows

Yahoo

10 hours ago

'Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'. This was a phrase used by economist John Maynard Keynes and he is so right. If you go down the status quo road, you will always be mediocre. You have to have alternative thought.
It is a lesson the late Richard Thornton taught me. I had first met him at his London office in the late 1970s, having had no idea what I wanted to do after leaving university. I had studied economics at Oxford but didn't really know what a bond was.
Richard was in a hurry to hire young people for his new company GT Management (now LGT) on a starting salary of £5,000 and the job based in Hong Kong.
I was thrown into the deep end and within days I was managing other people's money. I didn't own a suit and I later used it as a rag to wipe my car down as it was so cheap.
Read More: 'In our workplace, we look for passionate, slightly unhinged mountain climbers'
The company grew very quickly into an international investment leader. In 1979, there were still capital controls from the export on foreign currency from the UK. When Margaret Thatcher came to power she abolished the premiums and there was a boom from the 1980s onwards. It was a great time to be a fund manager.
Richard was in his late 40s, a ball of energy and was highly impulsive, which was a bad thing in fund management. I was his 'bagman', we travelled a lot to Japan, I had to prepare all the questions for meetings and it was a lot of fun.
An office was later opened in San Francisco and I was put in charge as a 21-year-old of their US fund at the start of the tech boom. Richard saw me as a hard-working person and someone he could rely on.
I later met a house build company in Ireland, said we should buy 25% of the company and so Richard invited the two brothers over for lunch. The fact they had six glasses of wine each didn't impress him and, thanks to his irascible temperament, said we had to sell all the shares, which then went up 100 times.
Richard was later fired from his own company after shouting at a subordinate. He asked staff whether they would like to join him in a new company and the only person who said yes was me.
Read More: 'I returned to my old office to sell ties after being made redundant'
I could put up with his temper as I had a vision to be an entrepreneur and invested cash in a new business called Richard Thornton Management. We went to $1bn in a year and sold to Dresdner Bank four years later.
It gave me enough money to start my own business as Richard had become very unpredictable and would take to phoning up staff very late at night. It's not the way I have ever operated and I now get up at 4am and don't work after 6pm. You have to have some rules in your life otherwise you will be overwhelmed.
I also never shout at my employees, most of whom have been with me for 30 years. Treat people kindly and you get a lot more back.
I gave up fund management in 2000 and since then I have maybe done too many things: biotech, property investment, the food business. I am interested in new things and have worked harder now than I did in my early twenties.
Where most people talk about cultivated meat, 'clean food' is our definition of what we are now doing at Agronomics. We are trying to make it more accessible to investors and the general public and making bio-identical foods and materials using laboratory conditions.
We are building a factory in the US dedicated to the production of dairy and egg proteins. We own 52% of the company and the $120m facility will be making eggs without chickens, dairy without cows, with very low emissions, no contaminants and low land and water use.
In an industry where people are against it for luddite reasons, we started Agronomics four years ago and the asset value has trebled. We have two customers which will absorb the factory's capacity for the next five years.
The UK is a leader in food tech and it's important for the government to get behind it. It's a growing eco system but it's not enough when you consider we import about half of our food into the UK.
Read More: Meet Britain's 'king of billboards' who sold his business for £1bn
We are in the same situation today of food insecurities as we were before the Second World War, so why would we not use our natural strength in this area at home?
If I hadn't applied to Richard and got the job over 40 years ago, I would not have the luxury of doing passion projects like this which I now have. That is all down to him.
He was very bright, intemperate and very disorganised. I'm maybe not as bright as Richard was, but I am very organised and temperate. Those three factors, plus working harder aged 68 than anyone I know today, is what gets me up in the morning and to be very joyous about life.
Read more:
Meet the 'jokers from London' who sold 100,000 blocks of butter in first 10 weeks
'My sofa took six months to arrive — so I built a £20m business'
'I paid myself £4 an hour to get my Rollr deodorant off the ground'