Entrepreneur’s Diary welcomes CEO Alex Connock

Tuesday, July 07, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Media sector | Tags: Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, media, diary, Ten Alps, Digital Britain, Bob Geldof, Accountancy TV, Entrepreneur’s Diary

For 12 weeks, two CEOs – one male, one female – will be writing a behind-the-scenes of business diary for us. VIE at home’s Ros Simmons kicked off the series. Now Alex Connock of Ten Alps, a multiplatform factual media company he co-founded with Bob Geldof, joins in. First up, a quick Q&A…

Can you introduce yourself with an elevator pitch?
CEO of Ten Alps plc. Started it in 1999 with six people. Ten years on, we’re at £80m turnover with 520 staff, but we’re not having a massive party because it wouldn’t feel right in the recession. At least, that’s what our finance director claims. You’ll have seen our TV documentaries for years without realising it – on war, terrorism, famine, prisons… We really are a lot of fun.

What does Ten Alps do?
We are a factual media producer – online, TV and print. We’re multiplatform because our clients are, and that’s the way we all use media today. You’re multiplatform, too – if you read The Sun online, or you watch BBC TV programmes on iPlayer.

What are Ten Alps’ vital statistics?
A factual media factory, in two divisions. Communications division… A new link2 business portal shortly to launch, covering sectors from infrastructure to energy… aggregating the output online from our 600 B2B publications… Corporate responsibility content from top agency Dbda ... Dozens of corporate videos produced ...

Content division… About 40 TV programmes in production through ownership of top production companies Brook Lapping, Blakeway, Below the Radar and Films of Record… with hard-hitting films being made from divorce courts to the Iraq war… Online TV channels like Teachers TV, with its massive library of 3,700 specially-produced programmes… and, coming soon…. Accountancy TV.  I bet you can’t wait for that.

What stage is the company at?
To put it in terms of a California surf movie, we spent much of the past 10 years having sand kicked in our face – but now we are starting to ride some waves with the big boys. At first we were just a simple supplier to major firms, but now we are creating and owning our own content, in serious volume – just as many established media plcs are in existential crisis as their business models are challenged. 

What is your vision for the business?
We’d like to be to 2010 cross-platform factual media what Granada was to 1970s TV. We’d like to be creator and owner of high-class, hard-hitting, original, highly targeted journalistic content, with the commercial skills to exploit its value.

What style of entrepreneur would you say you are?
I’m someone who has got enough experience to realise that if this business is a circus, I am not the star juggler, tightrope walker, clown or acrobat – I’m more like a guy with a clipboard announcing who is on next. I revel in working with people who are renowned for what they do – from political interviewer Brian Walden, to talented executive colleagues like Adrian Dunleavy and Nitil Patel, to star producers like Roger Graef. I’ve sat in internal meetings as the only person who hasn’t been on a New Year’s Honours list. Geldof gave as a reason for not attending a recent board meeting that he had been flying on Air Force One at the time.

Three words that describe you?
Let’s crack on.

What does a typical working week involve?
I live in Cheshire in a semi-rural paradise heavily populated by football stars. Take your pick of the paradoxes in that sentence. .

But I mostly work in our office in Savoy Street in London, combined with the Ivy Club, Soho House and Groucho Club that together form a kind of Bermuda triangle of media networking. To be honest, most of our best ideas and our 20 acquisitions have come out of our personal networking – real or online – rather than formal mandates received in the office. Everyone in the business, including me, should be selling.

I am a fanatical emailer – probably 250 per day. The idea that I would drop ‘off the grid’, even on holiday, is about as likely as a premiership football club deciding to stage matches in Westminster Abbey.

Finally, we also have offices in northern cities Manchester, Newcastle and Belfast – places which I feel offer fresher stories, if only the media would give them the airwaves. Media City in my native Manchester should make a difference.

How do you switch off from the pressures of work? Any guilty pleasures?
There was that old joke about BBC application forms: why do they ask what you do in your spare time, when anyone who works in TV knows that you don’t actually have any spare time?

Do you watch The Apprentice or Dragons’ Den?
I think The Apprentice could be an elaborate joke, so masterful a misrepresentation is it of how to succeed in business today. Its idea of business best practice is as up to date as an Amstrad computer. Its premise that business is about getting one over on your team-mates is the diametric opposite of reality. Business is about your team mates succeeding.

What can we expect you to be writing about in the three months of your Entrepreneur’s Diary?
Fast-moving projects in the media at a time of extraordinarily rapid change.

What, do you think, will be your unique perspective?
We’re in the middle of things – making great films, this year becoming Britain’s biggest business contract publisher, getting involved in the exciting dynamics of Digital Britain. What I’m not going to claim is that it’s easy or always fun. I usually fail at something – an investor pitch, a sales opportunity, a public-sector tender – before I’ve even had any breakfast.

Read more posts from our Entrepreneur’s Diary.