Alex Cheatle - Ten Group

Back in the 1990s, having a concierge membership had a certain cache. It seemed to exist more as a status symbol for the elite than the actual services it had to offer.

But that image was about to change. Towards the end of the decade, a young Proctor and Gamble employee on a backpacking sabbatical was suddenly hit by a vision – to turn the concierge concept into a global industry, making it ‘an intelligent choice’ for the time-poor masses.

The Ten Group is now 12 years old and boasts 300,000 members. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, says entrepreneur and Ten CEO Alex Cheatle - having a personal Lifestyle Manager will soon become as ubiquitous as owning a mobile phone.

“We think most people will have a concierge at some stage in the future. I compare it to having a mobile in the early 90s. People looked at them thinking ‘who’s that plonker trying to impress?’ I think the concierge market was quite like that a few years ago. The perception that it was something for the idle, image-conscious rich was not very helpful.

“These days with mobiles, we feel slightly odd if we don’t have one - it’s the way we get things done now. And a concierge service will genuinely organise people quicker, cheaper and better than even a PA or husband or wife could.”

So what does this essential service encompass? Ten is on-call 24/7, largely based in the UK but with offices in San Francisco and Hong Kong. Its territory covers Europe, Asia and the Americas and exists to ‘organise anything that our members don't have the time, inclination or expertise to organise themselves’, and they can deal with any kind of request as long as it is legal and moral.

At present the company employs 280 full-time staff speaking seven languages, meeting the varied demands of the 30,000 calls per month.

They are employed because they have 10-20 years of experience in that field, and carry out an enormous variety of activities, be it finding a cleaner, booking a holiday or even buying a car for a client. Delegating the mundane and trivial chores even stretches to Ten employing a team of dedicated present wrappers.

And sometimes they rise to the oddest challenges.

"We do have weird requests, once to put a game together between a guy and a grandmaster chess champion, another guy made some gin and needed us to find a gin maker to make it to that specific taste. We organised both of those.

“The recent volcanic ash kept us busy. We had to get lots of people back and others out so we were getting luxury coaches all over the place. To make it special, our members stopped off at a luxury chateau for wine and a Michelin starred meal.

“We’re also extremely practical and can relocate a family moving back to the UK,  finding schools for the children and a home to live in.”

The price for access to such diversity is £300 a month, unless you are a Coutts or Barclays Premiere customer. Then it is yours for free.

Under another and more specialized division is Ten Professional Support, currently catering for head-teachers because Alex admits to ‘always being obsessed with education’.

“We realised there’s about 20,000 head teachers in the country all facing the same waves of government policy and legislation and they all have the same customers; the kids, parents, governors and teachers.

“We’re well on the way to 3,000 schools using our service. We don’t help them with their restaurant table bookings, tickets for Madonna or holidays. We help them with, ‘How can I best recruit a Mandarin teacher?’, ‘What are the success stories behind schools that have launched the diploma?’ or ‘How do I go about writing a letter to parents explaining that the risk on this school trip is worth taking? And of course it’s a fraction of the cost of getting a consultant in - which some do and it breaks my heart.”

“If you are an entrepreneur running a business that’s turning over £1 million plus but less than £20 million, you’re unlikely to have a corporate infrastructure. So you can turn to us as outsourced people who can help organise everything from your business travel to your Christmas party to stationery deals.”

It has not all been plain-sailing for 40-year-old Cheatle and his co-partner and COO Andrew Long on the road from start-up to the £11.5 million enterprise it is today - a figure which is forecast to double by the end of 2010.

“In 2003 we did technically go under and then resurface. They were really hairy days. We didn’t run into financial trouble because we didn’t understand the numbers but because it took a while for our business model to take off. In the end it turned out our model was right - it just took an extra year or two on what we expected.”

Cheatle explains the philosophies that helped them keep faith.

“Our growth is driven by a very honest and basic driver which is: the better we get, the bigger we get. If we don’t get good we don’t get bigger.”

And he attributes Ten’s success to the workforce he is extremely appreciative of.

“It’s down to an old fashioned marriage of technology and people - because it’s the people that create the knowledge as it's needed and that inspire confidence in clients.

“The heroes in our business are the Lifestyle Managers which is why we need to recruit really, really good people, then coach and train them, giving them complete autonomy to do their job, whilst supporting them.”

The Ten Group is the most successful and fastest growing lifestyle management company in the world, with awards including the Fast Growth Business Awards 2008: Service Business of The Year and Sunday Times 2008 Fast Track 100.

Alex Cheatle will be speaking at the Entrepreneur Country Forum, In A World With No Money..., on 16 June 2010 at Savoy Place in London.  Register now to secure your place!

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