Fatal Error (22 page)

‘It would be nice to see some revenues,’ said Tony.

‘Absolutely. And we’re making progress on the retailing side.’

Tony pushed the reviews and Guy’s laptop away and picked up the financial attachments to the board papers. He frowned.

‘Amy has a team of designers working on a range of sports-casual clothing,’ Guy went on. ‘She’s lined up suppliers in the UK and Portugal.’

‘Wouldn’t the Far East be cheaper?’

‘We need the flexibility of rapid turnaround times for orders and new designs. Whatever happens when we start selling our own-label stuff, it’s going to happen quickly, and we’ll need to respond quickly. She’s also negotiating deals with the suppliers of club and national strips and memorabilia.’

‘It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it?’

‘There are long lead-times. We need to be ready.’

‘It all sounds exciting,’ Tony said. ‘Tell us how we’re going to pay for it, David.’

I ran through the numbers, which were set out amongst the board papers. I’d worked hard on them, and I was pleased with the result.

When I finished, there was silence. Tony was staring at me, absent-mindedly tapping a pen against his chin. I tried to catch his eye and smile. His expression remained stony. Hoyle was watching his client closely. He knew him better than me, and he knew something was up.

I tried to remain calm, but inside alarm bells were ringing. What had I said wrong? What had I missed? Why was Tony so warm to his son and so cold to me? Did this still have something to do with Dominique?

Eventually Guy cut in. ‘Thank you, David. As you can see, we are being prudent with our cash, and we’re keeping within budget.’

‘We might be within budget, but we’re not making any money. Are we, David?’ There was an edge to Tony’s voice.

‘Not yet, no,’ I admitted. ‘But at this stage in Ninetyminutes’ life we should be investing in the business.’

‘We’re making losses, with no prospect of that changing. I don’t call that “investing in the business”. I call that spending more than we earn.’

Anger flashed inside me. My professional pride was hurt. I was the accountant, what did he mean by lecturing me? ‘This is a start-up,’ I snapped. ‘What do you expect?’

Tony raised his eyebrows. He slowly moved his gaze to Guy and then back to me.

‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘Till next month. I’m glad the site is going so well. Congratulations.’ This was aimed more towards Guy than me. ‘Perhaps at our next meeting we can go a little bit further into our financial strategy.’

That sounded ominous, but I wasn’t as concerned as perhaps I should have been. It had been an uncomfortable meeting, and I had let Tony get to me for a brief moment, but I had survived. I had received a cooling rather than a roasting. That I could learn to handle, I thought. It was just a question of attitude.

We soon forgot about our chairman. Ninetyminutes was buzzing, and the loudest buzzing came from Guy. He was everywhere. If he didn’t have the ideas himself he encouraged the other people in the team to have them. He truly was inspirational. Decisions were made in a matter of seconds, all by Guy. His yardstick was, would a certain idea get us closer to being the number-one site in Europe? If it did, we went ahead with it. If it didn’t, we forgot it and moved on to the next thing.

Despite the site’s initial success, Guy was unhappy with it. Gaz’s ideas were good, his stories were brilliant and Mandrill’s design was better than anything else out there. But in Guy’s view the site lacked something, although it was difficult to get him to pin down exactly what. After long discussions into the night we decided that what we needed was someone to pull all these elements together and organize them. But what kind of person? And where could we find them?

We didn’t have the time to advertise and we didn’t have the money for a headhunter. Then I thought of Ingrid. Neither of us had seen her for seven years, but she had been working in magazine publishing then. If she didn’t know anyone herself, she might at least help us identify the kind of person we should be looking for and suggest where we might find them. If she’d talk to us.

I dug out her number from an old address book and called her up. She was surprised to hear from me, but she agreed to have lunch with us the next day.

We met at a small pizza place near her office on the South Bank. She was cool, composed and confident. She looked a little older, lines were beginning to show around her mouth and pale-blue eyes, smile lines. Her chestnut-brown hair was cut shorter, and she wore an elegant but informal trouser suit. Jade earrings dangled from her ears. She looked poised and in control. And amused.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You two joining up to become dot-commers. A dissolute actor and a buttoned-up chartered accountant.’

‘Killer combination,’ said Guy with a smile. ‘And unique.’

I wasn’t sure I quite liked the description of myself as a ‘buttoned-up accountant’, but I didn’t quibble. Suave merchant banker, perhaps? But of course one of the reasons I was doing this was to lose the accountant label.

‘I almost didn’t recognize you. Guy has no signs of a hangover and you seem to have lost your suit, David. And your hair.’

‘Well, we recognized you,’ said Guy.

‘It’s lucky you had the same phone number,’ I said. ‘Seven years on.’

‘Same number. Same flat. Same job, I’m afraid.’

‘That dull, huh?’ said Guy. And then, in response to Ingrid’s sharp look, ‘Just getting my own back.’

She smiled.

We ordered our pizzas, and caught up on what we each had been doing. Then Guy asked the question. ‘What do you think?’

‘Of your site?’

‘Yes.’

Ingrid put down her knife and fork, pondering the question for a few moments. ‘It’s good. I’m impressed. The design is excellent. I know nothing about football, but you’ve got some very good writers. Easy to load. No bugs that I could find. Not bad at all.’

Guy looked disappointed. ‘Nothing wrong with it, then?’

‘No. For an amateur site, it’s really first class.’

‘But it’s not an amateur site!’ Guy said, with too much vehemence.

‘Oops,’ Ingrid said. ‘I didn’t mean amateur. But you can tell it hasn’t been done by a professional media company.’

‘Why? The design’s OK, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. As I said, it’s very good. But the whole thing doesn’t quite hang together properly. It lacks coherence. It’s inconsistent in places, some things are a little difficult to find, everything is given equal weight.’

‘What do you mean, equal weight?’

‘Well, in a magazine it’s up to the editor to tell the reader what the really interesting stories are and make them easy to see. You can do that on the web, too, although most people don’t. But if you look at some of the good newspaper sites, they are carefully edited. If you know what you want, you can find it. If you just want to browse, the interesting stuff will be there for you.’

‘That’s it!’ said Guy, glancing at me in triumph. ‘That’s exactly what I was saying! So what can we do about it?’

‘You need someone to coordinate everything. Editor, publisher, call it what you like.’

‘Well? Is there anyone you know who might be able to help us? Or who would want to help us?’

Ingrid paused, as though flicking through a Rolodex in her head. ‘Maybe.’

‘Oh, yes?’

But Ingrid didn’t give us a name. At least not yet. ‘I still can’t get over you two teaming up. Despite my crack about chartered accountants, I’m not really surprised about David. But you, Guy? What about the late nights? The women? The drink?’

Guy took a sip of the sparkling water in front of him. ‘All in the past,’ he said with a grin. ‘Just ask Davo.’

Ingrid glanced at me. I nodded.

‘Seriously,’ Guy said. ‘I’ve changed since the last time you saw me. I’ve come to that point in my life where I want to prove that I’m not a loser, that I can create something worthwhile. I’ve worked hard at this. Fourteen-hour days, weekends, I haven’t had a holiday since I started this thing. And this is just the beginning. But I’m prepared to do whatever it takes. I really badly want this to work, Ingrid. And when I want something, I generally get it.’

Ingrid raised her eyebrows.

‘So who are you thinking of?’ I asked. ‘And do you think they’d do it?’

‘I think I do know the right person,’ said Ingrid. ‘But I’m not sure whether they’d do it or not.’

‘Tell them to spend a day with us,’ said Guy. ‘If they can’t get away from their job, there’s always Saturday. We’ll be in the office all day: Chelsea are playing away.’

‘All right.’

‘So who is it?’ Guy asked.

Ingrid smiled. ‘Me.’

Guy returned her smile. ‘In that case we’ll see you on Saturday.’

*

Ingrid came in that weekend. She clicked. Gaz liked her. Neil liked her. Even Owen liked her. At midday, Guy and I talked it over. After our lunch with her we’d both taken a look at the on-line magazine she had developed. It was aimed at professional women in their thirties, not exactly our target market. But it was smooth, sophisticated, interesting, seamless. It worked.

We offered her a job that Saturday lunch-time. She accepted it on Sunday. She took Monday to go into work to resign and she was in our office on Tuesday morning.

She turned out to be the final ingredient that made ninetyminutes.com really come alive. She listened to Gaz, encouraged him, and coaxed him into getting his ideas into some kind of priority. She talked to Owen about streamlining links and upload times, agreeing with all his concerns about scalability. And she told Mandrill what to do. It turned out that you can tell enigmatic men with goatees what to do, if you do it in the right way.

Under Ingrid’s guidance, our site was looking better and better. It was certainly an improvement on the other glitzy but clunky sites which inhabited the soccer space on the web. It looked professional. It looked a winner.

22

‘We need to move faster.’

I choked in my pint. Guy’s eyes were shining in that messianic way I was beginning to recognize whenever he was talking about Ninetyminutes’ future. ‘Move faster? You’re crazy. We can hardly keep up with things as they are now.’

We were in the Jerusalem Tavern, the pub just across the road from the office. It was half past nine, the end of another long day. But Guy had plenty of energy left.

‘Doesn’t matter. We’ve got forward momentum. Ninetyminutes will go as far as we push it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know all that stuff we were going to do in our second year? Open European offices, the on-line retailing, our own-brand merchandising?’

‘Yes.’

‘We should start on it now.’

‘But we’ve only just got the site going!’

‘I know. But it’s like this. There’s a land grab going on at the moment. It’s like the Californian gold rush. Amazon have got books in the US and in Europe. Tesco are going for grocery sales. Egg for on-line banking. We have to get soccer. We’re going to overtake the others in the UK, and we’ve got to overtake them in Europe too.’

‘But how can we manage all that?’

‘We’ll manage it. All we have to do is think big and think fast.’

He was mad. But probably right. It had to be worth going for. ‘We’re going to need more money. Now.’

Guy nodded.

‘I think it’s still a bit early to go to the venture capitalists.’

‘We have to do it.’

‘Your father won’t like it.’

‘I know,’ said Guy. ‘But I’m not going to worry about that now. Look. Think through how much we need and then let’s work out how to get it.’

It was stupid. The whole thing was stupid. I smiled. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll work on it.’

I had only just started to get down to the numbers when the phone rang. It was Henry Broughton-Jones.

‘I took a look at your site the other day,’ he said. ‘Very impressive.’

‘I’m glad you like it. Although I never had you down as much of a football fan, Henry.’

‘I prefer the horses. Just to watch, you understand. Look, do you fancy a spot of lunch?’

If you are the finance director of a start-up and a venture capitalist asks you out to lunch, then you say yes. Especially when he seems pleased that you can fit it in the next day.

He chose a smart restaurant just off Berkeley Square, the like of which I hadn’t lunched in since my Gurney Kroheim days. I noticed he wasn’t wearing a suit, but green cords, checked shirt and a blazer, with ox-blood brogues. Sort of Wall Street dress-down casual meets Cirencester Agricultural College. It didn’t quite work.

‘So what’s this, Henry?’ I said. ‘Dress-down Friday on a Wednesday?’

‘It’s subtly chosen to impress thrusting entrepreneurs, David. You are impressed?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Actually, it’s a bloody nightmare,’ he said, running his hand through his thinning hair. ‘I much preferred pinstriped
suit, blue shirt and a blue tie. This way my wife laughs at me every morning. She says blue and green don’t go together. Is that true?’

‘Couldn’t tell you, I’m afraid. It’s not the kind of thing we have to worry about on our side of the fence.’

‘No, I suppose it isn’t.’ He examined the menu. ‘Shall we get a bottle of wine? I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’

‘Sure.’

Henry ordered an expensive Montrachet to go with our fish.

‘OK, Henry, what’s going on?’ I asked.

Henry laughed. ‘I’m being proactive. I want you to humour me.’

‘Proactive?’

‘Yes. We had a big strategy conference at Gleneagles a couple of weeks ago. We talked about the Internet. As you can’t help but have noticed, things are hotting up. In the States websites are going public at astronomical valuations. The VCs over there are making bucket loads of dosh. It’s going to happen here and we don’t want to be left behind.’

‘Of course not.’

‘As we see it we have two choices. We can either give the next twenty-five-year-old management consultant who comes through the door with a plan to sell bagels on-line a couple of million quid, or we can work out the sectors that look interesting, find the promising firms that operate in those spaces and see if they want our money. Make sure we get to them before someone else does. I thought you were a good place to start.’