{"id":4909,"date":"2000-07-01T17:43:56","date_gmt":"2000-07-01T16:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.quintessential.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=5"},"modified":"2017-07-25T18:25:13","modified_gmt":"2017-07-25T17:25:13","slug":"new-york-london-paris-munich-fear-and-loathing-on-the-ipo-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/samathieson.com\/sa-mathieson\/new-york-london-paris-munich-fear-and-loathing-on-the-ipo-trail\/","title":{"rendered":"New York, London, Paris, Munich: Fear and loathing on the IPO trail"},"content":{"rendered":"

First published in Business 2.0 magazine (UK), July 2000<\/em><\/p>\n

“Place your bets for the floatation roadshow, financing’s answer to the Grand National. It’s not so much about finishing first, more about simply making it to the line.”<\/em><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s late May, and two Internet executives are mentally and physically preparing themselves for the businessman’s version of an Ironman competition. One is nervous, and the other is cocky as they get ready to embark on what, at the best of times, is a rocky, rigorous ordeal and what, in the current climate of stock market decline, seems downright masochistic. They are embarking on their companies’ IPO roadshow. They hope to encourage investment banks and the public to pour hundreds of millions of pounds into their fledgling operations.<\/p>\n

But it’s not clear whether either will make it to the end. John Palmer, a veteran of similar fundraising quests, projects an air of confidence. \u2018It\u2019s a lot of fun, it\u2019s invigorating,\u2019 he says as he gets ready to float collaborative buying Web site Letsbuyit.com, of which he is chief executive. He will soon be in for a surprise; this is a race where being a favourite does not guarantee a place among the finishers.<\/p>\n

Newcomer Simon Franks is perched on a sofa in a laid-back office near Covent Garden in London. But despite his Soho-style black suit and tie with dark blue shirt, he looks tense and a little haggard as he answers (or dodges) questions from journalists. \u2018I\u2019m not going to tell you how it works,\u2019 he says in response to one.<\/p>\n

But he is clearly nervous and when Business 2.0<\/em> asks him ‘What is all this like?’ he responds with total conviction. \u2018It\u2019s horrible,\u2019 he admits. Franks, the chief executive of video-on-demand firm Filmgroup plc, is readying himself to ask Europe\u2019s financiers for a cool \u00a381 million. Place your bets for the floatation roadshow, financing\u2019s answer to the Grand National. It\u2019s not so much about coming first, more about simply making it to the line.<\/p>\n

Have you ever applied for a mortgage? Have you had the bank staff nose around your personal life, knowing you must answer all their questions, however impertinent? Multiply that by a thousand, add on three zeroes, and you have the pre-floatation roadshow, a gruelling event that tears a company’s top two or three managers away from daily business to submit themselves to cross-examination by financial institutions.<\/p>\n

Both Filmgroup\u2019s Franks, and John Palmer are preparing to start this tour in difficult conditions, as technology indices plummet, and several potential floatations have already withdrawn from the race. A rival of Filmgroup, Yes TV, will succumb a few days after Franks\u2019 expression of horror.<\/p>\n

But Letsbuyit.com\u2019s Palmer is champing at the bit, his confidence buoyed by his past experience in raising private placement funds for Letsbuyit. \u2018I like to sell, and it\u2019s selling at its best,\u2019 he says. \u2018You\u2019re selling the concept, the company, that it\u2019s a worthwhile investment.\u2019 His eight-day tour starts in Frankfurt, on whose Neuer Markt exchange Letsbuyit will float. It then takes in the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and France (in a single day) and Scandinavia. \u2018I\u2019ll be doing about eight presentations a day,\u2019 he says. \u2018Analysts can ask very blunt questions. Sometimes you have to get aggressive back.\u2019 So doubtless he will want to go and collapse during the middle weekend? \u2018Actually, I\u2019m going to the Grand Prix in Monaco,\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n

Starter\u2019s orders<\/strong><\/p>\n

If the experience of other Net companies counts, then Palmer and Frank can expect, among other things, a costly ordeal. The average pre-floatation roadshow for a substantial UK-based company lasts about two weeks, taking in financial centres across Europe and often a few in the United States. A very thorough roadshow would take 10% of the floatation\u2019s costs, according to Andrew Edmond, head of global equity syndicate at merchant bank Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. These total costs start at \u00a375,000, he adds, and can rise to several millions. Jim Rose, chief executive of pan-European auction site QXL.com, reckons he spent \u2018a low six-figure dollar sum,\u2019 on a two-week tour trans-Atlantic last autumn. Floatation costs at T-Online, the Deutsche Telekom-controlled Internet service firm, accounted for most of a \u00a313.7 million pound loss in the first quarter.<\/p>\n

It is possible to launch the shares for less, if you restrict the promotion to one financial centre. The three top executives of estate-agency site Easier.co.uk spent the best part of two weeks at the Stakis hotel in Islington prior to listing on London\u2019s Alternative Investment Market in February, meeting 21 institutions. Joint chief executive Steve Butcher reckons they spent just a few thousand pounds on the roadshow, such as it was. \u2018The only costs were our own board and lodging costs,\u2019 he says. \u2018Oh, and taxi fares.\u2019<\/p>\n

Most roadshows star three of the company\u2019s managers, normally the chief executive, the finance director and the chairman or chief operating officer. The aim is to deliver three punchy presentations lasting half an hour in total, leaving the rest of the standard hour slot for questions from the financiers. Best not ask for more. \u2018Institutions are fairly compartmentalised with their day,\u2019 explains Edmond, at Dresdner Kleinwort.<\/p>\n

Like most wannabe sporting heroes, the aspiring floatee has to go through some tough training. Edmond puts firms he is preparing for the roadshow through a couple of days of training, including getting his own bank\u2019s sales staff to give the management team some practice. \u2018We run through the rigorous questioning they will experience, and sometimes it is a culture shock,\u2019 he says. \u2018You can get the chief executive faced by a teenage scribbler questioning his whole strategy.’<\/p>\n

Whistlestop<\/strong><\/p>\n

And they\u2019re off. QXL\u2019s Jim Rose, who launched stock simultaneously on both the London and Nasdaq exchanges last October, is slightly hazy about how many times he presented the company\u2019s story \u2013 \u2018I think we did 76 or 83\u2019 \u2013 but he remembers visiting London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paris, Geneva, Zurich and Frankfurt. Oh, then Milan, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Denver and San Francisco. In two weeks. \u2018We probably got up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning, and worked until 11 at night,\u2019 Rose says. \u2018It\u2019s an exhausting, kind of a strange feeling,\u2019 he adds. \u2018If you thought about it, you would never do it. But it is an exhilarating, once-in-a-lifetime experience.\u2019<\/p>\n

Brian Gunn is chief executive of ecommerce consultancy Nettec, now listed on the London Stock Exchange. \u2018We floated on April 10, but all the pain was in March,\u2019 he says, with the word \u2018pain\u2019 in underlined and in italics. \u2018We did Paris in the morning, flew to Frankfurt and Zurich in the afternoon, flew to Milan, flew back to London.\u2019 He has to think about the order. \u2018It should be indelibly printed on my mind,\u2019 he says. The grand tour also included Stockholm, Amsterdam, Dublin, Edinburgh, London, Boston and New York, an itinerary dictated by Nettec\u2019s bank for the transaction, Salomon Smith Barney.<\/p>\n

Gunn describes an oxymoronic mix of sensations: \u2018It was as strange situation, as it was both tiring and stimulating.\u2019 The schedule didn\u2019t leave much time for relaxation: \u2018You don\u2019t get to see the sites of Paris or Zurich,\u2019 he says. Instead, Gunn, his chairman Jeremy White and finance director Fraser Park \u2013 \u2018We were the three musketeers, I\u2019m the good-looking one,\u2019 comments Gunn \u2013 had to improvise their own style of tourism to help them keep their bearings.<\/p>\n

\u2018What interested me was the different style of buildings,\u2019 he says. \u2018In London, there is a lot of marble palaces,\u2019 adding that the same is true of Paris. \u2018In the Netherlands, it\u2019s very businesslike \u2013 the Dutch are quite parsimonious. The buildings are nice and large, but not particularly ostentatious.\u2019<\/p>\n

And there are other ways to place yourself \u2013 just listen to the bank staff. \u2018The Germans are very thorough and formal,\u2019 says Gunn. \u2018The Swedes are very knowledgeable about the Internet. The French are fairly inscrutable, as per normal.\u2019 Gunn, a Scot, demurs from offering an opinion on London\u2019s financiers. Other tour veterans say there is little difference between the financial centres. \u2018They are all blue-chip institutions,\u2019 says QXL\u2019s Rose. The biggest difference for him was adjusting his presentation between the countries where QXL had launched, and where it had not.<\/p>\n

Rose can offer an insight into another tension-reliever. \u2018You have some jokes, making fun of people\u2019s personal habits,\u2019 he says. One of the firm\u2019s advisers had told them that the first rule of financing is that a company should get money when it can, not when it wants to. \u2018We changed that to, the first rule of the roadshow is to go to the bathroom when you can, not when you have to. It\u2019s stupid, but it\u2019s pretty quickly appropriate.’.<\/p>\n

Rose says one of the toughest things is keeping the firm running in the absence of most of the top managers. \u2018We all had mobile phones, and between meetings we would have a few minutes on them. We\u2019d be dealing with the office late at night and early in the morning.\u2019<\/p>\n

All the roadshow veterans say how much confidence they had in those they left behind \u2013 they needed it. Online travel agency Lastminute.com\u2019s co-founders, Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, must have it in spades \u2013 executive vice-president Charles McKee joined from Virgin Atlantic all of three days before they left for their 10-day floatation roadshow. The firm clearly applies its just-in-time sales technique to recruitment too. McKee effectively started work for Lastminute while holding down the job at Virgin Atlantic. \u2018I spent a lot of time late at night and on Sundays over here, going through checklists,\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n

He thinks the roadshow can be a positive experience for those left behind: \u2018It\u2019s an opportunity for the birds to fly out of the nest,\u2019 he says. But you can\u2019t see the boss checking your work. \u2018Martha and Brent would jump on the site in the morning from their hotel, look around, then say \u201cThis page looks a bit funny\u201d,\u2019 McKee recalls.<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s in the nature of any founder \u2013 there is a very long umbilical cord to that which you have given life.’<\/p>\n

The purse<\/strong><\/p>\n

For riders who complete the course, there\u2019s a series of generous prizes. The company gets its big pay-day \u2013 or at least it used to (the share price for many recently public companies, like Lastminute, has been diving below their initial float level). The existing shareholders \u2013 probably including the roadshow participants \u2013 suddenly find out how much those shares are really worth. Then, the world notices they exist, financial journalists being notorious for ignoring companies that don\u2019t have share prices and annual general meetings as an aide-memoire to their existence.<\/p>\n

Least important but possibly most enjoyable, the chief executive gets to see the shares being traded \u2013 I list, therefore I am. If the company is floating on the New York Stock Exchange, one of the few bourses left with a trading floor, it throws a party. In 1998, ‘predictable’ German software firm SAP, one of the few tech stocks to list in New York, dumped a load of sand and beach balls on Wall Street and booking a band to perform sundry beach-oriented numbers to passing masters of the universe. Chief executives don\u2019t have to go these lengths \u2013 and fortunately for the denizens of Wall Street, most don\u2019t \u2013 but at least at the New York Stock Exchange they can see the first trade taking place. The problem is that tech firms mostly use exchanges where everything happens over the networks. So the boss goes to where the action happens \u2013 a bank\u2019s trading floor. These are basically over-equipped call centres, with worse-behaved and very slightly better-paid operators.<\/p>\n

They have lots of phones, lots of screens and big dot-matrix price boards. On October 7 last year, Jim Rose went to the Credit Suisse First Boston call centre\/trading floor, at the Canary Wharf complex in London\u2019s Docklands. QXL launched its shares at 195p on London, and $16.15 for the Nasdaq-listed American Depositary Receipts \u2013 a device that allows US citizens to trade foreign shares through US markets (the apparently odd exchange rate is due to each ADR containing five London shares).<\/p>\n

It was a volatile market, as usual, and QXL rose by 18 percent on its 1:30pm opening. Then it dropped back to 190p, before climbing back to 207p. \u2018It\u2019s amazing,\u2019 Rose recalls. \u2018All the things you have put together for a year and a half\u2026 you don\u2019t know what to expect. It\u2019s definitely a buzz, to see how people are voting.\u2019 Because that\u2019s what it is \u2013 the race\u2019s result is decided by a poll of the crowd, which starts now and continues indefinitely.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a tough job, but it\u2019s got to be done. So how do veterans reckon the roadshow can be made more bearable? \u2018I think you can gauge investor\u2019s interest by the quality of the questions,\u2019 says Nettec\u2019s Brian Gunn. However, don\u2019t expect any certainty. \u2018We always asked if they were\u00a0 going to buy the stock, but they were very polite and didn\u2019t give too much away.\u2019<\/p>\n

What about the current market downturn? \u2018If the business opportunity is a solid opportunity, I\u2019m sure the City will be receptive,\u2019 says Steve Butcher, at Easier. \u2018If there is a difficulty, I suspect a number of institutional managers may say they won\u2019t invest until the market calms down.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Be mentally prepared for the worst,\u2019 advises QXL\u2019s Rose. \u2018The whole procedure is like running a marathon, not a hundred-yard dash. It\u2019s tremendously late nights for months before. Definitely, pace yourself.\u2019<\/p>\n

Rose adds: \u2018I used to play American football. You would play and work hard, do two training sessions a day. This is very much like playing a season. You find out who has got stamina.\u2019<\/p>\n

Gunn has some final tips. \u2018Sometimes a change of suits is important, and make sure you have the right laundry in the right city \u2013 a couple of times we almost caught up with our bags. But enjoy it \u2013 it\u2019s part and parcel of taking the company public. I wouldn\u2019t have missed it for the world.\u2019<\/p>\n

One week later, Business 2.0<\/em> calls Letsbuyit.com\u2019s John Palmer, in Frankfurt for the first day of his roadshow, expecting to hit his voicemail. He answers. He must be in between presentations.<\/p>\n

\u2018Have you seen the news?\u2019 he asks. \u2018We had a board meeting at 10pm last night. We\u2019ve delayed. It\u2019s a tough market, just horrible market conditions.\u2019 That means the whole thing \u2013 the tour, the probing questions, the long days, the triumphant first trade, the millions of euros \u2013 is suspended. Letsbuyit.com has fallen at the first, just because the going was too soft. The firm will now look for savings throughout its business, and may have to cut jobs, while seeking an injection of private funds.<\/p>\n

\u2018You gear yourself up for these things,\u2019 Palmer says, sounding rather gutted. \u2018It\u2019s a let-down. You prep yourself to get into the excitement, into a strong selling position, then the rug is pulled from under you.\u2019<\/p>\n

He\u2019s still in Frankfurt. \u2018There\u2019s never spare time. We\u2019ll be focusing on improving our business,\u2019 he says. And when will he try again? \u2018You really can\u2019t tell, because it\u2019s dependent on the market. It\u2019s 5% up today, it could be down tomorrow.\u2019<\/p>\n

‘Oh, are you still going to the Monaco Grand Prix this weekend?’<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m not sure now,\u2019 Palmer replies. For now, racing is cancelled, at least for Palmer. As Business 2.0 went to press, Filmgroup was pressing ahead with its roadshow. Perhaps shaky nerves are a requirement on the combative IPO trail.<\/p>\n

(Note: Filmgroup dropped its floatation days after I filed. Letsbuyit eventually returned to the markets and floated successfully a couple of months later, but for much less than it had originally planned.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright SA Mathieson 2000<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First published in Business 2.0 magazine (UK), July 2000 “Place your bets for the floatation roadshow, financing’s answer to the Grand National. It’s not so much about finishing first, more about simply making it to the line.” It’s late May, and two Internet executives are mentally and physically preparing themselves for the businessman’s version of … Continue reading “New York, London, Paris, Munich: Fear and loathing on the IPO trail”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-it"],"yoast_head":"\nNew York, London, Paris, Munich: Fear and loathing on the IPO trail<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Article for Business 2.0 on how British companies Letsbuyit.com, Filmgroup plc, Easier.co.uk, QXL and Nettec rushed towards IPOs during the dot com bubble\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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