Ian FishwickTranscription
Ian Fishwick
Commercial Director, Innopsis
Ian is the Commercial Director at Innopsis.
Ian has over 29 years experience as Managing Director or Chief Executive of various technology companies in the UK. Ian has also completed nearly 40 telecom mergers and acquisitions in his career.
In November 2016 Ian had the honour of being appointed to the Cabinet Office SME Panel.
In January 2019 Ian moved from Chief Executive Officer to Chairmain of AdEPT Technology Group plc.
Ian lives with his family in Tunbridge Wells
Intro:
Around three years ago, I took my family to a Jamie’s restaurant for a celebration meal. The meal itself was unremarkable, the food was nothing special. The only element that we remembered was that we paid £12 for 8 strips of anchovy. Our expectation was for a great experience with simple, but delicious food. The deliverable was unremarkable food at an inflated price. We never returned.
This week, I was surprised to hear that Jamie Oliver claiming that the reason why the Jamie chain of restaurants failed was all down to Brexit. Whilst there may be some small element relating to the on-off Brexit dates, the main reason in my mind is that the deliverables were not matched by the expectation and thus customers perceived the restaurants as poor value.
The Jamie’s restaurant chain failure blamed on Brexit follows as series of stories in the media of how Brexit either provides a world of opportunity or will provide the destruction of our way of life. What the truth of the matter is, will or will not be known in the future. This leads into this podcast episode regarding the impact, or not, of Brexit on technology businesses given by Ian Fishwick.
Ian:
I was recently asked to give a speech at Child & Co Bank, which is one of these small historic banks owned by the RBS NatWest. The event was co-organised by Evolution Capital, and the audience were owners of technology businesses. Having bought over 25 tech companies, they wanted my view on what the impact of Brexit would be on the appetite for UK technology acquisitions. I tend to speak from bullet points, so this is a broad summary of what I said. I hope you find it useful.
I was a managing director or chief executive for 29 years. I finally became a part-time chairman at the end of 2018. I had the honour of reporting 29 consecutive years of rising EBITDA. What is the relevance of that, apart from the fact that those three decades saw massive changes in technology? I'm a great believer in the law of unintended consequences, and there are many impacts of technology that I didn't expect.
My latest surprise is that my most recently dialled numbers tells me that my new best friend isn't actually a person. It's an electronic gate. This is probably gives you a clue about the amount of online shopping in my household. I've just finished reading Nine Crises by William Keegan, the long-time economics editor of The Observer. He looked back over his 50 years as an economics journalist, and identified nine crises or periods of economic uncertainty over the last 50 years.
