Interview
JTC’s shared ownership model has been at the heart of the firm’s 30-year growth story, which has seen it go through owner management, private equity backing and, most recently, a London listing. Now, the approach has earned it case study status on Harvard Business School’s MBA course. CEO Nigel Le Quesne is, quite rightly, feeling rather proud Words: Eila Madden Pictures: Glen Perotte
What impact has that ownership model had on the business – and has the model been affected by JTC going public in March 2018? Everybody who works for JTC remains an owner of the business and, as a listed business, we have an internal key performance indicator of trying to keep that ownership at around 25% of the total share capital. I think the model creates a bond that is different from a normal employer/ employee scenario. Everybody feels that they’re part of something. As a result, we
20 july/august 2019
never really see a nine-to-five mentality from our people, the principle being that we all own part of the business and we’re all in it together. We spend a lot of time making sure the model is meritocratic, so that everybody builds up the value they hold in the business over the period of time they’re with JTC, based on their performance and seniority. It’s been very successful – so much so that we’ve been recognised by Harvard Business School’s MBA course. They’ve chosen our business as being unique in how we’ve dealt with shared ownership and we’re being featured as a case study in the first semester of the next academic year. I also have the honour of taking part in the first couple of lectures in Boston. In a nutshell, what does JTC do? We’re a fund administration business and a trust company. We help individuals, families
we never really see a nine-to-five mentality from our people, the principle being that we all own part of the business and we’re all in it together
and institutions to administer, manage, grow and preserve wealth in a responsible and sustainable way. But, probably most important for me, we concentrate on client service excellence with an emphasis on surpassing expectations rather than just doing what’s required. On the institutional side of the business, we’re now a major global fund administrator with a wide range of clients – from first-time fund managers right up to some of the world’s largest institutions. This is across a range of asset classes, which includes private equity, real estate, infrastructure, renewable energy and, more recently, fintech. On the corporate side, we provide services to a number of multinationals. Included in that will be some employee benefit-type structures and we’ve used the expertise of running our own employee ownership schemes to help and advise others with that. And for clients that are individuals and families, we’ve become a sophisticated provider of services to family and private offices, acting for many as the manager of all their individual advisers. Some of those clients have been with us for over 25 years. Recently, you celebrated your first anniversary of being listed on London Stock Exchange. Why did you decide to go public? We had a really good relationship with our private equity backers at CBPE, but we’d come to a natural end of their target investment period. More importantly, we were probably growing beyond their capacity to support us, so it was time to look at a new stage in our development. There had been similar companies from our sector come to the market, both in the Netherlands and here in Jersey, so the understanding of the dynamics in our market had become more sophisticated among the investor community. But most
www.blglobal.co.uk
▼
What’s your background and how did you get to where you are now? I’m Jersey born and bred. At the start of my career, I spent a 10-year stint with the civil service here in Jersey. During that time, I qualified as a chartered secretary and joined PwC – that would have been in the late 1980s. And then a couple of years after that, I joined what is now called JTC as its fifth employee. It was there that I began to understand the dynamics and the potential of the trust sector. It was around that time that I experienced a challenging life event. I lost my first wife in 1996 and I think the grieving process added a little bit of strength to my character. I tried to channel that into something positive by focusing on creating and growing a different type of organisation from what was around at the time – that organisation eventually became what JTC is today. How did that manifest itself? In the late 1990s, I implemented a model where everybody was an owner of the business – we hear a lot about that today, but it wasn’t as common back in those days. It’s based on the fundamental tenet that if you allow people to share in the benefits of growing a successful business, the business itself will be stronger and the service provided to your clients will be better.