ENTREPRENEUR Listening to Ian Richardson detail the latest plans for his new company, you would be hard pushed to remember that entrepreneurialism is not actually in his blood, and that in fact up until he entered his fifth decade he was quite content to remain as one of Leeds’ top corporate lawyers. This latest venture is actually the 51-year-old’s second go at building up a business, after he and Dr Magdy Ishak sold Covenant Healthcare in a £170m deal in 2005. You could even call it a third go, if you count a casual acquisition he made in between the two to help out a York-based company that was in trouble. Like Covenant, the new business, SkinCity, is very much geared at the broad healthcare market, only this time it’s an umbrella company focusing on preventive medicine and patient wellbeing. “Preventative medicine and stress management are two areas that we feel will be incredibly important in years to come,” he says. The company’s first acquisition was Aromatherapy Associates, a London based spa and aromatherapy products provider, at the end of 2009. But late last year it came back to Richardson’s Leeds roots by buying two companies which jointly run the Leeds Screening Centre. The centre has capitalised on the city’s considerable healthcare expertise by offering, among services, advanced screening for Down’s syndrome in foetuses, and tests for pre-eclampsia. It was previously jointly owned by the Leeds Ultrasound Screening Service (LUSS), founded by Gerald Mason, a consultant in feto-maternal medicine at Leeds General Infirmary, and Genome, founded by Professor Howard Cuckle from Columbia University in the US who is also emeritus professor at the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds. Both men retain a stake in the new business. “The centre has developed an extremely accurate test for Downs,” says Richardson. “That is the key test that they do. I couldn’t explain it completely myself, and you would need Howard to go through statistics, but the test they do is significantly more accurate than what is currently available.” The services provided will of course be private, but Richardson disputes any idea that the
BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11
SPRING 11
The NHS has to go more towards prevention. The private sector working with the NHS can be extremely effective
growth of such companies could lead to a two-tier NHS, with only the richer patient being able to afford the kinds of services that the screening centre provides. “If it is going to keep a lid on its costs the NHS has to go more towards more prevention,” he says. “In fact, the private sector working with the NHS can be extremely effective.” Nor does have any truck with the view – as espoused by some disability campaigners – that the kind of genetic and pre-birth screening his company is looking to provide is a sinister development in that it could eventually lead to people trying to screen out all perceived abnormalities to create the perfect human being. “I don’t think that’s a totally silly argument,” he says, “but nobody would want to move towards perfect human being. Genetics is however going to allow us to be given far more information about living a life in a way that will give it a maximum possible span. Within 20 to 30 years somebody coming into adulthood will have their own personal healthcare mapped out. So, if you are susceptible to heart disease you will have a different lifestyle from someone who is not genetically predisposed to it. “This is still very young technology. Science has given us an incredible asset, and I don’t think people have worked out how to use it. But, with an ageing population and increasing costs, we have to move towards preventive rather than reactive medicine.”
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He has hopes that SkinCity will grow quickly. He thinks it should make around £10m in turnover this year. “Aromatherapy Associates is looking to go into retail with individual shops,” he says. “The genetic business is something we want to develop and extend. We are keen to open in other locations.” As with all umbrella set-ups, he will eventually get some advantages from cross-selling between the two businesses. “But we have bought two businesses in less than two months,” he says, “so we need to bed them down.” That won’t just involve him; Richardson is only interested in buying businesses which have a day-to-day general management team he can rely on. But even if things should not go totally to plan, he has experience of dealing with a troubled business as well. In 2007, not long after he had finished his earn-out period and only eight months into what was supposed to be a retirement, he bought York-based travel company Travelscope out of administration and installed Jonathan Wackett – or “Wacko” as he calls him – as managing director. Wackett was a former head of corporate finance in Europe for Pricewaterhouse Coopers, someone Richardson had done many a deal with during his time as a corporate lawyer in Leeds in the 1990s. “I had known the former owner of Travelscope since I was seven and we were both at school in Pocklington,” he says. “I knew the business, and got a call from a couple of the managers there. They wanted to know if I could buy certain assets. They were having difficulty selling the business as a whole to a third party because of data issues. A lot of customers were on databases that had come to them through reader offers with newspapers, so it was not an easy situation in terms of intellectual property. “I decided to back it, and the price was very low,” he says. “I couldn’t turn it down. Wacko was a very well-known guy in corporate finance, very gifted. He’s a bit older than me and had pretty much semi-retired. But he is a guy I have utmost respect for. He has some equity interest in it, and we have made a couple of acquisitions. It will probably turn over between £10m and £11m.”