#29 Luke Johnson, entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify  In his 20s, Luke Johnson led the acquisition of Pizza Express and as chairman, helped it become the UK’s leading pizza brand. He has since established and helped develop household names, Strada, Giraffe, the Ivy, Zoggs and Integrated Dental Holdings, as part of his family office vehicle, Risk Capital Partners. He is a successful newspaper columnist, author, former chairman of the Royal Society of Arts, and current Chairman of The Institute of Cancer Research. In our exclusive podcast, Luke provides a critique of private equity, a critique of public markets, a critique of lockdowns and some of the most sensible advice we’ve heard yet about how businesses should be run in this brave new world. Uncorrected transcript\some inaudible parts Ross Butler: You’re listening to a Fund Shack, private chat number 29. Welcome to Fund Shack. I’m Ross Butler, and today I’m here with Luke Johnson, a well known entrepreneur, businessman, philanthropist, and private investor, Luke. Welcome. And I have to say thanks so much for coming to meet us physically, because this is the first time we’ve been back in the studio 18 months and personally I think it makes a real difference. Nice to see. I was looking over your bio in preparation for this. And I had to say, and I don’t say this just a flatter you, but I was amazed at the breadth of your undertakings and your achievements. So you’ve got obviously a varied portfolio. And within that I recognized about three quarters of the businesses. Now you do consumers, so maybe that’s not so surprising, but that leap out of me, then you’ve been a successful newspaper columnist over years, if not decades. And I know that that’s not easy to sustain and you’ve been very active on the philanthropic side. You’ve publish books. This is quite a productive repertoire. Now you only get one life, so it obviously doesn’t seem strange to you, but why do you think it is that you’ve managed to be so productive across so many relatively varied domains? Luke Johnson: Well, I think I’ve always liked to be busy and I have a father who has had an extremely long career and although he stuck to the one career of being a writer, a journalist and a historian, he, he was incredibly productive and wrote many, many millions of words and published 40 books and so forth. So I think he gave me a good example to follow as a role model. And you know, to a degree, I think life is what you make of it. And if you have the energy, there are always opportunities. I think given that most of us perhaps we’ll live to, you know, be in our eighties. That means we might well have a 50 year working career. And it seems to me, therefore that we should all plan to have at least two different careers and possibly more I’ve always been interested in people who’ve done a variety of things rather than just one profession and stuck to that their whole working life and then retired. None of that interests me in the slightest. Ross Butler: It rather goes against the grain these days, cause everyone wants to specialize to such a great degree. And if you’re seen to be your specialist in more than one area you’re seen as an amateur in at least one of those, Luke Johnson: Well, there may be some truth in there. And I think I could be accused of being a [INAUDIBLE] at some things in life. And you know, I don’t deny that if you diversify, then you may have less depth and you know, there are advantages to focus and specialization, particularly in the modern complicated world. However, the point you made at the beginning is we only have one life. It’s important to keep interested and lively. I think for example, take philanthropy. I’ve served on the boards of a number of different charities and nonprofits over the last few decades. And one of the great advantages of that is I think it teaches you things and you meet people that if you are only doing business, you wouldn’t. So I would actually encourage all successful people in sectors like private equity or venture capital to seriously consider whatever age, but say in their forties, the idea of becoming a trustee of a school or hospital or some other nonprofit, because I think it broadens your horizons. And that should be partly what life’s about. I think there is a risk if you only do one thing, you get dull and you repeat yourself and the needs to be more to it than that. I think. Ross Butler: Yeah. investing itself is very nature. Kind of it’s, you’ve gotta have a broad outlook on life because you know, you’re looking at different sectors. You are not the specialist, you’re not the, in most cases, the executive, the doer, you’ve gotta stand above that. So that will kind of make that, that probably adds to your ability to be a successful investor. Luke Johnson: Maybe I think one of the challenges for private equity is that although they pretend to themselves, they aren’t the specialist in terms of how to run a business or a particular industry. I’ve sat on boards with private executives who are there telling the managers how to run the business and making decisions that I think should be delegated to the executives who are full-time in that business. And the arrogance sometimes are private equity executives in thinking they know best let’s them down. I think there are some areas where private very good, you know, buying and selling for example, raising finance, they’re pretty good at that. Some of them are pretty good at picking talent but above and beyond that, you know, knowing markets, knowing competitors, you know, understanding the intricacies of the technologies that they’re working with, really being able to spot the best executives at the operational level to work with. Mm not so sure Ross Butler: I’m sure you’re right. And I actually, I think I do agree with you, but to play devil’s advocate slightly, if it didn’t work, would they, would they do it? It’s certainly the trend is for greater activism and certainly the institutional investment community buys the idea of interventionists private equity firms. So presumably they look at the data and think, well, those that are a bit more muscular in their approach with executives do better. There must be some cause in effect, Luke Johnson: There probably is if they’re the right private equity firm and as you well know, you know, it depends which quartile of a PE house you are talking about. I think we’re all humans and I think private equity investors have as much ego as anyone. And, you know, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, once they’ve developed a certain quantity of wealth what’s next, and obviously what’s next is some degree of status. And that would mean them adding value and making a difference and being important in the ownership so that the value accretion is partly thanks to them. Now, I would normally accept that the financial engineering aspects of deals are probably down to the PE house. I have they bought it on a low, multiple, can they sell it on a high, multiple, have they added the right amount of lever to goose the returns? Luke Johnson: Have they made a clever bet in the first place? All those things of course are down to them, but, above and beyond that, you know, quite often I think, you know, it’s debatable whether they really make a difference. Now, I think there are some very good private equity investors. And I, I would say on average, you know, successful private equity investors are clever people. And, you know, obviously if they succeed and they, you know, get backing from limited partners and, and show good returns, then they can’t be that thick. However, it’s amazing what lever in a rising market can do. Luke Johnson: And, you know, generally speaking over the last two decades, certainly, you know, it’s been a pretty good game to play. I would say private equity in terms of accumulating returns for investors and indeed enriching private equity investors. I think, and I’m not talking about myself so much, cause I’m not really an institutional private equity investor or executive, but I think it’s as good a career as one could pursue, if, you know, you want to get rich in a pretty safe way because you are playing with other people’s money to a very large degree and you know, you can write very big checks. And so if you get your bets right, then you do extremely well. And to a large degree you know heads say wind tails, other people lose. So, you know, private equity as a career has proved a pretty good bet. And I suspect it will continue some time because you know, there are a lot of organizations raising big funds and there’s a lot of parcelling which to a degree, you know, is self-fulfilling Ross Butler: So, you’ve packaged yourself up to some degree as one of those people, because yes, you are not an institutional, but you’ve got risk capital partners. You could have just been Luke Johnson, the big wealthy investor, but for some reason you see it as useful to be seen as part of that community. Luke Johnson: Well, I think probably a lot of people prefer to deal with a brand, an organization rather than an individual. I think an individual is more egotistical inevitably. I think when we set up risk capital partners over 20 years ago the sort of private office was much less common, I guess, if one were doing it now, you know, that’s what I would do. Also. I have more money now than I had 20 years ago. In the meantime, we also did raise a fund with limited partners. And you know, it’s say for one, an investment is now spent and we’re returning funds and it will show a good return to our LPs. And I think it’s been a success, but I didn’t wanna do another one. The point about a fund of course, is it’s a very, very long term commitment. Luke Johnson: It’s really a 10 year commitment from all the partners. And indeed obviously the limited partners. So it’s a very unusual structure in terms of most jobs, if you like. And, and it, it really is a partnership arrangement rather than employment arrangement and all the longevity and loyalty required that, that displays. And indeed, I think if you look at the history of most PE houses that have fallen apart more often than not, I would say it’s cause the partners fell out, you know, and that may have been because they made some bad investments, but quite often it’s literally personality clashes leading to the, you know, founding partners of the organization, not getting on etc. And that’s what leads the LPs to then dessert them. But I’m not in denial about the fact it’s a lucrative and on some levels successful structuring of buying assets, because I think there will always be the advantage they have over say, public companies in private equity are virtually, always willing to buy and sell. Luke Johnson: Every asset is for sale. And they are always willing to buy a new asset. Public companies are slaves to the cycles of the stock market. And very often in my experience, public companies are forced to sell at the bottom and buy at the top. And it astounds me how often I come across situations where there’s a public company in a particular sector that will know that industry very well and have huge synergistic advantages of making a strategic acquisition, but for a variety of reasons, they’re too slow or it’s at the bottom of the market or whatever. They can’t make the acquisition private equity, which doesn’t know the industry as well. And doesn’t have any synergistic benefits makes the acquisition and then flips it to the industrial buyer a few years later at a huge profit. And, you know, you wonder why does the public market always end up paying more? And I guess it’s because private equity are ultimately really M [INAUDIBLE] specialists, all they do is buy and sell in a sense. And that’s what they focus on. They’re small and flexible and they have this great timing advantage, which really plays to their strength. Ross Butler: I agree with you. I think it’s it’s one of those things and there isn’t a problem with it. As long as the, those rewards are accessible to as many people as possible. One of the problems is that anyone can invest in the public markets, but it’s, it’s increasingly easy to invest in private equity vehicles, but it’s still pretty difficult for your average job. Luke Johnson: Yeah. And of course, as we know, private equity still only represents a tiny proportion of the overall savings and pensions money out there. And as a proportion of overall institutional individual portfolios, it is growing, but it’s still, I would imagine worldwide, you know, under 10% across most diversified forms of savings. And it, it is gonna grow structurally more allocation is gonna be devoted towards private investments once or another, be it VC or PE. That’s probably a good thing. I’m not surprised even though, you know, two and 20 relative to public market management fees is I, the level of attention required investing in private companies is a great deal, more intense. So, you know, I would argue it’s, it’s justified to an extent and the returns are there. And another area where I think private markets have an advantage is they are more willing to put higher levels of debt into investments. Generally, my experience public company fund managers, don’t generally like to invest in companies that have 3, 4, 5 turns of [INAUDIBLE], senior debt. Whereas many PE houses are perfectly comfortable with that. Indeed. They would consider that a standard lever of leverage for a normal buyout. So, you know, that financial engineering in rising markets and growing businesses, compounds returns. Yeah. And  it’s an another advantage that PE has over public markets. So Ross Butler: Just at this point, can we step back to some of our international listeners might be wondering where have you come from, if you are not a mainstream private equity guy, could you give us a quick potted history, maybe looking, starting with, well, wherever you like, but particularly like Peter express as a signature deal. Luke Johnson: Sure. Okay. So in my late twenties I, and a, a group of partners took control of a private business called pizza express. We merged it with a a group of franchise restaurants, pizza expresses, arguably the leading pizza chain in the UK. It’s been going since 1965. We took control of that in 62, 63. We took it public. Ross Butler: Wasn’t it ’82? Luke Johnson: No, ’92, ‘93. Ross Butler: Sorry. Okay. Sorry, Luke Johnson: Go. I’d only just graduated from university in ‘82. Ross Butler: You said ‘62, so yeah, you’re Right. Luke Johnson: Yeah. ’65. It was founded. ’92, ’93 we took control of it. We took it public, and it was very successful. And I was chairman of that during the nineties and, the chairs rose from 40p to eight pounds more. And, off the back of that, I then started doing more deals. It initially mainly public company deals. And then through the later nineties and into the two