Chris Hulatt was an aspiring fund manager within the graduate program at Mercury Asset Management (now Merrill) when he met Simon Rogerson and Guy Myles. At the turn of the millennium, the trio founded the Octopus Group, the parent company of six financial and energy corporations.
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that three twenty-somethings founded the extremely successful company on a whim. But that is exactly what happened – with the assistance of what they now call the “Terminator gene.”
“Everyone thought we were totally crazy,” Hulatt recalls of the moment he and his co-founders dropped out of the graduate program to affix Octopus Investments (the primary of six divisions of the Octopus Group, which incorporates British energy giant Octopus Energy). found.
They did not have a giant marketing strategy or any investors.
“We thought, why don’t we dare to start our own fund management company? You know, this is such a rash behavior that people sometimes decide to do.”
At 23, Hulatt had only been working for 2 and a half years. But only a transient glimpse into the company world was enough to persuade him to place every little thing (each physical and each penny of his $25,000 in savings) into the success of Octopus Investments.
“We didn’t want to take a traditional job again.”
Hulatt never needed to return to the 9-to-5 routine for one more employer. He continues to be co-director of the Octopus Group, which now employs over 2,500 people and serves 2.5 million customers.
According to the corporate, where all of it began, Octopus Investments now manages greater than $16.7 billion on behalf of its clients.
More than 70% of those funds goal investments that combat climate change, improve people’s quality of life and combat inequality.
Pick up the phone and begin dialing
With no salary to fall back on, Octopus’ Hulatt and his co-founders needed to quickly find investors for the corporate or else they might must return to their old jobs with their tails between their legs.
They arrange camp within the front room of Hulatt’s London apartment, with a trusty copy of the Yellow Pages, a landline telephone and “an old laptop that was about an inch thick.”
“We spent much of 2000 calling thousands of people to convince them to invest in this startup fund management company that they had never heard of, run by three very young people who weren’t exactly have a long experience in the financial industry.” Hulatt says. “It was super hard.”
“One person held up his phone and said, ‘Listen to this, that is the sound of my paper shredder destroying your enterprise plan – don’t ever call me again.’
“It would have been all too easy, after spending a month or two trying to convince people to invest in us, to just give up and assume we weren’t going anywhere,” he adds – but they didn’t .
As Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort would say: They picked up the phone and kept dialing.
“It took a very, very long time (most of 2000), but we really wanted to try and get the business up and running.”
By the top of the yr, after many nos, the young founders had convinced 85 people to speculate around $2 million in Octopus Investments.
It’s a lesson in the facility of small successes: It wasn’t a novel idea, a powerful presentation that won over a serious VC firm, and never even a stroke of luck that put Octopus Investment on the trail to the success it has today.
“We just stuck with it. It’s this stubborn refusal to give in – we call it the “Terminator gene” – that has been so vital to us,” advises aspiring entrepreneurs.
“You just have to be totally persistent, believe in yourself completely and never give up.”
