How We Can Help:

About us:

Mike Southon - Life Story


Photo - Mike SouthonI'm probably best known for being a weekly columnist in the FT every Saturday: My Business.

I'm also co-author with Chris West of best-selling business books 'The Beermat Entrepreneur', 'The Boardroom Entrepreneur', 'Sales on a Beermat 'and 'Finance on a Beermat'.

I’m also one of the UK’s top business speakers, a Fellow of the Professional Speakers Association.

You can find details of the books, my speaking activities and a ever-growing array of top-quality resources for entrepreneurs and growing businesses on this website, Beermat.biz.

I also sometimes randomly morph into Confused Disco Legend and 70s Fashion Guru Mike Fab-Gere. Details here: www.fabgere.com.

Here's the full story of how I got here:

Went to Papplewick School in Ascot (contemporary - Richard Curtis - whatever happened to him?) then to Wellington College in Crowthorne, where Chris West was my best friend - we met in 1967, outside the headmaster's study.

I had a relatively happy time, considering the unpleasant nature of British public school boarding in the 60s. My first housemaster was James Wort, who was definitely my first Mentor - a very lovely man, whose first words were "you should go down to work the theatre - you'd enjoy it".

I’ve been in show business one way or another the rest of my life.....thanks James!

I then went to Imperial College to read Mechanical Engineering, but got thrown out after one year for preferring to drink beer and chase women than go to lectures.

I then had a few lab-type posts, culminating in one of the best jobs I ever had, working for Tate & Lyle Research in Reading, developing detergent from sugar. I was particularly good at making washing powder....

About that time, Chris wangled me into an Oxford undergraduate Dixieland Jazz band called 'The Oxcentrics'. Chris and I were never at the university itself though Chris was at the Poly for a while.

The Oxcentrics was a complete hoot - Brideshead Revisited meets Spinal Tap - we did dozens of May Balls and I got into all sorts of scrapes.

My stage name in those days was 'Gorgeous Mike Vaseline', and I was singer/compére.

There’s an Oxcentrics web site: www.jpbowen.com/oxcentrics.

Chris and I also ran a mobile disco in the 70s called The Piglet Productions Roadshow with Mike Gould (who founded it) and Graham Michelli (another pal from school)

Around 1977 all my pals were leaving Oxford and I felt it time for a change of job. Fortunately, my second Mentor, Dr Mike Inkson, suggested going to Bradford University to read Chemical Engineering and Economics.

I can highly recommend going to University at the age of 24 - you have much more idea on what you really want to do, plus it was nice to drink cheap beer and chase teenage girls again....

I decided to do acting, but lack of any genuine talent meant I formed a smutty review company, which eventually contained local professionals (e.g. Ian Bleasdale, 'Josh' in Casualty).

We eventually toured 'a show wot I wrote' called 'The Perils of Arnold Hardstaff' every Fresher's' week for ten years, and did the Edinburgh Fringe a couple of times.

It was while doing theatre shows that I met Mike Banahan and Andy Rutter, who were the same age as me, but computer science lecturers at Bradford University. Mike was in charge of the technical production, Andy drove the van etc.

I scraped a 2:2 at Bradford, and then started working in the construction industry, building oil refineries, or, more specifically, wandering around with a clip-board while hard men did the actual work.

I eventually became site manager on a 150-person project, though it was rather like the upper class twit 23-year-old officer nominally in charge of a squadron of soldiers, who actually listen to the 40-year-old Sergeant Major for the important stuff, like not getting shot.

I had an excellent General Foreman - the only skills I had that he actually needed were the ability to read, write and add-up. He did the rest and his management style was most distinctive - fire someone the first thing in the morning to create the right attitude in the men. I learned a lot from him.

I'd probably still be there had not the bottom fallen out of the market and they got me out selling scaffolding. This made me miserable, as we had no added value whatever, and the only way I was going to get business was to bribe people. This is a skill I still haven't mastered, though I'm getting better at blackmail......

I was complaining about this to Mike Banahan, and he told me he and Andy had written a book about UNIX ('UNIX the Book'), and they were doing freelance training for a company conveniently situated over a sex cinema in Soho.

I blagged a sales job there and persuaded Mike Banahan to join. We would probably still be there had not another person joined, Pete Griffiths, the original Beermat Entrepreneur, who suggested we start our own company.

(Classic Beermat Entrepreneur quote at the time: "Why are we working for these morons....?")

I co-founded The Instruction Set in January 1984 and five years later we had 150 employees in the UK and USA (I co-founded an office in Boston with Rick Medlock), and a turnover of £7.5M.

We had no outside capital (sorry to any Venture Capitalists out there) - Andy Rutter and Pete's brother David Griffiths (a VP of Goldman Sachs) joined in the first year and 5 of us each had 20%

Eventually, we got an offer we couldn't refuse and sold the company in 1989 to Hoskyns (now Cap Gemini Ernst & Young).

If anyone out there is considering a trade sale, please ask me for advice. It was a very difficult time - as we say in the book, two weeks later I was depressed and wished I could give the money back. Well sort of.....

15 years later the Hoskyns/Instruction Set acquisition is now regarded as a model example, with many of my former employees still there, others senior executives/partners on big companies and some having started businesses more successful than The Instruction Set.

We just had a reunion and people flew over from the USA and Australia to be here, which makes me very proud of the company I co-founded.

I wish I could take credit for the excellent Human Resources processes which resulted in such warm nostalgia, but that was Pete and Dave. I was just out selling, which I finally learned how to do reasonably well.

Incidentally, my motto now is "Money in itself does not make you happy, but it does make misery a lot more comfortable".

We had a two year earn-out, so I left in 1991. I retired, and then came back three months later, bored. It was clearly time to have fun, so I decided to form another band.

I'd reformed The Oxcentrics with original clarinet player Oliver Weindling and Chris West on drums. We got some fabulous jazz players, mostly members of Loose Tubes, including Ashley Slater (Freakpower with Fat Boy Slim) on trombone, Mark Lockheart, John Eacott, Mark Bassey, Robin Aspland and occasionally Django Bates, Billy Jenkins and the Argüelles brothers.

We expanded the repertoire through swing, jump-jive to rock and roll and I realised my first love was sixties music, so I formed The Coffee Machine which swiftly migrated to Mike Fab-Gere and the Permissive Society.

I packed the band with top session musicians (people from Iron Maiden, and  Michael Schenker’s, John Entwistle’s and Mike Oldfield's bands) and from 1991 played every college in the country several times - one of the tours was sponsored by Sol Beer and Durex condoms - you can imagine what that was like....

I have two particularly good stories from those days - one involves a girl with a condom on stage at Bournemouth University another when I broke my ankle at Leeds University. I'll tell you over a beer.

The repertoire was rock classics: Beatles, Stones, Kinks etc..

By the way, one of the best Entertainments Managers on the circuit was at the University of London: Ricky Gervais. He was not at all like David Brent in those days, but had real star quality and the students clearly loved him.

After that I toured major regional  theatres with a show called 'Freak Out!', which also starred stunning David Bowie lookalike John Mainwaring from Jean Genie and often Marc Bolan lookalike Danielz from T-Rextasy.

When I was getting a bit fed up of touring, I began to listen seriously to requests from my chums for help with their start-ups.

Since then, I've worked on about 17 start-ups, some just helping out a mate for 6 months, others serious ventures that eventually went public (Micromuse, RiverSoft).

RiverSoft was a real experience - much of the book is based on what I learned there, especially about my current Mentor, Sir Campbell Fraser, who was chairman.

The key section in the book about Mentoring is based on him. Every bit of advice he's ever given me has been excellent, including the decision to try and get the book published.

Some of the start-ups I've worked on are still going and some have gone bust - I learned the most from the latter...

All the while I've been a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School, and the talks gradually migrated from 'Open Systems Technology' to 'All My Horror Stories About Start-Ups'.

Another Mentor, Martin Rich at Cass, suggested I write a book, but I did the sensible thing and found a proper author, my old school chum Chris West, who in the interim had published travel and self-help books, plus a stunning set of murder mysteries set in modern China.

He turned my insane ramblings and weird life experiences into a methodology for turning a good idea in a pub to a great business: 'The Beermat Entrepreneur'.

It's published by Pearson and is available in all good bookstores and on-line from Amazon.co.uk

We've sold over 50,000 in the UK, are published in Netherlands, Spain Japan, Russia, China, India, Thailand, Lithuania, Indonesia and Romania.

'The Boardroom Entrepreneur' was released in March 2005, 'Sales on a Beermat' in August 2005, Finance on a Beermat' was released in March 2006 and Chris is now working on the fifth book.

We now have a big web site with an ever-growing number of resources for entrepreneurs and start-ups, including free downloads and tools, podcast –friendly radio interviews, e-books, and Sales workshops.

I now spend my time doing public speaking, around 150 events per year. These include keynote speeches, moderating conferences and delivering ‘Sales on a Beermat’ workshops which show you how to double sales immediately and get everyone involved in the sales process, without them feeling sleazy or uncomfortable.

More details here.

And Mike Fab-Gere still struts his funky stuff now and then, usually at corporate events, but also weddings, bar mitzvahs, coming out parties and putting it back parties.

The band is now a ten piece with a horn section and girl singers and a rapidly increasing disco/ABBA type repertoire. Current players (some of whom have been with me 10 years now), include alumni from Wishbone Ash, the Colin Blunstone/Rod Argent band, and my keyboard player/musical director for a year or so ago, Don Airey, is taking a break to do Deep Purple. He may be some time.....

I can now sing enough to get by, but as the band features some of the best players in the country, who kick serious bottom.

They do call the 70s the decade that taste forgot - see www.fabgere.com  to learn why....

Our repertoire contains classics Mike Fab-Gere thinks he wrote himself like 'Honky Tonk Woman', I Will Survive', 'I Want You Back' and (throwback to Oxcentrics days) 'New York, New York'.

We also ran an entire event for Sun Microsystems at Nottingham Ice Arena - budget was over £350K and special guest for the conference bit was The World's Nicest Man, Stephen Fry.

I was well chuffed when Stephen wrote the foreword to ‘Sales on a Beermat’ and said “this is a nice book by nice people”.

You probably get the point by now. The best fun I can have is to put on a big afro and play the best songs ever written with the best musicians in the country to an audience having lots of fun.

That's what being lucky and making money got me - freedom to do what I want. You may have different hobbies, but Mike Fab-Gere has a classic 'Meaning of Life' elevator pitch:

Personal stuff last: live happily in Hampstead with wife Virginia, son James and two cats.

Keen on watching international rugby (worked with Will Carling for a while, which is another blog in itself) and support Spurs, so am used to pain and disappointment. Keen on scuba, but only somewhere warm.

So if you're an entrepreneur, want to work with one, or want to work like one, please do get in touch.