Jeremy Middleton, FTSE-200 company co-founder

Feb 15 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal

From Procter & Gamble to politics, and investing in start-ups and climbing a few mountains in between: Karen Dent meets FTSE-200 company co-founder turned venture capitalist Jeremy Middleton.

DIRECTOR Jeremy Middleton likes to keep busy. There are the nine small companies in his investment portfolio, a stake in FTSE-200 company HomeServe and a hectic few months ahead of him on the political front – plus plans for a trip up South America’s biggest mountain before the year end.

“I have quite an eclectic range of interests,” he says. “You do your early career and are interested in getting ahead and starting up in business, which is what I was. But as soon as things started to become reasonably successful, I was looking at other things that would be challenging and worthwhile to do.”

“Reasonably successful” is one way of describing insurance and maintenance firm HomeServe, which is now worth around £1bn. Middleton remains on its executive committee.

It came out of a business consultancy Middleton ran with friend Richard Harpin, whom he met while they both worked at Procter & Gamble in Newcastle.

“I was always trying to find a big business idea and together with Richard, we set up a whole series of different businesses based on Osborne Road, where we started out,” says Middleton.

“One of those developed into HomeServe and became very successful. At one stage, when it clearly was successful, Richard and I looked each other in the eye and decided that he wanted to focus exclusively on driving the HomeServe businesses and I wanted to arrange different things.”

Harpin, who now lives in York, moved out of the region with HomeServe, which is now based in the Midlands – from where Middleton himself hails. But to him, the North East is now home – even though he freely admits he may have achieved his political ambitions if he had moved elsewhere.

“I think that I would have had a good chance of going into politics, becoming an MP at the time I wanted to if I had been prepared to move,” he says.

“But I wasn’t really interested in moving for personal reasons, and I didn’t want to represent somewhere that I didn’t live. There are lots of other ways to be involved in your community.”

He was on David Cameron’s ‘A list’ of potential MPs for a number of years before deciding to withdraw and he says he no longer has the desire to spend his life in the House of Commons.

“I decided there were too many other things to do in life and if you really want to be successful in politics, you have to be exclusively focused on it,” Middleton said.

“And I might have been prepared to be exclusively focused on it when I was 30 but I’m not prepared now when there are other things I want to do, of which the business is one of them.

“I’m close enough to see what it involves and I think people who get to the top of political parties, it’s popular to vilify them, but they are normally pretty talented people anyway – and the demands made on them are unbelievable.

“You’ve got to want to do absolutely nothing else at any point in time in your life – and I’m quite happy not to do that! I’m quite happy to make my contribution.”

That contribution is as the current chairman of the Conservative National Convention, which is the party’s top voluntary post, and he is deputy chairman of the Conservative Party Board.

Middleton says: “I’m very much involved in the planning for the General Election from a volunteer perspective – I’m only doing this job for a few years, this particular position.

“I’ve been doing it nearly a year and I’ll probably do another two years, but if you’re a capitalist and a Conservative, then this is the time to do it.

“I think we’re at one of those moments where there is a prospect of an important change of direction in the country and of Government, so it’s a bit like 1945 for the Labour Party or 1979 for the Conservative Party and 2010 is a chance to be part of that change of direction.

“And to be a spectator at the scene of great events is an interesting thing to be – a contributor and a spectator but not a player, not a politician.”

His business, Middleton Enterprises mainly funds start-up firms based in the North East, often in conjunction with North Star, and he has various property investments.

“I wanted to put my money where my mouth was and see if we can’t make the right investment decisions and help people develop their business into something more significant,” he says.

“I’m involved with nine small businesses. When I achieve a successful exit, then I’ll do another one but I’m not looking to expand the number of businesses I’m involved with.

“They say you start out with a portfolio where you may invest in 10 businesses – this is what people in venture capital always said – and you’re looking for one that really works.

“You expect three or four of them maybe to not survive; you can expect three or four of them to just bumble along, and you’re looking for one or two of those ideas to really work.

“Now at the point at which you invested, you thought these are great people, these are great ideas, this could be a fantastic business. But doing private equity investments or business angel investments, there are so many things where things can fall over, it’s so high risk that you need to do a certain number.”