Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is serial entrepreneur, James Abrahart, Founder of office solutions companies, Interfax Systems and Altodigital and Founder of the sports management company, Global Image Sports. Growing up in Islington and grateful for the difference good teachers can make in life, particularly when you have undiagnosed dyslexia, James built Interfax Systems into one of the leading independent providers of office solutions in the UK. Before selling his company and moving his family to the US, he’d set up Altodigital, which when he sold that to Xerox early March 2020, had twelve UK offices and over 400 employees. Altodigital’s partnerships with leading sports brands gave James and his wife Jackie – she’s a lifelong West Ham fan but James luckily, is an Arsenal fan – an idea, they created Global Image Sports as he says, ‘for fun really’ and to give something back to the US youth players. Global Image Sports provides player development, coaching, education and international soccer, football – depending on where you’re coming from – travel for youth clubs around the world and partnerships with major pro clubs. You’ve done lots of things, it’s fabulous to have you on the programme. Looking back to the kid that was brought up in Islington and now fast-forwarding to where you are, in your wildest dreams, was this what would be happening?
James Abrahart
Err, no, absolutely not. As you know, I’ve mentioned I’ve struggled with dyslexia so, confidence and stuff was difficult early on, you know, especially at school.
Elliot Moss
And the dyslexia thing has come up with many of my guests over the years actually, and there seems to be a disproportionate number. What did that mean for you, just thinking, going back then to before all the business stuff kicks in, what does that mean in terms of how it feels to be a young child where, I assume, teachers think you haven’t got ability?
James Abrahart
Yeah, yeah, they did, some of thought I was absolutely stupid I think, looking back, because inner city school in north London, so they’re always under pressure anyway, you know, and I’m sure they’re underpaid as well back then, as they are now I’m sure, so it was difficult for them to give anyone, class sizes might have been 35, 40, I can’t remember exactly, it seemed to always be a lot of people in the class so, yeah, you struggled a lot and your confidence was pretty low because some bits you just didn’t seem to get, you know, to simply click and yeah, I don’t know, all my buddies, all my friends, they’d seem to think I was the smartest kid in the class because I was always organising stuff if they wanted something done, they would come to me and say oh we want to, you know, whether it was a football game or after school water fight or whatever it was, I would always, say you’ve got to organise it James, pick the sides, sort it out. So, yeah, so it was a bit strange, I couldn’t comprehend why I was struggling.
Elliot Moss
And that organising bit, what happened, I mean, again, just looking now, you’ve talked about the businesses you’ve set up, we’ve talked about, I mentioned the businesses you’ve sold, what role does organising, seeing stuff, seeing the patterns and the shapes, what role did that play back then?
James Abrahart
Well I found out, looking back, and obviously I did read a couple of books, one was changing, The Gift of Dyslexia, and you know even reading was difficult. I’m okay at reading, it’s more of a spelling and grammar style stuff and short-term memory at times, like names and stuff but seeing the bigger picture was always seemed to be very easy for me and I could never understand how other people couldn’t see it. It was almost like I was in a little box and I often used to think about someone telling the story about my life because I would see things so differently. I couldn’t work it out why they couldn’t see that, you know, like organisation, it seemed okay this is what we’re going to do and you know do that, you do that and they’d be looking at me like oh this is so cool, you know and I’m like, I don’t get you know, it’s weird.
Elliot Moss
And you know when you say you see it, this always intrigues me because I’ve got lots of friends who are dyslexic and they’re super bright and they are off the scale bright actually, when you say you see it, do you visually see it or is it just it’s what comes into your head and it’s a thought or is it a bit of both? Do you know what I mean with the pieces, when you go well you’ve got to do that, you’ve got to do that, are you kind of visualising the pieces moving on a board?
James Abrahart
Yeah, I think what it’s done in another way also is, because you have to develop different skills when you’re dyslexic so you have to work a lot on your people skills because if you get caught in a situation where it’s academic, for argument’s sake for making it a little bit easier and you don’t know, you didn’t quite understand what they’re asking, you have to think of way round it, so I developed early on, empathy I guess, which is the key word in my life I think that trying to understand what the other person was trying to achieve and what they wanted to get in life and that made my life a lot easier because suddenly people found that I was interested in them, sometimes it was just because I wanted to get out of a certain situation, other times it was well what do you want to get out of this, explain to me what you want to achieve and so, yeah, you just see things differently I found and the empathetic side of trying to understand the other person’s point of view just developed very early on.
Elliot Moss
And interesting of course, most people don’t start there, they start with what they want to achieve and I guess that immediately changes the way that the conversation goes.
James Abrahart
It does, yeah, even at a young age, I think it will get, you know people’s egos up and you, at that time you don’t realise that but when you say okay, how can I help you? What do you want to achieve? And then suddenly you become this sort of the coolest guy in the school because, and I remember that, all the guys that were real tough guys, I wouldn’t say they were bodyguards but you know I was almost untouchable because they would sort of protect me in a way that would say look, don’t want anyone mixing with him because he’s going to organise the next football game or you know and so yeah, it was pretty, it was a good time to be honest.
Elliot Moss
Tell me about this first business and how that came about, just in a brief sort of summation of why did it come about that you set up a business because it’s one thing seeing stuff and I suppose once could say well it’s a natural progression that you then go oh, you’re going to be the guy that sets something up but what was the moment when it actually happened?
James Abrahart
I was a technician effectively, they call it technician or engineer and I used to go in and fix stuff in the office world, often, West One is where the studios are, was one of my areas and I’d see all the sales guys earning three times as much as me, often working half the day, and I thought I’m pretty smart, I think I could do that and so I transitioned into selling and I read lots of books about not just Gift to Dyslexia but how to improve you know subconscious thinking and all that stuff in terms of changing your mindset because I was pretty shy, and I still am actually shy, but I had to get outside that envelope really so then I moved into sales and Ofrex as we mentioned earlier on. First year in I think I won an award and then I’d become top tales engineer two or three years running.
Elliot Moss
So this was a few years after school as well I imagine. And how old were you when you left school James?
James Abrahart
Sixteen I think it was. And again that teacher, Mr Ashton, when I went for the job at Ofrex, I remember a careers officer, just no way are you going to get this job James with your grades effectively.
Elliot Moss
So the grades weren’t too pretty?
James Abrahart
They were awful. But Mr Ashton encouraged me to read about electronics, which I was interested in, and…
Elliot Moss
This is a teacher at…
James Abrahart
At Apollo Park School at the time. And I started to build radios and crystal sets and all sorts of radios at home and he said to me, when you go for the interview you’ve got to take your shopping bag full of your radios, so that what I did and then they gave me the, I got the job and then from there I just took off really and went from being a sales technician to then around 19 maybe, I got headhunted to start a business with another guy to run both sales and the engineering side, the technical side, and so I left and started with him.
Elliot Moss
And was that the Interfax business?
James Abrahart
No, no, that was…
Elliot Moss
So this is pre-that, another one?
James Abrahart
Yeah, another one.
Elliot Moss
Okay, so getting quite an apprenticeship here.
James Abrahart
And that didn’t end as well because the chap was difficult, not wanting to pay people the right amount of money on commissions and I just said you can’t do that you know, if someone thinks they’re go to earn x, y, z, that’s what they’ve got to earn, you can’t start charging them for admin fees and whatever else he made up but anyway, there was three guys that were there, it ended up being a particular lawsuit because I left out of restricted covenants and they left and then I ended up in parallel running the industrial tribunal in parallel with the High Court action.
Elliot Moss
You led it.
James Abrahart
I led it, yeah. Yeah. I did have some help from a really good solicitor.
Elliot Moss
I’m trying to work out what you can’t do, this is ridiculous. And then I decided, polymathically, I was going to do a bit of Law, I was doing a bit of sales, I was doing a bit of engineering, I mean it’s extraordinary actually, joking aside.
James Abrahart
Yeah, no, to be fair the solicitor held my hand a bit and he was a great guy and he said to me if you come into the office, you’re going to get charged so buy me a beer and I’ll give you some advice and so that’s what we did, we had regular meetings in the put and he said you can’t say that, you know the barrister, because they had a barrister obviously. Anyway, we won that which meant that the High Court action, we mirrored that industrial tribunal action because it was restricted covenant and stuff like that and then that dropped away and so then we started the company, Interfax.
Elliot Moss
And that was the very first business.
James Abrahart
Very first.
Elliot Moss
And I’m going to pause it there because we’re going to come back because I want to hear much more about these early years at Interfax and what that might have led you to learn about what was going to happen next and making sure it was all super successful. Much more coming up from James, my Business Shaper today, it’s James Abrahart, he’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now though, we’re going to hear a clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Tom Grogan talks about Web 3.0, the next iteration of the internet and what businesses and individuals need to be thinking about when formulating their own Web 3 strategies and pursuing valuable, impactful projects.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is James Abrahart, Founder of office solutions companies, Interfax Systems and Altodigital and Founder of the sports management company, Global Image Sports. We were at the beginning of the story and I want to kind of crystallise it terms of the Interfax Systems. Just those first few months, you set this business up, how old were you at the time James?
James Abrahart
I would have been maybe 25, maybe 24, not sure the exact, 24, 25.
Elliot Moss
Young.
James Abrahart
Yes.
Elliot Moss
And how long were you involved in that business for?
James Abrahart
Interfax? About eight years maybe, nine years.
Elliot Moss
And that business then got sold?
James Abrahart
That business it gets sold, yes.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, so you’re probably in your late twenties, early thirties when you sell the thing.
James Abrahart
Yeah, the only funny thing about that was when we acquired the name, Interfax Systems, we didn’t realise it was also the Russian news agency.
Elliot Moss
I was going to say, it is exactly that.
James Abrahart
Yeah, and so we…
Elliot Moss
Which is independent, he says.
James Abrahart
Independent.
Elliot Moss
In inverted commas.
James Abrahart
Yeah, yeah so we used to get confused a lot with the Press and would come out for Interfax newsagent and they thought we owned that as well which was quite funny but anyway.
Elliot Moss
But you didn’t?
James Abrahart
We didn’t, no.
Elliot Moss
To be clear everyone. He didn’t.
James Abrahart
No connection at all.
Elliot Moss
No connection at all. You sold that, and again, just quickly, selling a business of whatever size, it’s a learning curve, there’s tonnes of paperwork, there’s people involved. Going back to that thing you mentioned and I love it, it’s about empathy, was that where you pressed the accelerator down on how to get a deal across the line, was it around the empathy piece or were you that ruthless James, which bit of you came to the fore?
James Abrahart
The other thing my wife and my kids always say is connecting the dots, so like we had a conversation five minutes before you know and you mentioned LA etcetera. I’ll connect dots with people, so someone will say to me oh you know my son or daughter’s trying to get into x, y, z and I’ll know someone that I spoke to maybe four years ago and I can…
Elliot Moss
And you’ll go, pull it out.
James Abrahart
Connect the dots. So what happened with Alco Standard that acquired us was a big American company, 12 billion of revenues, big company, and we had some issues around the legal issues. Without getting too complicated, I wanted to a convertible no and they would do that for several hundred million normally, you know they do swaps and all that complicated stuff, financing, and so by pure luck just in one of the conversations, one of the executives in Europe mentioned a, was an American guy that was on the main board that had an office at 1 Regent Street and I tracked him down, same name as the American, one of the financial guys in the Government, a guy called Paul O’Neil. So Paul O’Neil was a big investor in Alco Standard and actually was one of the first guys and I literally called him up.
Elliot Moss
Cold.
James Abrahart
Cold, and it could have killed the deal to be honest because I didn’t mention it to the European executives and yeah, Paul was brilliant. I sort of become an adopted son of his you know and I remember the funny thing about 1 Regent Street was, I thought I’d go in for ten, I had to get past the secretary which was a bit difficult on the cold call but I managed it and I thought I’d be in there for 20-30 minutes so I had at the time, I put half an hour, forty minutes on the meter and I could see my car being towed away over his left corner and I didn’t want to, because he was in mid-flow, I mean this guy had invested in every, Coca-Cola, he was telling me stories, brilliant, brilliant guy.
Elliot Moss
How long were you there for?
James Abrahart
I think two hours, I think I had to call my partners up and say I’ve either killed this deal but my focus now is trying to get my car back you know because it was in the pound you know.
Elliot Moss
Have you ever felt like you’re in a movie, James, it just happens to be starring you? These are mad stories. But just, so you get to a deal but off your own kind of hutzpah, your own desire to go and do it a certain way.
James Abrahart
Well, literally, the reason it took slightly longer was Paul at the time said I’m going to make the call, unbeknownst to me he’s talking to a guy called John, he said yeah, I’ve got a guy in the office now, I really want you to meet him John, he’s a great guy, yeah I think we need him in this company, we need to do this deal, blah, blah, blah. Turns out he was talking to the CEO in America and literally, this was Thursday, and I was on a plane on Sunday to go and see the CEO and you can imagine that the executives were pretty irritated you know that they had to do a bio on me etcetera so, and then John and I got on like a house on fire but it could have had something to do with Paul who’d arranged his options and his salaries for the last three years, so maybe it wasn’t my negotiating skill, it was just that he didn’t want to say no to Paul O’Neil.
Elliot Moss
But the point was I think for me, you had an idea, it wasn’t in the box, it was out the box, you went and did it and hey presto. I’m going to jump to the next business, Altodigital. That sold three years ago to Xerox at the time. Again, that’s not a short-term win, you built that business over a number of years, sort of over twenty years, twenty, thirty years in fact.
James Abrahart
Err, yeah, twenty-five years ago.
Elliot Moss
Twenty-five years. When you’re in it for the long haul and again I’ve just taken twenty-five years and simplified it down to thirteen seconds, when you’re in it for the long haul James, are you just again a day by day guy or did you have a vision of at some point, I am going to sell my baby and it’s going to be for the right price or is it not like that?
James Abrahart
It wasn’t like that. I mean the first business I sold off, Interfax, was to really spend more time with the children, so going just briefly back to that, they wanted me to run Europe at Alco Standard, which at the time was about 600 million of revenues and I never really sold the business for money, I sold the business so I could spend a bit more time with my four children, at the time might have been three, so…
Elliot Moss
Who are now grown up.
James Abrahart
They’re grown up.
Elliot Moss
One of whom is rather well known in the music world.
James Abrahart
Sure.
Elliot Moss
JHart. I’ve said it now, go check him out on Spotify and anywhere else, you’ve probably heard of him but anyway carry on.
James Abrahart
So when I set up Altodigital, I mean the dyslexic thing made me, I’m always keen to get better people around me so I don’t really worry, I’ve not got insecurities in that because I know that if better people like for instance a financial guy or you know people that are very focussed or detailed orientated, because that complements what I want to do, so we had a great time at Alto you know, the executive team, small team, four or five guys but all the people were great you know, so that did allow me to spend more time in the US as well and not have to keep coming back so, I’m a big delegator, I think my kids called me King Delegator you know, and normally Jackie my wife ends up doing most of it but so, yeah, that allowed us, so the vision wasn’t necessarily to sell, the vision was to grow it and then it was around the time the dotcom was taking off and I’d seen that in America obviously and me being in America, and investment guys like Paul O’Neil that I mentioned to you, they come in early to help us put some seed capital to grow fast and yeah, so that’s how we saw it you know and it was, ecommerce was taking off, Amazon was going pre-public so there was a lot of big companies that were moving and it wasn’t quite in the UK, the ecommerce world was not here, most of the companies didn’t understand it so we were ahead of the game early on and we had, at the time, before we were just about to go public, we had over 10,000 ecommerce sites, which was unheard and it was the way we did it, we didn’t sell them the ecommerce sites up front, we effectively rented it over a period, so rather than costing 5,000, we would put it over five years so it allowed the business, an SMB or SME in the UK…
Elliot Moss
To afford it, yeah.
James Abrahart
To afford it. But it put them on the Web, which is what we were trying to get.
Elliot Moss
Which is exactly what you were trying to do. And just thinking about, you just talked about being a delegator and people and not feeling insecure, I imagine that goes way back to recognising what you, even though you had these extraordinary strengths and people can’t see what you see, knowing what you couldn’t do, and being comfortable with that, I mean that’s, and that’s quite a big thing because most people don’t quite get that level of clarity, maybe they’re not forced to but I imagine and again looking at a lot of dyslexic people, Sir Richard Branson was, so James Abrahart, that’s exactly what you do, you go well, I can do stuff you can’t do, I’m the magician but actually I know that’s what I do.
James Abrahart
Yeah, no, a 100, I mean a 100%, I think when I sold the first company that’s how I found out I was dyslexic because I’d heard that Gift to Dyslexia, actually I was in the Euston Road, I remember where I was and it was coming towards the end, I’d decided I didn’t want to stay in Alco Standard and run Europe so I was leaving, so I was in the last two weeks of my tenure if you like and my secretary, who is still with me today, she said, I said anything going on? she said oh we’ve had a couple of small, minor complaint letters and one of them’s from the Dyslexic Society and I just took the letter off her desk, for no reason, you know and I said, and I’m in the car and we did have car phones then, it was the early days of the car phone and I remember one of the radio stations, I don’t know which one was talking to the author of Gift of Dyslexia and I had one of those moments that I had to pull over the car because I’m thinking, this guy’s talking about me and literally I looked down and there was the letter and I called the professor who’d sent the complaint in and he thought our service was unbelievable, he said this is incredible, he said you’ve fixed the problem and now I’ve got the managing director calling me up. So I went yeah, yeah, oh I’m just listening to the Gift of Dyslexia and he went, oh fantastic, so chat, chat, chat and I said how do you know if you’ve got that? He said why, do you think you’ve got it? I said well I don’t know. He said well where are you and he was literally round the corner and he said come round for a cup of tea and I’ll test you and I went oh, I don’t like tests and he went, I can already tell you’ve got it. So that’s how I found out I am dyslexic. IQ of super high when he tested it apparently which is quite funny really because I lived on that with a…
Elliot Moss
I was going to say, you’ve got it on a sheet and you lift it up at breakfast, you go kids, shush, 347, now be quiet and eat your cereal. Final chat coming up with my brilliant guest today, it’s James Abrahart and we’ve got some music from Ezra Collective, that’s coming up in just a moment, I’m sure you’re not going to go anywhere.
Ezra Collective, one of my eldest son’s favourites with Lady and it’s their version of the Fela Kuti classic just in case you didn’t know. James Abrahart is my Business Shaper today just for a few more minutes. In the stories you’ve told, you mention and oh we were in the US, you moved, you moved the whole family to the United States. Massive upheaval. Why?
James Abrahart
Erm, we just wanted another experience partly, I mentioned to you earlier, one of my kids was being slightly bullied at school, we just decided we wanted a new chapter and the American investment group I was in wanted me to look at several of their investments they’d done, so it just seemed like a good idea.
Elliot Moss
And you like change, James.
James Abrahart
We did. Both of us did to be fair.
Elliot Moss
You and Jackie.
James Abrahart
Yes, although she was obviously leaving the parents behind was tough but it was fun for the kids.
Elliot Moss
Yeah. But it’s something, do you think if you look back across your life that the change thing is something you’re more than comfortable with, in fact it’s something you quite thrive on?
James Abrahart
Yes, yes, we did and it’s been good for the kids in their development as well to see another country and live there so, it’s been, it was great times, we loved it.
Elliot Moss
The other thing that occurs to me is that it feels like you’re a bit ageless, like you might be however old you are, you’re not 130 but not you’re not 25 either, you kind of have a very natural energy which means you’ve gone again quite a few times, you know the whole, the serial thing that I mentioned, as in with an ‘s’ rather than a ‘c’ that we were talking about before, and the latest iteration, I say it’s the latest, thirteen years now, the Global Image business. What in a nutshell is that about for you, not, I mean I know it’s all around looking after sports people and stuff but why that?
James Abrahart
Well, when we were there in America, three of our children played soccer, as they call it, you know the two girls, Sam and Abbie, and Stuart and I was just a little bit disappointed about some of the quality of the coaching that was going, predominantly sadly from English or European to the American so, because we would already, we were already supplying a lot of professional clubs in the UK and I got to know the CEOs or COOs either at dinners or gold days and then they found out I lived in America, they would go, actually Arsenal was the first one, fantastic guy called Ken Friern, who was on the board at you know brilliant guy, he invited me to Arsenal and said can you come along and talk to me about America, James, which being an Arsenal fan I’m like yeah okay I’ll do that and so it was brilliant. Amazing, amazing man, super, empathetic and so that’s what started me thinking okay I can help the pro clubs but I can also help the young players see the game slightly differently and coaching and obviously the girls’ game was huge in America, right, and so I had to convince some of these, West Ham was one of the, Tony Carr, I remember having a conversation with Tony Carr, Sir Tony Carr now, and saying Tony, you know, you need to let the girls, and he said oh girls in the academy, you know, so I went I’m telling ya, it’s going to be a big sport and the brands will want the Premier League to have girls teams so I remember my particular daughter, Sam, she would get into Tony’s comfort zone with him when he was coaching when he’d come over to America to coach for us and eventually you know he just said to another great guy called Paul Heffer, Academy Director at West Ham, I think we should let the girls in now and yeah, so now looking back, yeah so we did it, we’d give it the opportunities, we’d give ‘em UK coaching from Premier clubs whether it was West Ham or whatever Premier club we’d partner with, you know, Wolverhampton or Wolves you know, up and down the country and then they would send the coaches out to the coaching sessions and then of course the kids would want to come over on tours to watch EPL games as they call them and so yeah, that was, and it was good so we, it wasn’t a money thing, we didn’t do it, Jackie and I didn’t do it because…
Elliot Moss
No. It’s a passion, it’s a passion.
James Abrahart
It was just something and it just kept growing.
Elliot Moss
I was going to say, you’re here thirteen years later and it’s still going, right?
James Abrahart
Yeah, we’re on a smaller scale, Covid was pretty brutal, you can imagine and obviously I’d sold my, I’d sold Alco so that took, that was tremendous energy to sell that, it took a lot of strain and then literally the good news was selling it on March 11th which was global pandemic day, which was amazingly lucky to do that, then the GI sites started, we had 700 people come in to London effectively in April 2020, so you can imagine that was, sorting that out was…
Elliot Moss
I can imagine. I’m going to have to close off but I want to ask one last thing, I think I’ve read somewhere that you said look there’s all this stuff we’ve been talking about, these incredible achievements in business and yet you say your biggest achievement is your family.
James Abrahart
Sure.
Elliot Moss
Just in a nutshell what does family mean to you?
James Abrahart
Well it’s a lot of luck I think when you meet your partner, I mean if we’re still together, as you know we’ve, it’s the song that is our wedding song, she done a lot of the heavy lifting to be honest, Jackie. I don’t know, it’s just the kids made me realise you know when they were younger, they were important than business and financial gain and they’ve really enhanced both our lives to such a degree. The kids are funny and they keep you young, you know you mentioned about that, so it’s been fantastic and I just, I wanted more actually and I think my wife said no after four.
Elliot Moss
That’s quite a lot, James.
James Abrahart
It is quite a lot.
Elliot Moss
I mean, come on. Listen, it’s been brilliant talking to you. Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it? I think you mentioned kind of why you’ve chosen it anyway just now but let’s…
James Abrahart
Yeah, well we got married to this song so, my wife and I, we were talking about it the other day when we were looking for the song so it’s Endless Love by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross.
Elliot Moss
Lionel Richie and Diana Ross there with Endless Love, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, James Abrahart. So much of what he said was down to what he called ‘the gift of dyslexia’, his ability to understand other people and think about them actively, his empathy, his ability to connect the dots, his understanding that having better people around him was not a problem, in fact it was a virtue and finally, the way his children called him ‘The King Delegator’, that ability to let go and let other people get on with it. Fantastic stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.