Alex Cheatle describes himself as “anti-bling”. The company he co-founded and has led for 25 years, Ten Lifestyle, may provide an elite service to high rollers, but he displays none of the trappings of wealth.
He is clad in a red-and-blue chequered short-sleeved shirt, black-rimmed glasses and jeans when we meet by the canal in Paddington, west London, not far from his longtime home in firmly middle-class Queen’s Park. “I’m not trying to live the life of our members – I’m trying to keep costs down,” he says.
Ten Lifestyle’s members typically join up through their bank (including Coutts, Barclays and HSBC in the UK) and are offered a trusted concierge service, saving them time and offering access. Venues, keen on its big-spending clients, allocate them sought-after concert tickets, restaurant tables and purchases.
Ed Sheeran tickets and holidays to the Maldives and Mauritius have been the most common demands in recent years, but some clients have quirkier requests. There was the man who had Ten organise his Italian proposal, complete with a portrait painter who secretly depicted him on one knee as the couple’s favourite music played for the big reveal. And the law firm partner who has, for two decades, stipulated detailed holiday conditions, including the road-safety levels en route to the local boulangerie.
Ten has 275,000 members split between the “mass affluent” – households with a combined income of more than £100,000 – and “high net worth” individuals, with liquid assets of more than £1m.
With a cost of living crisis raging, supporting wealthy people in splurging their disposable income may feel a little crass. “I do worry about the level of inequality in the world and our service does mean that richer people can get tables at restaurants that poorer people can’t get. I’m not entirely comfortable with that,” Cheatle admits. “We’re compensating for this by thinking: ‘How can we nudge these people into doing things that are better?’” To this end, Ten says it is now helping clients to become philanthropists and encouraging them to swap Dubai for Dorset to save air miles.
In August, Cheatle will ring the bell at the London Stock Exchange as it becomes the first Aim-listed business to be granted the status of a B Corporation, or B Corp – a social and environmental standard.
We’re entrepreneurs for different reasons, but we want to make the world a better place
He believes his worldview is shaped by his upbringing. Born in Brazil, his goods-trading father split from his mother – who was an assistant to various City titans – while he was growing up in Chingford, east London, at the age of four. He would go on to set up Ten in the spare room of his flat on the other side of the capital in Marylebone in 1998, teaming with his events manager half-brother, Andrew Long, who is dyslexic.
The Ten chief executive recounts a chat with a cabinet minister who asked how to create successful entrepreneurs. Cheatle glibly suggested: “Stop diagnosing kids with dyslexia at school, so they have something to prove. And you want more kids to suffer separation from a parent – we’re entrepreneurs for different reasons, but we want to make the world a better place.”
As a teenager he sold curtain cloth on Walthamstow market and cheap imported toys on the London underground. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford (and shudders on mentioning an encounter with the Oxford Union’s Jacob Rees-Mogg) and joined consumer goods company Procter & Gamble’s graduate programme.
He contracted malaria in Cambodia while travelling the world on the hunt for a business idea and while recovering in San Francisco pondered how he could “use the ability to manipulate data at vast scale to support individuals and their families” in the dotcom boom.
In the early days, Ten had false starts, such as trying to offer plumbers and builders to clients. “You just can’t deliver reliable plumbers – they don’t exist,” he says, chewing on charcoal sourdough over breakfast at Australian-themed restaurant Bondi Green.
Now, Ten operates across the world – from Brazil and the US to Singapore and Australia – with 1,300 employees and annual revenues of £46.8m. In May, it reported its first pretax profit since listing on the stock market in 2017, for the first half of its financial year, and it is expected to end the year in the black.
Cheatle holds 13% of the stock, and his half-brother nearly 4%, while the billionaire George Soros’s fund has almost 6%. The shares have nearly recovered since a hammering early in the pandemic, which forced venues to shut and Ten to switch to offering online cookalongs and book readings.
However, he is not entirely enamoured of the public markets, which allowed him to raise £25m to aid the company’s expansion on floating, but have repeatedly marked the shares down and valued the business at a modest £75m.
“The market is not good for raising money right now. There have been redemptions, so fund managers are having to sell positions in companies they don’t actually want to,” Cheatle says, arguing that this leaves investors unwilling to take risks on smaller stocks. “I know in Britain we’re supposed to be all Hugh Grant and self-deprecating about it, but this business could be worth hundreds of millions. As we get bigger, we’ll have more restaurants, better availability and better benefits than booking direct online.”
Cheatle appears keen to display his moral compass. He recalls refusing Ten members’ requests for medical-grade masks during Covid to ensure the NHS had enough. He is visibly proud of The Key, a service he founded to support school leaders with nationwide advice and sold for more than £15m in 2011.
Long-term, he hopes to find a philanthropist to back a version of The Key for social workers. He says: “The government is too scared to offer social workers advice for fear of being accountable. So they are left flapping in the wind with total responsibility, and very inconsistent support.”
Cheatle believes that advances in Ten’s technology and artificial intelligence will soon help him achieve his original vision of creating a tailored service for a mass market, using vast quantities of data. The tech draws on the 9m requests Ten has received so far to offer suggestions and complete bookings for its members, freeing its growing workforce to handle more complex queries.
“When we started, someone asked for a photo of Muhammad Ali in Brixton – it took four days to find it. Now it takes seconds with the internet. We’ve always had to adapt our business to new technology. We can adapt, and we will.”
CV
Age 52
Family Married with an 18-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son.
Education Bancroft’s School in Woodford, east London. Then PPE at Oxford University.
Pay £299,000, and his stake in Ten is worth £9m.
Last holiday “A combined business/family trip to visit our offices in the US and Canada.”
Best advice he’s been given “Value people who trust easily – they are likely to be trustworthy.”
Biggest career mistake “During our toughest years – in 2003 – we lost confidence, focused on survival and dialled down talking about our vision. We should have kept talking about our future plans – they would have happened sooner.”
Word he overuses Opportunity.
How he relaxes “Snorkelling. I don’t need a fancy reef – just floating and observing feels quite Zen.”
