Chris Hulat was a trainee fund manager on the graduate program at Mercury Asset Management (now Merrill) when he met Simon Rogerson and Guy Miles. At the turn of the millennium, the trio founded the Octopus Group, the parent company of six financial and energy companies.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that three twenty-somethings created the wildly successful business on a whim. But that’s exactly what happened – with the help of what is now called the “Terminator gene”.
“Everyone thought we were completely crazy,” Hulat recalls of the moment he and his co-founders dropped out of graduate school to start Octopus Investments (the first of six divisions of the Octopus Group, which includes British energy giant Octopus Energy).
They didn’t have a grand business plan or investors lined up.
“We thought, why not start our own fund management business? You know, one of those rash things that people sometimes decide to do.
At 23 years old, Hulat only worked for two and a half years. But just a brief taste of the corporate world was enough to convince him to throw his all (both physically and with every penny of his $25,000 savings) into the success of Octopus Investments.
“We didn’t want to get a traditional job again.”
Hulatt never had to go back to a 9-to-5 job for another employer. He still co-manages the Octopus Group, which now employs over 2,500 people and serves 2.5 million customers.
Today, Octopus Investments, where it all began, manages more than $16.7 billion on behalf of its clients, according to the company.
More than 70% of these funds go to investments that tackle climate change, improve people’s quality of life and tackle inequality.
Pick up the phone and start dialing
Without the salaries to rely on, Octopus’ Hulatt and his co-founders had to quickly find investors for the business or face returning to their old jobs with tails tucked in.
They set up in the front room of Hulatt’s London flat with a reliable copy of the Yellow Pages, a landline between them and “an ancient laptop about an inch thick”.
“We spent much of 2000 calling thousands of people to try to convince them to invest in this start-up fund management company they’d never heard of, run by three very young people who didn’t exactly have long pedigree in the financial industry,” Hulat says. “It was super hard.”
“One guy picked up the phone and said, ‘Listen to that, that’s the sound of my shredder shredding your business plan – don’t ever call me again.’
“It would have been too easy, after we’d spent a month or two trying to get 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 long, long time (the best part of all of 2000), but we really wanted to try to get the business up and running.”
By the end of the year, after many rejections, the young founders had convinced 85 people to inject about $2 million into Octopus Investments.
It’s a lesson in the power of small wins: it wasn’t a first-of-its-kind idea, an impressive pitch that won over a major venture capital firm, or even luck that launched Octopus Investment into the success it is today.
“We just kept going. That kind of stubborn refusal to give in – we call it the ‘Terminator gene’ – is so important to us,” Hulat advises budding entrepreneurs.
“You just have to be totally persistent, totally believe in yourself and never give up.”
