People's Phone boss playing a bigger hand

CHARLES Wigoder insists that he has slowed down since the 'Greed is Good' days of the late Eighties. In that frenetic era, he remortgaged his flat and founded People's Phone, working up to 100 hours a week.

Now chairman and dominant figure in Telecom Plus, which sells cut-price household power and phone services, there are few signs of him taking it easy.

The company is valued at £224M, but Wigoder reckons it will join the £1bn-plus heavyweights in the FTSE 100 index within five years. Hardly a leisurely pace.

But the world championship bridge player simply can't resist taking the next big challenge - and the next risk. 'It's not about money - that is just the score. I am ambitious, I have always wanted to be the best. If I'd followed my father into law, I'd have wanted to be a Law Lord.'

Wigoder peppers his speech with ums and ahs, but he is purposeful in thought and action.

Slicing into a thick steak at lunch in London's Caprice, he confidently reels off figures suggesting the group will double in size in four years...and double again by 2010.

At 42, he has time on his side. He has a young family - a boy of 13 and three girls aged 11, 8 and 4 - and splits domestic life with wife Lizzie between homes in north London and the Cote d'Azur.

In the firm's last financial year, he pocketed £255,000 under the open-ended contract he negotiated in 1998 when he joined the cash-strapped business as executive chairman and largest single shareholder.

Wigoder was just 35 when he made his mark with People's Phone. Vodafone paid £77m cash for the company and he walked away with £6.5m. Now, just seven years later, his stake in Telecom Plus is worth eight times that.

Was he resentful that his venture capital backers got the bulk of the profit from his labours?

'No,' he replied philosophically, 'it's the old argument - you can have 100% of nothing or a small percentage of something large.'

But his passion for taking risks means he is less sanguine about the regulatory regime for publicly quoted businesses.

'All the regulation in the world will not prevent dishonest businessmen from defrauding investors,' he said.

'The Government seems to want to regulate risk out of the market, but the nature of capitalism is about taking risks. Institutions and investors should be able to assess risk. All regulation does, is increase cost.'

Early in his career, working as a 'teenage scribbler' analysing stocks, he met Michael Green and wrote about the 'very charismatic chairman' of Carlton Communications.

He was hired by Green as head of corporate finance and development, engineering audacious deals to accelerate Carlton's growth. But his two biggest deals - bids for Thames Television and for satellite TV, subsequently BSkyB - both failed.

Itching to run a business himself, he struck out on his own when Green refused to give him command of a Carlton division. It was 1986, the height of the have-it-all era.

'There was huge opportunity,' recalled Wigoder. 'We could issue paper to acquire businesses. I had a credible management team, a good story and the right track record. There were lots of institutions prepared to be supportive.'

He joined Sangers Photographic, a small firm quoted on the second-tier Unlisted Securities Market, changed the name to Quadrant Group and took it to a full listing.

The firm had a lucrative shop in London selling car phones, but after Vodafone and Cellnet refused it a licence as a service provider, Quadrant bought one via Southern Cell Phones, based in Essex. But the stock market crash in 1987 dramatically stopped Quadrant's ambitions.

Wigoder based himself in Essex to sort out Southern Cell Phones - and saw the future. He was convinced there would be huge growth in mobile phones, but could not persuade Quadrant's chairman to bet the ranch on it. So he remortgaged his flat and raised £500,000 to start People's Phone.

Two years after the sale to Vodafone, Wigoder underwrote a rights issue to raise £1.1m for Telecom Plus. He rewired its business model and operations. It kept its marketing and distribution methods, capturing customers cheaply through personal recommendation of 10,000 freelance distributors. This army of foot soldiers, growing at 500 a month, earns commission recruiting friends, family and neighbours to Telecom Plus services.

At meetings in local hotels, recruits are served tea and biscuits with the incentive of extra income. Unlike a pyramid, distributors earn commission from real income paid by customers they introduce.

Telecom Plus raised a further £5m in 1999 from new shares and convertible loan stock and floated at £2 a share in 2000 to raise £3.5m. The shares crashed to 70p during the bear market but have recovered to 367p.

Wigoder, not one to suffer self-doubt, remained sanguine throughout. 'I am no longer in such a hurry,' he said reflectively. 'Telecom Plus is a long term project and I can afford to be patient.'