42 Degrees - Business from a different angle

It was a busy old summer for Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the ebullient 38-year-old entrepreneur behind budget airline easyJet and a squadron of other 'easy'-branded businesses.

In June, he launched easyCruise, which allows holidaymakers to sail the French Riviera from £25 a night. In July, he opened negotiations to acquire a central London site for his low cost cinema chain, easyCinema. August saw him launch his latest venture, easyHotel which promises no-frills hotel rooms in central London, from £20 a night.

Perhaps some might advise him to focus more and concentrate on getting one thing right at a time. But Stelios is quite possibly the most prodigious entrepreneur operating in the UK at the moment. His role-model Richard Branson may have a longer track record, James Dyson may be richer, but nobody comes even close to matching the astonishing energy, compulsive, frantic pace and sheer scope of Stelios' recent new business record.

You can't help wondering how he would occupy himself if he weren't such a successful entrepreneur. His response is that he would probably be an unsuccessful entrepreneur. "I always had problems working for anyone else. So I would have tried to start my own small business. Perhaps a kebab shop in Greece, just to keep to stereotype," he laughs.

In truth, he can't imagine doing anything other than setting up businesses and admits he's not even that interested in running them once they are viable. "My aspiration is to be a serial entrepreneur. Maybe it's because I have a low boredom threshold, but once one of my companies is on track, I prefer to delegate its running to corporate managers so that I can concentrate on turning a good idea into a viable business."

Psychologists could have a field day analysing a personality only interested in new experiences, reluctant to see things through to their conclusion. As with nearly all very successful business people, however, money is not a motivator, he says, it is merely a tally of how well he has done.

But an exchange with him soon brings out a darker, altogether more difficult motivation. A polite, mild mannered man, Stelios doesn't much like to use the 'f' word. Yet he admits that failure, or at least fear of it, is a constant part of the background chatter inside any entrepreneur's head.

"Success is a journey, not a destination. I don't think anyone would relish the thought of failure, but there is no reward without risk. And yes, fear of failure must be a motivation. But I have been fortunate so far. I have launched 15 businesses in 13 years and apart from Stelmar (his shipping line launched in 1992), which sold at many times the value of the original investment, all of them continue to serve the consumer and grow."

Not that everything he has touched has turned to instant gold. Several of the businesses struggled in their early days. According to the Financial Times easyInternetcafé for instance guzzled £80m of Stelios' cash in its first year alone. Stelios is certainly adept at talking up his victories while glossing over his reverses. Although none have gone under, The Sunday Times estimates that cumulative losses of his ventures outside easyJet reached £127m last year.

In a way, it is the fear of failure, "or maybe that is better put as a desire to succeed," interjects Stelios, which has shaped his apparently scattergun approach to picking businesses. "I certainly like to spread my risk. That is another reason I went into brand extensions. Putting all your efforts into one company, or one industry such as travel, leaves you exposed to risks outside your immediate control. So we expanded into other industries beyond travel. Within those industries, we are further spreading the risk by franchising and licensing our brand name to other reputable companies."

Although Stelios has never experienced failure first-hand, he believes that we would be better off in this country if we didn't stigmatise entrepreneurs who have. The British attitude is if you have failed once, you are a failure for ever. The American attitude is that if you have failed once you have learned a lesson that makes you more likely to succeed next time. It's not hard to guess which approach Stelios favours. "The American point of view accepts, and almost congratulates failure as a path to eventual success. It has made American society much more entrepreneurial and, ultimately, more wealthy," he says.

In fact, he argues with genuine conviction that one of the most important contributions the British government could make to promote a business culture in this country is to de-stigmatise the idea of business failure. "It would encourage people to risk their own money without the fear of humiliation," he says.

Nonetheless, he thinks the UK, with its more liberal markets, is by far the best place to be an entrepreneur in Europe. "We still have a long way to go to catch up with the US. But I don't think I could have started easyJet and then the easyGroup in France or Germany. Ten years on, deregulation still doesn't really exist there and the lack of a level playing field would have made it impossible."

With his torrent of new ventures, Stelios sometimes gives the impression that he is unfocused, even incoherent in his approach. But he says, there is a strategy behind his frenetic programme of launches. "The older easyGroup companies – easyInternetcafé, easyValue and easyMoney are all now making modest profits and I hope that easyCar will break even this year. So with these companies stabilising, we decided to launch the second phase of easyGroup businesses – ten of them in just over two years," says Stelios.

He has very clear criteria for deciding which markets to attack. "They need to be consumer-facing businesses where there is room for innovation – an outdated business model which can be improved or a new approach to providing goods and services where the consumer can be given a better deal." If there is the possibility of a publicity-attracting run-in or court case with a better established rival, all the better.

It's an MO he has used repeatedly to great effect. In the past, he has locked legal horns with BA, Barclays Bank and the big Hollywood studios to name but a few. All year he has been engaged in a dispute with Orange Telecom over the use of the colour orange as part of easyMobile's livery. The case hasn't gone to court yet but whoever wins, it's clear that for Stelios, failure is not an option.