He was hoping to get the paperwork done in time for the transaction to be announced as soon as the stock market opened the next day, and to fulfill the business's commitments to calls with analysts and journalists. The deal happened, albeit with a delay.
Christopher Mills, who worked until 11pm on the paperwork in the hope of avoiding the delay, bounded into the meeting room at 5pm the next day; the deal was announced. He showed no signs of fatigue.
Mills may well be among the most influential people in the City as founder and backer of a host of financial services companies, but if so, he is also among the most anonymous.
The £100mn transaction that required his signature was AssetCo’s acquisition of fund house River & Mercantile. Mills is the largest shareholder in AssetCo, and a non-executive board member, having helped to set up the business with Martin Gilbert and others.
Of AssetCo, he says “it is about backing Martin Gilbert”, and the business currently shares an office with Harwood Capital, the company Mills created and owns, though AssetCo is now in the process of finding its own office.
Harwood Capital is the culmination of Mills' 40-year career in the City, a period during which he helped to found and sell several prominent businesses in the asset management and advice sectors; sat on the board of more than 100 companies; and has seen the City change from a place where governance was often ignored and where the American behemoths had yet to arrive, to the current world of ESG, compliance and consolidators chasing scale in order to compete with those very giants.
Mills is now 69 years old, but says: ”I will work until I die. I am one of those people who likes working.”
In addition to the shareholding in AssetCo, Harwood Capital is also the second largest shareholder at Polar Capital and Frenkel Topping, and previously owned stakes in Interactive Investor and Harwood Wealth, an advice market consolidator.
Mills also operates the Oryx International and North Atlantic Smaller Companies investment trusts, alongside its range of private and property equity funds, which hold investments in businesses across multiple sectors including life sciences, media and leisure.
It all began for Mills more than 40 years ago when he joined the investment bank Samuel Montagu. He says: “I was approached by a US firm to leave, and in order to keep me, they offered me the chance to manage the North Atlantic investment trust, and I have managed that ever since, taking it with me to the different firms.”
After a change in management he did leave Samuel Montagu, where among his roles was negotiating the merger of two businesses to create the one that exists today as Invesco.
JO Hambro
Mills later partnered with James Hambro to launch JO Hambro Capital Management (JOHCM), a business which today has £30bn of assets across a range of retail and institutional funds. A senior executive at the company when he was there was Gavin Rochussen, currently chief executive at Polar Capital, backed by Harwood. Mills says it was Rochussen “who really built up JOHCM”.
Polar Capital is one of the businesses presently being discussed in the City as a likely takeover target as consolidation grips the asset management industry. Mills says: "It will be sold, but not yet, Gavin has to build it up first.”
He confesses to being “completely unable” to speak a foreign language but displays a remarkable dexterity for maths during our interview, rattling through both the hypothetical and actual financial details of businesses in which Harwood has a stake, saying he has been “blessed with a memory for figures”.
Harwood was created when he bought the private equity and real estate businesses out of JOHCM in 2003. Harwood is one of Mills' middle names. On creating Harwood he also jointly launched Harwood Wealth, which he describes as “one of the first advice market consolidators”, but sold this in 2020 to private equity business Carlyle Capital for £91m.
There have, of course, also been poor investments including Team Rock, a company which published music magazines and on which his business lost its entire £20m investment.
For someone who has been at the heart of the corporate world for four decades, Mills displays none of the corporate speak of such an environment. He happily describes one chief executive of a listed company as “stupid”, and says of Frenkel Topping, the advice business, “they wanted it to be another advice market consolidator, but I put a stop to that. I had just sold one of those (Harwood Wealth) and if I wanted to own one, I would have kept it”.
Adviser market
Frenkel Topping specialises in providing “expert witness” statements in court cases, assessing the level of compensation needed by individuals for their future who may not be able to work again. The company has expanded by buying the providers of services to those people, and of the dozens of businesses, past and present, that Mills mentions during our conversation, it is one which he gets the most animated about in business terms.
Mills says he “doesn’t do much publicity”, barring one interview a year on a specialist investing website. The reason he is making an exception this time is out of “a duty to the other shareholders in the North Atlantic Smaller Companies trust”. This is the £800mn of net assets vehicle that Mills has run since his days at Samuel Montagu, and in which he owns 30 per cent of the shares – a stake valued at more than £250mn.
The trust invests in small and mid-cap companies in a way that is similar to the private equity funds operated by Harwood. He says the trust has outperformed the market consistently for years, but acknowledges that the trust’s relatively low profile may have hampered share price performance, and it trades at a big discount.
He says the smaller company end of the market is where he finds stronger opportunities, as the bigger private equity funds tend not to get involved there, so the valuations are more attractive.
So what are his biggest red flags when it comes to assessing an investment opportunity?
Mills says: "Sometimes it feels like we have to apologise afterwards to the people who come in here to pitch. What we do is more like an interrogation, we don’t just let them read out their presentation because that’s what they have been trained to say by the brokers, and that’s no use.
"I think the biggest red flag is if they lie to me. I don’t lie to people and won’t have them lie to me. Also, I would never invest in airlines, only an idiot would own an airline in my opinion, and I wouldn’t ever invest in tobacco on ethical grounds, those products literally kill people."
Mills has no intention of stopping, or slowing the pace of his deal-making, but as he reflects on the lessons of his working life he says: “You should never change your investment strategy. And never believe it will always be the same this time. I remember when I started out in this industry, there were a bunch of stocks that were nicknamed the nifty 50, and everyone wanted to own them. A good number of them have gone bust and others, the shares feel a long way and never recovered, and maybe that’s something for investors to bear in mind.”
David Thorpe is special projects editor of FTAdviser
