It‘s also why he took up the challenge of helping young mothers Leila Wilcox and, initially at any rate, Karen Dwyer in their quest to develop child-friendly bath products to suit the budgets of single mothers as part of Channel 4‘s highly entertaining television series Make Me a Million, broadcast in autumn last year.
"I‘m most interested in businesses that have a crusading aspect to them. It‘s nice to think you‘re moving agendas as well as making money," he says, when we meet in the plush surroundings of London‘s No.5 members‘ club. "I love politics and I see businesses as political organisations.
I got sucked into traps like anyone else. I had no idea about marketing a
product. Do you go to the movies and hand out packets to kids as they‘re leaving
or is it point of sale? Do you stand outside schools? Do you use viral
communications?
"For instance, mine was a financial services company in 1990 where the whole nature of financial services was based around commission," he explains. "My staff were encouraged not to wear suits at all, no one was on commission and we recruited based on the characteristics and mannerisms that you would expect more from care workers than insurance salesmen because we had lots of people who were HIV positive. We changed the whole culture of how to deal with customers."
It‘s this mixture of business and politics that makes Massow such an enigma and brought him to fame long before his recent appearances on television. Having joined the Conservative Party at the age of 14, he was at one point the youngest chair of a local branch in the country.
He rose to prominence as a rare example of an openly gay Tory, worked as Margaret Thatcher‘s official escort at the Conservative Party conference in 1999 and even put himself forward that same year to be the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral elections the following summer, before making national headlines by defecting to the Labour Party over the Conservatives‘ support for the controversial Section 28 legislation. He‘s also been chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Art, where he courted further controversy by denouncing concept art, and has worked with the Prince‘s Trust to promote running a business to prisoners due for release.
So having finally sold his business - by then called just Ivan Massow - to its staff in 2004, the opportunity to promote entrepreneurship to a wider audience was a challenge he felt he couldn‘t refuse. "Lots of people were asking me to do television but I turned down most of them because I didn‘t really want to be a presenter," he says. "But this one appealed to me because you could see a business going from nothing to being worth something over the course of the year.
"I thought it would be quite educational and that people would see that they could do it for themselves," he adds. "I didn‘t realise that, television being what it is, it would be a lot more lifestyle-oriented and that a lot of the detail about how to start and run a business would disappear."
Out of his depth
Massow is the first to admit that there was nothing in his background to prepare him for the task of taking a range of children‘s bath products from initial concept to supermarket shelves. But Massow is also motivated by a desire to prove people wrong - emanating from being written off as stupid at school on account of his severe dyslexia - so the perceived arrogance he detected from his rival mentors A4E founder Emma Harrison and serial entrepreneur Chris Gorman only served to strengthen his resolve to make the project work.
"I found both of them a bit patronising but I invited that because I was a lot scruffier than them," he says. "They were all glitz and glamour and I was there in a pullover. I wasn‘t really going for the whole 'who‘s the smartest one here‘ thing. That wasn‘t how I was going to win it. If I was going to win it at all it was going to be through hard work."
The resulting company Halos n Horns won the television series, which challenged three teams to take £25,000 and make it into a million pounds within a year. At the end of the series the business was valued at £9.4m and had predicted sales of £13.6m for 2006. The firm‘s range of preservative-free shampoos, baby washes and now toothpastes is now in virtually every major UK supermarket and represents one of the more lasting beneficiaries from the current wave of television-inspired businesses.
Massow is no stranger to the television cameras. He was a regular feature on the Big Breakfast during its first year giving business advice and was also the subject of a BBC documentary Mind of a Millionaire in 2003. But having the television cameras follow your every move while you‘re starting up a new business in an area where you‘ve no previous experience, and yet are acting as a mentor to two people who had no business experience at all, was a whole new challenge.
"The whole time I thought it might not work," he admits. "For instance, in order to sell products you have to go through a three-month stabilisation period to make sure it‘s not risky and the colours don‘t change. We were using completely new formulations which we thought would work but anything could have fallen down and virtually everything did: the printing went wrong, bottles leaked and the first formulations turned out to be inadequate so that was another three-month process.
"So in the end we were printing bottles with the ingredients on without knowing whether they would be good enough, which meant we could have wasted all the bottles," he says. "We were producing stock for supermarkets without really knowing that they were going to take it."
Dwyer straits
But nothing could have prepared him for dealing with the problems caused by Dwyer‘s inability, or reluctance, to commit to the project. Both Dwyer and her best friend Wilcox were young mothers but while Wilcox threw herself into the project, it became evident from very early on that Dwyer was far less interested.
"Karen wanted to be on TV and was only committed to getting her hair right. It really felt like that all the time," says Massow. "The only time she was punctual was when the cameras were on. The rest of the time she was out shopping for the next time the cameras were on. I wasn‘t prepared to carry someone through so they looked good for a television programme; I needed someone to work hard as an entrepreneur. We made a decision to let her work remotely from Ireland so she could be with her mum and her kids but four days would go by and we wouldn‘t hear from her," he adds.
"The piece of research we‘d asked her to do would come back in a tatty state, if at all, while Leila would be standing with her child in her arms outside a school with a clipboard and would work until one o‘clock in the morning doing graphs or searching on the internet. There was such a disparity."
Massow and Wilcox eventually bought Dwyer out of the business, repaying her stake of £15,000, while the company went on to seal deals with Tesco, Sainsbury‘s and Morrisons as it swept aside the rival challenges offered by the FreshBed and The Lean Team.
The whole experience has been something of an eye-opener for someone who had only ever sold virtual products and hadn‘t had to consider complicated issues such as marketing, packaging and distribution. "I didn‘t know anything about this kind of business so I made mistakes and got sucked into traps like anyone else," admits Massow. "I had no idea about marketing a product. Do you go to the Harry Potter movies and hand out packets to kids as they‘re leaving or is it point of sale? Do you stand outside schools? Do you use viral communications?
"I hadn‘t got a clue and it was quite exciting to find out and I‘m still learning and getting some really good advice from some of the big players as well," he adds. "And the answer is that quite often point of sale is the way forward and lots of the other stuff is a waste of money. But you don‘t know that when you‘re doing it."
But, of course, Massow had extensive business experience to call on, even if he hadn‘t got his hands dirty with supplying products to supermarkets before. Hundreds of businesses and industries have since benefited from the gay market but it was Massow who first discovered the real value of the 'pink pound‘, long before it came into fashion.
Yet despite building up a very successful insurance company - twice - he‘s had to learn his fair share of tough lessons along the way. His first mistake was to stay on at the business after he had accepted venture capitalist funding in 1998, effectively agreeing to take a back seat and watch another company run the business he had built up from scratch.
"I didn‘t particularly get on with them; it was a personal thing," he says. "I found them too slow to respond to requests and I didn‘t know how to speak to them. And to be honest I was so depressed, like many entrepreneurs when they sell their company and can‘t cope with new restraints, that I was physically depressed and finding it very difficult to go work."
Massow was eventually offered an escape route in the form of a reverse takeover by the company‘s only competitor, Rainbow Group, creating a new business called the Massow Rainbow Group. But he was so desperate to get out that he was happy to leave with a stake in the new business rather than a big payoff and for the organisation to continue trading on his name. He escaped to Ibiza and that should have been the end of it. "I couldn‘t see the business doing badly but my priority wasn‘t really money," he recalls.
"It was about being free again. I‘d had 10 years of running my own business and doing everything I wanted to do and then had to suddenly go back to acting like an employee. I wasn‘t taking Prozac but perhaps I should have been. I felt that down about life."
Over the Rainbow
But just eight months on he received a telephone call saying the business had run out of cash and would he be able to put up £50,000 to pay the staff. Massow did more than that: he returned to the company determined to get it profitable once again. And that, he says, was the second mistake.
"I shouldn‘t have gone back," he says. "Sometimes you should walk away more quickly and shouldn‘t let personal pride and, dare I say it, loyalty to staff and the brand get in the way. On the other hand, maybe that would have been the wrong time for my reputation to be dragged through the mire. If I had let the business go bust, would Channel 4 have asked me to do Make Me a Million?
"I‘d left the business with huge amounts of cash and it effectively had the entire gay market," he adds. "All they had to do was cut down the expenses in between. I couldn‘t see how this had happened but I hadn‘t concentrated on the business at all. I thought it was over."
So just over a year after he had left, Massow found himself back in the one place that he didn‘t want to be. After a lot of hard work, including the unpleasant business of making staff who had somehow held on to their jobs after the merger redundant, and at a personal cost of £1.5m, he finally made the business operationally profitable once again before selling it in 2004 to a staff buyout for a "ridiculously low price".
Massow, meanwhile, has his eye on further television appearances and is currently looking to attract further investment in Halos n Horns so he can take a step back. "I‘m either looking to sell or become more minority so someone can come in and take over my position because I know nothing about this market really," he says. "I‘ve probably created everything I know on camera so I owe it to Leila to let her trade me up."
He claims to have no political affiliation these days but is clearly closer to his Conservative roots than the Labour Party, despite his brief flirtation with the latter. His love of foxhunting made him as uneasy a fit in the Labour Party as his sexuality had with the Conservatives, although he now is a strong advocate of David Cameron and the notion of 'compassionate Conservatism‘. For Massow, politics is a means to an end rather than an end in itself and once again he put himself forward, unsuccessfully, as a candidate in the 2005 London mayoral elections, this time as an independent.
But there is still a lingering sense of unfinished business from his previous life and frustration at a campaign not yet totally won for Massow, despite finally escaping the world of gay finance. "You‘d think society had moved on but it hasn‘t. People still have a lot of phobias," he says.
"I didn‘t realise quite how strong it was until recent meetings with certain large insurance companies. There are still some matters that need to be taken up and I‘m thinking at the moment of wading back in on certain issues," he says. "For instance, there are still a lot of companies that don‘t allow two males or two females on a joint application for life insurance even though we‘ve got gay marriage."
For now, he‘s just happy to be doing something that he really loves again. "At the moment I‘m going through a period of consolidation so I‘m cleaning up businesses and doing all my housekeeping," he says.
But with television companies falling over themselves to offer him future mentoring roles, Halos n Horns establishing itself as a genuine brand and a burning desire to use his position to help address prejudice, we can expect to hear a lot more from Massow in the future.