Profiling UK Public Leaders: Interview with Kevin Limn

Profiling UK Public Leaders, Episode 1

Most first-time public company CEOs are warned about the reporting burden. Fewer are warned about the advice.

Kevin Limn took Adsure Services PLC onto AQSE in October 2023, after 20 years inside the business. Two years in, what he describes most vividly is not the compliance calendar. It is the number of people who suddenly had a view on what his company should do next.

"There are a lot of different people wanting to take some of your attention, potentially looking to steer you on specific directions."

Inexperience is not the same as being wrong

His answer is unglamorous: trust your own judgment. Not because the advisers are wrong, but because never having done an IPO does not make you wrong about your own business. That asymmetry is exactly what makes a new CEO defer, and deferring is how you end up executing someone else's strategy with your name on it.

He also reframes what good decision-making means. It is not being right every time. It is:

• Knowing whether a decision is needed now, or whether the better move is to sit with it
• Taking the least-worst option when there is no good one
• Changing track without ego when something clearly isn't working

The capital test

Adsure floated without raising. Kevin has since been encouraged, more than once, to go to market sooner than the business needs to. He hasn't.

The conventional read on a tight register with a low free float is that it is a problem to solve. His read is that it is an asset he has not spent yet. He knows who his shareholders are and expects them to be there when something more significant comes along. "To do something for no reason may actually jeopardise your ability to do things when you do need to do them."

Judgment needs evidence

Backing your own judgment requires knowing what is happening on your register. In the UK, that is the part of the system that does not work.

A CEO carries a responsibility to know who owns the company's shares, and the information is not freely available. Adsure's register runs to fewer than 15 lines, so his view is clearer than most, but the nominee accounts still hide the detail. The detail is the point: who moved, when, and whether it was a response to something the company did.

Without it, you are throwing a narrative into the market and hoping. Which is a strange way to operate, given nobody runs a lead generation campaign without a conversion metric. Investor messaging gets treated as the exception.

Confidence and evidence are not substitutes. Both are harder to come by in the dark.