Profiling UK Public Leaders: Interview with Mark Steeves (AIM:EPP)

Profiling UK Public Leaders, Episode 4

Mark Steeves chairs VSA Capital and Energy Pathways. He describes himself, without much hesitation, as a salesman, and it shapes how he talks about almost every part of the job.

Asked for the best advice he has received, Mark resists the idea of a silver bullet, and lands on listening.

For a chair specifically, he says the requirement is being good with people: teasing out what board members actually think, and being willing to tell someone directly when you do not think they are giving you everything you need. The purpose is a board that reaches decisions after everyone has had a chance to speak.

He is candid about the chair and chief executive relationship being the delicate part. People who lead executive teams, in his experience, do not easily take criticism or direction. His conclusion is that you do not have to like your board or your CEO, but you do need to understand them and be behind them.

Raising money when both ends of the market have thinned

Mark describes a market where individual retail investors are fewer than they were, and traditional institutions less active than they were.

His practical conclusions:

• Be constantly looking to raise. He thinks turning money down when it is available is a mistake
• Accept the awkwardness that comes with it. Share prices move, and you may end up having given one investor better terms than another. He sees that as hard to avoid
• Engage traders as well as long-term holders. You want shareholders who buy the story and add to their position, but a volatile stock is inherently interesting to people who make money from the movement, and they are part of the market too

Shots on goal

The most consistent theme is that Mark never really stops pitching. His view is that you cannot predict which conversation produces a shareholder, so the only rational approach is to have as many of them as possible, with no assumptions about who is worth the effort.

The same instinct makes him sceptical of a certain kind of non-executive candidate, the sort who arrives with a contacts book and a list of people they know. His test is whether they can actually deliver, and he says many step away when that question is asked directly.

Reading the room

Looking five years out, Mark expects politics to become a much more significant backdrop. Businesses must stay out of politics, in his view, while reading the signs carefully.

He is a committed believer in capital and what can be done with it, both charitably and for private gain, and thinks business is widely cast as the villain. The skill he expects leaders to need is the ability to articulate that case better than they do now.