Business reporters and CEOs don’t always see eye to eye – the Pru’s Mike Wells is quite the exception

My Week

Alan Yau at his pub/restaurant the Duck & Rice in Berwick St, Soho (Alex Lentati/Evening Standard)

In more than two decades reporting on matters financial, I’m afraid I’ve never felt at home strolling through the City of London. Those deliberately intimidating high stone walls and columns soaring up like palisades from the pavements; the weirdly all-male crowds in their suits and ties. It feels so alien from any other part of my world. Nowadays, while the people may not be as universally male and white as they were when I started out, it’s adopted another alienation technique: the place has so many building sites that you keep losing your bearings. Once-familiar landmarks are now acre-sized holes in the ground surrounded by high hoardings. Pavements disappear from one week to the next, driving the puzzled pedestrian through maze-like diversions which deposit them in completely the wrong place. And don’t get me started on the dust and noise of the construction lorries pounding through the streets.

Meanwhile, the skycrapers are now so numerous they block the horizon, making it impossible to triangulate, as one used to, using the old NatWest Tower and Lloyd’s of London.

I guess that’s a longwinded way of apologising to my pals at the Pru for being late for our meeting this week, which involved me schlepping sweatily across the City from my previous pow-wow at the rather soul-less corporate office of RBS. Weirdly, RBS’s modern glass edifice was built without a communal area like a canteen or atrium for staff to socialise in or welcome guests.

Perhaps it doesn’t want its 79 per cent shareholder (that’s us taxpayers) to think its staff are slacking.

It’s good to chat

The Pru’s chief executive Mike Wells is as engaging a businessman as you’re likely to meet. An athletic, tall Canadian (via Nashville and New York) with dazzling teeth and Hollywood looks (think Clark Kent aged 50), he puts the typical English chief executive in the shade.

As an insurance lifer and keen mathematician, he’ll talk your legs off about his industry if you wish. (He ran Jackson Life, the Pru’s US operation, before taking over last year from Tidjane Thiam). But he also has a fascinating hinterland.

For half of our meeting – before he had to shoot off for a doze at the opera – we discussed his son Jackson’s burgeoning success as a singer songwriter in China. Wells Jr has had sell-out tours in the country, and even sings in Mandarin.

We talked of Mr Wells’ own love of music, and how he lends his time and business nous to Nashville’s Music City Music Council and readily bids in auctions for Gibson guitars at industry functions there. But if country and blues is not your thing, he can expound on cattle (he owns a ranch outside Nashville), US politics (he’s a conservative with a gun licence), or world travel. Given that he nowadays has charge over the Pru’s vast Asian business, he’s seen a lot of that region. His advice for the must-see place there? Hanoi: get there before the 21st century catches up.

Why am I going on about this stuff in a column about business? Because being a well-rounded individual with get-up-and-go makes all the difference when running a multinational corporation. Often, the boss will be spending months negotiating torturously complicated deals with powerful executives and politicians in countries like China, Korea and Taiwan, where personal relationships are absolutely crucial. They’ll involve many long dinners and meetings, public functions and, in some cases, long stretches of travel together. Conversation has to flow and be entertaining. Mr Wells must pull it off with elan.

Thinking ahead

I’m always far more at home in the pub than in a corporate City environment. So it made a cheery change to meet the boss of Enterprise Inns, Simon Townsend, at one of his boozers in Soho. Unlike Enterprise’s gritty Blue Posts up the road where his swashbuckling predecessor Ted Tuppen would hold court, The Duck and Rice hardly looked like a pub at all. In fact, once you’d got past the huge vats of Czech lager by the front door, it resembles an upmarket Chinese bar with a full-service restaurant upstairs. I hazard that, by the exquisite floor-to-ceiling Oriental tiles and wooden décor, the refurb must have cost Enterprise a fortune. Wrong. Enterprise spent barely a penny. Instead, Alan Yau, the founder of Wagamama and Hakkasan restaurants, paid for the whole lot. Rather than go down the traditional route for pubcos like Enterprise, where the tenant has to buy his beer from the company, Mr Yau is operating more like a retailer in a shopping centre, paying rent and a cut of the proceeds to Enterprise and striking his own deals for lager – hence the Pilsner from the Czech Republic.

Historically a tenanted estate, meaning the local publicans run the show in return for rent and a beer tie, Enterprise under Mr Townsend is increasingly running different business models at its 5,000 properties.

Some are on a variation of the deal with Mr Yau, where the publican or restaurateur mixes and matches between rent-only and beer tie models, and some moving to be managed houses. Others are going into a more experimental division set up to build a new upmarket chain of pub-restaurants which it can hopefully then sell on at a tidy profit. This is set up as a joint venture with Rupert Clevely, famed for setting up Geronimo Inns. The beauty is Enterprise learns and benefits from Clevely’s gastropub experience while, hopefully, making a decent profit when they sell it in five years’ time. Small firm, entrepreneurial thinking in a FTSE-100 business. I’ll drink to that