Day in the life: Point man

8:32am
Arrive at my desk after cycling through Hyde Park to work. Our offices are next to Waterloo Bridge on the banks of the River Thames.  We have a team meeting every Tuesday at 9:30 so my first hour of the day today was spent dealing with overnight emails from the US because we have investors on both the east and west coast of the States. I’ll then get some prep work done for the team meeting. 

Jeremy Lytle

9:31am
Team meeting begins. It is a structured meeting chaired by one of our four managing directors, this time Steve Tudge.  All 23 members of the investment team will be here, with the five members of our Manchester office connected via video conferencing, and we start with our advanced deals currently in exclusivity. We then work through our pipeline of potential opportunities, usually companies coming to the market in the next 12-36 months which we have been tracking. Next we go through the portfolio. Currently we have 14 companies and each case team will update us on their portfolio company on a rolling basis so roughly we are updated on each company every four to five weeks. I report on investors, both existing and prospective and the whole meeting is a download where everyone should be feeling fully appraised.

10:37am 
I’m doing my regular work between now and lunch so today I’m reading some of our final investment papers. I am also speaking to one of the case teams on a potential co-investment opportunity that we are working on. We discuss what we should be talking to the LP about, what materials we need to send them, when they need it by and how quickly they need to respond.

12:45pm
We always have a team lunch on a Tuesday that usually consists of an internal or external presentation combined with sandwiches. Today we have two summer interns presenting an origination project they have been working on for one of our sector teams.

3:03pm 
We are not fund raising at the moment but I still make sure I’m meeting potential investors on a continual basis. This afternoon’s meeting is an introductory meeting with a US-based LP coming to our office for the first time.

4:38pm
We have the management team of one of our portfolios coming in, CarTrawler, based in Dublin. We invested in this high growth online aggregator of car hire supply in May 2011. This is typically an annual event for each of the companies and I sit in as an observer as they present to ECI’s Investment Committee on their progress. It’s good for me to be a part of this as it allows me to hear directly from the management team on recent trading and an update on their respective market(s). This is invaluable for me so I am fully informed for ECI’s investors. It goes beyond just the numbers.

6:00pm
I have a BVCA meeting as I sit on a couple of their committees. This meeting is for the Investor Relations committee that will last about 45 minutes to an hour. Luckily for me the BVCA is just one floor down so I avoid any London-based traffic panic.

7:03pm
Back to my desk and it’s time to clear the backlog of emails, requests and action points. I’ll typically leave by about 7.15pm to 7:45pm unless I have an event to attend.