As the face of Channel 4’s new business reality TV series, The Profit, multimillionaire investor Eric Collins will inevitably find himself being compared to Sir Alan Sugar, but the two men couldn’t have less in common. The Apprentice star might choose to be chauffeured around in a Rolls-Royce bigger than some apartments, but Collins doesn’t own a car in Britain. Sugar may be known for giving his contestants a hard time, but Collins is not a fan of “yelling at people”. “I haven’t found it to be a very effective strategy,” says the elegant 54-year-old American with dual British citizenship. Furthermore, Collins doesn’t reside in a mansion in Essex but in an apartment on London’s Bankside; he not only doesn’t have the habit of naming businesses after himself, but barely even has a social media presence; and he doesn’t get off on firing people.
“I’ve had to let people go,” says the serial entrepreneur who has helped sell companies to the likes of Microsoft, was appointed by President Obama to the Small Business Administration’s Council on Underserved Communities, and has been named by the Financial Times as one of the most powerful black business people in Britain. “I’ve helped people find a better connection between their talents and another organisation. It’s not my favourite thing in the world, but I’m OK with it.”
Sitting in the bar of the Cadogan hotel in London, which has been opened especially for his photoshoot, he admits to never having watched The Apprentice or Dragons’ Den, the other show The Profit will doubtless be compared to, and not enjoying the humiliation that seems to be a necessary part of reality TV. “Why does it need to be cruel? People are looking for someone to come in and say, ‘You are the worst entrepreneur I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe you do this stupid thing!’ For me, it would not be constructive. We’re trying to build these organisations up.”
Building things up is something Collins has extensive experience of as CEO of Impact X, a venture capital fund that aims to invest in businesses set up by under-represented entrepreneurs, to tackle “the market inefficiency that over 95 per cent of venture capital in Europe goes to white men”. It has attracted high-profile investors from across the UK, US and France, including the comedian Lenny Henry, the actor Adrian Lester and Uber board member Ursula Burns – the first black woman to run a Fortune 500 company when she served as the head of Xerox. The aim is to raise £100 million of funding, and it has, as its greater mission, nothing less than “generational, societal change”. “If you just have a few restaurants and some barber shops that are started by black people, it’s very different to an Amazon that’s started by a black person.”
Does Impact X have a focus on tech? “Technology had all the opportunity to disrupt not only technology but social systems. [But] when you look at the organisations that are actually out there, all of them are going through soul-searching [about racial representation]. I believe that technology has the best chance of unseating some of that.”
Did he see racism while working in tech himself? “Oh, I would be blind not to. Systemic racism still perpetuates. I note that there are not a lot of other people like me around, in the UK and in France, Germany, Sweden, when some of the populations are as much as 8 per cent black. Black Lives Matter has been happening for ever, right? Since the introduction of black people into the United States, there’s been violence against black people that has been state-sanctioned and/or state-non-investigated. Impact X is about putting your money where your mouth is: good intentions are not good enough.”
Which is not to suggest that The Profit, which sees Collins offering investment to four struggling businesses in the hope they can turn things around, is earnest or dull. The programme, which has been a hit for CNBC in the USA and which also owes something as an idea to Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, offers emotion as the entrepreneur behind Winny’s, a three-year-old company specialising in Jamaican packaged food, has to sit through market research where members of the public turn out to hate his food. There is humour as Collins meets the proprietor of Prymo, which specialises in invisible repairs, and discovers the company headquarters has been emblazoned with the initials JFDI – standing for “Just F***ing Do It”. “That might need a rethink,” says Collins to camera. And you can’t help but wince as Collins coolly offers the same entrepreneur £100,000 for 40 per cent of his business – a fraction of what the founder thought it might be worth.
“Look them in the eye and say it, because it’s fair and appropriate. It’s not an arbitrary number. I do have to present to them an option allowing me to invest. Sometimes they accept it, sometimes they don’t… It’s a gift for me to be able to be embedded in diverse businesses in Manchester, Birmingham, Sussex and then London also.”
You don’t often hear Americans waxing lyrical about the opportunity to travel to industrial parks in Manchester and Birmingham, but then Collins’ optimism is as tangible as Sugar’s misanthropy. It’s hard work to get him to divulge personal information – he won’t even tell me the name of his partner of 25 years, to whom he has been married for 8 years, and asks to go off the record to tell me things that aren’t in the least bit controversial – but it is even more difficult to get him to say anything critical. I ask if he finds Gordon Ramsay on the equivalent show pointlessly cruel and he responds with, “I don’t know. Maybe Gordon’s nicer than me, maybe his is just an act? And I do think that passion is important in business.” Why has he suddenly decided to do TV? It can work for investors, as it did with Reggae Reggae Sauce, when the founder, Levi Roots, appeared on Dragons’ Den. But then there is the tedium of celebrity, endless requests for money from the deserving and undeserving, and in America Collins’ counterpart on The Profit has found himself being sued by one of the businesses he was supposedly trying to turn around. “Being with The Profit is very challenging and rewarding… [which in themselves] are things that have a tendency to bring me fulfilment.”
Collins also has an inadvertently entertaining line in corporate speak. When I ask him if he is prepared for celebrity, he says: “The intention is for that public profile to be utilised to leverage the other messaging.” When I ask how much money he is investing in the four companies on The Profit, which include a mobile haircutting service named Trim-It and a Sussex bakery specialising in sourdough, he launches into a three-minute description of how companies are valued on their ebitda figures (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation). When I ask where in the world he would most like to be right now – thinking he might say North Carolina, where his 86-year old mother lives – he says, “London, in the venture capital community. It’s the epicentre of a growth economy in terms of under-represented investing.” And when I ask what he most likes or hates about Britain, he says: “I really like the people I meet in the technology space.”
I laugh and say I was expecting him to cite something cultural, like our sense of humour or Marmite. He warms up. “It depresses me that people here do not have an appreciation for sweet tea. That’s a big disappointment. There’s so much tea, and all you need is a little ice and some sugar and it would be perfect.”
Collins takes time to defrost, but it helps that the “messaging” he is talking about “leveraging”, his work as a venture capitalist at Impact X, is genuinely fascinating. He came to it after a circuitous career that saw him, among other things, and not in chronological order, gain degrees at Princeton and Harvard Law School alongside Barack Obama (“I’ve known him since my first day at law school. But I don’t think he talks about me in his interviews! I have not seen him since various inaugurations”), set up a couple of businesses including a casualty of the first dotcom boom and a production company (his 1997 feature film, Legal Deceit, has a rating of 3.4/10 on the Internet Movie Database), work as a strategy consultant with Microsoft and IBM, and end up in Britain after working for an AI company started by two Cambridge graduates (“I thought I was going to be here for two years, but there was more to do”).
I assume that the Black Lives Matter protests last year created a surge of interest in Impact X – it gained a load of coverage, and he was quoted saying, among other things, that instead of solely fretting about reparations for slavery, people should invest in black businesses through initiatives such as Impact X. But Collins tells me that this hasn’t been the case: Impact X has the aim of raising £100 million, and while they are closing on the first tranche of £30 million, it is proving challenging work. “We find a lot of interest from the United States in terms of pension funds, endowments, private equity funds, high-net-worth individuals’ foundations, who are interested in diversifying. Here, we find some interest… but we don’t find any of the institutions you might expect.”
So Black Lives Matter didn’t change much? “I would say among some people, some things have changed tremendously. But again, you saw the [Sunday Times] Rich List – there are, what, 4 people out of 1,000 who are black? In the FTSE 100 there’s not one black in any of the most senior C-suite or chair positions.”
I can’t quite tally Collins’s trenchant activism with the carefulness of his demeanour, but there is another illustration of his subcutaneous passion for social justice when I ask him what he misses about America and he provides the most unexpected answer: its toxic politics.
“I grew up in a family that was very political. I was at my first state convention when I was 18. I was a delegate. I remember Bill Clinton speaking there when he was governor of Arkansas, when he was starting his presidential run, and so for me, that has always been an interesting space. And I’m involved less here in politics. I’m used to that sort of bruising politics.”
But every centrist on the planet was depressed to hell by Trump. “Well, I’m not saying I wasn’t depressed, but it also was very energising, right? You had then the population spending a lot of time on those sorts of issues.”
In turn, his family history provides a deeper explanation for his activism on race. He was raised in the Deep South by parents (his late father, Henry, a university professor and then an executive with a Swiss chemical company; his mother, Adeline, a music teacher and guidance counsellor) who chose to move from Philadelphia to raise a family in a rural, racially segregated part of the country.
“I think they wanted us to continue that tradition [of civil rights]. They didn’t have to; they could’ve stayed in the northeast. Why did they decide to do that? Because you have to take a stand about things. There are causes for which it’s important to fight, and with certain types of opportunities and advantages, you need to make sure that you’re fighting not just on behalf of yourself, so that you can buy your own Maserati, but so that you can make the world a better place. This was what they hammered into us, that you have an obligation to the world to make it a better place.”
It was a high-achieving family: his older brother became a transplant surgeon, his younger sister a broadcaster. He concedes it could be “challenging” following in the footsteps of a high-achieving brother, though it sounds like his parents, as well as being progressive, were highly supportive, encouraging their children into therapy whenever necessary.
“Well, my mother was a counsellor, and one of the things about my family is that we believe in strong mental health. When I was very young – this is an example – I didn’t get a part in a school Christmas pageant, and I came home very upset. So, you know, we had to see the therapist, and I was then able to talk through some of the reasons for my shyness and then move forward.” He laughs. “They created a monster.”
I ask him whether he thinks America is more screwed up about race than Britain. “Both countries have their challenges.” I tell him I interviewed the black actor David Harewood recently and he argued that the problem with Britain is that we have no infrastructure to campaign against racism.
“I have places we can go when what we need to do is organise. Lenny Henry is one of my vice-chairs. He is doing something right now in terms of vaccination, he does a lot of things with Comic Relief, so we can get the group, activate them. But we don’t have an organisation that’s being proactive. There’s a deep network, but what we don’t have is [an organisation] that can take a proactive agenda, that has its own funding.”
Another difference: in America a conversation exists when it comes to the issue of reparations for slavery, whereas in Britain we struggle to remember that we profited from slavery to such a degree that, according to the FT, slave-related businesses in the 18th century accounted for about the same proportion of GDP as the professional and support services sector does today.
“When I applied for British citizenship and took my Life in the UK test, the only question about slavery was about what happened to end slavery, not that slavery existed.”
It turns out his family have traced their roots back to the 1720s, in Virginia. A slave background? “Well, of course, if you’re a black American, generally you have that kind of a lineage. But if you also find yourself a census, you have to look at the data itself, and if the census data has your first and last name, it means you’re a freed black person. So someone in 1720 was a freed black, and then after that we don’t know.” Does he think that the history of slavery explains racism on both sides of the Atlantic? “I think the reason we have systemic racism is because people continue to benefit in very tangible ways, in the board room, in the offices of power. So, in the UK last year, if you were a woman and you were a woman-founded team, 2.9 per cent of venture capital went to you; if you are a black founder, 0.2 per cent of all investment capital went to you, and if you’re a black woman, it’s 0.02 per cent, and that means that everything else went to a white man. Those numbers mean there are a lot of individuals who are not being funded who have great ideas, and that some who don’t have such great ideas are getting funded, so that’s the issue.”
Characteristically, he doesn’t dwell on the negative sentiment for long. “For us at Impact X, remember, we think of this as an opportunity. Because everyone’s investing in the white males from Oxford and Cambridge who are in artificial intelligence, we have an arbitrage option, because there’s a market inefficiency, so it allows us to get good valuations for deals. That’s what you need when you’re an investor, and that’s why we find it surprising that there are not more people trying to throw capital at us and say, ‘Because you have a different thesis, you have a different approach, which has been proven: our money will get multiplied by working with you.’ But it will come in time.” He looks up at the ceiling. “It will come in time.”
The Profit is on Channel 4 later this year
Shoot credit
With thanks to the Cadogan, a Belmond hotel, London (belmond.com)
