Moby Dick

A tycoon from Troon, Richard Emanuel is very driven. He makes millions from his telecom empire, but this upwardly mobile businessman remains committed to his partner, his family and Scotland

AT FIRST glance, Richard Emanuel has everything he could want. The 32-year-old Scot is wealthy, good looking and six months ago, he sold his company DX Communications for #42million, making him a personal fortune of #18million. He is valued at #25million, making him joint 74th in the Sunday Times Rich List for Scotland, along with records boss Alan McGee and singer Annie Lennox.

But drop in on Emanuel's idyllic home outside the Scottish seaside town of Troon and you soon realise his multi-millionaire lifestyle has its drawbacks. He might have the world at his feet and ambitions to build an international telecommunications empire, but his milk is distinctly lumpy. He beams an apologetic smile and says: "The milk has gone like cheese. Sorry. This is only the second time I've been home this month."

The sign that Emanuel is even slightly flawed is a welcome one. As he settles down with a cup of instant coffee, complete with powdered milk, it is obvious that the blip in his otherwise perfect image is unusual. The boy wonder who launched the mobile phone retailer DX Communications at age 21 and sold it to BT Cellnet last September gives good PR.

The son of academics, he was privately educated at Glasgow's Hutcheson Grammar, but left school at 16 to make his own way in the world. He began his working life in an Edinburgh health club, where he learned the principles of business by selling vitamin pills to clients. In 1987 a flashy customer asked him to look after his mobile phone at reception while he exercised. The phone might have been rather bulkier than today's nifty little models, but for Emanuel, it was love at first sight. Realising there was a yawning gap in Scotland's mobile phone market, he set up DX in a cramped industrial unit in Glasgow's Govan, joining forces with John Whyte a year later to launch a string of shops. By the time DX was sold, the company had been growing at an astounding annual rate of 164 per cent over five years.

Emanuel is impeccably dressed in a grey suit, with striking dark looks and a perfect white smile any male catalogue model would die for. He sits in an immaculate living room, decorated in safe, neutral shades. Its tidiness speaks volumes about his housekeeper's abilities - and his long absences from home.

From where he is sitting, he can gaze across his own flawless lawns towards Troon's legendary golf course and out towards the sea. That is, if he tires of the Hoffman paintings of semi-clothed females that are hung around the lounge walls. Upstairs, a pool table is waiting to be used in an entertainments room, along with a wall- mounted, flat-screen DVD player. Emanuel's home, set in an area dubbed locally as Millionaire's Row, is perfect for touching down in after jet-setting around Europe on business. This is the ultimate bachelor's pad, right down to the sour milk.

Since selling DX and its 140-strong chain of mobile phone shops last September, Emanuel has been working flat out to strengthen the rest of the business empire he shares with Whyte. Interactive Telecom Solutions, the holding company owned by the pair, has four divisions that didn't go under the hammer, including a mobile phone servicing business based in Clydebank and an insurance company for mobile phone users.

Emanuel has come a long way since forging DX Communications with #1000 savings and a #3000 overdraft. Now he means to go where DX could only dream of - on a global scale. Building his dreams is an exhausting process that requires almost evangelical zeal and the 70- hour weeks he has been working for nearly a decade. But although Emanuel is dedicated and demands nothing less from his staff, he says he knows where to draw the line.

"The last two or three months have just vanished," he says. "On Tuesday I got up in Nice at 4.30am to get a 6.30am flight to Holland. Then I got up at 6am on Wednesday and worked through to 2am. Yesterday, I got up first thing to fly back to Scotland and work flat out. I must admit, last night, I did veg out in front of the TV for two hours, so you do get tired. What you realise is you don't win any medals by killing yourself."

Emanuel pauses to describe how a fighter pilot's ability to make critical decisions is inevitably dulled by exhaustion. It is the first in a string of references that he makes to male icons, from top athletes to racing drivers, suggesting his ego has a lot to live up to. His philosophy is simple. If he is to reach his goals, he can't risk burning himself out, so a playboy lifestyle is out. Emanuel would rather be Richard Branson than George Best any day, no matter how much fun the footballer had before sliding towards self- destruction.

"If you're tired and grumpy, you're not going to be the most motivational person to be around and the quality of your work could suffer," he says. "I can't burn the candle at both ends - go out to parties till four in the morning and get up at 6.30am to do a day's work. I work hard, but I look after my health and diet. A lot of people push themselves very hard, eat a lot of junk and are out to all hours, but you've got to watch."

WITH a little prompting, Emanuel allows his PR shield to slip a little and explains that he needs a solid foundation in his life to achieve what he firmly believes he is capable of. The two anchors in his life are his girlfriend, Valerie King, and his Canadian mother, Lois. They were there while he built his business and he has no intention of neglecting them for the rock 'n' roll lifestyle his money could undoubtedly buy. If that sounds dull, he doesn't care.

"Those relationships are very important to me and I wouldn't sacrifice them for anything," he says. "If big chunks of your life are devoted to business, you want stability in other parts of your life. It needs to be quite centred and balanced. There are sports stars who lose the plot, but the ones who are pretty stable in a relationship and centred, with their heads screwed on, tend to do well. You're pushing yourself to your limit to try and do the best you can and if you don't have a strong foundation, it's a hard thing to do."

Emanuel's preoccupation with stability is understandable. He might have attended an exclusive, fee-paying school, but that didn't buy him a perfect family life. His parents divorced when he was ten and he and his younger sister Jane went to live with Lois in a tenement flat on Glasgow's southside. The children continued seeing their father Ronald, an English-born chemistry lecturer at Glasgow University, who went on to become a vice principal. Lois, now retired, kept her job as head of the English department in Langside College while raising the children. Emanuel was inspired by her example.

He says: "I wouldn't regard myself as being privileged. I was fortunate. I had parents who cared about me. Divorce is certainly not a positive thing for a child to go through, but it's a common occurrence that hundreds of thousands of children have to deal with.

"I don't bear any emotional scars. An experience like that tends to make you stronger, like any event in your life that's not positive. I look back at my business career and there were many difficulties and tough times to work through, but it's often the hardest times that you develop the most."

While Jane excelled in music, graduating on to the Royal College of Music in London, Emanuel turned his back on academia.

"It wasn't for me," he says. "I'm good at working at something I believe in, but I'm not the most self-disciplined person at doing things I don't like. I just wanted to leave. I knew I was going to do something, but quite what, I didn't know. Looking back, you sometimes wish you'd applied yourself a bit more, but probably if I had, I wouldn't be where I am today."

Before launching into business, Emanuel spent a year at Langside College, where he met Valerie. He stayed friends with her while he began his mobile phone crusade and she trained to be a primary teacher. They became a couple three and a half years ago. Valerie, who works in a Barrhead school, has a flat in Glasgow and the couple spend what time they have together between it and Emanuel's home.

Emanuel insists their relationship can cope with his working hours and globe-trotting lifestyle.

"Our relationship is very strong," he says. "For as long as Valerie has known me, I've been busy working, so it's not as if we had all this spare time and then suddenly that was lost. It's not as if I was choosing the business over my partner.

"She's passionate about her own job. Teaching kids in Barrhead - and before that, in Castlemilk - can be a more stressful job than mine at times. Teachers can have ten, 15 hours a week at home doing marking or whatever after school. If Valerie was at home twiddling her thumbs, there might be a problem, but she's not. We see each other two or three times a week. I'm away a lot, but it's not like being in the Navy, where you're away for months."

He looks at the little black gadget sitting on the couch beside him and adds: "I've got a mobile phone, funnily enough. That helps." Later, Valerie confirms that he switches the phone off while he is sleeping, but he keeps his pager on.

ALTHOUGH he and Valerie have no plans to have a family at the moment, Emanuel wants one. Having come from a broken home, he realises the importance of children feeling their parents are there for them. Again, he points to the mobile phone as his salvation. He says it is the key to being able to work while surrounded by nappies. The two aren't mutually exclusive, he insists.

"You can make work and family compatible," he says. "You can make the time. I don't need to sit at a desk to work, so I don't have a desk. My vision for Interactive Telecom is to build a pan-European, probably international telecommunications group, so it's going to be many times the size of DX. That's a big goal to have, but my job is not sitting behind a desk for hours shuffling papers. It's about doing deals and talking to customers on the end of this thing." Again, he gestures towards his beloved mobile.

"I don't need to be physically in a location - this phone is my office. You can fax and email from it while taking the kids to the beach. I believe I can build a company ten times the size without a desk. That means I can be with a family, work and still sit here."

With family scheduled for later, Emanuel's baby is his company. And just as offspring make their parents proud, he gets pleasure from seeing Interactive Telecom thriving. He says the Clydebank mobile servicing business is dearest to his heart, because it is injecting desperately-needed jobs into the area.

"I don't want people to perceive me as some kind of playboy," he says. "I'm very focused and I'm very pro-Scotland. I'm proud of what we're doing as a business. We now have Europe's biggest repair facility for mobile phones, based in Clydebank, a real jobs blackspot. It employs 140 people at the moment and will grow to 200 by the end of this year. That's important to me.

"All the sugary bits about being wealthy are fine and can be good fun, but it matters that me and my colleagues are doing something positive."

When Emanuel does have time to enjoy his surroundings, he takes long walks along the nearby beach, studiously avoiding the golf course, the regular stomping ground of business types.

"I love the sea and being beside water," he says. "I find water very calming. If you look out the window, you've got sea and sky. I need that kind of space, having lived in a tenement and then a city centre flat until I was about 28."

He stops to welcome Valerie, who has arrived to remind him they are due to fly to Nice in the next couple of hours for a weekend break. The interruption is well-timed proof that Emanuel's life is not all work and no play. The businessman politely makes his excuses and prepares to turn his mind to pleasure. If he is travelling light, you can be sure he remembers one item even before his toothbrush - his mobile phone

Copyright 2000
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