BIO: Sir Steven Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Good & Prosper and has been involved in business finance and investment for the best part of 30 years, having started working for Merrill Lynch Investment Bank in Munich, Germany, in 1987 at the age of 24.
STORY: Steven entered a successful partnership that saw them take a stock from 50 cents to 400 euros. They made so much money from their business, but the problem was Steve wasn’t ready for that kind of success. He had no system for dealing with the wealth he created and eventually lost all his money.
LEARNING: Being successful is 100% dependent on you. Working on yourself is the key to having whatever it is that you want to have.
“You’ve got to be the owner in order to do the things that owners do and thereby to have the things that owners have.”
Steven Wilkinson
Guest profile
Sir Steven Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Good & Prosper and has been involved in business finance and investment for the best part of 30 years, having started working for Merrill Lynch Investment Bank in Munich, Germany, in 1987 at the tender age of 24.
Good & Prosper is an advisory and investment company through which Steven acts as a thinking partner for business leaders and owners, supporting them as a generalist business expert across the fields of finance, leadership, and culture.
Good & Prosper is also a knowledge platform teaching finance to entrepreneurs with a focus on Small & Medium sized businesses, primarily in the English-speaking world.
Steven founded the publishing business Pitchfork Press and publishes a weekly essay, “Pitchfork Papers,” via Substack to a rapidly growing and diverse international audience.
Worst investment ever
Steven started his investment business in 1998 and had an excellent first couple of years. This was because, as a value investor, he had no interest in any of the new economy stocks. Steven stuck with stocks in the public markets, mainly because that’s all he could afford. Steven had a couple of stocks that were mind-bogglingly great investments. And so his business did quite well, and capital increased substantially over the following years.
Steven met an American gentleman who invited him to be on the board of a company he was considering setting up. The gentleman was working for one of the more famous German companies. This publishing company profited enormously from the new economy boom. He’d been in charge of managing what was a promiscuously bought portfolio of new economy businesses.
The gentleman invited a senior law firm partner and a guy with deep restructuring experience to join his board. The gentleman set up the initial board meeting to get to know each other. The meeting was at the lawyer’s office. The gentleman never showed up, and the lawyer had to return to work. So Steven and the restructuring guy chatted and were fascinated by each other’s stories. They decided to stay in touch.
The restructuring guy had made much money with his previous partnership and wanted to see what he could do on a bigger stage. That’s how Steven got into a partnership with him. The guy was impressed by Steven’s capital markets intelligence and excellent networks. And Steve saw the guy as an absolutely focused money maker and restructuring genius, which he undoubtedly was.
The two new partners came up with the idea of buying a shell company, an empty stock-exchange-listed company. The thinking behind this idea was that they were coming into a time when they could buy assets cheaply. And if they could generate the sort of returns they thought they could return, the share price would reflect that reasonably quickly. Then they could determine through rights issues or shares issues how much money to take in and how much control to give up.
So they found a shell company that had been formed for a spa in a little village and bought 90% of it. The deal was that Steve would take 40% of the shares, be the chairman and help with strategy, investors, and networks. His partner would take 60% and do all the work. The company was phenomenally successful. They took the share price from 50 cents to 400 euros.
While this should have been Steve’s most successful investment, it turned out to be his worst because he was not ready for that kind of success and had no system for dealing with the wealth he had created. In 2007 everything blew up. Steve lost all his partnership and his money. He was also left with a wealth-destroying amount of debt.
Lessons learned
- Being successful in business, being good at investing, and being a good owner is 100% dependent on you.
- You have to be ready, deserving of wealth, and be in a position of giving to receive.
- Working on yourself is the key to having whatever it is that you want to have.
- Whatever you experience results from your own self-reflection, self-development, and maturity.
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