Plenty of directors in the bank

Jonathan Hick's relationship with his bank started when he was 13. Barclays lent him £200 to fund his own mobile disco and soon he was providing the music at bank events. Three years later Hick was at it again, importing huge foam "hands" for football matches.

In his mid-thirties he was involved with the world's first drive-through fish and chip restaurant in Hull, and found himself with only three weeks to find a good Managing Director. It wasn't easy, and the business was sold at a loss, but it gave Hick an idea: a register of chief executives and venture capitalists, and a meeting place for them. The result is Directorbank.

" I put an ad in the FT saying: 'If you're interested in a management buy-in, either as a candidate or as a vendor, send details to a box number.' To my astonishment 267 people replied. I discovered that chief executives of Footsie 250 companies will send their CV's to a box number blind," he says.

Thus was the register established in 1998. Hick now 39, says: " I put in £50,000 and Barclays matched it. Well, I'd been with them for about 20 years."

Eighteen months later Hick turned to Stephen Ross of Springboard, a venture capitalist prepared to back early stage businesses. Ross invested just short of £450,000. Hick says: "It helped to fund the technology and the database, paid for some marketing and kept me going for six months while I knocked on the door of every venture capital house in London." Ross has 40 per cent of the business and Hick has 30 per cent.

Now Directorbank boasts almost 40 retained venture capital clients and 550 venture capital executives, as well as a much longer list of immediately available non-executives. Hick hopes they will be much in demand after this week's report on corporate governance, which recommended that non-executives should be in the majority on public company boards. An events arm has been started and the first profit made last year.

"Anyone can have an idea," Hick says, "but at the end of the day money will assemble either behind a management team or a tried and tested manager. If you haven't got one, go out and get one."

Jonathan Hick, Chief Executive of Directorbank