You can ring my bell

Over the last few weeks I have been kept busy working for a company called Infinis Energy. It is a pure UK renewables business so was right up my street. It has performing assets in three different technologies; landfill gas, onshore wind and hydro. What has been different for me is that I was approached to be Chairman as part of the preparations for a listing on the London Stock Exchange. I have never been through an IPO (initial public offering) before and found it very interesting and, at times, frustrating. It involves a cast of thousands. I counted five different investment banks, three law firms, two corporate finance advisors, a specialist adviser on landfill gas and one firm of accountants. The conference calls, which at times were running at more than one a day, had so many people on them that I thought they might crash the system. 

It is also a very bureaucratic and legalistic process. The company had to issue a 250 page prospectus which amongst other things includes a very long list of every possible risk, to the extent that I thought we should have included the risk of a meteor hitting one of the Infinis sites. We had to have a number of Board meetings and I dread to think how many trees were sacrificed to produce all the papers. Everyone seemed to be issuing comfort letters to each other and everything had to be verified. 

On top of all this the business had to be marketed to investors. I got involved in something called 'pilot fishing', a term which seems tautologous at best as it involves initial discussions with potential investors and then the Management team spent nine days on a roadshow covering the UK, the US and Germany. They had over 40 one to one meetings as well as group lunches and video conferences. At one point the database of investor contact had over 700 individual fund managers being tracked.

This all came to head on 20 November when Infinis became the latest company to list on the London Stock Exchange. The management team were invited to a nice little ceremony to mark the start of trading, like the bell ringing ceremony in New York. They kindly invited me and it was a really good way to mark the end of the IPO process and the beginning of life as a quoted company. 

As a result I know find myself the Chairman of a public company board. Will I have to grow up now?