32 entrepreneurs
Courtier-Dutton predicts a bright future ahead It’s not often that being 'fired' is described as a lucky break, but for David Courtier-Dutton it was the decision that set him free from life as a city lawyer and opened the door to a whole new career in the music and fashion world. Today, he is founder and CEO of SoundOut, providing crowd powered predictive testing methodology for the music industry, and its sister review website
slicethepie.com. With its ability to spot both the best new trends and the 'no hopers' of tomorrow, the concept has also been taken up by the retail fashion sector and is poised to move into new markets. With a full-time staff of 15 at its Reading base, the company posted a £800,000 turnover in 2015 and Courtier-Dutton forecasts 100% growth year on year. Alison Dewar found out the secrets to his success
Growing up in Farnham, Surrey, Courtier-Dutton went to the local prep school and then Bradfield College, near Reading, before heading off to Exeter University to read law. He spent two years with a top city law firm but shortly after qualifying, Black Monday hit the financial markets and Courtier-Dutton, along with the majority of his fellow cohort, was let go. He moved first into the corporate finance world, then technology and finally property development, before founding SoundOut and
slicethepie.com a decade ago this month. He is married to Cassilda, an interior designer, and has two grown-up children.
in the technology sector and I quite enjoyed it – I quickly realised being an 'expert' was to always make sure I knew 1% more than anyone else – which in the mid 90s was relatively simple in the UK. I remember once writing an internal paper for the bank to explain what the 'Internet' was.
What did you want to do when you grew up?
At school, I couldn’t decide whether to pursue arts or science, so I did both and studying law seemed to offer good training while I decided what I wanted to do longer term. Having joined a city law firm I found it was a difficult profession to break away from due to the attractive pay and benefits, so I was very fortunate to be fired and see it as one of the defining moments of my career.
When I was a lawyer, I always dreamed of being a venture capitalist, I thought it was the most exciting job in the world. Now I’m a bit more jaded and I realise that although they get to meet a host of interesting entrepreneurs and companies, it’s mostly about financial engineering and constantly structuring risk to protect their downside.
But you moved into the corporate world?
Yes, as a corporate financier, I was part of a dedicated emerging companies team, working with businesses in the £20 million-£80m capitalisation space and handling exits and flotations. I carved out a bit of a niche for myself
businessmag.co.uk
I then joined Infobank, a B2B trading hub which I had helped to float on AIM, firstly as the in-house lawyer and then as strategic development director. In 18 months, its value went from 40p to £42 a share with a market cap of around £2.5 billion, and in April 2000 we undertook an IPO on the London Stock Exchange, raising £130m. It was just as the dotcom bubble began to burst. During the three week investor roadshow we saw the share price drop to £13 – every day we visited shell-shocked technology fund managers and the last thing they wanted to do was talk to a technology company when the value of their portfolios was collapsing. In the end, we just managed to raise the finance but then faced the brutal dotcom hangover. Having made some money from the deal, I left a year later.
What did you do next?
My wife is an interior designer and we’d always enjoyed working on properties together. I set up a residential property business in Bristol with two partners and one of our highlights was developing Bridge House in Clifton, Bristol, into luxury apartments, which even today is still the most desirable address in the city.
What tempted you back into business?
I had always been into music and around the early 2000s, I was increasingly frustrated by buying CDs, getting them home and finding out that from 12 tracks, there were only two or three that I really wanted to listen to.
I also knew there were huge numbers of unsigned artists and plenty of music, but no way to access them. Sites such as MySpace were just exploding and for the first time bands and fans were beginning to be able to connect online, which I thought was fantastic.
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – JUNE 2016
The only thing they were missing was a way of raising money outside the traditional label system and that’s when I launched Slicethepie as a fundraising site for musicians. They could upload a minimum of three tracks, which would then be reviewed anonymously by an online community. Using the blind review system meant we could identify which were the best bands, while another part of the website enabled the community to invest so the bands could afford to record an album.
How successful was that?
We funded about 35 bands, one of whom went on to sign for Atlantic Records. The underlying business model wasn’t working though, so in parallel we set up a market insight business offering the service to independent record labels and artists that enabled them to automatically submit songs to our community to get reviews and market research.
Our problem was that no-one had really heard of
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76