Wed 2 Jan 2008
... with Stephen Wicks
It seems that the devil makes work for idle hands - even if it proves to be rather rewarding toil. Michael Dineen discovers what tempted Stephen Wicks out of, a very brief, retirement. 
When a man has sold the business he worked hard to create, the question inevitably arises: "Were you tempted to retire?"So, I asked it of Stephen Wicks, some time creator of Country & Metropolitan.
"Yes. I was. I put my £10 million in the bank and I got more and more depressed. It lasted a month, until finally the mood got so bad that Jenny, my wife took me to the doctor. He said that if he'd got ten million in the bank he wouldn't be depressed - but perhaps I should get a job."
And that's precisely what he did. He set up Inland Plc with a few former C&M colleagues, investing a handsome chunk of his own fortune as a sign of good faith - as did some co-directors - and ordered a new brass plate for the front door.
Inland is a company, as its name suggests, set up to prepare land for immediate development - by the highest bidder.
Stephen, with a team of ten, shuns the business of actual building these days. He prefers the intricacies of negotiation with sellers and local planning staff which eventually results in a value-added parcel of real estate with no lingering bureaucratic headaches for the house builder who buys it.
In these days of planning frustrations and delays, Inland is offering a welcome service, and it is a service which will expand as house builders tire of expensive time-wasting attendance upon bone-headed planning officers.
For "bone-headed" read over-worked, under-resourced and nationally lacking firm policy guidance. But bone-headed will do as an abbreviation. As somebody once said if planning officers were any use at all they'd be working in the private sector.
Today in a suite of offices which closely resembles C&M's former land department in Rickmansworth, Stephen Wicks does seem entirely at ease; and he admits he is glad not to be involved in building any more.
Creating Inland seemed to me to be a logical course for someone who began his career by persuading the owners of large gardens to join forces with neighbours and sell them to a developer.
A pioneer of this technique Stephen was at first an electrical contractor whose work took him into all manner of wealthy suburbs in the Home Counties, and clearly he was a man of patience and tact to achieve this kind of co-operation. And these are qualities he is still able to call on today.
Creating Inland seemed to me to be a logical course for someone who began his career by persuading the owners of large gardens to join forces with neighbours and sell them to a developer
One of C&M's major schemes involved the development of a former military airfield at Rissington in the Cotswolds, and thus Stephen became a regular customer for official land such as this - and also valuable real estate owned by the health services.
Currently Inland holds 1,500 plots of which one third have planning consents.
"We will keep some of these to form the nucleus of a land bank," he told me.
And while he certainly seems relieved that he no longer has the day-to-day responsibility for running a publicly quoted house building company, there's still a lingering desire to be in the trade; hence Inland have taken a stake in a small local developer called Haworth Homes.
But it's life with a small team that he is enjoying after that brief spell of enforced inactivity. For he has reverted to the entrepreneurial role he relished before becoming chief executive of a public company - a bureaucrat, as he sees it.
Of course since they became an AIM quoted company early last year Inland could be vulnerable to take over, but it would be interesting to see first how far Stephen and his team can develop this instant-development-land idea before some land hungry giant gobbles them up.
Inland now seem destined to build a stock of usable land largely financed through the AIM flotation. For example they bought themselves a major shareholding in Poole Investments whose main asset was 3.8 hectares of riverside land strolling distance from Poole's busy centre.
While planning talks about this potential gold field proceed there's a rental income of £335,000 coming in which will be administered by Inland's in-house finance department.
It was obviously a shrewd move to buy land which yields an income while the planners dither!
An illustration of how Inland are operating is their flagship Farnborough development. In August 2006 they bought the 9.6 hectare site for which the local plan made provision for 200 homes.
Inland spent many months' patient discussion with Rushmoor Borough Council, and their patience has been rewarded with a planning decision allowing 399 homes, plus nearly 10,000 square metres for commercial development.
It doesn't take a financial wizard to work out that the value of the parcel Inland bought from the Ministry of Defence was greatly enhanced, if not doubled, by those patient negotiations - lasting a little over a year.
The value-added hectares will no doubt figure in Inland's land bank - an open invitation for land marauders to mount a new take-over campaign!
But that would certainly be a mixed blessing for Stephen Wicks who has proved to himself that it's the work which matters to him. The monetary reward that comes from selling a business doesn't quite measure up to the buzz he gets from building that business into a successful one.
First published in Show House Magazine January 2008.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but some information contained within this article may have changed since it was first published.
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