YOU can’t win. There I am, dressed in jeans and jumper for my famously informal interviewee, and Charles Dunstone turns up in a snazzy Dunhill suit looking like a City slicker.
“I was seeing my investors,” he protests, slinging off the jacket. “Showing them a bit of respect.”
Dunstone makes it sound like he has been visiting the Mob. But he looks good, trimmer than last time we met, short and tanned, with the same genially podgy features — less Charles Kennedy now, more Ant and Dec’s posh elder brother.
“What a day,” he adds, making a beeline for the open bottle of St Aubin Villages. We are meeting at the offices of his City PR firm, and Dunstone, founder of Carphone Warehouse, is buzzing.
He is two days into the launch of his free broadband service, on an endless circuit of presentations and interviews, but still jumpy from the excitement it is generating. “We’re getting 50,000 hits a minute on our website, 25,000 people joined up by midnight Wednesday — our target was 4,000 so we have done six times that.”
And the early reports that his team simply couldn’t cope with the demand? He makes a face. “The website went live at 7am on Tuesday morning and was just hammered. It’s the biggest supported website we have, but by late morning it was starting to keel over.
“So we did some clever IT stuff overnight and put more hardware behind it. We were still getting hammered on Wednesday but we coped.”
He takes another slug of wine. Dunstone, 41, is on a land-grab, rolling out his offer of free broadband to get customers signed up before rivals pitch in.
His offer, through Carphone’s Talk Talk fixed-line service, is part of a package: £9.99 a month for unlimited landline calls and £11 for line rental, broadband thrown in on top. He hasn’t even got the equipment in BT exchanges yet, but he knows that others are eyeing the market keenly. Phones, television and internet are all converging — what counts is getting customers on the books.
He is also careful to play down Carphone’s aims. “We’ve started a revolution but we’re not trying to build a monopoly out of it,” he says. “I don’t want 70% of the market; we’re targeting about 15%.”
You have to give him credit for brio, if nothing else. Carphone currently has only 75,000 broadband customers. BT Retail has 2.3m and NTL, merging with Telewest, 2.8m. But he reckons free broadband could take the market by storm.
And he is not bad at whipping up attention. Being one of the more approachable blokes to have made a billion (nearly — he is worth £830m in next week’s Sunday Times Rich List), he has everyone falling over themselves to publicise his latest gambit.
As David Ross, former schoolmate and now deputy chairman of Carphone, puts it, Dunstone is “so personable” that he is always plausible.
Dunstone winces. “But I’m very strict. I only do business pages,” he says, conscious that he could soon surpass Sir Richard Branson as Britain’s highest-profile boss.
He adds: “All that Dragon’s Den and TV stuff, they are all over me to appear but I don’t want to know. Anyway, I’m a one-trick pony. I’ve done one entrepreneurial thing, I don’t want to own trains or planes.”
But doesn’t free broadband take him beyond Carphone’s usual turf? The group has 1,771 stores across Europe (669 in Britain) and is one of this country’s great retail successes. Providing fixed-line services looks very different. “Not really,” says Dunstone, “because we have approached it in a classically retail manner in a marketplace that traditionally had only telecom-type thinking.”
Which is? “How much can I get away with charging, irrespective of what cost price is. Whereas retailers think differently: ‘If I can buy it that cheaply, imagine what I could do for my customers with that price.’ And that’s how we come to it. We’re bringing that retail sense to the residential market.”
But what next? Adding in a mobile-phone service? Entertainment on line? Dunstone shakes his head. “When we talk to customers, they’re not excited by the idea of a unified bill for landline, broadband and mobile, because landline and broadband are regarded as a family asset, and mobile is deeply personal.
“And in terms of providing entertainment, I am unconvinced. I think that people will want to go to the BBC or Google. We are just the pipe. No way is this predicated on building a content business.”
That will relieve competitors and investors alike, who must be worried where Dunstone’s ambition will take him. So far, he has surprised sceptics by constantly improving his business. But even those who have competed against him, and come away impressed, wonder when he will overstretch himself.
“Charles is clever, he is customer focused, he has very good strategy allied with a down-to-earth management style,” says Pierre Danon, former chief executive of BT Retail and now adviser at JP Morgan. “Often I thought he cannot sustain it, but he does.”
Dunstone always puts his success down to luck and common sense. It has bolstered him since he started his first phone shop with £6,000 savings. All he had then was a nous for marketing and a personable charm which his father, a BP executive, says he had from birth.
It compensated for a lack of interest in schoolwork — B, C and D for A-levels at Uppingham boarding school — and anxiety about his weight. Even now he shrugs glumly when I tell him he is looking good.
“Could be trimmer. I’m 78kg at 5ft 7in. My doctor says I should be 74kg. He has put me on porridge and Benecol (a low-cholesterol spread) in the morning.”
Beneath the easy charm, Dunstone is driven by anxiety and a tough competitive streak. That way, he remains always alert to rivals and constantly worried about strategy. Danon remembers walking down London’s Oxford Street with Dunstone, where staff in every phone shop, not just Carphone, greeted him with respect. And all the time, Dunstone’s mobile was beeping as his own outlets sent their daily figures to him.
Mastery of that kind of detail is a gift. Dunstone, always likeable, belittles it. “Staff know I’m Mr Lightbulb,” he says. “The simplest way you can measure an organisation is to walk in and see how many lightbulbs have not been replaced. Look at Heathrow — the greatest place in the world to spot non-working lightbulbs. All it says to me is, nobody cares.”
Then he is off about whether Carphone should introduce a smart new shop-fit, already on trial in London’s Kensington. Go for it, I tell him. His busy branches look grotty now.
“You’re right, but there’s a big debate inside the company: maybe it’s too posh? I have to be careful that I’m not the Kensington-living, Blackberry-carrying guy imposing my tastes on the chain.”
But he is the founder and 34% shareholder — it’s his gut-instinct that counts, surely? No, he retorts. “I’m very democratic. I listen to people.”
And what about his private life? The press is always keen to see whom he is dating but, to tell the truth, I don’t have the heart to push him on it. As “Britain’s most eligible bachelor” — see any women’s magazine — he is bombarded with offers, so it must all be a bit weird.
Does he feel he will lose his business edge if he settles down? “I’d really like to have a family but I’m not a very easy person to go out with,” he sighs. Since floating the Carphone group in 2000, business takes up nearly all his time.
He looks thoughtful. “I don’t think I’m married to the job — I have a real life outside work — but, um, I think I can understand why you might say that.”
Well, a lot of people hope he will fail at something. He laughs — he knows that — but, he says, adjusting his tie, he still delights in confounding expectations.
Charles Dunstone's working day
THE Carphone Warehouse boss wakes at 7am at his home in London’s Holland Park. Charles Dunstone has porridge for breakfast. “I don’t like it, but I’ve been told to.”
Then he drives himself into his office in Acton, before 8am. “I mess around with e-mails and post — I am diligent about replying. Every person is a possible customer and I don’t want people to think I am high and mighty. Then I do meetings, but I don’t have a long attention span. I wander round a lot — that’s the best thing you do as a boss. And most days I’m out visiting.”
His PA, Claire, organises his life. She pays his bills, reminds him of birthdays, and tells him where he should be. Dunstone discourages business lunches, so he entertains a lot in the evening. “I’ll go out or cook for friends at home: pasta with peas and shrimps.”
Vital statistics
Born: November 21, 1964
Marital status: single
School: Uppingham, Rutland
First job: salesman at Torch Computers
Salary package: £400,000 plus bonus
Homes: Holland Park in London and Burnham Market on the Norfolk coast
Car: silver Range Rover
Favourite book: Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer
Favourite music: Jack Johnson
Favourite film: Pay It Forward, starring Kevin Spacey
Favourite gadget: new Blackberry
Last holiday: Meribel, France
Downtime
CHARLES DUNSTONE relaxes by messing about in boats. “I have two big boats. One is a racing yacht that has just been built. It’s 52 feet and takes a crew of 14 to sail. It’s for racing in the Solent. Then I’ve got a bigger, more comfortable boat, 118 feet, which is new and has terrible technical problems, I don’t know when I’ll sail it. That cost €12m (£8.3m). I bought it from someone who ordered it and didn’t want it.”
This weekend, however, he will be sailing near Burnham Market in Norfolk in his 13ft Enterprise dinghy. “I am happy sailing in anything really. I just don’t like ocean racing. I want other boats round me to compete with.
In ocean racing you never see anyone. But sailing to me is like business: it’s about the camaraderie, the team of people, and trying to win.”
