Born 5th May 1964
The youngest of six children, Justin was educated at Downside School in Stratton-on-the-Fosse before going on to study Art at Wimbledon Art School and then St. Martins. After completing his degree in Fine Art in 1987, he took a year off in France, fell in love with his future French wife, Charlotte, got married and had a son, Anthony in August 1988. Faced with the need to look after his new family, he abandoned his plans for an artistic career and went in the world of business, becoming a salesman for Micropal – a company that specialised in data about investment funds.
Being an entrepreneur at heart, in 1991 (the year his second son, Jonathan was born), Justin asked Micropal if he could represent them as their agent in the valuable Swiss market. Once there, the business went from success to success and, in a few years, the team grew to six people. Micropal, pleased with his success, asked him to run their French business in 1994. The same year, he formed StatPro to develop a new analytics program that worked with the Micropal service. By 1998, StatPro employed over 40 people but then Standard & Poors acquired Micropal and everything changed. S&P bought out the agencies and StatPro was left on its own. Faced with this sudden rupture to the business, Justin refocused StatPro on software for asset managers.
StatPro rapidly built two new products, but one worked particularly well and that set the destiny of the business. At the end of 1999, StatPro had just 11 large asset manager clients, but at the end of 2000 that had grown to 75 clients. Not only that, but in May 2000, StatPro launched its IPO on the London stock market. Things continued to go well up to 9/11, by which time, the number of clients had swollen to 125. The aftermath of that event was felt by most businesses but was especially difficult for smaller software companies. The rate of growth for StatPro slowed dramatically.
In 2006, Justin decided that the business needed to switch tack again, this time to what is now called Cloud Computing. Indeed, the cloud was so new that AWS only launched its service in June 2006. The decision to bet on new technology was a good one, but it took time to come to fruition. The new product, aptly named Revolution, was launched in May 2011. Justin used to tell people that “Overnight successes take years of work”, and this proved true for Revolution. Clients were not always ready to adopt the latest technology, even if they could appreciate its potential benefits. However, bit by bit, little by little, Revolution started to win everyone over, including StatPro’s competitors who by now had also made a mad dash for the Cloud. From 2016 onwards Revolution started winning all the awards for “Best Solution” in the market, displacing the competitors.
In November 2019 however, StatPro, having grown to employing 330 people in 12 countries with $75m of revenue, was sold to Confluence Inc, a Pittsburgh based business backed by TA Associates (a Private Equity business). As a result, Justin left StatPro to take a break after 25 years of running StatPro. And then came Covid…
Whilst Justin was trained as an artist and still paints more or less every day, he is also interested in music and, of course, he loves writing. His grandfather, Dennis Wheatley, was a major novelist in his day, writing 70 books and selling over 40 million copies and he serves as an inspiration to Justin, although his style of writing is very different.
With his first novel, The Fractured Tree, he has fulfilled a dream to become a published author and is busy working at a second novel and already has ideas for a third. Justin draws his inspiration from the many experiences he has had running an international business. StatPro had offices in many major financial centres and it always fascinated Justin just how varied cultures were from city to city. He also came across a wide range of characters in the course of his business dealings; bombastic, subtle, conniving, indolent, brilliant, dull, creepy, unctuous, terrifying; you name it, he met them and across many nationalities. No character in his book is of someone specific, all are composites, but they are also very vivid. Many would say that Justin is the biggest character of them all.
