Jason Drummond has been ranked as Britain's wealthiest young entrepreneur by a newspaper survey.
The unexpected news was broken to the 30-year-old businessman on Sunday morning - as he was trying to stop his young son chasing a pig around a Surrey farmyard.
A telephone call, from a friend, told Mr Drummond that his 64% shareholding in Virtual Internet, an Aim-listed internet domain name, brand and trademark protection group, valued him at £123m - £51m ahead of second placed Robert Bonnier, chief executive of Scoot.com.
"It was nice to hear but a fairly farcical situation to find out in," Mr Drummond said. "To be honest, though, the money doesn't bother me too much, it's the challenge of growing the business that I like. I'll keep on going for as long as I enjoy it."
To emphasise his point, Mr Drummond had wiped the manure off his shoes, slipped back into his suit and returned to the Square Mile by 7.30 the following morning to outline the next stage of Virtual Internet's growth strategy.
He said yesterday that the company plans to move from Aim, where it listed in January last year, to the main market and raise £33m to fund both domestic and international expansion. The planned placing is ambitious, given Virtual Internet's market capitalisation of £198m, but broker Hoare Govett is fully underwriting it and early institutional demand has been strong. "My diary for a week of presentations was filled in an hour," he said.
Virtual Internet was set up in 1996 to provide internet domain name registration, e-mail, website hosting and e-commerce services to businesses of all sizes. Most of its 45,000 clients are in the small to medium size bracket although more than half of FTSE 100 companies, including Abbey National, Glaxo Wellcome, Marks & Spencer and Rolls-Royce, are customers. New-media accounts include Lastminute.com, QXL.com, CompuServe and AOL France.
As an infrastructure provider it is a decidedly unsexy business by dot.com standards but Mr Drummond likes it that way. In a sector where combat trousers and long-term losses are increasingly the norm he sticks to sensible suits and profit forecasts.
"If you believe in the longevity of the internet then you should believe in us because we provide crucial services which allow far racier companies to function and grow in this space. We're the pick and shovel providers at the mucky end of the gold rush."
Virtual Internet now operates in five countries and is targeting more European cities once the placing is completed. "We want to become the dominant domain-based services company in Europe and the global leader in brand protection. Around £15m of the money raised will be spent on tactical acquisitions in Europe, the US and moving into Asia Pacific. The rest will invested in people, building our sales, marketing and technology teams."
Even without his newly raised profile, Mr Drummond believes he has a compelling proposition to put to potential new investors. "Lots of immature companies are coming to the market at the moment and raising a lot of money. We've been around for four and a half years, have a mature management team and investors who are becoming increasingly sophisticated, like our model. We're not dependent on unique users or subscriber numbers, we offer real services to customers who pay cash and come back."
In the year to October 31 1999 turnover was £2.07m but losses after tax were £4.4m. Since then former Schroders managing director William Slee has been recruited as chairman and a chunk of senior management appointments has been announced.
"We are making significant progress as a group, these changes have speeded things up and soon we hope to be able to illustrate that."
