Financial roadshows, run to a schedule that keeps moving

A typical London day starts with a breakfast meeting at half past seven, which means a hotel collection at ten past. From there it is one-on-ones through the morning, generally an hour apart, across the City and Canary Wharf, then a lunch presentation somewhere central, then an afternoon block that drifts west towards the Mayfair and St James’s funds. It ends with a flight or a train, and that last leg has no slack in it.

Between those appointments sit fifteen-minute gaps that are supposed to cover a two-mile drive. They do, sometimes. What they do not cover is a meeting that ends at 11:09 rather than 11:00, a lift that takes four minutes to arrive, and a reception desk that wants a signature and a visitor badge returned on the way out. Those three things cost nine minutes each time.

Understanding that shape is most of the job. The chauffeur is not waiting to be told where to go next; they already know, they are already there, and the nine minutes lost upstairs are absorbed by the fact that nobody has to find a car, explain an address or wait for a vehicle to come round a one-way system. That is the whole margin.

Most roadshows run on one vehicle. The second one is worth it in three situations, and it is worth naming them rather than upselling by default. The first is when the party splits, with a chief executive in one meeting and a finance director in another at the same hour, in buildings a mile apart. One car cannot be in both places, however well it is driven.

Materials are the second. A management presentation with printed books, a demonstration unit and two banners does not want to be unloaded and reloaded at every stop, and a small vehicle shadowing the day with the equipment in it saves twenty minutes of carrying at each end. It also stops an expensive demonstration unit riding around on somebody’s knees for six hours.

Third is the airport leg at the finish. When half the group flies out at six and the other half stays another night, splitting the cars at the last stop is cleaner than a detour that makes both halves late. All three cases are decided in the planning conversation, before anybody is standing on a pavement negotiating. None of them is a surprise on the day.

Almost every roadshow finishes with a departure that cannot be missed, and it is usually booked weeks before anybody knows how the day will actually run. By four o’clock it is obvious whether the schedule has drifted, and that is the moment to decide what happens to the final appointment rather than an hour later. Waiting until five removes the choice.

Our chauffeurs raise it rather than waiting to be asked. If the final meeting is in the West End and the flight is from City, the cut-off time to leave is a real number and we will tell you what it is. Losing fifteen minutes of a last meeting is a smaller cost than losing the flight, but it should be a decision rather than an accident.

Where the day ends at a terminal, the leg is treated as an airport transfer in its own right. The check-in cut-off governs, the traffic at that hour is priced in, and the drop is at the right terminal for the airline rather than the first one on the perimeter road, which is a mistake that costs a quarter of an hour.

Roadshows travel with more equipment than people expect. Printed presentations for every meeting, spare copies because there is always an extra attendee nobody mentioned, laptops, adaptors for whatever the host’s screen turns out to want, and often a physical product that the whole story depends on being able to put on a table. It adds up to more than two people can comfortably carry.

Keeping all of that in the car between stops is the obvious answer and it is why the V-Class does so much of this work. Coats, cases and boxes stay put, the team walks into each building with what that meeting needs, and nothing is left behind in a lobby because somebody was hurrying to a lift. Things do get left behind, and it is always the expensive thing.

It is worth telling us about anything unusual before the day. A demonstration unit in a flight case, a cool box for samples, or a pull-up stand that is two metres long when packed all change the vehicle, and they are a great deal easier to plan for on the Thursday than to solve on the Monday. Dimensions are more use to us than descriptions.