Alex Turner meets ALEX HOYE, chief executive of Warrington digital marketers Latitude Group

RUNNING a marathon is a gruelling physical challenge, made no easier by the biological clock slipping the wrong side of 40.

At the other end of the pain-pleasure spectrum is a trip through 50 chateaux in the Médoc region of south-west France, calling in at the vineyards along the way to indulge in wine and fine French food of oysters, cheese and steak.

Alex Hoye, though, will spend a Sunday in September combining the two pursuits as he joins 8,499 other runners in the Marathon du Médoc – where the 26-mile course is punctuated by 23 wine stations.

But then Hoye, chief executive of Warrington-based digital marketing agency Latitude Group, doesn’t seem content with doing just one thing at a time.

Since 2006, he has acted as angel investor and mentor for technology firms Skimbit, MyBuilder, RentMineOnline, GoMix and ski firm Faction Skis.

He is an advisor to Latitude Group owners Vitruvian Partners, a 1bn euro private equity fund focused on technology, media and telecommunications, a member of Cambridge Angels and on the advisory board of Seedcamp.

Hoye has been surrounded by computers since he left the South Carolina farm he grew up on to go to Stanford University.

“I was there the first year everyone had Apple computers available there as freshmen,” he said. “I studied international relations and economics. I came and did a year at Oxford where I rowed a lot and learnt a lot.

“I had always used a computer, but there was only one computer in Magdalen College, and it was only accessible to PhDs, but I persuaded them to let me use it.

“There was such a digital divide – but I still loved it.”

His career then took him onto three of the biggest names in global business. At Disney, he got involved in the media business, including broadcasting and film, before going to Harvard Business School to get an MBA and “to use the time to engage in the internet”.

From there, he joined McKinsey as a management consultant.

Hoye said: “At McKinsey, I worked with newspapers, television and music companies, dealing with the digital age. I remember looking at the opportunities and threats for media companies in 1995 – but most didn’t move until Napster came along.

“Things didn’t happen quite as fast as I had thought. Everything we said would happen did happen, but it took 10 years instead of five.”

Approaching 30 and increasingly restless, he set up GoIndustry, an online auction site for industrial assets.

“Do you want the short story or the long story?” asked Hoye.

“I saw an opportunity. There was a lot of focus on efficiencies on supply chain management, but there wasn’t much about optimising your asset base, your plant and machinery. So our idea was to start with the old stuff and then move onto the new stuff – but we never got round to that.

“Now the long story. It was 1999, and I hadn’t got on a start-up in 1996 when I thought I could. I was looking in California but my best friend was over here and he couldn’t find the right team.

“We went through 450 ideas and didn’t like any. We came up with zero.

“So we started from scratch and looked at where the money was – the financial statements. Industrial assets were massively fragmented, marketed by post and depended on hoping people showed up on an auction day.

“My belief was why we ended up succeeding while most of the others blew up in the crash – and we bought the two competitors which didn’t – was because we were international from day one.

“America was just another country to us, but the US companies didn’t have that approach.”

The company was valued at $100m when it went public in 2006 – “a lot later than our glorious plan”, Hoye recalled – and he soon took a step back to plan his next move.

THIS is where Latitude Group came in. The Warrington-based internet marketing agency had been bought in December, 2007, by Vitruvian Partners, which was co-founded by David Nahama, Hoye’s best friend and partner in GoIndustry.

Hoye joined the firm nine months later.

“I was looking for opportunities in the online marketing space – Latitude have always had a very pioneering aspect – but in an area where there’s a lot more transformation happening so we could do a lot more with it,” he said.

“In Latitude, digital marketing is fast becoming marketing.

“I didn’t envisage the downturn to be quite as deep, but we could see it coming and I thought the recession would accelerate the focus on online marketing.

“How people spend their time and how marketing spend was spent last year was nowhere near correctly balanced. Marketing spend was not aimed at where people spent their time. That’s now being corrected.”

Hoye has overseen a number of changes, resulting in turnover increasing 44% to £58.5m.

“We have become technology-aggressive. We have enough scale to be able to do that, our competitors cannot.

“We are always wanting to be on the front foot. We are really driving more of a cross-channel approach.

“The company built its name on search but we are now much more focused on the digital marketing needs of our clients.”

Hoye seems to be an ambitious man in a hurry, but he insists he is fully focused on his plans for Latitude.

He said: “We have got a lot of ways we want to grow the company. We are putting an immense effort on smaller and mid-sized companies, and I genuinely believe we will be able to generate more business from helping smaller and mid-sized deliver their marketing. That’s a huge growth opportunity for us.

“Then, on top of that, we want to look internationally. To achieve those two things will take a few years, then we will see.

“It took seven years last time.”

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