by Real Business - Thursday, 30th August 2007

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"Monetising eyeballs," he says. "That's the buzzword, that's what they call it. We've collected all these eyeballs - 280,000 people went onto the EasyJet site last week and between 6,000 and 7,000 people visit each of our Internet shops every day. We want to try and monetise them."

This is the latest new idea from the 32-year-old Greek multi-millionaire who started the no-frills airline EasyJet with a £5m loan from his dad in 1995 and now plans to float it this autumn for around £500m.

Easy.Com will be a virtual business, he says. It will be entirely Internet-based and act as a shopping comparison portal for all those eyeballs already captured by other EasyGroup companies. It will help shoppers find the best prices on a range of goods including flights and car rental - another new EasyGroup venture - and should be up and running by the spring. Easy.Com will make money through on-screen advertising and by taking a slice of customer purchases from retailers.

If it sounds far-fetched as a money-spinner, remember that's what people said when they first heard that an unknown Greek was starting a budget airline out of Luton. EasyJet's last full-year figures to September 1998 show a £2.3m pre-tax profit.

It is 9pm on a Wednesday night. We are sitting in the Victoria branch of EasyEverything, Haji-Ioannou's Internet cafe business. It's teeming. A queue of about 30 people stretches all the way back to the door. They are lining up to pay £1 for 40 minutes of access to the Internet via one of the hundreds of computer terminals on this floor and in the basement below.

Students, office workers, travellers, people of all ages are glued to terminals. They order coffee from the in-house cafe to be brought to their desks while they surf. And everywhere there is Easy orange, the colour of the brand at the centre of Haji-Ioannou's burgeoning empire and the foundation on which all his new ventures are based.

"Over the last five years, we've acquired brand values," he says. "Value for money, easy for the consumer, fighting the big boys, orange, innovative - these are what Easy means. Not because I decided, but because that is what people think of it."

EasyGroup, of which Haji-Ioannou is chairman, is the hub of the business. It acts, not as a parent company with ownership of subsidiaries, but as the engine of ideas, the sorting house that assesses the viability of projects, invests and hires project teams to get new companies up and running.

At the heart of the group are seven executives: as well as Haji-Ioannou, there are two finance men, two non-executives - one a former senior investment banker at Credit Suisse First Boston - a marketing director and a corporate affairs director. The HQ is situated in the EasyEverything in London's Camden.

The structure of the business allows Haji-Ioannou to roam the world in search of new ideas. Since starting the business, Haji-Ioannou has operated a paperless office. Every piece of paper that comes into the company is scanned into a computer system, then discarded. Keyfile, the electronic paperless office software he has used to date was updated last month (February) to allow what jargon junkies call "total mobility." In other words, EasyGroup executives can now access the company's system and files from anywhere in the world via the Internet.

Or from overseas stopovers. Haji-Ioannou has an apartment in Monaco and a house in Athens near his family. He usually spends two days a week in London, two days flying and tries to make regular trips to the US and the Far East to keep abreast of new ideas.

"I tend to move around a lot. Life is about four flights a week. Weekends are anywhere away from London preferably in the south of France or Greece. I spend a lot of time looking at businesses. It has become a bit of a hobby to go to New York and see what's selling today," he says.

Orbiting EasyGroup are the various Easy companies it has spawned. These are: EasyJet; EasyEverything, with five London Internet cafes; and Easy Rentacar, a budget car-rental business that will have its first vehicles on the road by Easter (or should that be Easyter?).

In the pipeline are Easy.com and EasyBank, an Internet banking business that will offer low-cost mortgages, loans and current accounts. "It'll be about lending the cheapest money you can get," he says.

While EasyJet is owned jointly by Haji-Ioannou and his elder brother and his sister, the other companies are owned outright by Haji-Ioannou and by management.

But how does it really work? Whose ideas are these? "I get leads, I get ideas, then I'll try and write something down. We kick it around, do a business plan, decide whether we can faithfully apply the brand and then maybe commit some real resources. Each venture has to pass certain tests to get funding. For every one I've said yes to, I've said no to ten."

He said no, for example, to budget hotels. "I looked at doing EasyHotels, but plenty of people are doing it already, like Accor, the French group that has Travel Inns and Travel Lodge in the UK. That is what an EasyHotel would have looked like but we don't like me-too propositions. We are also not an infrastructure company and not a business to business company; the broader boundary is the consumer."

He has also rejected more outlandish ideas, such as installing flotation tanks inside the EasyEverything cafes. An idea for make-up shops didn't get beyond the first hurdle, either.

The car rental idea did get past stage one. Easy Rentacar will offer cheaper deals than Hertz and Avis because it will only rent one, economy-model vehicle and all its sites will be off-airport locations to reduce overheads. "The thinking behind the airline was no agents, no free lunch, no Heathrow. The car rental business will be no middle men, one car and off-airport."

Haji-Ioannou is a fan of Sir Richard Branson, but believes Branson has spread the Virgin brand too thinly in some ventures. "We'll be a lot more disciplined and careful in applying our brand only to things we can do cheaper and on a consistent basis. EasyWater," he says, picking up a bottle of branded mineral water, "is not a business I would consider. If I took a bottle of water and put my label on it, nothing about the product would change. We're not into badging exercises."

As Branson expanded the Virgin empire, some questioned how profitable his ventures really were. EasyJet aside, might Haji-Ioannou find himself in a similar position? EasyEverything, for example, is a big-city concept that requires huge, prime-site locations with massive overheads. Can he really make money out of a venture that relies on footfall?

He's quickly back on the offensive: the EasyEverything business plan was originally based on the venture turning profitable at five units, but the first three outlets - Victoria, Tottenham Court Road and Camden - already cover their own costs and make a contribution to head office costs.

"My plan is for 50 stores across Europe in three years. To do that, you have to hire expensive people and make them work over a small revenue base to begin with. Because of that, EasyEverything still loses money but it should turn profitable at five stores."

His two latest stores - on London's Oxford Street and Kensington High Street - only opened in February so it's too early to tell whether his plans for the business to turn profitable at five are taking shape.

In the longer term, Haji-Ioannou wants to follow the EasyJet path with all his ventures: in other words, step away from the day-to-day running and float them off. For now he is busy hiring advisers to take him into his first public company deal. The books will close on the flotation in September, he says, and providing market conditions are good, EasyJet will join the stockmarket and Nasdaq as soon as possible thereafter.

On flotation, he will become non-executive chairman and take more of a backseat role. Not that his ambitions for the airline are any less grand than on day one: "We've got the cookie-cutter with EasyJet now," he says. "This is not a company that will be content with 18 aeroplanes for the rest of its life. We need more aeroplanes, more routes, more pilots. This is about growing. South West Airlines [the US business] has 290 aeroplanes, why can't we?"

Amanda Hall is a business journalist and profile writer. You can read her weekly portraits of corporate tycoons in the Sunday Telegraph.

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