Entrepreneurs: Northcott's Ted Jones is the man you need if you’re being hung out of a window

In nine years, Ted Jones has helped free a kidnapped pharma executive in Haiti, rescued 35 mine-clearance dogs from South Sudan, found psychologists to help the witnesses of a violent death on a superyacht off the coast of Thailand, rescued three people from the roof of the Radisson Blu, Mali during a terrorist attack and organised an air ambulance to help a terminally ill seven-year-old girl get home to Lourdes, France.

He’s also helped a businessman who was being hung out of the window of a 35-storey tower in Kiev by his ankles, tracked crews of rowers racing the Atlantic, and carried out a search and rescue of lost a miners team in the Peruvian Amazon basin, mostly without leaving his Spitalfields office.

How? With his international emergency response business, Northcott (it’s Jones’ middle name) Global Solutions, which he was inspired to set up after serving in Kosovo, Kuwait and Iraq with the Irish Guards.

After leaving the army, Jones worked for a specialist kidnap and ransom insurance underwriter “but I was concentrating on kidnappings in Latin America and had to be out there every few weeks, and finally my wife said I had to get a grown-up’s job”.

So he returned to London for a spell worked at Lloyd’s of London broker Howden, before being approached to he set up a medical evacuation company in Oman and Jordan focused on high-threat environments like Iraq and Afghanistan. It was while in Iraq, in 2009, that entrepreneurial inspiration struck Jones. “There were plenty of casualties in Iraq back then.

“I was in a bombing myself at the time: the car got a bit knackered but I was fine. But the US military pulled back from doing medical evacuations, so anyone who got into trouble was left with a model designed to look after first world holidaymakers. It was failing spectacularly. My military experience taught me that medevacs in such places needed awareness of security, maritime, diplomatic, legal, cash movement, tracking, and intelligence issues. I thought that I could do it better, hence Northcott Global Solutions.”

Jones, 45, used his former army contacts to recruit eight military medevac experts. He launched his business from his spare bedroom “but the children were too noisy so I rented a space in the City, and built a military style-operations room”.

Jones and his early ex-army staff spent a year building a database to deal with potential client emergencies, “not just medevacs, also foreign military invasion, civil unrest, natural disasters, business continuity experts, and more”. The phone didn’t ring for a while: “but then the Arab Spring hit and no one else was keen to play in that space.”

Early clients included the Foreign Office: “they called at the height of the Arab Spring, saying we’ve got people still stuck out there, and it’s potentially getting politically embarrassing because even the Filipinos have got their people out.

“They told us some Britons were in Benghazi [Libya], in the harbour, standing next to a blue ship. And by chance, it just happened that we knew the owner of that blue ship, so we got the people out immediately.”

Nowadays Jones and his 54 staff work worldwide. “We have a response time of minutes and hours over the industry standard of three to seven days,” he claims.

Clients include major corporates — “miners, oil and gas, the big banks, lawyers, anyone who sends people to dangerous places” — and individuals covered by their insurance policy. AIG, Allianz, and Hiscox customers are offered NGS’s number for their foreign emergencies.

“Most of the work,” says Jones, “is people falling down a ladder and needing to get home, or businesswomen going into labour early, or car crashes abroad.” Some, though, are more dramatic. NGS was called to build five UN ebola clinics in Sierra Leone “when no one else wanted to go in there”; it also looks after “about half” the crews of the world’s superyachts: “you’d be surprised how many get into trouble.”

“In general,” says Jones, “people aren’t aware of the risks.” He recalls a case of a “six foot six blonde guy working for a tobacco company in north Pakistan, who couldn’t find his driver to take him to the airport, so got into a random taxi. They kidnapped him, but he quickly hit our NGS tracking app on his phone, so we knew which direction he was going and immediately spoke to the Pakistani police who put in three roadblocks. The bad guys weren’t going to take a bullet for their boss so they quickly chucked him out.”

NGS also repatriated Stephanie Inglis, the Scottish Commonwealth Judo Champion after she suffered a severe head injury after a motorbike crash in Vietnam. “We are heavily involved in every major international hurricane, war, civil unrest occurrence to a greater or lesser extent,” Jones adds.

He remortgaged his family home twice to set up the business: he put in £62,500; as did his mum, a schoolfriend, and an industry contact. “We’ve since relied wholly on organic, internal investment. This industry is built on reputation and word of mouth.

“We very often get approached for a buyout, by private equity, mainly. But I think they’re all sharks. We’ve done a lot of hard graft to get NGS where it now is, and we’ve just got to the fun part. We’ll double in size this year, at least. The world’s troubles aren’t going away, and we’re just getting started.”

Founded: 2010

Turnover: £8 million for 2018

Staff: 54

Business idol: “My father. Despite being considerably dyslexic he worked his way up at a firm of local land agents in Hampshire, grew the company exponentially through two severe economic downturns and made it the leader in that market.”