James Ison was pulling out all the stops for a big birthday.
Not only had he hired a private island in the Caribbean, but he had sorted the travel logistics for extended family and friends, organised an airport meet and greet for all guests, and put on a beach festival with live music for the main event. There were welcome bags, and little “hangover kits” for the more raucous attendees.
Even the weather (which, he admits, was out of his control) was spot on. It was the perfect birthday.
It wasn’t his own big day, though. He didn’t even go to the party. Instead, Ison had worked round the clock for months to prepare the celebrations for his client’s 50th.
His own birthdays are a little different. Ison prefers to spend the day having a “quiet one” with his old school friends. When we speak, it’s the day before he turns 31, and he’s hoping to convince them to go to Nando’s, the high-street restaurant chain.
“I’m a recluse,” said Ison. “I live in the countryside in the Midlands on a farm – the complete opposite of skyscrapers, the corporate world and the £12 pint of beer. I enjoy it. It’s better for my mind.”
His lack of want for anything too fancy is probably because Ison spends the majority of his time caring for the needs and whims of the ultra-rich.
His company, The 0.1% Group, is a holistic concierge service for – you guessed it – the 0.1 per cent. The joining fees simply to become a client can be as much as £100,000, depending on whether you have been referred or if Ison has crossed paths with you before.
“Complete and utter chaos,” Ison says when asked to describe this type of life. He lives on his iPhone, and the notification that tells him how much time he has spent on his screen regularly averages 13 hours a day.
“I try not to commit to too many meetings because I have to respond to people within 30 minutes, an hour maximum,” he said. “I don’t like to keep people waiting, and if you can’t get hold of me via WhatsApp then something very bad has happened.”
Ison estimates that he responds to up to 50 messages every day. Some are simple queries – “Where’s the safest place to go in Mexico at the moment?” or “Do you have any villa recommendations in Miami?” – but others can throw his diary for the day out of the window. A client could message: “James, I need to be in New York tomorrow. Make it happen.”
They also range from the wholesome to the dark, although Ison has a line; he doesn’t do anything illegal, doesn’t get involved with sex work, and sees the company more as a family-oriented business.
He says no when asked to help “move boxes from Colombia to Miami” and once received a voice note from an unknown number, asking him to source a 50 to 55-year-old handsome man who could be paid to have an affair with the sender’s wife. He wanted a divorce, but didn’t have a prenup. Ison didn’t take the job.
“I thought it was a joke at first,” he said. “But there is actually a large market out there for that kind of thing. It’s not the kind of work I want to be doing though. I also don’t do the ‘Hollywood vibe’, so try not to work with celebrities and especially footballers. Footballers are the worst.”
A lot of the time, Ison’s main role is as an ideas man (although he also has to make these ideas a reality).
“As people get wealthier, they have consumed a lot of things, and now, they want that extra thing that they didn’t know was possible,” said Ison. “That’s where we got the private island festival idea. He didn’t ask for that specifically, but he wanted something big and special for his birthday, and we delivered.”
He once managed to get a client’s favourite footballer, who had been retired for 30 years, to send a personalised video birthday message, and hooked up a Disney-mad family with the theme park’s VIP+ offer: a private jet tour of every park in the world with a personal guide and private shows.
So how did Ison – who, other than his Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt, which he insists is his only branded item, looks and seems like a regular 30 year old – end up managing the lives of those with wealth that most of us can scarcely imagine?
It all started in 2012 with an Instagram post: a picture of a 15-year-old on a private jet, the first post of the Rich Kids of Instagram (RKOI) account, a page dedicated to uploading pictures of the young, beautiful and wealthy. Think the Trump family and rappers’ kids, alongside less famous rich kids, like the son of the computer billionaire Michael Dell.
The account was an instant success, and eventually children of the wealthy and famous were queuing up – and paying – to appear on the page. Channel 4 produced a documentary about it.
In 2020, Ison outed himself as one of the page’s creators. It turns out, the brain behind the account had lived a life that was a far cry from the mega-rich it had been promoting.
Ison grew up sharing a bedroom with his single mum in his grandparents’ bungalow in Leicester. While the people he posted online were used to globetrotting via private jet, Ison holidayed in a caravan in Dorset.
The entrepreneurial and aspirational spirit was always there though, he says. He used to buy and sell at car boot sales so he could afford Playstation games, and had a poster of an Audi on his bedroom wall.
“I knew I was going to get there but I didn’t know how and I didn’t know when,” said Ison. His first step was to use the RKOI platform to launch a concierge service, RKOI Concierge.
He spent his initial years in the business chasing each lead that came his way, trying to close every deal and maximising all the contacts he had built while running the RKOI Instagram page.
“I worked out that over six months, we closed less than 0.7 per cent of every lead,” said Ison. “If you think about how many people are on Instagram and see these handbags and watches and they go ‘I want one’. Then you put in the hours and the effort, ask for the £20,000 or whatever you need and suddenly, they disappear. I’ve been ghosted so many times.”
But if his first concierge business was about designer gear, flashy cars and clients who show off their wealth on social media, The 0.1% Group is its toned down, discreet older sibling.
“I’ve gone from people asking for something and me sourcing it to having long-term clients who want someone to take care of the more holistic aspects of their life,” said Ison. “You wouldn’t have heard of most of my clients now – they don’t wear all the designer gear and they’re not in the tabloids.”
He doesn’t charge an ongoing fee to clients, working solely on commission instead. It’s risky, he says, but he wants clients to pay only for what they are getting.
The rate he charges depends on what he is selling. Ison said: “If you’re selling a £250,000 Hermes Birkin bag, you would be very lucky to put anything like 10 per cent on that. That’s an extra £25,000. The margins are more like 3 to 5 per cent.
“But because we do the whole holistic experience, we charge commission on everything. That means I’m finding that handbag, but I’m also getting them a villa and a private flight and tickets for the F1, for example, and getting commission on that as well.”
So far, so good. According to Ison, The 0.1% Group turned over £45,000 in the first year, just under six figures in year two and today, they are looking at nearly £6m of turnover annually.
With only one other business partner and no fancy office in Mayfair to pay for, much of the profit comes directly to Ison. Has he gone full circle and become a RKOI himself?
As neat an image as that would have been, the answer is no. Ison seems keen to keep himself grounded. He lives with his family – his grandparents, mum and step-dad – on a rural farm in the Midlands, and claims that he still shops at Primark and Zara.
“This is all new to me,” he said. “A couple of years ago, I had £47 in my debit account. I don’t really know what to do, but I’m just starting to speak to a financial adviser and having those adult conversations.
“I’ll be talking on the phone about private jets and my grandad will come in and say ‘James, the horse is out’ or ‘the electric fence is broken’.”
One treat he has allowed himself, however, is a flashy car: an Audi R8 V10, worth about £150,000 and the very same as the one that had been displayed on his shared bedroom wall all those years ago.
“I used to think to myself as a kid that if I ever won the lottery, I would buy it. I just thought, I’ve worked for this, I deserve it,” he said.
The only other “rich kid” item he’s interested in is a helicopter. At £8m to £10m a pop, he’s far from having the money now, but it makes sense to him. “I didn’t understand the value at first, but do you know how good they are? How easy and time-saving those things are? It’s obscene,” he said.
Obscene is certainly one way of describing the sort of ultra-wealth that Ison rubs shoulders with on a day-to-day basis – the sort of wealth that could make you feel uncomfortable, particularly in the midst of a cost of living crisis.
With thousands of people taking on extra work, cutting back on necessities and struggling to make ends meet, how does Ison feel about the world of the 0.1 per cent? Has his opinion changed at all over the years, having had a modest upbringing himself?
It has changed, Ison says, but only in that it is something he has grown to respect.
“I’m a bit more mature, and the way I see it is that wealthy people are still people. They still laugh, they still cry, they still have arguments and anxiety and problems. They are human – you have good people, you have bad people,” he said.
“It’s not as if the cost of living crisis is something that these people are unaffected by, either. We all are. I’ve had clients who are really upset because their business is going under, and they have to go in on Monday to tell 500 people that they are gonna lose their jobs.”
Ison gets frustrated with posts on social media using slogans such as “eat the rich”. He argues that a lot of families’ incomes come from the wealthy’s determination and success.
He adds: “Have you heard of the saying ‘more money, more problems?’ Well, from everything I’ve seen, it’s true.”
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