CEO Today United Kingdom Awards

www.ceotodaymagazine.com 114 CEO Today United Kingdom Awards 2018 TECHNOLOGY on top of the detail and managing this well. There were 70,000 people working for M&S during my time there and today, at Laird, we have 10,000 people spread across 20 countries. What working for large people organisations taught me is that communication is absolutely critical. It’s one thing to have a crystal clear strategy and direction in your own mind, but at Laird I had to get that across to 10,000 people and a number of different first languages. You can never over communicate. The career I had leading up to Laird developed that knowledge and was invaluable when I took over as their CEO. What was your strategy for turning around Laird when you took over as CEO? Firstly, simplification. Laird was complex, we had seven businesses running independently and some of those were relatively small, so I wanted to simplify the structure and operating model. I created twovery clear divisions, and within that, created some meaningful economies of scale in operations and support functions. I also changed a lot of the leadership team, replacing some 75% of my first line reports, a tough but necessary process of fast upgrading these positions. Secondly, was forcing through a message and culture which needed to be obsessed with getting the basics right. The fundamentals of Laird were generally fine but we had become over-focused on strategy and not focused enough on basic execution. For me, this was a root cause of some of the problems we had in 2016. Therefore, it was managing the day-to- day operations well again that became a big part of the turnaround. The success of this is evident in the numbers, in 2017 we delivered a 30%+ profit growth, largely on the back of simply getting the basics right again in our business. Why did you believe Laird would benefit from a period under private ownership? The truth of Laird was that we were a small conglomerate. We had a market capitalisation of just under a billion, but we were very complex for a relatively middle-sized business, even after simplifying things. The mid-cap size and complexity did mean we were struggling to get a good sell-side coverage, not helping our stock-market profile. Plus, with our geographical footprint, currency volatility had a disproportionate impact on our Sterling results. And finally, Laird is almost 200 years old but certainly had a mixed track record of trading performance in recent years, with some investors becoming a little jaded with the company. That did mean that despite the very strong profit recovery that we delivered, the share price wasn’t really responding so much. It was proving very hard to get the rating that I believed the company was worth. To really fix things, and de-risk some of the trading volatility, it was clear that we had to do some restructuring around the portfolio, selling some of the businesses that we had, building others out and investing in the core, for which we had limited resources. And the PLC Balance Sheet certainly did not have the capacity for meaningful acquisitions. With these factors, I was coming to a growing conclusion that we may be able to better execute the next chapter of the Laird story as a private company rather than a public one. However, that was largely theoretical, until a very credible approach was made by Advent International. What challenges did you face during this process? Taking Laird PLC from public to private ownership was a relatively smooth process, although a very intense one. When Advent International approached us, it was clear that they had done an awful lot of work and that their thinking was very much aligned with how I was increasingly looking at the world. This led to a good, early meeting of minds. Our own due diligence on Advent confirmed that they are a very high-quality private equity firm, and I believed that Laird would be in good hands under their ownership. After that, it was all about price and then my main role, along with my Board colleagues, was to represent the shareholders of Laird to ensure that we secured a price that represented very good value for them. We navigated this and in early March 2018, the Board recommended to our shareholders an offer which was at a premium well over 70% to the pre-bid price. There was no counter bid, the shareholders approved the sale and Laird de-listed in the summer. The challenges of this were the intensity of the process and making sure that as all of this was happening, the business continued to trade well and remain stable. This was all about strong communication, making sure everyone in