A CEO at the age of 39, Jim Marsh has held senior leadership roles across multiple sectors, including four years as Chief Transformation Officer at McLaren Automotive. He tells Al Clarke, Chairman of the Ennis & Co Advisory Group, that experiencing different industries in different roles makes for better leaders.
AL CLARKE: When you set out on your career, did you have a clear goal about what you wanted to achieve?
JIM MARSH: Yes, I was very clear right from the start. I’m a person who likes to set goals for myself and my objective was to be a partner in one of the Big Four accounting firms by the time I was 30 and a CEO by the time I was 40. I have one brother who’s seven years older than me, so he was always ahead of me. I think watching him was also a big motivation.
AC: Did you have an early idea about a sector or industry that you wanted to work in after accounting?
JM: No, it was completely the opposite. I explicitly didn’t want to specialise in a sector, and the more I worked across different sectors, the more strongly I felt that I didn’t want to get typecast to an individual sector. One of the features of my career is that I’ve forced myself to move sectors because I think that makes you more marketable in the long term by giving you the opportunity to translate ideas across sectors. For example, people might look at my CV and think it a bit odd that I stepped out of the corporate world at the age of 50 to become a partner at McKinsey. The simple reason I did that was because I was aware didn’t have much international experience and the role gave me the opportunity to work with clients in Australia and the US and in a completely new sector.
Building that breadth of experience has been very beneficial to me, particularly in my current role in private equity, where I’m working across different sectors. Most head-hunting firms want to typecast you in a sector and, even now, I get approaches from head-hunters about telecoms roles because I spent eight years of my career in telecoms. I tell them I’m not a telecoms person – I just worked in telecoms for a period of my career.
AC: As someone who was focused on your goal of being a Big Four partner by the age of 30 and a CEO by 40, how did you make your decisions in terms of moving from one role to another?
JM: Well, I joined KPMG and very soon after qualifying as an accountant, I worked in corporate insolvency and turnaround and found that I really enjoyed it because I like to work at pace. This triggered a series of thought processes about my future career. I decided that I wanted to focus on turnaround situations.
Because I had come through a finance and insolvency route, I started out in finance and became a divisional Chief Finance Officer with Boots. I didn’t really enjoy it, though, and so I took a different route that was tangential to finance by switching to a Strategy role with Boots The Chemists. From there, I decided to be even more radical by moving into sales as a Sales Director. The overwhelming theme running through all these moves was the need for rapid change. That was more motivational for me than the sector.
AC: Given that you began your career working in insolvency, what were your key learnings when dealing with companies in distress?
JM: The first thing I would say is cash is king, and that has been true of every industry I’ve worked in, whatever the dynamics are. The second thing I learned is about leadership, and I have hung on to a phrase that my first Chairman once told me: ‘Leaders cast a long shadow’. No matter how troubled or chaotic the business is, the leaders need to show authority and leadership. They need to nurture a ‘follow me’ culture.
The third thing for me would be: ‘Don’t make a decision tomorrow if you can make it today.’ One of the challenges I’ve had is that I’m not particularly analytical as a person. I’m quite an intuitive leader, and that has caused me problems on occasions. But I see a lot of leaders who use data as an excuse for not exercising management judgment. There comes a point when you just need to take the jump because if you look at data all the time, you’ll always find a reason not to do something.
AC: You’ve had a remarkable career, holding senior leadership roles at companies as wide-ranging as KPMG, Boots The Chemist, Energis, Cable & Wireless, Rank and McLaren Automotive and culminating in your current role as Executive Chairman in Private Equity. Do you think it is still possible for someone to follow a similar pathway to yours?
JM: I think it’s very hard and I think I was very lucky. The reason I was lucky is that I happened to work for some people who were radical thinkers and were prepared to take a risk on me in roles where I had no obvious direct background. One of the things I’ve tried to do myself now as I’ve become more senior is to take a risk on people.
I follow the advice I once received that you shouldn’t give people roles based just on their experience. You should give them roles based on their competency because it is their competency that will determine whether they’re going to be successful or not. That’s sometimes quite a leap to make but it’s something I’ve really tried to do. I’ve found that if you give good people the chance to sink or swim, in most cases they’ll swim.
AC: What happens when they sink, because not everyone will swim?
JM: Well, you help and support them. If they still can’t do it, you change them. The person who advised me to hire on competency rather than experience took the view that one in five people won’t succeed, and at that point you need to show leadership and address it. One of the things I often see in recruitment is that if a hiring decision is not working out, the hiring manager is reluctant to face into it because it looks like they made the wrong decision. I’ve never seen that as a negative. If someone takes a risk on someone and then realises that they’ve hired the wrong person and need to change them, for me that’s positive leadership. You’re not doing anyone any favours by hanging on to somebody who’s not going to make it. It won’t help the business, and it won’t help them.
AC: Has the one-in-five rule applied to your own career in terms of your suitability for roles?
JM: I can think of two roles that I’ve done that didn’t really work out. If I look back, both of them were situations where I was not being honest with myself about what I could and couldn’t do. One was a role that required me to be very detailed and analytical. As I said earlier, I’m just not that person and I knew within a week it was wrong. The other one was a situation where I was going to be required to learn French, and that was something that I didn’t feel was important for my longer-term development. So, yes, I would not pretend that I have got things right all the time, but my advice to anyone in a situation that is not working is to face into it, don’t ignore it.
AC: How many leaders in your experience are confident enough to be able to admit they have made a mistake?
JM: Not enough. When you’re in a leadership role, it’s important to have a strong relationship with your team and to create an environment where you can have honest conversations. In my first big CEO role, where I was leading a large international business, I and the executive team used to go to one of our remote geographies every quarter and spend the week together as well as meeting the local management. That was very powerful because when you’re altogether in a hotel overseas, you build relationships on both a professional and personal level. It also helps you to build your network for the future. Maintaining that network, nurturing personal relationships, has always been very important for me. Throughout my career, I’ve always sourced my roles from my network and have never through head-hunters.
AC: Has developing your personal network been a strategic decision you’ve taken to take control of your career rather than waiting for a head-hunter to call?
JM: I maintain a list of people which I review constantly. If I’ve not had any contact with someone for a while, I’ll just drop them a WhatsApp and ask them if they fancy meeting for a coffee or whatever. Ninety-nine per cent of the time they say yes, and it ends up being a productive conversation for one or both parties.
In any senior role such as CEO or Chairman, you’re always looking for talented people. By definition, the people on your list will be talented otherwise you wouldn’t keep them. Thinking about the people who are working with me in my current private equity role, I worked with one of them 12 years ago, I worked with another across three companies and I worked with another across two companies. That’s all come from maintaining my network.
AC: Everyone has gaps in certain areas, and you’ve said that being detail orientated is a weakness for you. When you’re a CEO, you’re obviously responsible for the numbers, so how do you plug that gap in your skill set? Is it about making sure you have people in your team who are strong in areas where you are not so strong?
JM: A hundred per cent. It’s about understanding your own strengths and weaknesses and compensating for your weaknesses by having good people around you. I’m an accountant by background, so I’m commercially and financially literate, but I’ve never built a spreadsheet in my entire life. I’ve always made sure that I have a strong analytical CFO, and we’d have some very good but challenging conversations. They would approach it from the detail up and I would approach it from the strategy down, the aim being to meet in the middle.
AC: It must have been a happy moment when you were appointed to your first CEO role at Cable & Wireless Worldwide. What were your thought processes once you realised you were now the captain of the ship?
JM: The main thing was recognising that I was now directly accountable for the numbers. We were a public company as well, so there was nowhere to hide. The most difficult thing I’ve had to do in my career has been public company profits warnings. When your CFO tells you that they’ve done the forecast and found a problem, it’s your responsibility as CEO to face into that. You can’t hide away from the numbers because it’s your business. You just have to show leadership and deal with it.
AC: You’ve worked in telecoms, gambling, automotive and now private equity. Does running an organisation in different sectors require different kinds of leadership skills, or is it essentially the same?
JM: I honestly believe it’s the same. You just have different flavours across different sectors. In some industries, use of capital is the most important thing. In other industries, it’s your channel footprint that’s most important. But, for me, it’s the same blend of leadership skills that you need. You just apply them slightly differently to address different problems.
AC: How did you prepare yourself for your first CEO role?
JM: I had very little notice, to be honest. I found myself in a situation where I was told that the business wanted to part company with the existing CEO and they wanted me to take over, so I had very little time to think about it. I come back to what I said earlier about having a clear goal to be a CEO by the age of 40. I was 39 at the time and I told myself that if turned down the opportunity, I was never going meet my target.
AC: You stayed in your CEO role at Cable & Wireless for six years before going on to lead various organisations. You’ve been front and centre of the shareholders’ expectations for many years, so how different has it been taking on a chairman role? How did you make that transition?
JM: I’ve actually found it quite developmental because I’m the kind of person who likes to grab things and fix things. Ostensibly, when you are chairman, your role is to manage the board, manage and represent the shareholders and enable the chief executive to be successful. I’ve worked with many chairmen over the years and I’ve tried to take on board one thing from each of them that I would like to emulate or replicate and one thing that I would want to avoid. I’ve taken those learnings to build my own chairman brand around them, but I would say I’m still developing as a chairman. That’s part of the enjoyment.
AC: From your perspective, are you seeing any skill gaps in the leaders that are coming through now? Are there things that the new generation of leaders are not prepared for?
JM: Going back to what I said about not wanting to be typecast to a sector, I see many examples of people who only know one industry or who only know one domain. For me, breadth of industry experience and breadth of domain expertise is really important because it makes better leaders. In many of the industries I’ve worked in, I’ve come across too many people with very narrow sets of experience. I worked in the gambling industry for five years, which was very different to anything else I’ve done, but I learned so much from it. The problem is that if you’ve only been in one industry, then you replicate the historic mistakes of that industry.
I prefer people who have got breadth of experience and skill set because it gives me confidence that they have the capability to adapt to other domains. On a personal level, I applied a number of things that I learned in telecoms when I went to automotive. The big thing that both of those industries have in common is that they’re both very capital intensive, even if the way capital is managed is different.
AC: Who are the people who have inspired you and had an impact on your career? What was memorable about them that helped to shape you as a leader?
JM: The people who have impacted me the most are the people who have taken brave decisions about me. I was given the opportunity to be a sales director having never worked in sales. I was given the chance to move into telecoms without having worked in telecoms, and I was given an opportunity in automotive without having worked in automotive. If people had not taken a risk on me, I would not be the leader I am today. That ability to think outside the box when it comes to people and skills is something I’ve tried to emulate.
I’ve also tried to emulate people who are all about energy and enthusiasm. A coach once said to me that I had ‘urgency addiction’, which was a phrase I’d never heard before. I don’t see that as a negative because I just want to get on and do things now rather than waiting around. That’s just who I am.
On a personal level, my values have been shaped by my father. He wasn’t a professional person and he didn’t have any educational qualifications, but his mantra was: ‘Always treat everyone the same’. It doesn’t matter whether someone is a cleaner or a chairman, you treat them with the same respect. Everybody deserves the same courtesy. That’s a strong personal value for me.
I think it’s important to have a set of personal values that you can stand behind. You’ve got to be able to look at yourself in a mirror and feel comfortable with the things you did the previous day and things you are going to do today.
