I started out in construction in the highlands of Scotland. I worked for the local government for seven years and my job was [in] technical service.
I did further education to get a degree in supply chain and then moved into oil and gas. For a boy from Aberdeen that had only built bridges in the mountains to suddenly be exposed to an international environment, it was quite a culture shock.
The company I worked for moved me to set up a joint venture in Russia in the mid-90s, so not too far after Perestroika. I didn’t speak any Russian, most people didn’t speak English so the main challenges were cultural.
I had to learn very quickly to adapt. I wasn’t going to change Russia and Russia might change me. I learnt very quickly that the best way to get on with people is to listen, not talk; see what they are trying to achieve and why, and then communicate what we were trying to achieve.
We were working with a state-owned company so if we had 80% reject rate, they didn’t care. It was just quotas. Whereas, we had hard deadlines, high cost, budgets — that was completely alien to the guys I was working with.
In the end, it was working quite well and there was no need for me to be there so I got promoted back to the UK. I moved to England to run a factory, which had grown making submarine parts for the Ministry of Defence. But as it turns out, the technology can be used in oil and gas, in deep-water connections.
Culturally, it was very similar to Russia because they had been making parts for the government. It was a case of: the quality matters but the prices and how late it is didn’t really matter. In oil and gas, you need it as cheap as possible, as fast as possible. There was a huge demand for the product, we just could not deliver it on time.
We had to commercialise the business or it would have died. We only had four customers so we broke the whole company into four streams aiming at those customers. The key thing there was that everybody knew what the strategy was, which was four weeks of free [products]. And that business grew three-fold in a year.
You have got to be client-driven and a good example is mobile phones. If you do any research on mobile phones, the iPhone will come out near the bottom. Yet, it is the best-selling; it is what the customer wants. And it’s not necessarily the phone, it is everything that goes around it. I learnt my lesson and I have adopted the same model in every business I have gone into ever since.
I then moved to the subsea sector in the States. Personally, that was probably the hardest. I know that sounds really odd. I think the reason is because the cultural diversity is not from one end of the extreme to the other, you don’t try so hard because you think it is going to be simpler. I lived in the US for about four years.
Then my former colleagues approached me to join Proserv and asked me to come here, to the Middle East. I inherited a business that had been manufacturing in the UAE and we continued to manufacture here but we also set ourselves a standard of becoming so good that we actually dispatch to the West as well.
We completely reversed the Jebel Ali model. The Jebel Ali Free Zone has been set up to bring things from the West and distribute them globally and certainly in the GCC. We actually manufacture in Jebel Ali and send it back out not only to the GCC, but also to America, Africa, Asia, etc.
