Mike Young, managing director of Marsol, looks back on a long and storied career that began in South Africa and has taken him all around the world
When I came out of school, there were very few choices – you could be an engineer, an architect or maybe an accountant, rather than a dustman, for example. There was no real formal training at school. So when I came out, I was a little unsure and my Dad decided I’d be a good accountant so I went to do accountancy and lasted about four months – it just wasn’t for me.
I became a student forester so I ended up operating the machines and before I knew it I was operating road equipment and bulldozers.
My brother was in the Navy at the time and was chief instructor of the dive squad. In 1968 we formed a diving services company and he was very safety conscious, which was very unusual for the diving industry back in those days. A lot of people were trying to get into commercial diving at the time, but it wasn’t like it is now – the kill rate was very high.
We got together with the South African Navy and the South African Department of Manpower and wrote the first ever worldwide dive regulations. Out of that came the apprentice system with the Department of Manpower, which proved to be really successful. It was on the job training and academics.
Because of the mining industry in South Africa, I found there was a lot of tooling I could marinise. That made us attractive to some of the bigger construction companies. We put together a big terminal off Durban together with a UK firm called Land Marine, which was then bought by a local South African firm, who in turn then bought our company, too.
People used to have a more broad range of skills across the board. Years ago, you had to figure things out for yourself a little bit, so you naturally became more knowledgeable, whereas now there are more specialist equipment and tools, so that logic and process isn’t the same any more.
My brother and I established joint-venture with a French company. The French in West Africa were really worried at the time about the Americans coming in and taking over, which was a possibility as all of the countries had become independent and could choose who they worked with. So we went into the offshore terminal market and could apply the pipeline technologies in that field.
The company then got bought by a corporate and I am not a corporate animal. I’m a bit of a freestyler and I like to follow my own route – I’m not so good at following rules and structures. It took me a while to figure out that you could still play a role as part of larger organisations.
I also left OCTO Marine because of a corporate takeover, which was when I established Marsol.
Empowering people is very important to me. As a South African, what we used to have was the 6,000 milers, which were basically guys coming from the UK to tell us what to do. So it thought empowerment was really important; I’d worked all around the world and I generally though that the local guys didn’t really benefit from it.
I’ve always enjoyed working with younger people who had a similar outlook to myself, who want to challenge things and get work done. It’s absolutely amazing what you are able to achieve from a can-do attitude when it is in a can-do environment.
