FANCY a new job in January? Steve Ingham is your man. The boss of Michael Page, the recruitment firm, reported results last week that one broker described as “phenomenal”. Everyone, it seems, is on the move and Michael Page, now one of the biggest white-collar recruiters in the world, is making a mint.
For Ingham, appointed chief executive in 2005, it has been quite a start. Profits and revenue up 30% last year, new offices opening in Russia, Mexico and the Middle East, employee levels close to 4,000 in 23 countries. Michael Page’s share price has nearly doubled, too. “We ended 2005 at 260p, and 2006 at 460p,” he grins.
Of course, Michael Page — set up 31 years ago by its eponymous founder, now retired — has been here before. It was a go-go stock in the last economic boom, before it sold out to the American recruitment giant Spherion in 1997, hated the experience, and freed itself in a 2001 float. When times are good, it does well. In economic downturns, nothing moves.
And bullet-headed Ingham, a former rugby flanker who is tall and bristly and very likeable in his blokeish enthusiasm, has seen it all as a 20-year veteran. The key, he says, is for the firm to push itself round the globe, riding on the multinationals’ coat-tails, so it can spread the risk.
“The issue we had years ago was that we didn’t have the people with experience to open new countries. Now we have and we can accelerate the growth.”
Sharing a sandwich lunch at his office in Weybridge, Surrey, surrounded by his rugby memorabilia, Ingham, 44, oozes confidence. Outside, young men and women sit earnestly at islands of desks, pitching into phones. “I’ve got four CVs you’ll want to look at...” The buzz is reminiscent of a City trading floor.
So are the incentive structures. Each group handles a discipline — placing engineers, accountants, sales staff — and each works as a team, sharing 25% of the profit made in their group. Their job is to collect CVs of people who want to move, and fill vacancies for firms desperate to get a good range of applicants. Client firms pay about 30% of the first year’s salary as a fee.
What’s important, says Ingham, is that the culture at Michael Page is strong, and that the company only expands organically, so it is never diluted. He sums up the culture thus: work hard, earn lots, totally meritocratic, constant feedback, no politics, no sulking, and always time “to have a few beers”. He and his regional directors, he adds, average 17 years’ service minimum.
That loyalty and team-sports drive — “yeah, you can call me a rugger-bugger,” says Ingham, “I played for Guildford and Godalming” — runs right through the firm. Good recruiters develop long-term relationships with client firms and applicants, too.
“There are candidates I have placed four times in their careers,” says Ingham, who worked in sales for the chemicals group Johnson Matthey before joining Michael Page. “Marketing manager, marketing controller, marketing director, then general management.”
And chief executive slots? No, he says. Michael Page rarely does top-level headhunting, as that would be “biting the hand that feeds us”. The big corporate clients wouldn’t want them ringing round their top executives.
Nor does Michael Page need the work right now. Its 2006 pre-tax profit is likely to nudge £100m on revenues of £660m. At a 30% rate of growth it could be a £1 billion-turnover business before 2009. It is already in the FTSE’s top 200 and, while the global economy remains healthy, growth seems assured.
()The only brake on expansion is the shortage of experienced senior staff to send abroad. And their willingness, adds Ingham. Nobody, for example, wants a posting to India right now, so Michael Page can’t open an office there. It will just have to wait.
That will seem surprising to some, but the firm is very much a people business — one of the reasons the internet hasn’t dented its growth. Ingham explains: too much on the internet is uncheckable, clients still want candidates interviewed face to face, and candidates want personal advice on career development. The increasing amount of employment legislation also means more companies happily outsource their hiring because it is getting too complicated to cope. All of that requires the human touch.
And Ingham, like all his staff, is an accomplished persuader. “Michael Page is a sales organisation,” says one colleague, “and Steve is an exceptional example of a type.”
You forget that at your peril. Ingham takes pride in the fact that his staff don’t work on straight commission, as other recruiters do, meaning they are less likely to force candidates into unsuitable jobs just to get their cut. But he does delight in the stories of staff picking up unlikely leads about vacancies — conversations in lifts — then dashing back to bombard companies with suitable CVs.
Commercial or pushy? “The client’s first objective is to fill the job,” he shrugs.
Even if recruiters act as over-aggressive barrow-boys? He recoils. “Would our clients be some of the biggest banks, and the biggest manufacturers if we were over-aggressive barrow-boys? That’s why other consultants come and go. We have had 30 years of market leadership. You don’t build that reputation if you are barrow boys.”
Others point out that Ingham could easily have slipped up in his first year in charge. His low-key predecessor, Terry Benson, was chief executive for 12 years. He was a hard act to follow.
Yet Ingham wasted no time in making his mark. “My first major decision was to go to Australia and part company with a guy who had joined on the same day as me and used to work for me. That was tough.”
Friends liken this no-nonsense approach — the Australian subsidiary was a mess, so the director gets the bullet — to Martin Johnson’s style when captain of England’s rugby team.
“Johnson never fannied about at half-time,” says Mark Stone, an old university chum of Ingham’s. “He would just say, ‘this is what’s gone wrong, you are part of the problem, sort it out’. And Steve’s like that. You’d follow him out of the trenches.”
That leadership seems to come easily to Ingham. He jokes that he learnt it young, getting his sister to knock on doors at their parents’ caravan park, trying to get other kids to come out and play. The flow of people through that family business in Cornwall, where he was brought up, gave him his ready gregariousness. He was later sent away to boarding school, but made his real rugby mates at Nottingham university, where he studied metallurgy — and partied hard.
He stuck with metallurgy in his first job at Johnson Matthey, but swiftly switched to sales. The company’s archaic corporate style — “three different dining rooms: blue collar, management and directors” — eventually drove him to look outside. Another rugby mate told him about Michael Page.
“He said, ‘if you make a lot of money for them, you make a lot of money for yourself’.” Ingham was hooked. By 1987 he was in.
Now, as chief executive, he seems to have everything in his favour — even his wife’s dressage horses have started winning. His chairman, veteran banker Sir Adrian Montague, says the current growth spurt will require “constant attention to detail”.
Ingham says he has set no grand targets. “I just want to keep growing the company by a similar amount in profit and revenue, and make us as resilient as possible. That means more profit streams from more businesses.”
And if the world’s economy does slow, Michael Page will just hunker down as before. The current growth, says Ingham, stems from the decision to keep offices open in countries such as Germany when Europe suffered last time. Rivals pulled out.
And if another recruitment group comes sniffing round again? The Swiss giant Adecco, for example, with its £12 billion turnover? “There are a lot of blue-collar recruiters trying to get in our space,” concedes Ingham, “but I can’t see what they would add to us. And we’re pretty expensive at the moment.”
But if the growth rate slips, and the share price falters ...
Ingham makes a face, then comes up smiling. “We’ll just have to speed it all up,” he laughs, and helps himself to another sandwich.
Vital statistics
Born: March 8, 1962
Marital status: married, with three daughters
School: King’s College, Taunton
University: Nottingham
First job: metallurgist at Johnson Matthey
Salary: £1.15m with bonus
Home: Wokingham, Berks
Car: Aston Martin DB9 in British racing green
Favourite book: The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
Music: Radio 5 Live
Film: The Godfather
Last holiday: Arizona
Steve Ingham's working day
THE Michael Page chief executive wakes at his home in Berkshire at 6am. Steve Ingham drives himself to one of two offices, in Weybridge or in central London.
“Group accounts are here in Weybridge. In London we have our biggest office, and I can influence the most people there.” Ingham still runs Michael Page’s UK division — his previous job — and frequently sits with the consultants. He takes reports, conducts quarterly appraisals of his executives, and regularly meets shareholders.
He doesn’t do lunch. “But I’ll happily do beers with people.” Ingham likes to finish by 7pm. He travels abroad two months a year.
Down time
STEVE INGHAM’s first passion is rugby — he played at local level until the age of 38, and travelled to the last World Cup in Australia. Michael Page has a box at Twickenham.
“But my hobbies don’t cost much compared with my wife’s,” he says. “She is a professional dressage rider — she’s had three wins this year.” The Inghams have seven horses, of which three are dressage specialists.
Ingham runs four times a week to stay fit. “It’s the only way to keep my weight down,” he says. He also plays golf off a 19 handicap at Wentworth.
And he loves his Aston Martin DB9. “It’s for my mid-life crisis — it’s going a lot better since I got that.”
