THE last time I met Adam Crozier he had just stepped out of a car crash after presenting Sven Goran Eriksson to the British football press. That’s a real car crash, not a metaphorical one. Characteristically, he never mentioned it. Slim, boyish, immaculately dressed in a charcoal designer suit and open-necked shirt, he had just seemed rather distracted in his quietly calm way, apologising for being late and looking as pensive as an Easter Island statue.
Back then, when he was just 36, his friends had been amazed that he had left Saatchi & Saatchi to grasp the poisoned chalice of running the Football Association (FA). Braggart-bully club chairmen, venal agents, underachieving national team — don’t even mention rebuilding Wembley. And Crozier, having witnessed Eriksson get a mauling at the hands of the xenophobic press, was beginning to get a sense of what he had taken on.
What would they all say now? Eight months after leaving the FA, here he is, beaming from ear to ear, presenting the Royal Mail’s £611m pre-tax loss to a group of grim-faced journalists on a grey May morning. Is he mad, masochistic or what?
No, just ambitious. “I think this is the last of the really big corporate turnrounds in the country,” he says in his soft Scottish burr. “The sheer scale is what really appealed. And the fact that some people think it cannot be turned around appealed too. My view before I joined, and more so now I am here, is that it can be done.”
Presentation over, he is sitting in his shirtsleeves in his fifth-floor office in east London. He looks much more relaxed than he did at the FA, where the constant jabbing from football’s vested interests meant his guard was permanently up.
Smiling and chatting, one leg tucked under the other on the sofa, Crozier explains that he became Royal Mail chief executive for the challenge, and also for the opportunity to work with Allan Leighton, former Asda boss and now Royal Mail chairman. He is not even depressed about the footie from the night before, when his beloved Celtic had crashed out of the Uefa Cup Final in Seville. Crozier had given his ticket to a friend because he couldn’t find anyone with a jet to fly him back for that morning’s presentation, so maybe he felt he got off lightly.
Anyway, optimism is the mood of choice at the Royal Mail these days. The losses are coming down, he says, changes are afoot. Yet hang on. In a short career that spans pet food, ad sales and agency management, surely he knows absolutely nothing about running a vast organisation employing a quarter of a million people? No, he smiles, but he can learn. And having completely revamped the FA, he knows all about instigating change.
But the Royal Mail? Overmanned, in the red, dogged by union unrest, soon to be swamped by competition — he could have chosen an easier brief. To Crozier, however, the problems present their own advantages. Everyone knows what’s at stake now, strike disruption is down, offices are being rationalised, 30,000 redundancies are on the cards.
“If you look at the huge turnround we are achieving at Parcelforce, for instance, I think it’s because plan A, which is changing it, is so much better than plan B, which is closing it. Sometimes,” says Crozier, “you need a bit of a spur to get people to realise that you have to move on.”
You also need some hard selling to workers and customers alike, the talent for which he was really hired. One of his old agency bosses describes Crozier’s unique skill as “intelligent seduction”, the ability to sell ideas to anyone without them realising what’s going on. He even sold a Swedish manager to the stuck-in-the-1960s FA.
He will need all that, and his love of organising, if he is going to thrive at the Royal Mail. And even that might not be enough if the economy turns down, competition turns up, and the organisation cannot plug the emerging black hole in its pension funds.
Crozier seems unperturbed. He says he got his calm style from his father, factor (estate manager) for Lord Bute in Scotland, and his people skills from his mum, a former secretary to the managing director of The Scotsman newspaper. Those skills plus his no-nonsense upbringing, first on the island of Bute, then state schools in Ayr and Falkirk — and failed football trials at Hibs and Stirling — will be key determinants in his attempts to bond with an occasionally bolshie workforce.
Even at Saatchi, where colleagues remember him as ambitious, driven and unemotional, he was never unpopular. Describing himself as a “control freak” who likes routine, Crozier admits he can, however, push things too far. Early in his career he was reprimanded for falsifying sales figures, an incident that returned to haunt him.
His other weakness, apart from impatience, is one shared by many quietly driven men: a love of working with extroverts. Friends remember Crozier’s unlikely bond with Kelvin MacKenzie, the former Sun editor, to whom he lent an office at Saatchi, and with some club bosses, who initially welcomed him at the FA. The same chemistry is clearly at work with the effervescent Leighton. When the Royal Mail chairman bursts maniacally into our interview shouting “Don’t tell him anything. Be very careful what you say”, Crozier creases up laughing, then retorts, “Actually, Allan, he was asking me what it’s like working for a lunatic.”
Opposites clearly attract — they also make good teams. Leighton says he wanted Crozier as a complement to Elmar Toime, the Mail’s executive deputy chairman, a professorial Aussie imported from New Zealand with a lifetime’s experience of modernising postal services. “It’s the twin-pack approach that worked with Archie Norman and myself at Asda,” says Leighton. “Adam has the common touch.”
So when he started in February, Crozier went straight to the shop floor. He was even given a delivery round in southwest London, near his Teddington home — making him the only postie on £500,000 a year with the England manager as a mate. Cue double-takes from football fans who recognised him as the shiny-faced, impassive one at Eriksson press conferences.
That kind of recognition should end soon and Crozier, for one, will be relieved. Friends say it was his discomfort at the pressure his young family was under that in part drove him out of the FA. The other reason was the authorities’ and the government’s complete unwillingness to deal with the corruption endemic in the game.
Did he leave too soon? Maybe, he shrugs, but he had brought the England team back to winning ways, he had helped sort out the Wembley fiasco, the timing seemed good.
He still speaks to Eriksson every week, they have remained close. What do they talk about? “This and that,” smiles Crozier. And does Eriksson give him tips gleaned from the Swedish postal system? Crozier laughs.
At moments like this, grey-green eyes twinkling, he seems like a man released from a terrible burden.
