HOWZAT

What’s grown is people’s willingness to borrow, which Cattles has efficiently exploited: it now has 700,000 customers. Even so, Mahon says the firm is extremely choosy about whom it lends to, and it is getting choosier — only 20% of those applying for loans are accepted.

Where the company has been smart, he says, is in broadening the distribution of its product range, sold through its main Shopacheck and Welcome brands. The company bought Dial4aloan last year, it has launched a car-finance arm, and it has also been talking to Barclays about providing risk assessment and arrears management to the bank’s customers who do not meet criteria for loans. It also runs about 500 off-high street branches to co- ordinate its local lending, though it hopes to streamline these to 350 as its weekly and monthly businesses are merged.

But its core skills remain the same: assessing who is a good risk for a loan, and establishing relationships with consumers that are mutually beneficial.

“We meet nearly all our customers face to face, we look at pay slips, bank statements and commitments made, and we take a decision,” he says.

That face-to-face relationship is one reason why Cattles has avoided credit cards. “We are not lending people money for the luxuries of life but for important things they require. These are relatively small amounts of money, from £1,000 to maybe £7,500. That is not fuelling up consumer spending.”

There are plenty around who will tell you, however, that specialist loan companies do prey on the poor, encouraging them to buy the unaffordable and tying their customers into increasingly expensive repayment packages. What about the morality of the business? Mahon will have none of it. Banks make loans, why can’t Cattles? What it has always tried to do, he argues, is to offer a business-like facility to those who would otherwise fall into the hands of the unscrupulous — hence his welcome for the government’s white paper on credit. It can only help clear the crooks out of the market. He says it with such assurance, it’s hard to disagree.

But that was partly why he was hired, to give the firm a plausible voice as it went through sizeable changes, selling a fresh vision first to Cattles’s staff and then to outsiders.

Barrie Cottingham, Cattles chairman, acknowledges this. “We’re bringing together the two sides of our business which have quite distinct cultures,” he says, “and we need someone with great people skills to oversee that.”

Mahon had retired from PWC when Cattles called. As one of six accountants now on the Cattles board, he clearly had no trouble feeling at home.

Others contend that Mahon’s skills are such that you would never guess his profession anyway. “Accountants tell you what to do after you’ve done it,” laughs Kevin McDonald, founder of Polypipe, the plastics company. “That’s not Sean. He’s not at all typical.”

McDonald, one of Mahon’s key PWC clients, says he had tried to lure his friend into Polypipe years ago, but was always rebuffed. He’s just surprised at where Mahon has ended up. “But it’s a big job at a big company,” he says, adding that Mahon’s very presence there will be a reassurance to many.

His commitment to good causes has earned him a lot of friends. He has worked with boys’ clubs, the ambulance service and university careers, as well as Business in the Community (BITC). He chairs BITC’s Leeds Cares initiative, which has been judged to be one of the organisation’s most successful projects. “Sean’s very astute,” says Pam Lee, BITC regional director, “and he doesn’t stand on ceremony.”

That human side touches most who meet Mahon.

He’s a big Coronation Street fan — “my idea of a good Friday night is to get back by 7pm and me and Pauline have dinner in front of the telly” — and a committed family man, popping round to visit his relations most weekends, or fitting in trips to see his three grown-up children.

Some will tell you that he also lost a baby daughter to an incurable condition in the early 1980s, an event which, for anyone, puts the importance of business into real perspective. “But he just got on with it,” says one friend, impressed at how Mahon maintained his balance.

Others intimate that he’s a good man running a sharp firm, but with a PR problem that maybe he hadn’t anticipated when he did due diligence on the job offer.

Now he’s determined to face down the critics and show Cattles has nothing to be ashamed of. But that doesn’t stop him from being anxious. “Be gentle,” he says as I leave.