IT’S not often you meet a man who is “passionate about pallets” — those rafts of wood that propel piles of goods around our constantly shrinking world. But in David Turner’s line of work, it’s a necessity.
“Yes, I can get totally excited about pallets,” he says, grinning at the thought. “Do you know that we have 220m of them? You wouldn’t think you could have such a cracking business out of all that wood and all those nails, would you?” Er, no. But business never fails to surprise. Brambles, the Australian industrial-services group that Turner heads, runs Chep, the world’s largest pallet distributor.
Chep used to be part-owned by GKN, the British engineering giant, but in a complicated deal four years ago, demerged itself out of the UK and into Brambles, placing its top British management in charge. Then Brambles relaunched itself with a dual listing on the London and Sydney stock markets.
Hence last week Turner, 60, an affable, silver-haired Brit who was formerly GKN’s finance director, was to be found enthusing about pallet rental while reporting Brambles’s interim results to the City. Then he was dashing across the Atlantic to see the Aussie firm’s American subsidiaries, before shooting south again to his newly adopted home in Sydney.
Confusing? Maybe. Exhausting, certainly. Pallets should really be a very simple business, but it’s just that everything around Brambles seems a bit complicated — like using Australia as a base to run a group that makes 80% of its £3.1 billion turnover in Europe and America. Blame that on the Australian government, which insisted as a condition of the merger that Brambles headquarters remain in Sydney.
But if you were going to choose someone to hand-hold you through all this, Turner would be your man. Compact in frame, straightforward in manner, always ready to laugh at the oddities of his trade, he has headed Brambles for 18 months, the surprise choice to follow former chief executive CK Chow, who left when results went wobbly.
Since then Turner, who had been happily planning to retire as finance director, has pitched himself into finishing off the radical restructuring of Brambles that Chow and he had started. Executives have been removed, lines of communication shortened with its four divisions — Chep (which provides 45% of turnover), waste-management operator Cleanaway (33%), Brambles Industrial Services, and information storage specialist Recall.
Wednesday’s interim results showed the focus on value management is paying off. Profits before tax for the half year rose 31% to £172m, and sales were up 5% to £1.6 billion. Operating profits for Chep in America jumped 111% to £52m. More important, the European pallet business, which had hit problems, raised profits 19% to £57m. Only Cleanaway disappointed, with profits down 14% to £37m. No prizes for guessing where Turner’s focus may fall next.
“Our challenge is to have every business growing well and generating shareholder wealth,” he says. “Every part of Brambles must sing, and sing at the same time. And if any part of Brambles can’t sing, we will do something else with it. We’ve not got a closed mind about that.”
In a world where plc finance directors are famed for their humourless taciturnity, Turner is something of a surprise. Sitting in the firm’s London office at St James’s, chatty and informal, he speaks with the smiley enthusiasm of someone given a chance he never expected.
“I had thought I would be packing up and seeing a bit of the world by now,” he says, “but if you are given the opportunity to do something you have always wanted to do, you just grab it with both hands and run with it, don’t you?” He offers Brambles a different style to his predecessor Chow, a Harvard-educated, high flyer who mixed a conspicuous public profile with a fluent grasp of serious business-schoolisms. Turner, in contrast, has no profile, and is positively self-effacing. But he is, according to those who appointed him, the right man at the right time.
“David is a great non-complicator,” says Brambles’s deputy chairman Sir David Lees, formerly Turner’s boss at GKN. “He is also a very hard worker, a good team builder and possesses an analytical mind.”
He has needed it, in particular to get a grip on Chep, which three years ago, in the blunt-speak of Brambles chairman Don Argus, “lost” 14m pallets in Europe. Many took that as an indictment of Chow and Turner’s regime. Since then, the company has introduced better controls and pricing, and invested £90m on reorganisation.
“At the end of the day it is about controlling the assets you have,” says Turner, “and making sure the customer pays the appropriate cost.”
That pragmatism has been the hallmark of a career that has seen Turner work in oil, food and engineering. Born the eldest son of a businessman in the Wirral, outside Liverpool, he trained as an accountant before jumping into business. Stints at Mobil, Booker and GKN followed.
The decision to leap into Brambles was easier for him than most. He had just started a second family and loved travelling. In Sydney, where Brambles’s head office overlooks the harbour, he has a beautiful house in the upmarket Mosman suburb and can boat, fish and play tennis with ease.
The downside is that Aussies are not keen on Poms running their leading businesses, especially when things go wrong. “The annual meetings have been lively,” nods Turner, “but I don’t have a problem with that.”
Others who worked with him say he has handled it well, another reason why the board turned to him to resolve the crisis. “David is a very calm individual who knows his facts,” says Sir John Parker, another Brambles director who came over from GKN. “And he’s not cocky. He can roll with the punches.”
As for the physical effects of the constant travelling the job involves — nearly half the working year spent flying round America and Europe — Turner appears to be coping. Another source suggests mischievously that the Brambles boss, with a wife in her forties and twins under six, is clearly “a very young 60-year-old”.
But at that age, is he in Brambles for the long haul? “I am not going to put a particular length of time on it,” he says, “other than to say that I have always wanted to see this business work, and the legacy I want to leave is of a working, wealth-generating operation in which people are having good fun...”
And know where all their pallets are? He laughs. That, of course, is a given.
