Business, with all its peaks and troughs, has been the adrenalin of daily life for Jo Haigh since she was a 16-year-old teenager and in the year that has seen her take over the reins as non-executive chair of Isle of Man-based ICM Group of companies she is also celebrating 25 years of running her own business.
Introducing her as the guest speaker at the Institute of Directors autumn lunch at the Sefton Hotel IoD chairman of the Isle of Man branch Clive Parrish said: “An experienced dealmaker, Jo specialises in putting together the right deal at the right time and in the right format for growing businesses throughout the country.”
He added: “Jo has bought and sold over 300 companies in the last 20 years specialising in owner managed companies worth between ?2m and ?20m.”
Jo, who describes herself as a ‘straight talking Yorkshire lass, and proud of it’, told guests who included Lieutenant Governor Adam Wood: “My whole life has been about business.”
From a working class background, education was Huddersfield Secondary School and her first job was as a wages clerk. When she was 16 her father died and her mother had to take over the running of the family sheet metal business in Huddersfield. She recalls how the conversation around the kitchen table was inevitably about the family business and money, sometimes even the lack of it.
Today Jo, a serial entrepreneur whose first board directorship was at the age of 26, is the force behind fds Corporate Finance, a boutique corporate finance house with offices in Wakefield, London and Birmingham. She has notched up a quarter of a century in buying and selling businesses and raising finance for owner managed companies. During those 25 years she has held more than 40 non-executive roles in companies across the UK and sold three of her own companies along with undertaking two personal MBOs.
Stressing the importance of non-executive directors and asked what qualities they should bring to the role she replied: “The ability to listen and know when it’s appropriate to intervene.”
She is the author of five best selling books and her latest, ‘The Keys to the Boardroom, how to get there and how to stay there’ was released in 2013. She is now in the throes of writing a sixth book, ‘Doing Business Right, The Wrong Way’, while also finding the time to run an art gallery in Wakefield. Awards for her myriad of business activities and successes are numerous as are the plaudits from the great and the good of industry and commerce.
But ask Jo, a vivacious 56-year-old mother of four grown up and successful children and more recently a grandmother, who she most admires as a business achiever and her reply without any hesitation is her mother. “She had to take over a nasty, grimy business in a Yorkshire town in the late 1970s where women then got married and had babies. She has to be my hero.”
She employs 15 people in a business that sells around 25 companies a year. She likes to nurture talent in inexperienced young people and believes culture to be more important than qualifications; while anyone, at any level of business, who displays arrogance is likely to get a frosty response. Her personal and business values are, “be kind, stay positive, have fun and work hard”.
“I never go to a gym and am lucky to be blessed with good health but my one regular indulgence is having my nails done,” said Jo, a self-confessed ‘Thatcherite child’, in an interview before the lunch. “My most recent guilty pleasure is a bright red Porsche Boxster, I call it my MenoPorsche, but then I’m sometimes too embarrassed to be seen driving it.”
She admits that when her children were young she had a full-time nanny. “I was never going to be a stay at home mum but like any working mum there were always those occasions when you have pangs of guilt but I had and still have a very supportive husband. We did work together for a time but I’m a massive control freak and risk taker and very, very organised and he is the opposite to me and very quiet. I happened to be this crazy, driven woman whose children went on to become massively career orientated.
“I never felt disadvantaged by being a woman and I think that sometimes a woman can herself create any challenges there might be. I do, however, go along with the philosophy of former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright when she said there would be a special place in hell for a woman who didn’t help and give advice to another woman. I also follow the advice of Coco Chanel, who said dress well and notice the woman, dress badly and notice the dress.
“I always told my children they ‘could’, never ‘can’t’. Every ‘failure’ is moving nearer to a goal and in business it was only after many, many setbacks that Sir James Dyson succeeded in setting up his own factory. It’s also important to remember that it’s not a sin to be successful.”
Her final advice: “No matter how you feel get up, dress up, show up and never give up.”
Photo – Jo Haigh.