Mark Greenwood, Finance Director, Grainger Plc
Nov 1 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal
The decision to move from Dubai to take up one of the top posts at Newcastle-based plc Grainger didn't require a lot of thought for Mark Greenwood. Six weeks into the job, Karen Dent catches up with the new finance director of Britain's biggest residential landlord as he gets to grips with life in the North East.
FAIRLY "full-on" is how Mark Greenwood describes his initial introduction to life at Grainger, the Newcastle-based property company where he has been finance director since the second week of September.
“As it happened our year end was on September 30; we announce our numbers on November 25; we issued a trading update on October 7 and so it’s right into the thick of it,” he says. “Which is a good way to learn the business, I guess.”
One of the conditions of the job was that the 51-year-old relocated to the region. A Northerner born and bred, Greenwood is from Burnley in Lancashire but admits he knew nothing of the North East bar the bits of Teesdale and the Cheviots he’d encountered many years ago while walking the Pennine Way.
“It was very much a requirement of the offer that I was based in the North East and I was more than happy to do that,” says Greenwood, who has moved to Slayley in Northumberland with his wife Eileen Tuohy.
“It was a good company to come for. I was keen to become a plc finance director again – which I was for Alfred McAlpine 2007-2008.
“Grainger I think is a fascinating company and a great story to reinforce to the investment community and a really interesting bunch of people, so it was a good move. This business was set up in 1912, it’s our centenary in 2012, and this business is rooted here.
“The board of Grainger were very, very specific that they wanted the finance director to be based here, and roughly half the people we employ are based here.”
He was headhunted for the Grainger post – “it sounds really dramatic, doesn’t it?” – and was initially contacted about the job at the turn of last year while working for construction and support services giant Carillion, as the company’s finance director for the Middle East and North Africa, based in Dubai.
Carillion had just taken over Alfred McAlpine, where Greenwood had worked for almost two decades – latterly as finance director – and he and his wife were just about to set off on the adventure of a lifetime, focusing on their joint love of skiing and the outdoors.
His wife had given up her job in financial services with RBS and the couple – who have two grown-up children, Tom and Emma – were ready to set off, when the offer came from Carillion.
“We decided to take this as an opportunity for a career break so my wife resigned her job and we planned to spend six months travelling,” says Greenwood.
“Then right at the end of the acquisition process in February 2008, Carillion who’d got to know me quite well through the process, asked if I’d like to go and join them in the Middle East to help run their Middle East-North African business.
“So I thought about it; me and my wife went out and had a look at Dubai and the Middle East. But we said, given that we had made plans to travel, we need Carillion to wait – and very flatteringly, I suppose – they agreed to wait until September.”
That six months out took the couple all over the world and gave them the opportunity to indulge in their passion for skiing.
“Generally speaking, we go to Val D'Isere – we’ve been going there for quite some time,” says Greenwood. “We’ve also skied in Switzerland and Italy, but when we travelled, we also skied in Chile and Argentina, and New Zealand. And we quite like to do some off-piste skiing and we’ve done a bit of heli-skiing, that’s what we’re into.
“We spent the first couple of months skiing in Europe and then as it happened, we had to go to Dubai prior to me joining in September for a very short period of time, and then we went to India.
“We there for three weeks, and then we went to China for a couple of weeks, and then we went to New Zealand, and then we went to Chile and Argentina, and then to Peru where we went on the Amazon for a bit as well.
“It was heavily influenced by the skiing. I wouldn’t like to classify myself as a tourist who ticks boxes, but I think India and China are two places, for me, that’s where we wanted to go.
“They’re both in different ways, incredibly experiential, really in terms of the people, the culture, the climate, everything.
“It was a real trip of a lifetime, we were very fortunate the way things worked out. But it was very much nose to the grindstone in Dubai from September 2008, I can assure you!”
The grammar school-educated son of an electricity board clerk and building society staffer, Greenwood read Business Studies at university in Leicester before starting his financial career with a wallpaper manufacture in Lancashire.
He then moved to Metal Box and from there, he shifted up to the aero-engine wing of Rolls-Royce, where he gained his accountancy qualifications.
“The business I was in was based in Derby covering a number of things, largely civil engines, and I was also covering the military engine business down in Bristol.
“It was there I qualified. I’m a fellow of the chartered institute of management accountants. It was a very interesting business, a really good place to train – big, big business.
“Then I moved on because I wanted to get my hands completely around an accounting function.”
The opportunity to do that was at NK International, where he oversaw the accounting for the multi-national computer consumables and printing business for three years, before shifting to McAlpine. He was there for 20 years.
“It didn’t seem it,” says Greenwood.
“The great thing about Alfred McAlpine was that I never felt I was doing the same job for more than two or three years. So I was either moving between businesses or taking increasingly senior roles within that business, but really I just enjoyed that general space; it’s quite a dynamic area to be in where you have to be on your toes and know your stuff.”
