As Ross Graham regained consciousness from an ankle replacement last March, he received a phone call that extinguished any hopes of a restful recuperation.
Andrew Day, the long-serving chief executive of Keywords Studios, a service provider to the video games industry, told Graham, his chairman, that he was burnt out. His doctor’s orders were to take an indefinite break.
Graham, 74, summoned the board for an emergency meeting that evening and, with one leg propped up on a stool, recommended promoting Keywords’ finance and operating directors to co-chief executives.
It is a transition that Keywords has taken in its stride. Shares in the Dublin-based company, which provides games developers with everything from translation services to graphic design, have risen by almost a third since Day’s departure. Today, Keywords is worth £1.7 billion and employs about 9,000 people.
For his efforts, Graham is winner of this year’s FTSE/AIM award.
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Graham’s career began in 1969 when he qualified as a chartered accountant with Arthur Young, the accountancy firm that merged with Ernst & Whinney in 1989 to form Ernst & Young (now EY). As a restructuring specialist, Graham was parachuted into crisis-hit companies battling for survival. Those early years, Graham said, taught him the principal reasons companies fail: getting complacent when the going is good.
In 1987, Graham accepted an invitation from Kevin Lomax, a golf-club acquaintance, to join Misys, a tiny business providing software to the insurance broking industry. As finance director he helped list Misys on the Unlisted Securities Market, the predecessor to Aim. Graham took responsibility for corporate development and helped turn Misys into a FTSE 100 company.
His involvement with Misys, though, ended in acrimony. After five “rather iffy” years after the millennium, Lomax made a bid to take Misys private. Graham, who had left in 2003, and other former colleagues advised investors to reject it and instead back their plan to spin off its banking and healthcare businesses into separate listed entities. Neither deal transpired. Graham’s non-executive career began in 2003 with a position on the board of Edinburgh-based chip designer Wolfson Microelectronics, where he chaired the audit committee and sat on the remuneration committee. Now, Graham is part of the furniture in the UK tech industry. He is an affable character but confesses to relishing a certain amount of conflict.
“I don’t mind combustible situations,” he said. “You could put your brain in neutral and go on a boring board, but where’s the fun in that? I’ve always believed in constructive dissension. There is no such thing as ‘right’, in my view. Indeed, someone may be wrong, but within it can be the germ of a good idea.”
In 2013, Graham received a phone call out of the blue from Numis founder and chief executive Oliver Hemsley. Hemsley explained that Keywords Studios’ investors had rejected the company’s proposed chairman. With Keywords just a couple of weeks away from its stock market debut, Hemsley needed someone fast. He asked Graham if he was up for it.
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The posting turned out to be one of the most rewarding of Graham’s near-five decades in business. In his first posting as chairman, Graham mentored the executives, who lacked his experience of bigger tech companies. “Slowly we’ve been growing up and here we are a £2 billion company. But we’re still growing into it — we are like a schoolboy who has matured early,” Graham said.
Last year, Graham helped appoint former Sainsbury’s digital director Bertrand Bodson as chief executive.
Despite approaching his ninth anniversary as chairman of Keywords, Graham is not planning on stepping down just yet. In addition to a new chief executive, Keywords hired two new non-executives to its board last year. Amid all the change, Bodson asked Graham to stay for another year to maintain stability — and he agreed. Shareholders will probably be pleased. After all, shares in Keywords have risen fourteenfold on his watch.
When Graham does step off the board next year, he will not be stepping onto another one. Retirement beckons. “This is my last hurrah,” he said. “I’m not going to spend all my time on the golf course, but I don’t plan to do too much.”