Tom Drury will swap dustbins for debt after resigning as chief executive of Shanks to take up the same position at a debt management company in Manchester.
Mr Drury said that he left the waste management company after almost four years so that he no longer had to travel from Knutsford in Cheshire to Shanks’s head office in Milton Keynes on a Monday morning and spend the week away from his wife, Jane, and their two children.
“Spending Friday night on the M1 and M6 is not the most pleasant thing in the world,” Mr Drury said.
He will join the British division of Arrow Global, the largest debt buyer in Britain, which has £6 billion under management and three million customers. It was set up in Britain in 2005 by Zachary Lewy, with whom Mr Drury worked at Vertex, the outsourcing group, before joining Shanks in 2007.
Mr Lewy invited him to join Arrow Global as chief executive and become a shareholder in the privately owned company. “It’s a very fast-growing business and I think I can help make a difference,” Mr Drury said.
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He said that he would be leaving Shanks in a very strong position. Trading for the three months to June 30 is in line with expectations and the company has continued to make good progress with a £150 million investment programme.
Mr Drury will leave Shanks by October and headhunters have been appointed to find a successor. Its chairman Adrian Auer said: “Tom has set a compelling strategic direction for the business.”
Mr Drury began his career at Unilever, then moved to PricewaterhouseCoopers before joining United Utilities. In 1996 he was appointed managing director of Vertex, its business outsourcing division. It became Britain’s second-largest company in the sector and was sold to Oak Hill Capital for £217 million in March 2007.
Shanks shares closed down 0.7p at 126.4p.
Making the most of waste
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• Shanks has become a specialist in new forms of waste technology. This includes biomass and gasification processes for the thermal treatment of waste, an area that is attracting interest from supermarkets that have spotted an opportunity to power their outlets using food waste
• The company has all but eliminated landfill from its activities in Britain
• Shanks has also shown considerable ingenuity in other areas. It was the first UK-listed company to issue bonds to retail investors denominated in euros, raising €100 million (£89 million) solely from retail investors in Belgium and Luxembourg
• Tom Drury is one of a number of chief executives to have decided that family comes first. He follows Danny O’Neil, the former boss of the insurer Britannic, who walked away from a £340,000-a-year job saying that he wanted time to watch his nine-year-old triplets grow up
• The ease with which Mr Drury has found another job shows that, despite concerns about the dominance of the South East, there are plenty of businesses in the country that can attract top talent