COLIN DAY bounces into the meeting room at Reckitt Benckiser’s Slough head office. “Hi. Colin Day,” he says, offering a vigorous handshake before sitting in front of a display of Reckitt Benckiser products.
The office may be in Slough, but it hardly is The Office. For Wernham Hogg, inimitable small-time paper merchant, read Reckitt Benckiser, the world’s biggest cleaning products company. For David Brent, the chubby fortysomething who did for business what Basil Fawlty did for the hotel trade, read the sprightly Day, one of the FTSE 100’s most respected finance directors.
Day wastes little time. He is not a ditherer. He professes a dislike for people who struggle to make decisions. Utterly unlike Ricky Gervais’s alter ego, he reveals a restlessness when it comes to staying in the same job for more than a set period.
It is a trait that appears to have been borne out of a five-year stint at British Gas, then still a national corporation, early in his career. It cemented his view never to become a company “lifer”. Six years is his average stint in one job and with one company, he says. In October, Day’s six years at Reckitt Benckiser are up. Is it, therefore, curtains for him in Slough, time to move on?
“I’m quite matter-of-fact about it,” he says of his six-year yardstick. Has he begun to think about the next challenge in his corporate life? “Yes,” he says, and grins. “I am that sort of person. I am a great believer in opportunity meets strategy.
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“I have never actively sought the next step. Things have tended to come. So I have started to get to a point where I’ve said ‘yes, it is getting time’, or I am ready for the next challenge, and then things happened. Whether that’s luck, good fortune, telepathic vibes, I have no idea. Things just seem to happen.
“I never came [to Reckitt Benckiser] five years ago thinking I’ll work here for life. I like what I do, I like this company, there’s a lot to be done here, and I am integral to it.”
Nevertheless, Day’s admission is surprising for a FTSE 100 senior executive.
In his five-and-a-bit years at Reckitt Benckiser — he joined a year after the merger of Reckitt & Colman and Benckiser — Day has established a formidable partnership with Bart Becht, the chief executive. Since Day’s arrival, Reckitt Benckiser’s share price has improved from 750p to Friday’s £18.64 close. Turnover is up from £3.2 billion to £3.9 billion in 2004 [Reckitt Benckiser reports its 2005 result next month] and pre-tax profits have soared from £447 million to £770 million.
Certainly, Reckitt Benckiser’s shareholders would have no cause to want Day’s departure. Yet Day is a man of energy, drive and ambition who relishes challenges and is bored with mundane tasks.
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He loves flying — he has a full pilot’s licence for single-prop aircraft — but brushes off the idea of gliding: “I like to see and feel the power of the propeller in front of me.”
Corporate hobnobbing is not for him, and he tries to minimise the duration of his frequent travels to Reckitt Benckiser’s global operations: “I’ve spent too many nights overseas and it’s not fair to the family.”
By all accounts, Day was the preferred candidate for the chief executive’s vacancy last year at easyJet, the low-cost airline on whose board he had served as non-executive director for five years. In the end, Day and the board could not reach agreement and he remained at Reckitt Benckiser, handing back his easyJet directorship to boot.
Bart Becht turns 50 this year and is unlikely to relinquish the chief executive’s role in a hurry — should Day want it — but there are other options, including regular approaches from private equity firms. There has also been a suggestion that Day could replace Gareth Davis, the Imperial Tobacco boss, who turns 56 this year and is already one of the longest- serving FTSE chief executives.
Day joined the Imperial board as a non-executive director last year and openly admits his admiration for both Davis and the tobacco company in general. Day is also on the board of WPP Group, the FTSE 100 media company.
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“For me, the decision is whether I go chief executive or non-executive,” Day says.
“Finance people are cut out to be, I think, good non-executive directors. If I was going to go down that route, then the ultimate ambition has to be to take on a chairmanship.”
Ironically, Jan du Plessis, the chairman of British American Tobacco, lives near Day in Buckinghamshire. Du Plessis, 51, made the direct leap from finance director of Richemont, the Swiss group, to FTSE 100 chairman in 2004 when he took the BAT chairmanship.
Day, however, is undecided. “Yes, I would like to be [a chief executive], because I know how to do it,” he says.
Day’s first job was as a trainee accountant at Kodak in 1973. A a year later, he left to join British Gas, where over the next five years he achieved his professional qualification. He also realised that the public sector and the “job-for-life” mentality was not for him.
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Day wanted to remain a finance executive, though, and, after the completion of a one-year MBA at Cranfield School of Management in late 1980, he joined De La Rue. It was at Crosfield Electronics, one of De La Rue’s subsidiaries, that he made his mark.
Day says that he does not believe in mentors and does not rate individual business events as key influences on his career. His six years at Crosfield, however, where he started as financial accountant and became group financial controller, provided the most influential moments of his budding career.
“There was something in that business. It was very embryonic, very entrepreneurial, commercial type of people who I still mix with today.” (He still plays golf with Jim Salmon, the former managing director.) “I still very much see myself as a boy of that company, even though today they look at me and say ‘we knew you’d do well’. It was ungodly hours, but really interesting, and really commercial. It wasn’t technical accounting, it was much more running the business. It was dynamic, exciting, hands-on, no frills, no airs-and-graces, but with really good people where there was this esprit de corps.”
Before joining Reckitt Benckiser in September 2000, Day spent 5½ years as finance director of Aegis Group, the media buyer run at the time by Sir Crispin Davis. It was a time of frenetic deal-making and Day reckons that he was involved in 40 acquisitions.
It was also around that time that he first ran into Sir Martin Sorrell, the WPP chief executive, who Day lists as his most-admired businessperson.
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“It was on Concorde. I was in 1A and he was in the other front seat. And I thought I worked hard. Martin probably did it in a ratio of 2-1 or 3-1 over me. I always remember he got one of those BA sick bags and was piling [papers] all in there and that’s what spurred me on.”
Day is a meticulous note- taker and has records of business meetings dating back to 1980. His children joke that he should turn the reams of writings into his autobiography.
His stint at Reckitt Benckiser would no doubt form a chapter of huge success, but it is unlikely to be the final chapter of Day’s executive career.
POWER CV
Name: Colin Richard Day
Age: 50
Home: Buckinghamshire
Education: Cranfield School of Management, MBA; FCCA
Career: joined Kodak Ltd as a trainee accountant in October 1973 but left after a year to join British Gas for five years. After his one-year studies at Cranfield (1979-80) he held finance jobs at De La Rue Group and Crosfield Electronics. Became finance director of ABB Kent plc in 1988 and spent the next six years within the ABB group. Left ABB in December 1994 to join Aegis as finance director, where he was involved in 40 acquisitions as well as rationalisation of the cost base over a five-year period. He joined Reckitt Benckiser as finance director in September 2000. Also non-executive director of Imperial Tobacco and WPP Group
Pay: £1.7 million Reckitt Benckiser (2004); £60,000 Imperial Tobacco (2005); £50,000 WPP (2005)
Hobbies: flying, golf, skiing, gym
Marital status: married, two children