The veteran batsman who just hates to lose

Judi Bevan

28 June 2008

Judi Bevan meets Sir Martin Sorrell, the hard-driving Eighties entrepreneur who is still chasing acquisitions for the company he created, the advertising giant WPP

‘Building a company is the nearest thing a man can do to giving birth and nurturing a child to maturity,’ says Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder and chief executive of WPP.

An escapee from Saatchi & Saatchi, where he was finance director for nine years, Sorrell swiftly bought 15 companies in marketing services. Then came the giant-killing bid for the American advertising icon J. Walter Thompson in 1987. ‘It was 13 times our size but making less money than we were,’ says Sorrell, who saw off four rival offers. Next he famously bid for Ogilvy & Mather, where its founder David Ogilvy’s response was to call him ‘an odious little shit’ (later changed by a sensitive newspaper to ‘jerk’). Sorrell had anticipated an emotional reaction from the doyen of adland, and asked him to be chairman of WPP. ‘It was his baby but he had lost control of it,’ comments Sorrell. In the end they got along famously, Ogilvy in part stepping into the role of Sorrell’s father, who had died in the year of the takeover.

Born on St Valentine’s Day in 1945, Sorrell was an only child whose observant Jewish parents doted on him. His father ran J&M Stone, a large radio and electrical retailer that was the Dixons of its day. Through him the young Sorrell imbibed a committed work ethic. ‘My father worked six days a week and growing up I would go round the shops with him. I learned about the importance of hard work and detail,’ says Sorrell. ‘When people call me a micro-manager I take it as a compliment.’ His obsession with business eventually took its toll on his marriage, which ended in 2005 after 33 years with his wife Sandy accusing him of being a workaholic. She was awarded £29 million and he recently married a young Italian, Christiana, causing much stir in the Jewish community by having the service in a Catholic church. ‘We also had a Jewish ceremony with a huppah,’ he smiles.