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Tuesday 7 October 2008

The veteran batsman who just hates to lose

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.

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. ‘Nobody has a bigger emotional connection with this business than I do.’

That statement gives a clue to why, of all the Thatcher babes who made their names in the 1980s, Sorrell is the only one still to be running the same stockmarket-listed company with which he started. Of the rest, some failed and retired hurt, others sold out and retired happy, and a few reinvented themselves. Sir Nigel Rudd has become a serial company chairman; Michael Green is training as a psychotherapist; Sir Alan Sugar has become an unlikely television star.

But not the cricket-loving Sorrell, who has batted on relentlessly, scoring century after century. He has avoided the perilous ‘founder’s disease’ that causes so many entrepreneurs to wreck their companies once a certain size is reached. Although WPP had what Sorrell calls a ‘near-death experience’ in the recession of 1991-2, he recovered well, showing enviable calm in putting together the reconstruction while building in what proved to be a highly lucrative incentive scheme for himself and his top team. ‘He conducted himself with incredible dignity,’ recalls one shareholder. Sorrell emerged from the crisis with his credibility enhanced and a new respect for caution.

Sorrell greets me in the cramped reception area of WPP’s modest headquarters in a Mayfair mews, bidding farewell to his previous visitors with a wave and ushering me into a boardroom so small it is almost filled by the long oval table. On the floor are navy carpet tiles. Lightly tanned and dapper as ever in a grey suit, ice-blue shirt and deep-blue silk tie, Sorrell is the opposite of flashy. In WPP’s annual report the biographies of the other directors run to three paragraphs; his is just three lines. Why has he never moved from these offices to something grander? ‘I like them; we’ve been here since 1987,’ he says firmly. He agrees with Warren Buffett that water features and big buildings usually spell trouble.

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