FINANCIAL 6 MANAGEMENT November 2005

“Travel broadensthe mind; workingoverseas broadens it even more. There’salways a differentdimension to workingin another country– and you can’t getmore different thanPapua New Guinea”

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ONE2ONETrevor DightonChief financial officer,Group 4 Securicor

You took quite an unconventional route into financial management.I left school at 16 and had about 40 jobs in four years. I even dug graves for a time.Then I decided to go to college to study business and ended up taking CIMA whileworking for an electronics firm. After qualifying I worked for Deloitte and KPMG,and ended up doing the audits for copper mines in Zambia and Papua New Guinea.

And you liked Papua New Guinea so much that you decided to stay.I was sent out there by KPMG to set up a consulting arm, but I enjoyed it so much thatI settled out there with my family for five years. Travel broadens the mind; workingoverseas broadens it even more. There’s always a different dimension to working inanother country – and you can’t get more different than Papua New Guinea. It waseverything that I’d hoped it would be: a wild place, very exciting and underdeveloped.

What were the main challenges that you faced?My first job was to liquidate an airline. I spent six weeks taking it apart, but then theowner decided that he wanted to try to keep it going. So I duly ran the business forhim. The terrain in Papua New Guinea is so inaccessible that the aeroplanes weretreated more like a bus service. People used these little 12-seater aircraft all the timeto get around the country.

And then you ventured into publishing.For my last three years out there I ran a newspaper company. It was actually ownedby the Church, so it was quite an unusual business environment. I was the first non-Church person to be employed by them. One of the languages in Papua New Guineais pidgin and we ran a pidgin newspaper. It uses all sorts of slang – for example, thepidgin for “broken” is “bugger up”. It drew millions in foreign investment becauseeverybody loved the idea of a pidgin newspaper. I came in to help them when theyhad a funding crisis and sorted out the finances to make it a proper going concern.That gave me some really good experience and we went into profit after two years.

You also had a fortunate meeting early in your stay.When I arrived I met a guy at a cricket match. I actually knocked his beer over by mistake, but we got talking and we became friends. Someone later told me that he wasa big figure in the Papua New Guinea underworld. I think he must have put the wordout for us to be left alone because, in the five years we were there, we never had anytrouble. All the other houses in our street had been burgled at least once. That wasquite a lucky break.

How does doing business in Papua New Guinea compare with UK practices?There’s hardly any similarity at all. The basics are the same, of course, but the peculiar-ities of managing staff are very different. While I was at the paper, I’d get called out inthe middle of the night because the printers had started killing each other. Or I’d get acall from the police saying that our editor had been locked up for annoying a politician.We were in almost daily contact with politicians. Sometimes the prime minister wouldvisit to see the paper coming off the presses. We eventually left when my daughter was

FINANCIAL November 2005 MANAGEMENT 7Photographs: Michael Clement

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The system could be used for other purposes as well, presumably.There are lots of possibilities – it couldbe used for conditions such as Alz-heimer’s disease, for example. The wholething has become much more sophisti-cated, with satellite-based tracking systems. There’s fantastic potential,because most governments will eventuallyoutsource their prison services and tagging requirements to firms like ours.

What do you think are the main attrib-utes of a good finance director?People skills, definitely. It’s about gettingthe right people into the right positionsand ensuring that they develop. Therealso needs to be open and honest com-munication. The finance function has tofeel that it’s part of a team and that it hasa strong contribution to make.

At Group 4 Securicor the departmentis seen as a contributor to the company’sprofitability. Maybe this wasn’t the case30 years ago, but it is now. I don’t thinkit’s the same abroad, though. In the USand definitely in the Netherlands financeis still seen as a mere score-keeper.

Do you still travel a lot now?One of the biggest challenges is how to review business in such a diverseorganisation operating in so many coun-tries and how to delegate without losingcontact. We make sure that we get out and see as many businesses as we can.I spend a third of my time travelling,so I do still manage to visit some prettyfar-flung places. FM

FINANCIAL 8 MANAGEMENT November 2005

11 and we wanted her to go to a UK secondary school. But it wasn’t easy toleave – we had to tear ourselves away.

So how’s the security industry doing?Great. Our merger with the security armof Group 4 Falck last year has been ahuge success. We were having a goodtime before then, but this has opened upnew horizons. It’s allowed us to moveinto some newer areas – electronic securi-ty and developing markets in particular.Our justice service business (primarilyelectronic tagging) is going very well andour geographical coverage is incredible:we have 360,000 employees in more than100 countries.

Electronic tagging must be a particularlystrong growth area.Nobody knew how many people weregoing to be tagged when we piloted thescheme in Manchester ten years ago. But,once it took off, the numbers were verylarge. There are two categories of peoplewho are being fitted with electronic tagging bracelets: those who are on earlyrelease from prison and those who havereceived direct tagging sentences at amagistrates’ court. The government splitthe UK into five regions for tagging andwe run the system in three of them.

Tagging sentences are still in at anearly stage of development, but publicopinion is moving towards the idea thatimprisonment is a very expensive form ofpunishment, and that some offendersmay not benefit from this. The tagging ofearly-release prisoners cuts the govern-ment’s costs significantly, so I think there will be more and more tagging inboth categories. There’s a lot of scope for development in this area abroad,too. Israel, Singapore and Sweden arelooking into it, for example.

BURIALS, EXCAVATIONS,LIFTOFFS AND LOCKDOWNS1966 – 70 Leaves school to spend four years in a series of unskilledjobs, including digging graves and cleaning windows.

1970 – 74Realises that his older brother’s college grant is more than his annual earnings as a window cleaner andenrols on a business studies course. Goes on to join anelectronics company in Croydon, Surrey, where he studiesfor the CIMA qualification in his spare time.

1974 – 77Anglo American, Zambia. Internal auditor. Begins touse his accountancy skills to travel the world. Becomesan internal auditor at Anglo American’s copper miningbusiness. “The whole expat lifestyle was good – I playeda lot of rugby out there,” he recalls.

1977 – 81Deloitte Haskins & Sells. Audit manager. Takes thechance to expand his auditing skills after being offered a job in London through a contact in Zambia. It proves to be “a valuable experience”.

1981 – 86Wanderlust strikes again: Dighton switches to KPMG toset up a consulting arm in Papua New Guinea. He moveson after a year to help revive a struggling airline and thenleaves to run a local newspaper and media company.

1986 – 94BET. Finance director, security division. Dighton andhis family return to the UK from Papua New Guinea.He joins the BET group where he helps to prepare thecompany for its eventual sale to Rentokil.

1995 – 2004Securicor. Group finance director. Joins the securitygiant as finance director of the company’s vehicleservices division before transferring to the securitydivision in 1997. He is promoted to group FD in 2002,where a key part of his job is disposals and acquisitions.“Finding the right acquisitions has been one of thebiggest challenges in my career,” he says. “You have to kiss a lot of frogs along the way.”

2004 – Group 4 Securicor. Chief financial officer. Plays a central role in the recent merger of Securicor andGroup 4 Falck’s security businesses. Dighton’s main focus now is to complete the integration of the twoorganisations and maintain the group’s growth andtrading performance.

“In the US and definitely inthe Netherlands finance is stillseen as a mere score-keeper.”

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