CEO
WPP

Sir Martin Sorrell

0.00.02 Martin Sorrell, CO, WPP. WPP is a way of life and the best way of expressing that I found over the years is Bill Shankly, the famous Liverpool Manager, and he said football is not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that. And WPP is not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that. So everything about WPP is very personal cos you know you start it with two people in a room, you know, about the quarter of the size of this and, you know, you’re paranoid about going back to, you know, a room with two people.

00.00.33 So this is all very personal. I mean if we win a piece of business, you know, I take personal satisfaction. If we lose a piece of business I take umbrage. So it’s, you know, it is a matter of life and death as Shankly said. The man who was the Chairman of the Industrial Holding Company which my father’s retail company was a part, there’s a man called Charles Haywood and he said to me, “my boy, what do you want to do when you grow up?”. I said, “please sir, I want to go into business”.

00.01.01 So he said “well if you want to go into business, what you should do is to go to the Harvard Business School.” And when I graduated from Cambridge I got a place. And then, you know, I went from HBS to Glendenning Associates which was a marketing consultancy which we now own half of, or the non US part of. Then to Mark McCormack, you know, who is famous for having, at that time managing Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Jane Nicholas, but you know sports management, people management.

00.01.29 And then I then met James Gulliver who was a food retailing entrepreneur who had general interest as well and one of his interests was in a stake in Saatchi’s or what became Saatchi’s, that’s how I got into the advertising industry, became their CFO for nine years. My father went to school in the East End of London in Stepney and went to school, had to leave school at 13, and then went into the radio and electrical business and was very successful as the Managing Director of a radio and electrical firm.

00.02.02 He sort of… I wouldn’t say my mother was a strong Jewish mother but she was a sort of very loving Jewish mother and, you know, my father sort of doted on me and I doted on him. He was very instrumental I think in sort of guiding me. But he was not an oh no, he was a Manager and I think the central sort of thrust of what I wanted to do, which you know, when I my attack of andropause in 1985 I had was to try and build my own business, or build our own business.

00.02.35 I thought it was my last chance or the last chance saloon to start something. So we started something from scratch when I was 40 in 1985 and we bought into a company called Wire and Plastic Products. And it was a small engineering company that made wire baskets for supermarkets, and pots and pans, which we still own but obviously it’s a now very, very small part of the business.

00.03.00 And today WPP is an advertising media investment management which is media planning and buying information insight consultancy which is really market research, public relations and public affairs, branding and identity, healthcare communications and directed digital interactive business. You’d have to go back to 1987 and, you know, WPP was about, worth about £150 million at the time.

00.03.33 And we made a bid for JWT of about $525 million, but JWT was 16 times our size. So I think, you know, when you say what was the sort of… I think that was a very important moment and the slough of despond or the slough of despond was 91/92 when we were having exceptional difficulties, we were over leveraged and we had a very tough time at that point in time, but came through it.

00.04.02 I mean I think the true test is when you have difficulties, you know, when everything’s going well, it’s fine. But when you… in the 1990s all you had to do was come into the office and stand up. It’s how you deal with the difficult things in life that are important.