Financial Times Europe - 19.08.2019

(Joyce) #1
10 ★ Monday 19 August 2019

vate company without the checks and
balances of a share price or a public
company board of directors, he says.
The pair try, however, to get the best
of both public and private, combining
Standard’s long-term outlook with their
ability to buy stakes in quoted compa-
nies through 40 North.
It was through this investment vehicle
that they bought nearly 30 per cent of
Braas Monier, a German roof-tile
maker, in 2016. Months later, they were
offered another 10 per cent, which
would force them to bid for the
whole company at a moment when
they were still digesting the €1bn acqui-
sition of Icopal, a European waterproof-
ing business.
“We had a lot on our plate,” Mr Winter
admits, but they could make a quicker
decision and take a longer view than a
public company or private equity bid-
der could. They bid — through Standard
— and won control for €1.2bn.
Such investments need to pay back in
five to 10 years, Mr Millstone says.

“Being wrong for 19 years and right in
year 20 is just being wrong.”
Many private businesses reach a
moment where short-term demands
hand their managers a dilemma that
may make family dinners awkward,
such as whether to cut the dividends on
which relatives depend to conserve cash
for investment.
Mr Winter, whose marriage broke up
in 2011, knows that family dynamics are
never simple. “As a fourth-generation I
will tell you... things change as you
head down that many generations
where there is a divergence between
desires, needs and aspirations, and then
often businesses have to change,” he
acknowledges, but for now their share-
holder base remains small and tight
knit. “I’m confident that the way the two
of us work together works now,” he says:
“I’m not exactly sure what the right
answer will be 50 years from now, but
that’s not our issue today.”

COMPANIES & MARKETS


How to Lead.David Millstone and David Winter, co-chief executives of Standard Industries


Mr Millstone expands on his point:
“I’ve got four daughters. If one of them
screws something up terribly, she’s still
my daughter and I still love her and I’m
going to love her next year if she screws
up, and the year after. That’s not our
principle in the business. You’ve got to
be dispassionate about what’s working
and what’s not working.”
In public companies from Research In
Motion to Deutsche Bank, co-CEOs have
a patchy record: such power-sharing
arrangements often collapse when the
individuals involved discover they are
more competitive than complementary.
Why should Standard’s co-heads be an
exception?
“If we don’t both agree, we don’t do it,
which leads to us hashing it out until we
come to some cohesive decision,” says
Mr Winter. That, says Mr Millstone, is a
powerful “forcing mechanism” to find
consensus. Having a peer who will chal-
lenge you is especially valuable in a pri-

Standard has invested in drones to sur-
vey buildings, bought 3D mapping tools
and established a solar division.
Their investments have more than
doubled the revenues they inherited, to
$6bn, and lifted earnings before inter-
est, tax, depreciation and amortisation
from $250m to $1.3bn.
Mr Winter says his background in the
company his great-grandfather founded
taught him about the need for mutual
trust, shared values and transparent
communication in a family enterprise.
The biggest lesson, though, was that
“You’ve got to run it like a business. You
can’t run it like a family. You’ve got to
put the business first.”

coincided with the global financial crisis
straining an indebted balance sheet,
their efforts to pull GAF out of a long
asbestos-related bankruptcy process,
and battles to contain related litigation.
Those years were “incredibly hard
but easy in the sense that you had no
other choice,” he says: “Things were
coming at you so quickly that you had to
react and there wasn’t a lot of choice
about it.”
It wasn’t until 2011 that the two men
felt secure enough to ask each other,
“What do you want to do when you grow
up?” Mr Millstone says. Their answer
was to sell the chemicals business and
start building GAF into Standard, a
company propelled by the opportunity
to consolidate a fragmented industry
and a vision its co-CEOs dub “modern
industrialism”.
That term, says Mr Millstone, means
bringing a focus on innovation for which
the industry has not been known. So

T


he midtown Manhattan
offices from which David
Millstone and David Winter
run the world’s largest roof-
ing company are mirror
images of each other, their doors left
open to the tidy lounge between them
where the leather chairs and Ed Ruscha
prints are similarly symmetrical.
The two 42-year-olds with shared
tastes in blue suits, brown shoes and
open-necked shirts are co-chief execu-
tives ofStandard Industries— whose
roofing materials shield buildings eve-
rywhere from the Alamo to the Library
of Congress — and two related busi-
nesses: 40 North, an investment
vehicle; and Winter Properties, a real
estate company.
“The two Davids” have one more
thing in common: each married one of
the daughters of Samuel Heyman, the
1980s corporate raider.
Heyman died in 2009, leaving his
sons-in-law to run the business for a
family they had married into only a few
years earlier.
Each had initially hesitated to work
for their father-in-law, but by the time
Heyman died, “we had the benefit of
having grown up together” in the busi-
ness, recalls Mr Winter.
Until then, Mr Millstone had been
working on transactions and strategy
for Heyman’s operating companies —
GAF, a North American roofer, and
International Specialty Products, a
chemicals business — while Mr Winter
had been juggling duties at his own fam-
ily’s property company and risk arbi-
trage trading with Heyman.
“We very quickly made the decision
that dividing up the world was probably
not a great model for the next chapter of
our lives,” Mr Winter says: “That’s when
we decided to jump off the cliff together
and be 50:50 partners in every way.”
It was a formative moment, Mr Mill-
stone says, because Heyman’s death

Putting the business first in a family enterprise


The joint bosses of the
roofing materials

company seek consensus
in decision-making, writes

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson


David Millstone,
left, and David
Winter,
who ‘grew up
together’ working
in the business
Mary Beth Koeth/FT

‘You’ve got to be
dispassionate about what’s

working and what’s not
working in a business’

David Millstone

Education
1999 Yale University
Career
1999 Catalyst Recruiting
2000-2002 Bear Stearns
2002-2005 Harvard Law School
2005-present Standard Industries

David Winter

Education
1999 University of Pennsylvania
Career
1999-2002 Morgan Stanley
2002-2005 The Winter Organization
2005-present Standard Industries

Leadership
More interviews illuminating
the personalities of high-profile
leaders by focusing on the
issues they faced
ft.com/howtolead

CV

A wearable device that allows you to log your


mood is attracting interest from all over the world


In a recent FT Magazine article on the
crisis in workplace depression — said
by the World Health Organization to
cost the global economy $1tn a year
in lost productivity — a US workplace
mental health specialist, Donna
Hardaker of Sutter Health,
commented: “This is not about buying
Fitbits for employees and teaching
them deep breathing so we can pile
more work on them.”
This was read with particular
interest in the village of North
Newbald, Yorkshire, because it is here
that a tech device that might be
considered a mental health Fitbit for
the workplace has been developed.
Moodbeam, a £50 subscription-free,
wearable, mood-logging device, is
being piloted for employees at Barclays
Bank, by two Premier League football
clubs, a global TV channel, a law firm,
a UK Olympic team and a big
engineering company. The NHS in East
Yorkshire is trialling it for several
mental health problems, as are two
universities and a private school.
Interest is also coming from the US,
Australia and elsewhere.
Moodbeam’s principle is simple. It is
a wristband with two buttons, one
yellow and one blue. Wearers press the
yellow one when they feel happy, the
blue when they feel sad. The seemingly
facile information harvested is
uploaded to a phone app and
Moodbeam’s own cloud.
The inventors claim it is not only
hugely helpful and empowering to
users and their families and carers —
but also to mental health professionals,
since no such self -generated data set
on happiness previously existed. The
inventors believe that anonymised data
on how happy people are feeling in real
time at specific locations could be gold
dust for enterprises such as airports
and theme parks.
Moodbeam’s genesis could be a
storyline fromThe Archers, the popular
BBC radio rural life drama, which loves
up-to-date non-farming themes.
A journalist living in North Newbald,
Christina Colmer McHugh, discovered
that her daughter was being bullied at
the village school. The teachers were
dealing with it, but Ms McHugh
yearned to know how her child was

feeling during the day. Without
any tech background, Ms McHugh
dreamt up the idea for a wearable
mood tracker.
Cue the second character in the
story, fellow villager Jonathan Elvidge,
a former telephone engineer who in
the 1990s founded the Gadget Shop
chain and soon found himself on UK
rich lists. Then, after a commercial
dispute, he came close to personal
bankruptcy, losing his income and his
relationship. But he built it all up again
in a new consumer tech retailer, Red5,
sold that and at 52 had semi-retired,
apart from advising local start-ups.
So, Mr Elvidge knew a thing or two
about both tech and workplace mental
health. Early in his Gadget Shop days,
he was in the habit of vomiting from
stress every morning.
He was on holiday with his extended
family celebrating his second-time-
round wealth when Ms McHugh called
him with her idea. It appealed so much
that they became business partners.
The result, three years and £475,
investment later, is Moodbeam, which
has been selected to star in the British
pavilion at January’s Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
I wondered, however, if wearing a
visible device that announces you have
mental health concerns might not be
thought uncool by the likes of bank
managers, elite athletes and students.
But Moodbeam’s creators say I am
misjudging the mood of generations
new to the workforce.
“What we’re discovering is that,
for younger people, wearing it stands
for something — that I am open about
my wellbeing and mental health,” Mr
Elvidge says. “People at the boarding
school where we introduced it
positively wanted to wear their
Moodbeam as a visible thing.”
“Millennials are coming through and
employers are discovering there’s an
expectation on them to cater for their
mental wellbeing as well as physical
needs, or holiday entitlements,” Ms
McHugh says. “Interviewees are
saying, ‘What can you do for me if I’m
struggling with mental health? It’s a
generational thing.”

[email protected]

Moodbeam has been
selected to star in the

British pavilion at
January’s Consumer

Electronics Show



Jonathan Margolis


Technology



AUGUST 19 2019 Section:Features Time: 18/8/2019 - 16: 15 User: mark.alderson Page Name: MONINTERVIEW, Part,Page,Edition: EUR, 10 , 1


РЕЛИЗ


ПОДГОТОВИЛА

ГРУППА

"What's News"

VK.COM/WSNWS
Free download pdf