Tell us about your background
I was born and raised in Milngavie, near Glasgow. I studied for a BA in Business Administration at Strathclyde from 1976 to 1979.
After graduating, I joined what is now known as KPMG and became a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) in 1982. In November 1982, my wife, Lauren, and I left for Johannesburg, South Africa, where I worked for a firm we now know as Ernst & Young."
I returned to Scotland in 1985, and moved to Aberdeen where I joined Citibank, and in 1986 moved to Seaforth Maritime, an energy services business, going on to become the Finance Director in 1987. In 1989 I jointly led a management buyout of the company. We subsequently sold Seaforth a number of years later, and in 1994 I joined GRT Bus Group, a UK transportation business, as their CFO. GRT listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1994, and, following a number of fairly large acquisitions, subsequently merged with another business to become what we now know of as FirstGroup.
In early 1996 I made the move to the US with John Wood Group PLC (“Wood Group”), the large energy services business which at the time was privately owned. I became Wood Group’s CFO in 2000, and the company was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2002. As CFO, living in Texas made sense from the perspective that a large part of Wood Group’s business was in the US, but given we were UK listed it involved a large amount of travel to the UK and elsewhere. I retired from Wood Group in 2015.
Since 2015 I have served on several public companies' boards, both in the UK and the US. I currently serve on the board of three US public companies, where I am also the Audit Committee chair. In addition, I am a Director on the board of the University of Strathclyde USA Foundation Board, and I'm on the board of Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston.
I still live in Houston, Texas where my three daughters and their families also live, and have a home in Colorado where the weather is a little cooler in the summer!
Why did you choose Strathclyde?
I chose Strathclyde because it was a great local university with an excellent reputation and provided a qualifying degree for the ICAS qualification.
Little did I know it at the time, but I was to go on to marry Lauren, the daughter of my first Business Administration Lecturer, Professor Roy Wilkie.