How lorry-driving mum became boss of £2.4BILLION f irm
SHE was forced to spend her life on the road, driving an HGV to support her young daughter.
But now a Scots mother has revealed how a chance encounter saw her switch from driving lorries to becoming a top executive at a £2billion construction firm.
Shonagh Kinnaird started driving trucks to support her child after being made redundant from her office job.
But when she got chatting to a company boss about their mutual love of West Highland terriers, her life changed.
Miss Kinnaird had met a director of Mace, an international consultancy and construction firm, and was offered a job with it in 2006.
The 53-year-old has since become a director at the company and was one of the first women to be in charge of major construction projects.
She worked on Dublin Airport’s terminal two and spent five years in Vietnam working on a United Nations building in Hanoi, as well as a new German consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.
Now Miss Kinnaird, from Kinross, Perthshire, has told how she broke down gender barriers after going from driving a 40ton truck to working for the global company which employs more than 6,000 people and has a turnover of £2.35billion.
Speaking to Zara Janjua on the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Ask For More podcast, she said: ‘Lorry driving was a needs must. I had bills to pay and a child to bring up.
‘My father is a farmer and there was a conversation which went “you should be helping your father but you can’t drive a lorry” – and that was a red rag to a bull because I embarked on a course of learning how to drive and then got a job driving.
‘My first job was driving a tipper lorry from Aberdeen to Liverpool delivering animal feeds and fertilisers.
‘It was a 40-ton truck. They are not small and you have to climb a ladder to get into them.
‘I hung up my keys a few years later. I was then working for a contractor on a project and had to take delivery of a very large tree to the home of a boss of a construction company.
‘At that time I had a West Highland terrier called Dudley and I had to take him with me.
‘I was sitting on the kerb outside his house waiting on the tree delivery when the boss arrived walking his five West Highland terriers.
‘We got talking about our mutual love of the breed and that sparked the conversation and the rest of my career.
‘He was the director for Mace in Scotland and he said “you need to come and work with me”, which I did.’
Miss Kinnaird landed the role with Mace as a construction manager of an Aldi supermarket in Bathgate, West Lothian, and went on to complete nine stores for the firm in Scotland.
She is now an associate director with the company but has revealed that she faced sexism as she climbed the career ladder in the industry.
She said: ‘A lot of people would say “You were just the token female at that time”, but I don’t get that feeling.
‘I was given responsibility and put out there on my own. It was a sink or swim situation.
‘It made me want to be better than my counterparts and show them that it didn’t matter if you looked after your fingernails, you could still do the job.
‘The project in Ho Chi Minh for the new German consulate was the pinnacle of my career.
‘Both the Vietnamese side and the German side were nervous about a woman running the site. It was a big project with 2,000 workers on site and the more I heard people were nervous the more it pushed me into doing a good job because I thought, “I’ll show you”.’
Miss Kinnaird added: ‘I share my story now to inspire other women and show them that they can achieve anything they put their minds to.’
‘That was a red rag to a bull’