Jobs chief: bankers will leave UK if Corbyn wins
Stark warning from man who’s put a million in jobs...
ROBERT WALTERS has made a fortune from people moving jobs. Over the 34 years since he launched his headhunting firm, it has placed more than a million City workers in new roles and grown in value to £384million.
His stake in Robert Walters Plc is worth £12.5 million – a major achievement considering he is, by his own admission, from a ‘firmly lower middle-class background’ and the first person in his family to go to university.
The dilemma facing Walters right now, however, is that people aren’t moving jobs. They are ‘sitting on their hands’, he says, as they wait for a resolution to the interminable Brexit negotiations. ‘Would you move jobs if you were a financial controller in a major consumer goods company and you weren’t sure what their strategy was in Europe?’ he asks.
In answer to his question, his stock market-listed firm posted a profit warning earlier this month, blaming a ‘cocktail of confusion’ caused by global political tensions. ‘There’s panic out there, so the safest route is to sit still,’ Walters says. ‘That’s no good for us.’
Still, the 65-year-old appears relaxed as we meet in his corner office in the Robert Walters HQ in London’s Covent Garden. With Boris Johnson’s voice booming from a TV in the background, he leans back in his swivel chair and launches into a defence of capitalism.
Walters founded his business at the peak of the Thatcher years in 1985 and says the biggest threat in boardrooms around the country is the prospect of the Labour party getting into power.
‘There’s this devaluation of the entrepreneurial spirit within the Corbyn camp; there’s no incentive to really work,’ he says. ‘So the whole spirit of employing people and growing a business, which is really healthy, could evaporate if there’s a change of government.’ Walters knows three wealthy people who are so concerned about taxation and the economy under Corbyn they have moved to Portugal, which is tax-efficient for expats. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has threatened to ban bankers’ bonuses – and Walters says the hit on their pay would hurt his UK business, known for its annual survey of bonuses in the City. ‘It [Labour] would be a massive negative for the country,’ he says. ‘People will just leave.’
To help counteract this threat, Walters reveals that he personally donated a ‘deliberately chunky’ £200,000 to the Tories during their leadership crisis in the summer.
‘I wanted to make a statement to support capitalism and entrepreneurialism and all that good stuff,’ he says.
Yet despite calling himself ‘a child of Thatcher’, Walters doesn’t fit the conventional corporate mould. He says he used to be a hippy, and tells an anecdote about turning up to Royal Ascot this year in his girlfriend Anna’s bashed-up Mini. ‘I think the anti-style thing is quite chic,’ he says.
In his spare time, he paints in his studio at his Chelsea home, having ditched lager-fuelled outings to rugby and football matches, which had become ‘a bit tired and jaded’. Now he is into patronage of the arts, such as the Saatchi Gallery’s UK Young Artist of the Year award.
He’s also leading a government think-tank on prison reform. His firm’s scheme to help offenders back into the job market through career counselling has seen Walters visiting mass murderers in top security prisons in the UK and Norway. ‘It was quite scary in Wormwood Scrubs,’ he says. But the reward is creating a ‘bunch of people motivated to help the world’.
The whole spirit of employing people could evaporate under Labour
Walters trained as an accountant and started out at Touche Ross – now part of Deloitte – before becoming the fifth employee at rival recruiter Michael Page, then a start-up outfit above a laundrette. He quit aged 30 to launch his own firm, which now has more than 4,000 employees and made pre-tax profits of £20.9million on revenues of £634.5million over the first six months of this year.
It hasn’t always been plain sailing. In the 1991 recession, his company came so close to collapse Walters spent a holiday in Lanzarote shoving pesetas into a payphone to hear whether it would stay afloat. ‘We sold everything that wasn’t nailed down – the whole company car fleet went. But it was good timing because that was when the tax laws changed so it [the fleet] wasn’t beneficial to employers any more.’
Could we be heading for another downturn of that scale? ‘Could be,’ he shrugs. ‘But we’re quite prepared for it.’ His firm has offices in 29 nations including bases in Frankfurt, Dublin and Paris, as major City banks relocate to Europe.
‘We are in all the places likely to benefit from movement and disruption caused by Brexit,’ Walters says. He also reports growth in the UK regions, boosted by new jobs such as fintech and cybersecurity.
In the 2008 downturn, Walters took the ‘brave decision’ to expand into Japan, which is now his biggest market, accounting for 12 per cent of revenues and with 400 staff based in Tokyo and Osaka. ‘We got that one right,’ he says.
Walters has no plans to retire and says he thinks about work ‘most of the time, whether I’m on a beach in St Tropez or in a supermarket on the Kings Road’. Switching into Establishment mode, he puts on his tie and heads out to lunch at The Garrick, one of London’s most traditional members’ clubs.