Big shot of the week

WHEN applying to be chief executive of an ailing firm, a candidate’s best shot is to knock the chairman dead with a wellrehearsed turnaround plan.

He will use fancy spreadsheets and pie charts, and utter such gobbledegook as ‘streamlined efficiencies’, which he guarantees will send the firm back to profitability.

If all goes to plan, the bedazzled chairman will go running back to his board of directors and announce triumphantly: ‘I’ve found our guy.’

One imagines ITV boss Adam Crozier, 52, as this sort of flashy go-getter, blessed with the communicative dexterity and florid corporate chitter-chatter that leaves chairmen and head-hunters drooling.

Over a diverse career of 30-odd years, plum jobs seem to have plopped into his lap at will.

Slick, neatly coiffed and open-collared, this slight and softly-spoken Scot oozes smarmy ambition from every pore. Do we detect a touch of the Peter Mandelsons about him? His big break doubtless owes something to the New Labour era’s fixation with style and presentation.

It was during those heady days of Cool Britannia that the Football Association began scouting for a replacement for its notoriously dreary chief executive Graham Kelly – an ineffectual tub of lard who had come to personify the backward-looking grey suits of football’s governing body.

ENTER Crozier, a bristling young shaver armed with youthful pizzazz and a set of polished media skills honed at the advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi.

Seizing the organisation’s antiquated levers, he swiftly moved it out of its ivory towers in Lancaster Gate to swish offices in Soho Square, the beating pulse of media luvvie land. Jobs were cut, budgets slashed and the archaic organisation began to function like a proper business.

When England manager Kevin Keegan announced his departure in the Wembley lavs, Crozier bossily announced that he alone would be in charge of scouring the globe for a replacement. Out went the traditional tracksuit coach and in came Sven Goran Eriksson, an icy Scandinavian with a taste for the exotic.

Traditionalists hit the roof. Inevitably, such dizzying initiative became too much for the vegetables at the FA, and Crozier found himself out on his ear in 2003 after two and half years in the post.

But his turnaround job had not gone unnoticed.

Soon, royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton came knocking, tasking Crozier with turning around a crumbling institution that was losing £1billion a year.

Within five years, Crozier announced that profits had hit £355m, though his success was accompanied by the acrid whiff of cordite after 5,800 post offices were shut, the second post was done away with and Sunday collections axed. The price of a first-class stamp jumped 12p, and woe betide anyone expecting the postie before 2pm.

Vast target-linked rewards were thrown in Crozier’s direction – at one point he earned £3m a year.

This being royal Mail’s pre-privatised days, it comfortably made him the highest paid public-sector worker in the land.

So when he arrived in 2010 at struggling ITV, by then increasingly reliant on Simon Cowell’s downmarket shows, critics predicted repeats, cheap US imports and trashy, ratings-chasing programmes.

But much to every pundit’s surprise, he poured millions into content. Expensive shows such as Downton Abbey and Broadchurch became wordwide hits, while Grantchester and Victoria knocked the BBC’s drama output into a cocked hat.

Last year, he was paid £4m, though supporters say he has proved exceptionally good value, notching up six years of double-digit profit growth. Earlier this year, profits were up 18 per cent at £843million.

Crozier has certainly come a long way from his humble beginnings, growing up on the Isle of Bute, where his father was an estate manager.

He also had to recover from two early setbacks in his career, when football trials with Hibernian and Stirling Albion failed to set the heather on fire.

He then worked in the Daily Telegraph’s advertising department, where former colleagues say he left under something of a cloud.

It was only after he landed a job at Saatchi and Saatchi in 1988 that his career finally began to take shape.

rising to become its youngest ever chief executive in 1995, it was also there that he met his wife Annette. The couple have two daughters and live in wealthy Weybridge in Surrey, where fellow media bosses Jeremy Darroch of Sky and Gavin Patterson of BT also reside.

So what next? With a chill wind expected to blow through the advertising market in 2017, he may already be thinking of moving on.

There are plenty of ailing institutions in need of life support that would presumably welcome him aboard – if they can pay for it.

How about a return to the FA and revitalising England’s hopeless footballers? A turnaround job too far, surely, even for Crozier.