Past Featured Chairmen

John Cronin started his business career auctioning toast on the steps of his school to kids who'd missed breakfast.

With his relatively poor background, he says, he needed pocket money. 'The most I ever got was two pence for half a slice.'

He was paid three shillings to the pound for door-to-door sales of soap and other bath products for the blind. On his newspaper rounds, he noticed that construction workers on building sites looked hungry. He started buying them sandwiches at cafes and taking a cut.

'It was the beginning of buying and selling and recognising customer needs,' he says now.

Cronin left school at 16 and after a short apprenticeship in the Royal Signals was taken on as a trainee by Post Office Telephone, now BT.

'I wanted two things,' he says. 'To make as much money as possible and to wear a suit.' He began as an engineer, fitting switchboards for businesses. But he knew he didn't have to stay there, not in a company of 240,000 people.

He went into sales. His patch in South Warwickshire included all sizes of businesses. And again he noticed construction, this time as an undeveloped market.

'The problem in the UK,' he says, 'was that nobody was looking at the potential needs of customers moving in. There was no forecasting - just responding to demand.' Instead, he thought, work with architects and developers to plan ahead, simultaneously helping BT determine the best strategy for investing in fibre. Being smart would keep out the burgeoning competition.

The business plan he put together got stuck in 'the treacle layer of management' until he bypassed his boss and took it to the area marketing director, who immediately recognised its value. His boss threatened to fire him.

'I said, Get fired for what? Trying to take the company into the 21st century on looking after customers and looking after early stage investment in the construction world? I thought, if you won't listen, I'll find someone that will.'

The plan moved him up to national headquarters. He was advised to get some letters after his name to gain credibility - he'd failed the 11-plus exam and came to BT with only CSEs - and BT sponsored him on courses in marketing and at Cranfield. (Later, Netsource, sent him to Harvard.)

'It doesn't make me any different,' he says, 'but for others it made a difference.'

Still, he knew he would hit a barrier. 'Would I get to the main board of BT? No.' So when Mercury said, 'You've done us a lot of damage by coming up with this idea, join us in sales or marketing', he jumped ship.

Besides, 'I had 17-plus years in BT and I'd always beaten targets - and people were saying I was doing it because it was still a monopoly. I believed I was good and could achieve, and I thought I'd step out into the real world.'

One of his first steps was to get Mercury thinking in terms of account management and offering managed services and solutions rather than simply undercutting BT's prices by 20 percent, a clearly unsustainable business model.

He was head-hunted to become managing director of Teleglobe, the owner of undersea cables and therefore a wholesale bandwidth supplier to Internet service providers and UKERNA, the network connecting the UK's universities. The switch from retail to wholesale was, he says, 'interesting', because it meant dealing with much bigger contracts and many fewer customers.

In 1997, he was poached again to become group chief executive for NetSource Europe, which Cronin describes as a 'roll-up' - that is, a bunch of 10 companies across Europe all bought up by an Oslo-based business and rolled into one. Managing 21 founding CEOs from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Ireland and France while speaking only English himself was, he says, one of the hardest problems he ever had to solve in his career. Especially since all 21 wanted to be CEO themselves.

'Having these 21 founders from different countries, languages, and cultures - and getting them to look and act as one entity was most difficult,' he says. He told them that in creating value for shareholders, 'It doesn't matter what your title is.' What do they want, money or medals?

The acquired companies had a mix of people selling to everyone from residential customers to multinational corporation. 'We needed one clear plan across continental Europe about who we are.' Cronin focused the company on SMEs and grew its revenues to over $100 million. He got the company ready for an IPO in 1998 - but then the Russian market melted down. Instead, he sold it to the US-based company GTS for $300 million and left in early 1999.

It was around then, he says, that he felt he'd earned the money he'd wanted at the beginning. He bought a 15th century home, Claverdon Hall, previously owned by Henry VIII, part of the Warwick Castle estate, and spent six months pottering until his wife told him to 'stop project managing the kitchen sink and find something to do'.

In 2000 he became vice-chairman of Kast Telecom, helping to shape its vision and strategy, and then joined Brightstar to help drive start-up companies derived from BT's Martlesham research lab through the initial growth and development stage.

'I kicked the tires on several companies and picked being CEO of two and chair of one.' He is chair of Cambridge Broadband Networks, which sells wireless point-to-multi-point transmission equipment to telecommunications operators, Chairman of Bailey Fisher Executive Searc - a boutique search firm Based in Cambridge, Advisor to Next2Friends - a Mobile Video Social Networking site and Advisor to Private Equity and VC companies on M&A opportunities. He was Non-Executive Director of i2, which makes visual analysis products for law enforcement agencies, selling it to Choicepoint in 2004 for $100 million. Finally, he was CEO of the revenue assurance company Azure, which uses software tools to stop revenue leakage in the telecoms industry. It began with $6 million in funding and was sold three years later for $140 million. In addition he separately sold a security company which is today worth $32m.

All these steps are examples of the key qualities he believes a good chairman or CEO needs: a strong focus on goals and values, passion, putting customers first, determination, good communications, and getting everyone to focus on the same goals. Plus, he adds, 'EQ as well as IQ.'

It's been a long road. Asked what advice he'd give a kid selling toast today, he laughs. 'I'd say he shouldn't be selling toast on the steps because it's only a small market. Try the Internet.'

Wendy M. Grossman is a freelance business journalist. Wendy can be contacted at netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk or via her website www.pelicancrossing.net