Closing offices and shedding staff might not Cappear the best way for a newly appointed chief executive to win friends and influence people. However, Jason Kennedy, group chief executive of international multi-sector recruiter Grafton Recruitment, who took over the reins in May, is making a good fist of persuading the company’s 600 staff round the world that the pain has a purpose.

Founded in 1982 on Dublin’s fashionable Grafton Street (from which it takes it name) the company had enjoyed an enviable growth record. As well as riding on the back of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy, the pioneering zeal of the company’s founders - James Kilbane and Ken Belshaw - saw the company’s flag planted in 19 countries round the world, including such diverse markets as Slovakia, Chile and China.
However, in recent years, as the Celtic Tiger’s roar became muted, and economic growth around the world shuddered to a halt, the company’s annual turnover has stagnated at between £125m and £130m.

In short, Kennedy admits, the company got flabby, building its cost base while turnover remained static. With his feet barely under the desk, Kennedy wasted no time, cutting staff numbers in Ireland by 40 alone, and slashing costs by £8m.

Handed a remit by Kilbane and Belshaw to get the company back on the path to growth, Kennedy has no intention of softening the message. “I call it as I see it,” he says. “We must be fit not fat so we can exist healthily. But more importantly,” he adds, “when the market bounces back, I want to be faster than the competition. That’s why we are on an absolute mission to be fit. The biggest challenge we face is to stay ahead of the competition.”

“We are not retrenching for the sake of retrenching. If this was only about efficiency and margins, you know what - employ an accountant to do my job so we can just take the costs out of the business, and see what happens next.”

Already Kennedy claims the strategy is bearing fruit, with the “fit as hell” Irish business recording its best trading month in 15 months. In the longer term, Kennedy says the company expects to gain further efficiencies from a new front-to-back office global application.

Kennedy clearly relishes the challenge, having spent the first few months of his new job flying the world to Grafton’s foreign outposts in 19 countries. Looking fit and tanned, as befits someone who prefers to spend his evenings abroad in the gym rather than the bar, he has just flown in from Portugal, from where the company has withdrawn its presence, and was due to fly back there straight after the interview.

Kennedy has not always enjoyed the high life of the chief executive, however. He recalls how his first business venture, selling ice creams on the beaches of Rimini in Italy, ended in disaster after the ice cream melted. “We didn’t eat for four days, until some nuns kindly gave us some cornflakes and bread,” he says.

However, after registering with a recruitment agency, Kennedy soon found his metier, attracted he freely admits by the opportunity “to make plenty of commission” at a small Irish recruiter called Headhunt. “It was hard graft and long hours. You did everything,” he says. This even included jumping on a bus and physically collecting the cash from clients.

Kennedy soon left to join another Irish recruiter, Marlborough, later to become Marlborough plc, and listed on the London and Dublin Stock Exchanges. Kennedy rose rapidly to become deputy managing director as his business unit took advantage of the huge inward investment won by the Republic of Ireland’s Industrial Development Authority. “I was the young chap who captured the golden goose,” he says modestly.

For Kennedy this was a formative time in his career. “Mergers, acquisitions, disposals, it was all happening. It was a real rock’n’roll, roller coaster ride.” However, with the company growing exponentially “from a standing start to almost world champion status” and burning cash at a rate of knots, the year 2000 saw the almost inevitable parting of the ways, with Kennedy’s pleas that the company focus on its internal processes falling on deaf ears. It was a lesson that has remained with Kennedy. “Profit is subjective, cash is fact,” he says regretting only that he hadn’t learned it even sooner.

Kennedy’s next port of call was at Manpower Ireland, then “the big sleeping elephant in the Irish jungle”. Exploiting the company’s willingness to fund growth in the Republic, progress was rapid. Within two years, a company that was turning over £10m and losing £2m was transformed into a £50m business.

Exposed to many aspects of Manpower’s global activity, including its professional business in the UK, and the recipient of “some of the best leadership training in the world” might have satisfied many recruiters. But even the prospect of a job at head office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US failed to tempt the north Dubliner, showing once again that Kennedy is his own man.

“The opportunity at Manpower was to steer the ship, not to chart a new course, but that has never been my modus operandi. My modus operandi is to get inside the engine room and to understand its intricacies and idiosyncrasies, what is right and wrong and make it better.”

With his family also not keen to move, it was no surprise that when James Kilbane and Ken Belstead, Grafton’s founders, whom he has known for years, came calling, Kennedy found the offer irresistible. “We share a lot of the same values. They are Irish, I am Irish. They want to grow their global business, and I want to be a part of managing and channelling that growth.”

James Kilbane, Grafton chairman, told Recruiter that Kennedy had proved himself “a man of vision and ambition” and that he was confident he would drive the company forward as it looked towards the future.

And despite fewer opportunities for growth than in the boom years, and retrenchment in Chile, Singapore and Hong Kong, Kennedy emphasises that Grafton is always seeking new opportunities. One being investigated is in Peru, while closer to home, Grafton has “big aspirations” to grow its recruitment process outsourcing business in the UK, and is already in advanced stages of pursuing “some significant business”. Expect an announcement with six months, he says.

While looking to build on the pioneering heritage of the company’s founders, who were “on a quest to put their business flag and the Irish flag in those faraway markets” Kennedy emphasises that expansion must be based on one overriding principle - being embedded in the communities in which it does business.

“We don’t have a strategy of following the customer. I am not going to go into a particular jurisdiction because a customer is in that jurisdiction because the probability is the customer will move to another jurisdiction in the future,” he says. “We play it long.” Kennedy says it is a fundamental tenet of Grafton’s business model that it supports SMEs, and jobseekers.

Grafton is proud of its Irish heritage, and, for example, holds St Patrick’s Day celebrations wherever it operates. Kennedy says it he was “overwhelmed” by such a celebration in Bratislava, when business leaders, politicians, ambassadors and academics turned out.

Kennedy is as enthusiastic about recruitment as he is about Grafton. “I love the industry because it’s a passionate industry, with a lot of emotive people in it, he says. And he is perhaps even more fulsome in his praise of Grafton’s staff. “I have never met the calibre of talent, and the desire for success as I see in the Grafton business.”

His passion for the company, its staff, and its culture is at times overwhelming. “Grafton is not a corporate machine, it is the antithesis. Grafton is human, it is full of passion, it’s got this sales energy that I can’t hold in my hand. It’s like plutonium, such is its energy level.” Kennedy says that no words can adequately describe the essence of the company. “It is just ‘Graftoness’,” he says.

By comparison he describes Manpower “as a massive corporation, with layers and layers of management and process and great controls, but no soul in a rock’n’roll sense. There is no ‘Manpowerness’ ,” he adds. “It is neither a good or bad thing, but the culture I left at Manpower and the culture I have come into at Grafton are light years apart.”

Kennedy sees one of his key tasks as taking the best aspects of Manpower - financial control, robust processes and corporate governance, and importing them into Grafton. “What Grafton needs is a little bit of what Manpower can offer, some corporate manners and corporate structure to allow it follow its growth strategy.” Work on this has already begun, he says, for example, by introducing new management roles, such as global sales director. At the same time, he is determined not to change Grafton’s core ‘Graftoness’ - its sense of innovation, creativity, energy and zeal.

With the Irish market improving, the Slovakian market highly profitable, and Poland “doing nicely”, there are signs that Kennedy’s’ strategy could be bearing fruit. With SpenglerFox, Grafton’s executive search business performing at record levels, and Grafton’s eclectic mix of businesses providing a good margin mix, Kennedy is confident that turnover will “easily be in excess of £150m” in the 09/10 financial year.
If Kennedy’s prediction is correct, then his ‘fit not fat mantra’ will have worked, and the pain of his first few months in charge may turn out only to have been a temporary blip.

Grafton Recruitment Group
Employs 600 staff in 19 countries
Headquartered in Belfast, the group’s five brands are:
Grafton Recruitment (generalist contingency)
Grafton ESP (RPO)
Grafton Healthcare
SpenglerFox (executive search)
BluePrint Specialist Appointments (IT, scientific and engineering)
Maryb.ie (secretarial and administration
Financial results
06/07 07/08
Turnover £108.4m £127.6m
Gross profit £40.5m £47.7m

Jason Kennedy - career highlights
Home town: Dublin
Education: BA Psychology and MSc in organisational psychology University College Dublin
Courses in leadership and change management
May 2009 to date group chief executive officer Grafton Recruitment
2001-2009 Manpower Ireland managing director
1995-2001 Marlborough deputy managing director
1992-1995 Headhunt