CorpComms Magazine

Think of any corporate horror story of the past few years and it is quite possible that, there in the background with his mobile clamped to his ear, was Tony McGarahan. He was a best supporting actor in the drama that was Equitable Life. He was there when the building societies were tumbling into the arms of the banks in the 1990s. And there he was, again, parachuted in to sort out the unholy mess of Bradford & Bingley. And today, he's ready to jump in to sort out any corporate horror story where the existing internal press function needs help.

Just don't bother to call if you work for a tobacco company. 'My personal values are important to me,' he says. 'My father was a 60 a day smoker and it killed him. When I was much younger I worked in an agency and I was offered the chance to work on a tobacco company contract and I said no. I'd do the same today.'

What McGarahan, 46, does is a cross between a hired gun, an executive bodyguard and a PR. His beloved father was a carpenter and McGarahan too likes building: not shelves ('I'm crap at DIY,' he jokes) but business communication strategies and functions.

Whether he's working as a consultant or employed on an interim contract, he goes into organisations and creates a corporate PR function that will improve the company's reputation. He stays long enough to see it up and running, then heads off to the next job. Or, more excitingly, he gets that late-night call from a desperate chief executive who is being hounded by the press and needs his protection. Once that crisis and its aftermath is resolved and he's done his best to lay solid foundations for the company's future he's off, hungry for the next company needing his help.

Boardroom access

When he works for a company he expects to get boardlevel access so he understands everything that is going on. But that does not mean ignoring those further down the line. 'When I was in my first PR job someone commented that I spent too long in the post room talking to the guys down there. I said if you want to find out anything about an organisation then they are the ones who'll know.' That first job was at insurer Legal & General where the 18 year old first worked as a temporary assistant in the press office.

However, his biggest challenge came on the last weekend of September 2008 when, in the worst possible way, his cherished family collided with his professional life.

At the time, McGarahan was working for Bradford & Bingley. Late one Friday, he took a call from BBC business editor Robert Peston saying that he had heard Bradford & Bingley was to be nationalised the following Monday. McGarahan spent the whole of the Saturday on the phone taking calls from the world's media and, at one point, received a call from then opposition leader David Cameron demanding to know what was going on.

But then early on the Sunday morning he received a call from a relative. His brother Frank, then chief operating officer at Barclays Wealth, was critically ill in hospital.

Tragic death

Frank, an innocent bystander, had been attacked after trying to break up a fight in Norwich city centre the night before. His injuries were so severe that he died on the Monday morning (his assailants were later jailed for manslaughter). McGarahan takes what comfort he can from the help offered and messages of support he received at that time. Bob Diamond (soon to be Barclays chief executive) phoned, offering whatever help was needed.

'With the intense media interest in Frank's death, I learned what it was like to be on the other side of the story,' he adds. For so many years, he's been the one just in the background of so many stories. After starting his career at Legal & General, working under the charismatic Gordon Macdonald, he did a stint at local newspapers to get to know the other side.

Then he got a call offering him a more senior job at Legal & General; he leapt at it. 'I'd had my fill of sitting in magistrates' courts as a local paper reporter,' he explains. McGarahan stayed five years, leaving to set up and run a corporate PR function for Mecca Leisure, and straightaway he was propelled into corporate action (including fending off a hostile bid) which meant that, still in his early twenties, he was taking calls from City editors.

After a short foray into agency life, in the early 1990s he went to work for Birmingham Midshires Building Society. 'It had just appointed a new, young chief executive (Mike Jackson) and he wanted an in-house PR department which I was to run.

'At the time, the then regulator the Building Societies Commission told Mike he had six months to sort the society out and if he couldn't do it, it had arranged for the Woolwich to take Birmingham Midshires over. I stayed nine years: we turned the society around and in 1999 it was sold to the Halifax for £780 million'.

Top dog

Never fancying being number two in a corporate communications department, he left after the takeover and ended up at financial group AMP. At the time, the Australian owners were considering a secondary listing in London. 'I was hungry for plc work: I love the mechanics of the City, the excitement of a deal,' he says. But Sydney changed its mind.

He got one at his next post, working for construction company Taylor Woodrow where he re-engineered the corporate communications strategy. But the fun really came when Taylor Woodrow decided to make a hostile bid for Bryant Homes. 'I was in the middle of a bid battle, dealing with City editors, external PR agencies and board members. It was frantic. It was a hostile bid but we won.'

So how does he deal with the braying hordes of reporters, desperate for a story? 'I've always known that it's crucial to be totally honest with the media, because if you ever mislead them you will never recover from that. 'But you can encourage them to look at a story from different angles because there are obvious restrictions on what you can and cannot say. It's all about trust: you have to build relationships.'

Talking of relationships, his work hasn't always involved facts and figures. Twice he has had to face media inquiries about employer's love lives: the one that's been reported was when Equitable's chief executive Charles Thomson left his wife for a female employee.

An Equitable challenge

Certainly McGarahan's time at Equitable provided him with more experiences than most corporate communications professionals get in a lifetime. 'Equitable was an uphill battle - three quarters of FTSE 100 companies had group policies as did many MPS and most of the media and they all hated Equitable. It was the most exciting job I've ever had: it was non-stop.'

Since the demise of Bradford & Bingley he has worked for various companies with current clients including waste management group Shanks and electronics distributor Electrocomponents. But he's ready to be pressed into action if the need arises. 'Companies know if they employ me I will work tirelessly for them and I will take phone calls anytime.

'I'm not the kind of PR who'll get you column inches for your product, but I'm the one you need to make sure your message gets across when you are involved in something big, be it good or bad. I do this job because I love communicating and I love the excitement of being involved in big corporate stories.'

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