director profile
It has been a challenging three years that Patrick Coveney has
spent at the helmof Irish food group Greencore, but the business has come out all the stronger fromthe experience, he tells Grainne Rothery
In the role of CEO at Irish food group Greencore for just over three years, it’s been something of a baptism of fire for Patrick Coveney, who has a faced a range of signifi- cant company, industry and economy-related challenges in his short time at the helm. However, he is not one to be daunted by a challenge. Aged just 40, Coveney has a strong record of achieve-
ment in his education and career path to date. Armed with a first-class honours degree in commerce and the accolade of being UCC’s overall graduate of the year in 1992, he went on to do a master’s and doctorate in man- agement at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. As a schoolboy and during his time at university, he was
an accomplished rugby player, representing Ireland on a number of under-age teams and playing for Munster youths, London Irish and Oxford. He joined McKinsey straight from Oxford and spent
nearly 10 years there, working in London, Atlanta and then in Dublin for the last four years. For the final three years he was managing partner in the office in Dublin and, towards the end of that period, a partner for McKinsey on a global basis. Although he says he knew he didn’t want to be a con-
sultant forever, he has very positivememories of the com- pany and gained invaluable experience there. “As I often say, if you were in McKinsey for nine years, you really have 40 or 50 different careers because that’s the speed at which you get new client and project experiences,” he explains. “You are exposed not only to very good people within that organisation, but also within the clients that you work with. So you get a very fast-track education in business but in leadership too.” In 2005, an offer to join Greencore as CFO came
“pretty much out of the blue”, he says. “It was the busi- ness that would have interested me, but I had no tech- nical accounting background or qualification. I was attracted into the business by both the opportunity to be a public company director, to sit on the board, and I felt the business – I still verymuch do today – had a very, very interesting set of issues and lots of opportunities to go after.” While he came in to run the finance function, he
believes he was hired in part to strengthen the potential succession options for David Dilger who had at that stage been chief executive of Greencore for 11 years. “While there was no explicit commitment about his timetable for moving on, it was a consideration for me that he wasn’t going to be there forever,” he says. Around two years later, Dilger duly announced his
intention to retire and Coveney was appointed chief exec- utive designate in December 2007, a position he formally took up in March 2008. One of the greatest challenges for the company since
Coveney joined has been a significant shift in the focus of its business following the European Union’s reform of its policies on sugar, which until 2005 had been the compa- ny’s biggest earner. “At that time, Greencore would have been characterised
by three things: firstly, a strong, balanced ingredients business; secondly, a convenience food business that had a lot of potential but still sat some distance away from the heart of what Greencore was, which had largely been cre- ated by the acquisition of Hazelwood Foods in 2001; third- ly, a pretty high level of indebtedness associated with how the Hazelwood Foods transaction was structured. “What we had to do was try to figure out, in that
LEADERSHIP 26 Irish Director Summer 2011
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