Life among the luvvies

Calling Damien Harte’s office spartan is like saying that Alan Sugar can be quite assertive or George Best likes the odd drink.

The only decoration in the Channel 5 finance director’s monkish cell in Covent Garden is a framed poster, tucked sheepishly behind the bookcase, of Viz’s Roger Mellie, the Man on the Telly, whose favourite word describes the spherical parts of the male anatomy. ‘It is not mine,’ he protests like a man whose copy of Readers Wives has just dropped out of his briefcase.

‘Dawn (Airey, director of programming) gave it to me. I think she is trying to change her image or something.’

Can we use it for background in the photographs? No, for some reason this affable Irishman doesn’t want Roger Mellie dangling behind his head, so he despatches his secretary to grab some stuff from the marketing people.

‘Oh, and make sure you get a couple of umbrellas for these two, then they can be walking advertisements for us as well,’ he adds with a big grin.

Harte’s eyes are wandering around his office: ‘I don’t know why it is so bare,’ he muses. ‘I don’t suppose I have thought of it before.’ That may be because he has been a tad busy since joining the nascent TV station last July, what with setting up the finance department from scratch and taking on responsibility for human resources and overseeing the transmission system, which now accounts for 75 per cent of his time. ‘It stops me from getting bored,’ he says modestly.

A little sweat equity

‘Damien worked longer and harder than anyone else and always led from the front,’ says Tim Jackaman, managing director of financial PR firm Square Mile, who worked with Harte when the latter was finance director of Allied Leisure. ‘He had remorseless energy. In fact, the only criticism I would make of him is that he didn’t know when to stop. By now he will understand the TV industry inside and out: he will have absorbed it like blotting paper.’

Not that he is a workaholic. ‘You never see me in the office at 7.30pm or 8pm,’ he says. ‘It is a question of organising yourself.’ He must have changed, then, since he brought Allied Leisure back from the brink in the mid 1990s and invested an awful lot of what he calls ‘sweat equity’.

In those days he was an adrenalin junkie according to Allied’s managing director, Neil Goulden, who joined in 1995. ‘He left things to the last minute – until he could really feel the pressure – then he produced his finest work.’

His finest work must have been pretty impressive for Goulden to credit him with single-handedly saving the company. ‘Without him there would be no Allied Leisure. He led the recovery, he re-engineered the business and he gained the trust of shareholders and the City,’ he says. ‘There are two halves to him. He is probably the best accountant I’ve ever worked with: he is highly intelligent, prudent and has a razor-sharp mind. On the other side, he was late everywhere and totally disorganised.’

Harte’s ‘carefree Irish approach’ and its incumbent charm seems to have been partly the cause of the problem and partly its solution. ‘Don’t ever mould your style on him,’ warns Goulden. ‘Without his immense abilities and his charm, you’d never get away with it.’

Pear-shaped problems

Harte got ‘quite a horrible, dreadful shock’ when he joined Allied in 1993 – within six months things were going pear-shaped. Within a year it had breached its banking covenants, lost its chief executive plus two other directors and was being investigated by lawyers over how a #500,000 trade loan from Courage had been booked as profit in the 1992/93 accounts.

‘It was embarrassing and could have been fatal,’ Harte recalls. ‘It was lucky that the banks trusted us.’ He did the only thing he could: he told Courage its options were continuing to insist on repayment in six weeks and getting nothing, or staying with the business and replacing the debt by an advanced discount on the purchase of its beer. ‘It was a last-minute negotiation,’ he says.

Strength of character

Harte is an extremely effective negotiator and here we are back to the charm again. PowerGen group treasurer Rodney Barber, his boss in the mid-1980s at Rover Group, says: ‘He was always very friendly to deal with, he never got worked up or angry. He could be very pushy but in such a nice way that it was difficult to take offence, even when he was asking very impertinent questions.’

Barber characterises him as ‘very bright, very good and very hard working’.

His one glaring weakness, he says is his ‘Irish spelling’. ‘We used to say that there was no point giving him a dictionary because he couldn’t look up a word. It is testament to his strength of character that it has never blocked him in any way,’ he adds.

Harte’s powers of persuasion won him the support of Courage and the banks, with whom he negotiated a standstill then a refinancing package. ‘Within a few weeks of joining the company he had to make a presentation to the City,’ says Jackaman. ‘He was very impressive. Everyone saw him as our hitman, saying “I wouldn’t want to mess with him”, which is funny because he is such a nice man.’

He restructured the business, which involved the rapid disposal of about a third of its assets. ‘Four weeks out of the restructuring and we were looking to expand,’ says Harte with a touch of pride. An acquisition was followed by a year of stabilisation. The final part of its revival was the purchase of GX Superbowl in 1995 which almost doubled the size of the company. Job done.

Harte started looking for a new challenge. He likes a challenge. The trials of Allied followed hot on the heels of two ‘very stressful’ years as associate finance director at Gateway Foodmarkets where he played a key role in the financial reorganisation of the group. ‘It was a knife-edge operation,’ he says.

‘There was no scope for failure. At most normal companies, if you mess something up you don’t get a pay rise. At one stage we were 20 minutes away from going under. After Gateway I never wanted to do another job like that.’

He left the Gateway frying pan for the bubbling vat of Allied. ‘After what he did, he could have had the chief executive’s job if he had wanted it, but he didn’t want to run a small company. He wanted to be a finance director of a big one,’ Goulden comments.

Hard work pays off

With Channel 5 he has got his wish. For one thing it is the chance to create a finance department after his own image. Harte is a shirt sleeves kind of bloke – he whips his jacket off again as soon as the photographer has finished the more formal shots – and there is little emphasis on bureaucracy and a lot on hard work, he says. He tends to delegate a lot. ‘I get involved in the process and then let it get going,’ he adds.

Effectively, he is catering for two businesses. For his first nine months there is the massive retuning business with 6,000 people in the field which will end in the spring.

‘(The department) was initially structured along project lines – a traditional structure wouldn’t have worked,’ he says. ‘As we head towards launch it is mutating into a classic finance department.’

But enough of that. What’s it like being a beancounter in the ‘meejah’ and particularly where there are programmes to make, tantrums to throw, a station to set up to a very tight timescale and what he calls a fairly massive drop-dead date looming? ‘One’s heard stories about creative tantrums and things but there is no issue here. Everyone is massively focused and I was pleasantly surprised by the cost controls,’ he says. ‘It is a very lean organisation. The spend-and-don’t-worry attitude never got started here.’

Goulden thinks he is ideal for the Channel 5 job. ‘If you had a boring old accountant in there, he would never get on with all the luvvies,’ he says. ‘He has got a very intellectual chief executive and Damien is intelligent and thoughtful enough to hold his own with him and quick-witted and funny enough to be liked by the creative types. It will suit his style.

The worst place for him would have been somewhere like NatWest – he would have hated that.’

Contradictory elements

Harte’s style is laid back and likeable. Yet his CV is a queer document, bulging with boastful numbers. He completed his MBA three months early and was in the top 15% of the class; he passed the ICA exam first time and a year early and his honours degree put him in the top 10% of the class. It seems a strangely egotistical emissary for such an amiable fellow.

He shrugs it off: ‘That’s just a very American CV (he did his MBA in Chicago). They live and die by their grade point averages,’ he says. That’s all right then, it is just an aberration.

His office is no longer bare. He has decided to keep the boards from the photo shoot which means that rude Roger will stay tucked away in a corner but not quite hidden. Somehow that seems appropriate.