A believer in the power of good relationships in making a success in business, BDO Stoy Hayward’s Andrew Ware does not fit the image of a hardened corporate financier.
Andrew Ware breezes into BDO Stoy Hayward’s new offices in Baker Street as if without a care in the world. The head of corporate finance London, based in the accountancy firm’s West End headquarters, is refreshingly upbeat despite the doom and gloom in global financial markets.
Happily for BDO, Ware believes the mid-market has escaped the worst ravages of the credit crunch. He says deal-flow has not really slowed in the wake of the sub-prime crisis, with volumes down by just 10 per cent in the first quarter of 2008.
“It is not that deals aren’t happening, it is just that they are happening in a different way. They are being structured more pragmatically, with private equity houses putting in more equity or with pricing starting to adjust to take account of where we are,” he says.
Ware comes across as more down to earth than many a corporate financier. Perhaps it is his South London accent, perhaps his friendly manner. Most likely though, it is because he has taken bigger risks and shown more entrepreneurial verve than the typical accountant.
In the early ’90s he quit a promising career at Deloitte to help his father buy and run a small financial services firm. He is clear it was the most significant learning experience of his career. “Letting people go and dealing with banks on a daily basis was hard. You learn a lot about yourself in that environment – about how to treat people,” says Ware. “I take the view that you should treat people how you like to be treated. I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but when you know people have families, you have to be as fair and as clear as you can be.”
Ware joined Deloitte as a trainee accountant after graduating in economics at University College, Swansea. Before long he was invited onto the firm’s fast-track programme for high-fliers. He jumped at the chance to relocate to Los Angeles to assist on the General Motors account. “I acted as a partner’s assistant. It was a chance to learn how to develop and how to deal with people. It was like an MBA but a practical one,” recalls Ware.
Ware also did some privatisation work in the UK and Hungary before returning to London. This meant getting his head down to deal with doing business in a downturn. It was the early 90s when recession rocked the UK economy and the outlook seemed bleak. He joined PKF in 1994, a top-10 UK accountancy firm, where he was offered a job rebuilding its corporate finance business with Stephen Bourne, now head of corporate finance at BDO.
In the process Ware advised New Look owner Tom Singh in what was one of the biggest money-out deals of the time. It was 1995 and Singh, who had aborted a float of the fashion chain a year earlier, wanted to release capital from the company he founded in 1969.
Ware formed a strong bond with Singh and, after two years with PKF, Ware left to join Singh’s newly formed private office to help build a private equity business. “We were building it from the boot-straps,” says Ware. He went on to work at New Look in a renewed attempt to float the business.
After 18 months of hard graft, New Look achieved what had been impossible four years earlier and floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1998.
Such a high-profile deal was bound to get him noticed. Bourne, by now at BDO, was keen to have Ware back on side. He did not take much persuading. The opportunity to start from a small base again, this time to build BDO’s corporate finance business, was irresistible to Ware. Since he joined in March 1999, BDO’s corporate finance operation has grown 12-fold.
Acting on behalf of Nomura, Ware sold Lifeways Community Care to August Equity in July 2007. “I already knew Andrew Hartley and Richard Green and we all got on great. However, the key to these relationships is doing deals together,” says Ware. “It was a very competitive situation and they transacted really professionally. They put together a very compelling offer to buy the business, with HSBC to support them, but structured in a way we did not think was achievable,” says Ware. “They proved to us they could deliver.”
Ware believes it is private equity houses who are prepared to structure deals imaginatively, like August Equity, who will win out in debt-constricted markets.
He also believes strong relationships are key. “The team at August Equity has a nice style. They are real people and you get a sense that they treat people properly and their values are very good. Those things impact you if you are a relationship business like we are.” Ware laughs as he says this. For a man who has always been willing to take on new challenges, his “softness” side adds a refreshingly human dimension to the world of business.
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