Financial engineering: Keith Cochrane, FD, Weir

Then the terrorist attacks in 2001 saw Coach’s business fall off a cliff. The following June he was quoted in Forbes magazine calling Coach customers ‘riff raff’ (Stagecoach denies he ever said this). The following month he resigned, eight years after Brian Souter poached him from Arthur Andersen (where Cochrane had just finished working on the Stagecoach flotation) as his FC, and later FD. He didn’t manage to save the share price or plug the financial losses from either group or Coach in his time.

No regrets
“Some of the things we did in terms of restructuring and getting our arms around the US, even in that two-year period, I’m still very proud of. But I recognised it was probably the right time for Brian to take over at Coach rather than us both trying to do the job and I respected Brian’s position ­ he had views on how he wanted to move things forward,” admits Cochrane. “I’d say I’m a better FD as a consequence, mostly in terms of commercial understanding and broader management issues. I certainly don’t regret doing it.”

What about working for Souter, one of British business’s more colourful characters? “I had a great relationship with Brian. It was probably the natural next step in Stagecoach to become CEO and if I was going to try it, where better than an organisation and management team I’d been with for years, and a chairman for whom I had immense respect?”

After an 11-month break from business following his Stagecoach departure, Cochrane joined ScottishPower as director of group financial reporting under FD David Nish. But that was not without its troubles. Moving to become director of group finance in spring 2005 amid a management restructure, which then saw Nish named head of infrastructure and executive director Simon Lowth, an ex-McKinsey consultant (now CFO at AstraZeneca) made finance director, there were suggestions he was passed over for the FD role. He admits he wanted the job, but was deeply involved in finance in that role as the group pushed through the sale of its PacifiCorp business.

“I’d be daft if I said I didn’t want it; it would have been agreeable,” he concedes. “But I was given responsibility working for Simon for all sort of core finance functions, treasury, tax, internal external reporting. It was a very broad role and it gave me exposure to a lot of interesting activities across the organisation. At that stage, the organisation was going through the PacifiCorp sale, so there was a lot happening, a lot of interesting stuff to learn from. But I recognised from a career point of view it probably wasn’t a long-term solution.” A year later Cochrane got the FD spot ­ but at Weir Group.