Gordon Morrison and his charity work

From business to charity

“Charity is a business, and if you put non-business people into business, it won’t succeed.” Gordon Morrison is well qualified to speak about both the business sector and the charity sector. He and his brother built up Morrison, the construction company founded by their father, into one of the industry’s biggest UK operators, and sold it to a utility company in 2000 for £262 million.

Since then he has created a portfolio of businesses for himself – including his charity activities, which he considers to be businesses, just with a different type of P&L.

Straight-talking, personable, and humble, Morrison’s exit story is more interesting for being unplanned. He and his brother never intended to exit the family business after the sale: they had negotiated an executive position on the board for Gordon and a chairman role for his brother Sir Fraser.

“Business is all a process of learning,” Morrison says, recalling the story. “In the 1990s our business had been growing across the UK, doing bigger and bigger projects. We had gone public in 1995 but our balance sheet was just too small to raise the capital we needed.

“We were looking for a larger balance sheet to work with, and a water company approached us. They wanted us to commercialize their water business. And we wanted their balance sheet to give us the strength to go for much larger projects.”

The deal was done, “and then it didn’t go quite as expected,” says Morrison. The utility company management “decided not to have me and my team inside their business. Many takeovers go wrong on that basis. So we parted company.”

Charities through business expertise

Morrison found himself with a cash pile, and, for the first time in his working life, against his wishes, no company to work for. A situation many would dream of, but for the workaholic Morrison, more a nightmare than a dream. “It was quite a shock to the system, because your brain is operating almost 24 hours a day thinking about the next challenge and how you solve it, and suddenly you’re irrelevant to all that.”

And so his portfolio career began. First, he was approached by a friend who asked him if he wanted to become a trustee of a children’s cancer charity, Sargent.

“I sat at my first board meeting and realized something I have found repeatedly since then, that charities lack business acumen. The board approved a budget that, in my view, was going to lose a lot of money, so I voted against it.” Morrison says he continued “giving his views on a few things,” and the chairman stepped aside and Morrison took over. He quickly saw that only larger charities attracted government funding, so he merged with another charity in the sector and began a publicity and marketing drive. “Public awareness of our names rose from 5 percent to 45 percent almost overnight.”

Merging charities, he says, is like merging companies, “but the currency is emotion, not money.” He remained with the charity another year and it now turns over about £30 million a year.

Four years before his unexpected exit from the family business, Morrison also started investing in farmland. “I am not a farmer, I am an investor in farming.” He had noted that farmland is often run inefficiently: “farmers sometimes don’t want to share what they’re doing with anybody.”

He acquired land in Hertfordshire, north of London, and started a joint venture with three other farmers “so we could farm it all at once.” He now owns 2,500 acres (1,011.71 ha) out of 4,000 acres (1,618.74 ha) jointly farmed, “so we get the benefit of scale, and that was quite innovative.”

“We share our combine harvester, our tractors, our labor, and we cut 25 percent of our costs.” Some of the land has now been given over to vineyards and he says they recently tasted a bottle of sparkling wine made from grapes grown on their land.

Philanthropy and beyond

Morrison developed homes and storage facilities on some of the other land he purchased, using his privately owned overall management company, Chaldean, to manage everything. Chaldean has about 15 employees, a contrast to the thousands employed at Morrison when it was a public company.

He still spends about half his working life on charitable activities, notably a drive to treat cancer in children around the world, as chairman of the international charity World Child Cancer. He is also founder of a charity aimed at helping less privileged people in his home county of Hertfordshire, and chair of the Mayfair Neighbourhood Forum in London, where he has led a drive to help homeless people – something, he says, the local council should do more about.

Morrison is now in his seventies. Why is he still so active? “If you can do something, you should do it. I could easily go and play golf four days a week and talk about all the shots I had at the 16th hole or whatever, but that doesn't motivate me like helping others. I would feel underproductive.”

Will he ever retire from his charity-business time split? “No,” he says firmly. “I’ll be working till the day I drop dead.”