How I became a… turnaround CEO

To say that Dean Forbes is no stranger to adver­si­ty would be an under­state­ment. The south Lon­don­er spent his youth as a car­er for his moth­er and sib­lings, expe­ri­enc­ing sev­er­al bouts of home­less­ness. When dis­cussing his brief spell on the books of Crys­tal Palace FC, he describes him­self as hav­ing “failed foot­ball”. And he jokes that he must hold the speed record for drop­ping out of uni­ver­si­ty, hav­ing man­aged a sin­gle day in high­er edu­ca­tion.

Since those unpromis­ing begin­nings, he’s become a CEO who has turned around the for­tunes of four com­pa­nies, spear­head­ed exit deals worth well over $1bn (£820m) and twice fea­tured on the Pow­erlist, a rank­ing of the 100 most influ­en­tial peo­ple of African, African-Amer­i­can and Afro-Caribbean her­itage in the UK.

Forbes believes that his for­ma­tive expe­ri­ences of hard­ship have helped to make him an effec­tive leader when the going gets tough. 

“As a trans­for­ma­tion­al CEO, I’ll be walk­ing into a sce­nario that’s going bad­ly,” he says. “Maybe the com­pa­ny will have only a short lifes­pan unless we can revive it. This is where I’ll have a dis­tinct edge. I might have an edu­ca­tion­al dis­ad­van­tage, but I do have incred­i­ble con­di­tion­ing to fail­ure and dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances.”

Target man

So how did Forbes get to where he is today? After Crys­tal Palace let him go, his foot­ball agent found him a tele­sales job and “a degree of pride kicked in short­ly after I start­ed”. He dis­cov­ered that he had a tal­ent for sell­ing, aid­ed by the innate com­pet­i­tive dri­ve that had helped him to become a pro foot­baller.

“Every sit­u­a­tion I found myself in, I want­ed to be the best,” Forbes says. “Sev­en or eight years lat­er, I was run­ning the inter­na­tion­al arm of Pri­mav­era Sys­tems.”

Hav­ing become vice-pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er of the US soft­ware firm’s busi­ness out­side the Amer­i­c­as at the age of 29, he played a key role in its even­tu­al sale to Ora­cle for a report­ed $550m. 

He land­ed his first CEO appoint­ment in 2011 with KDS. The French soft­ware com­pa­ny was acquired in 2016 by Amer­i­can Express Glob­al Busi­ness Trav­el in the largest tech deal in the latter’s his­to­ry at the time. He then worked his mag­ic with CoreHR, which was acquired by The Access Group, before tak­ing the reins at B2B tech com­pa­ny Forter­ro in Feb­ru­ary 2021. Just over a year lat­er, he over­saw its sale to Part­ners Group for €1bn (£860m).

In each case, he arrived at firms that had lost their way to vary­ing degrees and set about putting them back on course. From these expe­ri­ences, Forbes has come to believe that there’s no need for any busi­ness leader, turn­around spe­cial­ist or not, to have func­tion­al knowl­edge across the board.

“When I start­ed out, I thought that CEOs need­ed to be bal­anced in all areas – great at finance, great at prod­uct devel­op­ment, great at sales and mar­ket­ing – but that just isn’t true,” he says, adding that it’s not even nec­es­sary to have a back­ground in the company’s indus­try. “It is help­ful to have some sec­tor knowl­edge, but not crit­i­cal. This job is more about under­stand­ing the ‘anchors’ of the com­pa­ny: what’s pre­vent­ing the busi­ness from ele­vat­ing itself.” 

An effec­tive turn­around CEO needs the abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy these anchors and work out the best way to unchain the enter­prise from them.

Winning the dressing room

When Forbes was a teenag­er, his favourite sub­ject at school was Eng­lish. He thought he might have a future as a mar­ket­ing copy­writer if foot­ball didn’t work out as a career. 

“I liked com­ing up with clever ways to explain things. That tal­ent has served me well,” he says, stress­ing that com­mu­ni­ca­tion – writ­ten and ver­bal; online and in per­son – is a cru­cial skill for any busi­ness leader seek­ing to moti­vate a work­force that may well be low on con­fi­dence.

“You have to be mul­ti-hand­ed at com­mu­ni­cat­ing. That is the num­ber-one attribute for a CEO in a pro­nounced turn­around sit­u­a­tion,” he says.

This is because you’re arriv­ing at a time of great uncer­tain­ty, so employ­ees are look­ing to you for reas­sur­ance that the busi­ness is in safe hands. “You won’t have this feel­ing of Google-like suc­cess. You won’t see a place with great morale and peo­ple mak­ing tons of mon­ey,” Forbes says. “So you must con­stant­ly remind every­one why they should keep swing­ing the bat and cel­e­brate any time they hit a home run.”

What are the oth­er impor­tant things that a trans­for­ma­tive CEO must bring to a strug­gling busi­ness? For Forbes, it’s “qual­i­ty, bal­ance and diver­si­ty of the team”. 

He explains that he will struc­ture a lead­er­ship team so that it blends peo­ple who’ve been at the firm for some time with peo­ple who’ve worked with him before else­where. He is also unafraid of chang­ing the line-up, even when things are going well. 

“I’ve watched the impact on my teams when we change some­one after we’ve just achieved some­thing bril­liant,” says Forbes, explain­ing that it’s a sure-fire way of encour­ag­ing each mem­ber to keep their eye on the ball. “Ordi­nary teams nev­er achieve extra­or­di­nary things. I’ve always had bet­ter teams than I deserve.”

And last, but cer­tain­ly not least, on the Forbes list of essen­tials for the trans­for­ma­tive CEO is robust plan­ning, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to man­ag­ing the many risks affect­ing a firm whose future may be in jeop­ardy. 

“I’m very par­tic­u­lar and very detailed in my plan­ning,” he says. “This is not because I expect every­thing to go accord­ing to plan. It’s because I don’t want any laten­cy between things not going accord­ing to plan and me con­sid­er­ing the impli­ca­tions.” 

Turning on a sixpence

Work­ing out how best to approach the first 100 days in post has nev­er been easy for Forbes. Most incom­ing boss­es will nor­mal­ly be able to spend time set­tling in and tak­ing stock before mak­ing any sig­nif­i­cant choic­es, but a turn­around CEO must act quick­ly and deci­sive­ly, while also con­sid­er­ing how much upheaval the organ­i­sa­tion can tol­er­ate. 

Forbes likens the sit­u­a­tion to “hav­ing a patient on your oper­at­ing table who needs three or four organs to be trans­plant­ed. On the one hand, the soon­er we oper­ate, the soon­er the patient moves into recov­ery. On the oth­er, do this too quick­ly and the trau­ma may be too much. It’s the artistry in mov­ing as quick­ly as pos­si­ble with­out caus­ing last­ing dam­age. I lose a lot of sleep over this very hard task.”

As with any lead­er­ship role, lone­li­ness can also be a chal­lenge. 

“It’s the unfor­giv­ing nature with which peo­ple view my job,” explains Forbes, whose aver­age work­ing day lasts from 6am to 10pm and large­ly involves fire­fight­ing. Most peo­ple believe that the finan­cial rewards of his suc­cess should more than com­pen­sate for such a gru­elling sched­ule, he says, “but I get tired and have dif­fi­cult days, just like every­one else.”

A healthy dose of per­spec­tive helps Forbes to get through such days. “I’ve been home­less; I’ve been hun­gry. I’ve been in far worse sit­u­a­tions, so the stress doesn’t real­ly reg­is­ter,” he says.

On the good days, the pace – and high stakes – of the job are what moti­vates him. “I like the fair­ly imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion you get from a turn­around sit­u­a­tion,” he says. 

To stretch the metaphor, a day of fire­fight­ing means a day of sav­ing people’s liveli­hoods, if not their lives. 

“You are doing good and hav­ing an impact reg­u­lar­ly. I real­ly enjoy what it does for oth­er peo­ple,” Forbes says. “It’s cool to be able to say you’ve been a part of wealth cre­ation for hun­dreds of peo­ple who oth­er­wise might not have found their way through.”

Giv­en that there were near­ly 101,000 busi­ness clo­sures in the UK in the third quar­ter of 2021 alone, accord­ing to the Office for Nation­al Sta­tis­tics, it’s unlike­ly that an aspir­ing turn­around CEO will ever be short of job offers. How does Forbes go about tar­get­ing a com­pa­ny that he can be con­fi­dent of sav­ing from the scrapheap? 

For him, it’s a mat­ter of find­ing firms that still have plen­ty of vital signs, as there is lit­tle virtue in try­ing to resus­ci­tate those that are beyond redemp­tion.

“If we’d need to change 100% of what’s avail­able to a com­pa­ny to be suc­cess­ful, I wouldn’t like that. If it’s less than 15%, I’ll be able to find a path to suc­cess,” he says. “But I won’t need 10 pos­si­ble routes – I’ll just need the one.” 

Read more from the “How I became a…” series here