A Premier week that will live long in the memory

Premier Recruitment's chief has come a long way, writes CIARÁN HANCOCK.

LAST WEEK was one of the more memorable for 45-year-old Pat Fitzgerald, founder and chief executive of Cork-based recruitment group Premier.

On Friday, he got the green light to proceed with his £45.2 million (€57.5 million) takeover of UK-listed recruitment company Imprint. At a stroke it virtually doubled the size of his business.

The following day he was in Cardiff with his young son to cheer on Munster as they grabbed rugby's Heineken Cup. "It was absolutely fantastic," he says of the match. "It'll live long in the memory."

Fitzgerald hails from the small village of Barraduff in Co Kerry. It's as rural as rural goes and the Premier boss, like many of his countymen, prefers to keep his head down and stay out of the limelight.

Interviews with him are as rare as hen's teeth and only the acquisition of Imprint has forced him to put his head above the parapet.

Premier is a private company, and unlimited to boot. So there is no requirement to lodge its accounts with the Companies Office each year. "It keeps everything private," he says.

When asked how much of the business he owned, Fitzgerald paused for a moment, shifted nervously in his chair, arms folded, before saying, in a hushed voice, that he was the majority shareholder - and sure let's leave it at that.

He chuckled when asked how much profit the company makes, although he was prepared to reveal that its net fees (recruiters' lingo for gross profit) are north of €100 million following the Imprint deal, and his firm now has 820 staff - 250 of them in Ireland.

Imprint was immediately delisted from the stock market by Premier, closing off another avenue of public scrutiny.

This deal is worth shouting about. On paper, it looks a steal. Around this time last year, Imprint - whose recruitment brands include Accreate, ECHM and Morgan McKinley - was worth about £120 million.

The collapse in stock market valuations globally, however, and the dramatic downturn in the financial services sector, Imprint's bread and butter, saw its valuation more than halve.

Suitors formed a queue at its door as consolidation in the recruitment sector gathered pace, and Imprint was put in play last October. Two rivals - OPD and Hydrogen Group - looked set to slug it out in an auction-style process.

Cute Kerryman that he is, Fitzgerald stood back and bided his time before entering the ring with a knockout blow. Premier showed its hand in early March and in a clever tactical move, worthy of any chess grand master, Fitzgerald snapped up about 25.6 per cent of Imprint's shares.

In one fell swoop, he had a blocking stake and it was checkmate to Premier. Fitzgerald's timing was immaculate.

"We couldn't have afforded it 12 or 18 months ago," he says modestly. "We were fortunate that the euro moved against sterling in our favour. We were also fortunate that we were able to sit back and let the other two bidders put their best offers on the table.

"Equally, we were fortunate that as a private company we could put an all-cash offer on the table. In the current climate, cash makes a substantial difference."

Cash is king at present, and Fitzgerald's hip pocket was bulging with the stuff thanks to support from Bank of Ireland and Bank of Scotland Ireland, who helped to fund the deal.

Only time will tell if he was right to place such a big bet. Imprint has a number of well-established brands - Morgan McKinley being the pre-eminent one. It is, however, heavily exposed to the financial services sector and has offices in the main centres around the world. It is bound to be hurting.

"Ultimately, I believe that good brands survive the downturn," says Fitzgerald, with an understated confidence.

He predicts that Premier and Imprint will each grow their net fees by about 10 per cent this year.

It's a long way from the heady days of the recent economic peak, when annual growth of 30-40 per cent was the norm for recruiters, but it's decent in the present climate. "We're very happy with 10 per cent in the current environment," he says.

Encouragingly, Premier is still recruiting staff itself and Fitzgerald believes things aren't quite as bad as some people are painting them. "Normally when you see a significant downturn, it's the temporary market that suffers first," he explains. "That tends to get followed by hire freezes and redundancies. The interesting thing is that temps haven't gone.

"Certain sectors have been hit extremely hard but there are a lot of sectors that are performing quite well," he adds, citing pharmaceuticals, high-end multinationals and general professional services.

"I don't think we would have done something of this scale if we weren't reasonably optimistic. We see a stability in the market now. It's not booming ahead by any manner of means, but it's stable."

It's not always been champagne and caviar for Premier and its founder, who left Ireland for London in 1985 with a B Comm from UCC in his suitcase.

Fitzgerald's mission was to qualify as an accountant. He quickly discovered that this line of work "didn't suit me", so he switched to being an analyst for a firm of commodity brokers before returning to set up a recruitment business in Cork city.

It was 1988 and Irish people were leaving in their droves in search of work. Fitzgerald, armed with nothing more than a £15,000 bank overdraft, began by placing accountants in jobs in Britain.

"The first four or five years were quite tough," he recalls. The business, like the Irish economy, got lift-off in the mid-1990s and Premier's footprint gradually moved east, first to Kilkenny, then Waterford, before it pitched its tent in Dublin in 2000.

He also began opening in regional centres around Britain and moved into the London market in the past three years.

Fitzgerald likes the fact that no single client of the Irish business accounts for more than 1 per cent of turnover. "That's a model that has served us well." Clients include the Musgrave Cash Carry group, food companies Kerry and IAWS, and pharmas Pfizer and Glaxo Smithkline.

The takeover of Imprint brings the Irish business onto a higher plane. It gives the company a presence in Asia and a decent foothold in the City of London.

When asked how many offices it has and in how many countries, Fitzgerald has to rack his brains, before proffering: "We have about 27 offices in eight or nine countries."

The challenge is to bed the acquisition down, which he reckons will take 12-18 months. "I certainly think we could do the same size deal in the next 24 to 36 months," he says.

By 2012, Fitzgerald wants to have more than doubled the size of the company and positioned it as one of the biggest recruiters in Europe.

"I think we're at the top table now but if we achieve that , we will earn our place at the top of the top table."

Whether Fitzgerald will be Premier's representative remains to be seen. "Will I stay in this forever?" he asks himself. "No, I won't, but I hope Premier will. I always work in five-year time cycles . . . so 2012 is another target."

By that stage, Fitzgerald will be nudging 50. Could it then be time to step off the recruitment carousel? "Maybe, but certainly the expectation would be at that stage to have somebody internally who will take up the reins."

He'll be a hard act to follow.