By NZPA
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Thursday 30th January 2003 |
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Most recently, it was a call from Hastings meat company Richmond asking if he would step into the shoes of departing chief executive John Loughlin.
Milne, who had no background in the meat industry besides a holiday job in a meat works, agreed -- but only for a short time.
That time has stretched as Richmond tries to fend off a takeover offer from its long-time nemesis PPCS.
But Milne still intends to retire to his Cambridge lifestyle block as soon as he feels his role as a steady hand is over.
Milne is modest about his reputation, but his career path paints the picture of a man who tends to get called up in a crisis.
"He's competent, he's low key, there are no strutting airs and graces, none of the vain glorious accoutrements of leadership often. He's just a nice guy and the sort of personality that Kiwis rather like running anything," said one long-term former dairy industry insider.
Milne admits he has a habit of ending up in jobs "where there's been out of the ordinary problems".
A biotechnology graduate, he has helped a milk company recover from an earthquake, kept the Dairy Board's European operations going while executives were under threat of tax-related jail terms, and has run the country's once largest dairy company.
But milk was not where Milne began. For six years, he worked for Dominion Breweries as a trainee brewer, manager and project developer.
He swapped it for the Dairy Board in 1981 after deciding that, morally, the beer industry "wasn't quite my thing".
Milne started developing markets for new dairy products in Australasia and then in Germany, where he spent four years.
"I had to learn German pretty quickly," he laughs.
While there, Warren Larsen, the then head of Bay of Plenty milk company Bay Milk tapped him for a management job. By the time he got there, in late 1987, the Edgecumbe earthquake had left the milk company in virtual ruins with inadequate disaster insurance.
"It was a long hard process to get the debt levels down and get the company operating properly. Our efficiencies were poor, our yields were poor and we'd had to rush the rebuild because of insurance issues."
But Bay Milk got back on its feet, specialising in innovative dairy ingredients and developing spreadable butter.
When Larsen moved on, Milne became Bay Milk's chief executive in 1991 until it merged with New Zealand Dairy Group in 1997.
He wanted to stay to see the merger formally through, but by that stage the Dairy Board had sought his help in Europe.
The day he arrived in London, British Customs arrested six of the board's staff on charges of tax avoidance for spreadable butter and other imports.
Customs claimed the way New Zealand butter was made no longer qualified for their low tariffs, a battle the Dairy Board eventually won.
Milne oversaw the board's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Russia, and helped organise the defence. Even now, he does not comment on the case because outstanding legalities linger.
"It happened and it shouldn't have done...but the important thing is the trade continues.
"The six of them, it had all varying impacts on them in terms of their personal life and career... I can look back on it as an interesting and challenging experience, they can look back at it as very life changing."
As the case went from being a criminal to a civil and European trade case, Milne faced a new crisis: economic collapse in Russia.
"The banks closed and we lost a lot of money. The staff, their life savings were lost. People (staff) were giving me their credit cards and saying, Go back to London, here's my pin number, see if you can get any money out of my account."
Other foreign companies pulled out but Milne decided to keep New Zealand's $350 million Russian butter and cheese trade going. It was already operating on a cash-only basis after being badly burnt in the early 90s.
"...we had to put guards on our stocks so that it wasn't stolen -- and a lot was stolen -- and manage our way through that.
"Without banks it's a bit hard to run a business, you've got to collect cash, you've got to fly around on planes with cash, and it's a bit dangerous in a country where things don't quite happen the way they do in New Zealand."
The experience taught him to move fast.
"Get the facts, assess the situation and move fast and don't wait for all the facts because otherwise you'll never do anything."
He also now tries "to distil things down to their core".
"Don't get your strategies too complex... and share the strategy so that everybody knows pretty much the direction to travel ... People tend to want the company they work for to succeed, if only they knew what it was trying to do."
Milne was ready to retire, when an old Bay Milk colleague, Doug Leeder, who was now the chairman of Dairy Group, phoned asking him to take up a short-term contract as chief executive.
Together they started furthering a vision formed at Bay Milk: a giant milk company which eventually became Fonterra.
"We went out and promoted the one company idea in 1996, and all the small companies thought it was a great idea, and the two big companies thought it wasn't a good idea because they had their own plans."
The idea had picked up momentum in Milne's absence and the two big companies, Kiwi and Dairy Group, had just entered an agreement to begin mega-merger talks.
But to some Dairy Group hardliners the proposal smacked too much of compromise.
Doug Leeder resigned, and Milne will say is it became clear to him towards the end of his contract that "there were issues within Dairy Group that meant it was better that I wasn't there".
Three months later, the two companies struck a deal.
Looking at Fonterra now, Milne says its first-year performance does not meet his hopes yet but thinks the company's suffering mostly perception problems.
"It's a great concept, it's pity that it's had a few bumps, but it's got to work. It's hugely important to the New Zealand economy, it's formed, it's there."
Retirement beckoned again, but the Dairy Board had more work for him, this time to restructure ailing Australian dairy company Bonlac, in which the board had just taken a 25 percent stake.
He remains a director of that and Via Lactia, a genetic research offshoot of Fonterra.
Now as acting CEO of Richmond, Milne took up the mantle "despite the fact I promised my wife I was definitely staying home to be a farmer".
He commutes between Cambridge and Hastings, keeping the company on track while the company wages a bitter battle for control with shareholder PPCS.
Milne admits the legalities are time-consuming as Richmond tries to shrug off a $6.5 million loss in the September year, due in part to low volumes of stock.
But he is focused on the day-to-day.
"We reported at our AGM that our budget is for a performance that is similar, not to last year which was a loss, but the two previous years which were reasonable profits and at the moment, we're performing ahead of that budget."
Whatever the eventual outcome for Richmond, Milne maintains he's still just filling shoes while the company's board searches for a replacement for former ceo John Loughlin, who left last October to concentrate on his winery business.
"Some end to the uncertainty needs to happen. I do have a term but I'm not going to walk away unless there's a better solution, until it gets to some kind of end point."
Before the phone rings again, Milne is adamant about one thing: he won't be applying for the chief executive's seat at Fonterra.
Craig Norgate's job is up for review, as agreed in the merger documents, but Milne says he's not interested.
"I made it clear that I wasn't a candidate when I came for the Dairy Group job too. It's too big a role. Dairy Group was a big role but I don't aspire to it (Fonterra) at all...I think there are more capable people."
Besides, he's overdue. The 49-year-old says he decided many years ago to retire from business when he was 47 and go farming, where he can work for himself.
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