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Jim Gray
• Putting the Murphy Group on the map is the current aim of 44-year-old Jim Gray, managing director of a concern which is not nationally well known even though it runs 300 commercial vehicles, has El 6m worthof earthmoving plant, plus huge mining and building assets. His aim is to publicize "Big M" and take group turnover from E12m to E5Orn in five years.
Jim Gray is having to look very hard to see where the future profit lies in his road transport activities, and has already started, rationalizing by cutting the general haulage depots to two — London and Manchester. More profitable are his bulk tipper operations, with coal, grain, fertilizers, etc.
Packaged timber from Tilbury is proving good contract traffic for his flats but return loads are a problem. He believes that only really large companies will make a good living from general trunk haulage, having the facilities and the strength to get good contracts.
As a lad, Jim was determined to escape from the mining world into which he was born in Fifeshire: now he is chairman of a subsidiary which mines opencast coal. But he escaped — by way of accountancy and 10 years' study, cutting his professional teeth on shipbuilding, then launching out to India as finance director of Liptons.
This became a marketing exercise which broadened his management skills (he recalls that Liptons had 5000 tea salesmen in India alone!). And a four-year spell in Canada as a management troubleshooter with the country's largest conglomerate gave him, among other things, expertise in the plant and civil engineering fields. Returning to Britain in 1970, he felt confident enough to apply for the job of general manager designate of Murphy Bros, just bought by BET.
Now he is m.d. of the group and chairman of the six subsidiaries. No time now for golf, but time for his four children and his Leicestershire garden. He gave up football — of senior amateur standard — in his thirties.
Jim Gray is also a muSic lover; and his big record collection, from classics to jazz, shows appropriately wide taste for a man whose business covers haulage and housing, factories and fuel distribution, construction
and coalmining B.C.