MORE ROOM ON TOP?
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Eileen Lim is finance director and company secretary of bus and coach company Maidstone & District, and was instrumental in the management buyout which followed its privatisation programme. Did she set out to be so successful?
111 Only two women hold top jobs in the newly-privatised former NBC companies. One of them is Eileen Lim.
She is finance director and company secretary of Maidstone and District, which runs bus, coach and commuter services in north west Kent. The Chatham-based firm runs some 340 buses and coaches, has an annual turnover of 17million and employs around 1,000 staff. She has 20 staff working directly for her.
Her work can make or break the company. She has to evaluate new ideas to see if they are going to be financially successful, monitor the performance of the company and advise the managing director on the most cost-effective way to develop the business.
She has no particular philosophy for women who want to rise up the ladder. "I definitely did not have a career structure in mind when I set out on the accountancy road," she says. "I didn't even know what a chartered accountant did!"
She went into accountancy as a summer job when she left school and admits that she was originally thinking of going into hospital administration.
"I didn't want to go to university — I wanted to go out and earn an honest crust", she says.
The road to full chartered accountancy is not easy. Lim started in 1972 by taking articles with a small London company. Four years later, she moved to a mediumsized firm and subsequently got her ACA — the chartered accountant qualification — by which time she was an audit senior.
In 1976 she joined London Country Bus. She had no reason for entering the bus industry. "My husband found the job advert in the local press. I wanted to get out of audit work and it seemed a good idea at the time — it was either the Tax Office or industry", she explains.
Lim started as an accounts assistant at the London Country Bus Services head office in Reigate and, within a year, she was made financial accountant.
By 1983 she had been promoted to assistant secretary and within a month of that had also become company secretary of East Kent/Maidstone & District, the National Bus Company subsidiary.
NOT CAREER-MINDED
It was expected that senior management staff in NBC would be prepared to go on training schemes, and NBC had a sizeable training department. Lim avoided being sent on the senior management training course, though she was asked to participate. She would have probably been the first woman to complete the course but says: "I'm not career-minded — I didn't want to be away from home for that length of time". The course involved some weeks away at a residential centre.
In May 1983, as the wheels of priva tisation started to turn, East Kent and Maidstone & District began to split away from each other. Lim left LCBS at the beginning of 1984 to concentrate on these two companies and on the newly-formed Kent Engineering and Ashford Properties.
The preparation for privatisation of NBC companies gathered speed in 1985. They had to start setting up their own separate management and accounting structures, because by 1988 they could be competitors. Lim could only work for one company and in April 1986 she became finance director for Maidstone & District.
The company was about to go down the difficult path of privatisation with a management buy-out led by herself, managing director Stephen Trennery, and three other directors.
"We wanted to be one of the first NBC companies to successfully complete a buyout", she says. It was, however, the fifth operating company out of 72 to be privatised by the end of October 1986.
"We are looking at the passibility of diversifying into other areas as well as running buses", she says. This does not necessarily mean more coaches, although M&D has recently taken over New Enterprise Coaches of Tonbridge — its first acquisition since privatisation. New Enterprise will, however, continue to run under its own separate identity.
Is Lim herself intending to diversify into any other duties within M&D? "I haven't actually got behind the wheel of a bus yet, though I keep threatening to", she says.
NO CAUSE TO DOUBT
Has she come up against any sexism or prejudice during her career? "On the whole, no. There have been minor things, such as caution on the part of some men, but I have got on well with most people. A woman has to prove that she is capable and that men have no cause to doubt", she adds.
She praises London Country's attitude in being bold enough in the first place to take on a woman. "Someone had to take the first step", she says.
"I do not believe in being aggressive about the rights of women, though I do believe in equal rewards for work done, whether it be a man or woman."
Lim sees her future as being with Maidstone and District. "We all work together as a team — we each do our own job and trust each other to do it well". What more could you ask?