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Derek Marsh
• Just appointed managing director of Crane Fruehauf Trailers Ltd at only 35, Derek Marsh is tremendously proud of the teamwork which has boosted CF sales from E6.3m in 1967 to Cl 8.4m last year and has enabled the company to capture half the British trailer market as well as some 70 per cent of light-alloy container sales. He extols the virtues of the company's young. energetic management team—all the senior executives are in their thirties or early forties---and in a sense he is a team in himself.
This neat, fair young executive who has brought his native Lancastrian drive and accent to a London hq and a Henley-onThames home is a qualified lawyer. a certified accountant, holder of a management studies diploma, and experienced practitioner in sales and marketing.
Derek Marsh spent his boyhood around Rochdale and gained his honours degree in law ILL. B) at Manchester University, but he saw legal studies mainly as a way of developing a logical mind and it was industry, not the Bar, which drew him. Intrigued perhaps by his LL.B. Turner and Newell took him as a management trainee in 1957. After workstudy experience he opted for the financial division and, with his customary talent for study, gained his accountancy certificate.
Seven highly valued years with T&N left hint with an urge for more responsibility in a smaller company, and he landed the job of chief accountant to Soden Trailers Ltd, "since when things have never stopped happening-. He became company secretary and a director and then Bill Boden, faced with sales problems, shot him into the job of sales director w;th the remark that a good manager should be able to manage anything. It must have worked; Derek Marsh was the master mind behind the imaginative sales campaign for the highly successful Baden Mark 3 trailer range, and when CF became CF+Boden in 1967 he was made group general sales manager. In 1969 he joined the main board as sales director, became marketing director and is now a director of nine group companies.
When not living and breathing CF, or forecasting the welcome effect of EEC membership in quickening the whole European economy, Derek Marsh is essentially a family man, playing football and cricket with his three young sons, indulging his enthusiasm for swimming. or gardening for relaxation.