Mike Hickson spent 30 years in the military. He hopes his experience will help the contractor get a bridgehead in the sector, he tells Dave Rogers
“What the army brings is leadership and management ability to deal with chaos and come out of it in a decent order.”
Sir Robert McAlpine’s relatively new head of its fledgling defence business is explaining why he thinks construction firms should be using more veterans from the forces.
“There is something special about a soldier who has worked in some very difficult places that can bring a bit of something special to any organisation,” Mike Hickson adds. “But you have to give them a chance.”
Hickson spent 30 years in the army after a career in the City stalled after just a few months. “I wanted to work in the City and make lots of money but I hated it; sitting at a desk just wasn’t me.” So he joining as an officer cadet at Sandhurst.
Mike Hickson CV
Sir Robert McAlpine
2024-present managing director, defence, Sir Robert Mcalpine
2015-2024 variety of roles including programme director, central area, phase 1 and land and property director, Fluor
2012-2015 logistics director, British Army
1982-2012,began as a second lieutenant and finished as director of the Royal Logistic Corps, 2010-2012
He arrived as a second lieutenant – for those less versed in army rankings this is the lowest officer rank – and left as a brigadier, in charge of 22,000 people at the Royal Logistic Corps. “It was really nice to finish as the head of your organisation that you’d joined 30 years earlier,” he says.
He had actually joined the Royal Corps of Transport all those years ago in 1982 but this was later merged into the Royal Logistic Corps.
“I was mad on cars, I used to race them so [joining the transport corps] seemed like a sensible thing to do. There was so much in there, that you could move around.”
He had actually signed up on a three year short service commission but says: “I thought ‘I’m loving this’ so I stayed.”
Before arriving at the army and after leaving the City, he taught rugby union in New Zealand and spent more than a year touring around the US on a motorbike. At the end of it, he remembers sitting on a beach in Florida thinking: “’What do I do now?’ I knew I didn’t want to sit at a desk, I wanted to do something different. I thought ‘I’ll just join the army’. No one in our family had been in the army.”
The tours he carried out during his career in the forces included Northern Ireland, peacekeeping in Cyprus and Sierra Leone and going to Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003.
He loved his time there but admits he had another Florida-beach moment in 2012. He was in his 50s, got to where he felt he could go in the army – “after 30 years you kind of hope you’re going to progress” – and was faced with the question he addressed on Pensacola Beach more than three decades earlier.
“The end of the road [in the army] is 55 unless you’re right at the top. Where else was I going? I’d been a brigadier for eight years and I just thought it was time to go. I hadn’t really proved I could do something outside and I wanted another career.”
So he joined US firm Fluor as a logistics director and immediately began work on expanding an oil field in Kazakhstan. It put his logistics experience to the test as it involved building ports in the Black and Caspian Seas, navigating the Russian canal network and constructing an 80km long road through the middle of nowhere.
At the end of it, HS2 was just beginning and the scheme needed a logistics director. He was asked if he fancied it, went along for an interview and eventually got the job.
He says HS2 had originally planned to use its buying power and purchase all the equipment and materials needed for the project and issue it all to its contractors. “I thought that was a rubbish plan,” he says.
Within five weeks he’d written up an alternative proposal which, in sum, was: let the contractors deal with it, they have their own supply chains and every time something was delivered late or not of the right quality, then under the old plan, well, it could all get quite legal.
“As a result, they didn’t really need a logistics director which made it slightly difficult for me.”
Instead, he became a programme director for the middle bit of the first phase, the stretch of the railway running through the Chilterns, before switching to land and property director where he was in charge of compulsory purchases. “You can either do it badly or really well and I wanted to do it really well.”
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He was buying up land ahead of phase two, the route from Birmingham to Manchester, when last October the leg got pulled by then prime minister Rishi Sunak.
Hickson says the project’s goalposts had moved beyond recognition. “I joined to deliver a national infrastructure programme and, in my book, running from north London to Birmingham is not a national infrastructure programme. It just wasn’t what I set off to do when I joined HS2.”
He can’t help but feel that HS2 has been a missed opportunity after all the chopping and changing over the years. The original Y-shaped axis – heading off to Manchester and Leeds after calling at Birmingham and starting in the middle of London – has been reduced to what National Infrastructure Commission chairman, Sir John Armitt last year called a “shuttle service” between Acton and Birmingham.
“HS2 should have been a transformative project for the nation,” he says. “We need to be bold in how we use our construction industry. It’s a fabulous industry for the nation. It’s an industry of people who want to do things well and an industry the UK needs to have and invest in.”
He was nine years at HS2 before leaving in spring this year. He knew McAlpine from his time on HS2. “I liked their culture, their values, how they operated.”
I joined to deliver a national infrastructure programme and, in my book, running from north London to Birmingham is not a national infrastructure programme. It just wasn’t what I set off to do when I joined HS2.
He got in touch with Tony Gates, until recently the firm’s head of infrastructure, and told him he was looking for a job, anything doing at McAlpine?
“What I didn’t know was that McAlpine was setting up a defence business. I wasn’t looking for a defence sector role.”
He had four interviews and, a few months before his 65th birthday, started in April this year. He admits he’s trying to build a business from scratch and right now the firm has not won anything or is even bidding anything.
If he is a one-man band, then he probably is because the defence business is, basically, him. “But I have the whole of McAlpine to pull upon,” he adds.
And then there is its history in the sector to use as a calling card – from its work helping build the Mulberry Harbours to support the D-Day landings in 1944 through to its jobs rebuilding Colchester garrison, which finished in 2008, and the new US embassy at Nine Elms which opened seven years ago after it moved from Grosvenor Square.
“The board have taken a decision that they are ging to build a defence sector. Defence is one of the areas that is going to grow. You follow the money so defence is accommodation for soldiers all the way to ammunition storage and developing barracks.”
He says the defence sector can be “notoriously slow” and a strategic defence review, out next spring, will bog things down further. “Where the money is going to be spent is a little opaque right now but what I’m focussing on is getting to know clients and for that client to have a programme of work. The focus is on where do things have to be done? We know there are sites, like [nuclear warheads manufacturing complex] Aldermaston that are cramped and antiquated.”
He says he hasn’t been given a specific turnover target but reckons £200m within three years feels achievable.
I’ve committed to a five-year plan to develop an enduring programme of work in defence for Sir Robert McAlpine.
“I need to be realistic,” he adds. “There are many competitors who have been there a long time but [clients] want a new entrant. I know a lot of the people and also speak their language – there is a bit of a defence language. When they come to visit our sites they’re blown away by what we can do.
“People [at McAlpine] recognise I can’t do it on my own but it doesn’t need more than me right now. We’re looking at jobs for BAE and AWE and we’re waiting for government programmes to come out. I’ve committed to a five-year plan to develop an enduring programme of work in defence for Sir Robert McAlpine.”
He knows the firm is in the foothills before it reaches the top of the mountain but adds: “The message I’m trying to send is McAlpine is back in defence. Right now I don’t want to increase my overhead because I don’t need to. But,” he adds, “pretty soon I hope to.”
The well-travelled Mike Hickosn
Before he joined the army, Sir Robert McAlpine’s managing director of defence, Mike Hickson, got the travel bug when he spent more than a year touring around the US on a motorbike.
In all, he visited 36 states, from the east coast to the west coast and everything in between. He didn’t go to university but says of the trip: “It was my university, my education.” He survived on 99c a day and adds he and his travel companion “met lots of people, who were fantastic. In 1980, I think the Americans were more open, more friendlier. We would turn up to people’s houses and they would give us food and a bed for the night.”
He doesn’t single out a particular favourite state but remembers the pair started in New York and went up to Niagara Falls in Canada in January. “Big mistake. It was freezing. We came back down to get some decent kit.”
Before riding around the US, he also spent time in New Zealand teaching rugby at King’s College in Auckland. A keen player – he was in the back row – he spent a while there before returning back to Europe – on a motorbike.
The motorbike thing also transferred to cars and he ended up becoming friends with the late Stirling Moss, the F1 driver widely regarded as one of the best to never win the drivers’ title.
Hickson helped out at Silverstone and the Ferrari Owners’ club. “With that experience behind me I was invited to drive a number of historic race cars. Stirling had a Maserati OSCA. I was also racing a friend’s Maserati OSCA – we decided that the two cars would race together, so we became a small team and travelled to races in the UK and Europe together, raced against and with each other. He and [wife] Susie Moss became good friends as a result.”
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