An Englishman in New York

During Robert Butler’s 13-year career with Reuters, he has taken up financial roles with the company’s international offices. Now a Vice President, Finance, in the New York office, he is working on an ABC model for the company. He speaks to Colette Steckel about life in the Big Apple

When Robert Butler moved to the US East coast in August 2003 to begin a new chapter in his career working in the New York office of global information company Reuters, he hoped that his move to the heart of the city might go smoothly. A new job, a new location, and a lot to look forward to. What could possibly go wrong?

Within days of his arrival, a massive power outage in the north-eastern US and Canada plunged the city of bright lights into darkness and scared the wits out of New Yorkers. “I had just relocated to Manhattan with my wife and three-month old twins,” begins Butler. “We were staying in temporary accommodation in Times Square, right by the Reuters office, so when a power outage blacked out the city, I rushed home. The air was heating up because there was no air-conditioning and it became unbearable, so we left the apartment. We had to carry the twins down 20 flights of stairs in the pitch black, which was pretty scary. We found a restaurant and stayed there until the lights were switched on in the city. It took 24 hours before Times Square got back to normal.”

A week later, one of the twins was rushed to hospital for emergency treatment. Butler was at his son’s bedside for three weeks. “It was a stressful time. Just starting a new job, trying to settle in a new city. We didn’t even have a doctor,” he recalls. “As a parent, seeing a child ill is the worst experience. I felt so helpless.”

Crisis over, some normality has returned to the Butler household. His family is now installed in the suburbs, the twins are doing well, and he’s enjoying the challenge of his role at the Reuters office in New York, which is the hub of the company’s US finance function.

As Vice President, Finance, Service and Operations, Butler has a varied role that includes business planning and business support of the company’s technical infrastructure - the 250-odd data centres worldwide that process data from journalists, exchanges and other sources and distribute it to Reuters customers. “A lot of what I do involves understanding how the business operates and what impact investment decisions will have on the company. One of my objectives this year is to build an ABC model and communicate it to Reuters staff. This is part of a plan to roll out ABC across the entire organisation.”

Butler admits that in the case of Reuters, which has a complex infrastructure with a vast portfolio of products delivering myriad services worldwide, it’s difficult to identify the cost drivers. “I don’t think that what I’m working on will be a complete ABC model simply because, with so many activities going on within Reuters, there are no clear cost drivers. But my team (of which there are six) have been using tools that help to make cost drivers more visible. For example, we can track the amount of time spent on a particular activity in our data centres and, from that, we can access the impact of new technology.”

With Reuters making significant investments in building new technology and creating a new generation of products for customers, the ABC model is crucial for management’s decision-making. But Butler concedes that using improved tools for investment decisions isn’t just about cost saving. It’s also about quality service delivery. “This isn’t a quick fix project to save and make money, it’s much more about long term company strategy - what markets do we want to be in, how do we design our products, and what products should we deliver?” he notes.

On target

Earlier this year, chief executive Tom Glocer announced at the AGM that Reuters’ goal of becoming a more competitive and efficient business was on target. The company is nearing the end of a three-year programme, named Fast Forward, which was introduced to stem the company’s financial difficulties. The company’s woes began in the late-1990s when falling stock markets saw a loss of jobs in the investment industry and a knock-on effect on sales of financial data.

To make matters worse, US rival Bloomberg started muscling in on Reuters’ territory, grabbing a share of the lucrative financial information market. In 2002, the company announced a loss of £394m, the biggest in its 150-year history. Job cuts were inevitable. “The contraction of the marketplace kicked off the whole fast forward thing. We had to change and start thinking about doing business differently because that’s what we had to do to survive,” recalls Butler.

The transformation programme, which includes investing in new information, streamlining the way information is delivered and rationalising non-core elements of the business, is delivering results. In Q2 this year, Reuters reported recurring revenue - the company’s benchmark revenue measure - of £547m, up 0.4% compared to the same quarter in 2004. Growth for the full financial year is expected to be between 1% and 2% while cost savings are expected to be £360m, heralding a return to financial form.

As for squaring up to the competition, Butler reports that Reuters is making progress and challenging the US market-leader Bloomberg. “In the past, Reuters was more Europe-centric. We developed products for the European market and then tried to sell them in the US, which was not that successful because they didn’t meet customer needs. There has been an increased focus on the US in terms of development, product design and marketing. People are much more aware of the Reuters brand. It has taken us a while to get there but last year was a good year for Reuters in the US and that has helped to lead us out of recovery.”

Making a difference

Butler has worked in the US since 1998 but he’s been with the company for much longer. He joined the UK headquarters of Reuters in 1992 as a trainee after graduating in maths and statistics at Sussex University. He felt a finance career would hone his analytical skills but he shied away from a Big Four training contract and instead applied for a position in the internal audit department of Reuters. “I wanted to avoid the training route through the audit firms where I would feel lost among a huge number of graduates. I was impatient to make my mark. I felt that I could make a difference early on in my career,” he reasons.

The experience with Reuters, whose graduate intake on the finance programme is three to four candidates a year, allowed an enthusiastic Butler to travel around the world on internal audit assignments in Asia and Europe, which he says gave him an international perspective of the business. In between stints in Reuters’ offices in Singapore, Stockholm and Geneva, he would return to the UK to attend revision classes and sit his ACCA exams. “I’ve always been interested in travelling,” he adds. “I thought I’d get the bug out of my system by taking a year out after university, which I did by travelling around Asia. But since working for Reuters, I’ve spent a lot of time in positions overseas.”

By the time he qualified, he was offered a post in Geneva, the European head office, in a management accountant role. He stayed for two-and-a-half years before accepting a financial controller role in the Reuters’ sales office in San Francisco. He was made Vice President, Finance, Operations and Technology, in 2001, following a brief secondment to the software development arm of Reuters in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley. But his return to San Francisco was short-lived, when the company decided to combine its fragmented finance departments into two locations, New York and St Louis. Butler uprooted to the East coast during that fateful summer of 2003.

“I’ve never really considered myself as a nomad,” muses Butler, joking that, in his youth, he didn’t leave the borders of his home city of Birmingham, although he concedes that he has made up for that ever since. “I would recommend getting some international experience,” he says. “I’ve seen the business at a micro and a macro level, and I’ve learnt a lot from working in different locations. I think that working in a variety of business conditions and cultures has given me some unique insights and perspectives.”

Since taking up his global role in the New York office, Butler regularly visits the Reuters UK headquarters, based in London Docklands - but his life as an Englishman in New York is likely to continue for some time. He even admits that he’s putting down roots in the US, much to his own surprise. “I never expected to leave the UK for over 10 years. I had always expected to return to London after I qualified,” he says, although he doesn’t rule out a homecoming in the future. In the meantime, it’s business as usual in the neon wonderland of Times Square, which Butler overlooks from his office. “It’s bizarre,” he says. “I really feel as if New York is my home.”