Whether it's as examiner, receiver or liquidator, Paul McCann believes in bringing some humanity to the job of restructuring companies, writes FIONA REDDAN

IT’S NOT A job for the faint-hearted. One minute you’re sitting comfortably in your office ready to go home, the next you get a call that you’ve been appointed as administrator to a company where thousands of jobs are at stake. But this is what happened to Paul McCann, managing partner at Grant Thornton, when his firm was appointed to Quinn Insurance in March 2010.

“We got the call the previous evening, and the next day it was announced,” he recalls.

In recent years, McCann has been called in to help rescue many of the most high-profile company collapses in Ireland, including O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars, the aforementioned Quinn Insurance, as well as a host of property developments and hotels, including the Burlington in Dublin. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t.

Indeed, being an insolvency practitioner is not without its difficulties. On the one hand, you have to respond to the demands of the secured creditors who appointed you, while trying to pay other creditors and find a path forward for the company to ensure that it retains employees. It can be an emotional, fraught environment.

“You do have to develop a thick skin and you have to be very patient,” says McCann. “Lots of people are looking at you to make a mistake. Earlier in his career, he might have lost the odd night’s sleep worrying over the outcome of restructurings and the potential impact on staff, but now it’s more a case of being woken by one of his four children under six. “You learn to deal with the pressures as you mature,” he laughs.

So does he now disassociate himself from the experience of going into a company to tell the employees that their future is uncertain? “I don’t think you can. If you don’t feel it – you can’t be empathetic. You can’t walk around coldly in this situation. You have to look at it at a human level.”

One of McCann’s first jobs in receivership was working on the collapse of the Irish Press, a procedure which was “particularly messy”, as McCann recalls, due to the fact that it was a receivership, liquidation and examinership all rolled into one. Not only that, but it also involved dealing with various unions. This taught him the value of communication.

“For me, the big part is communication. One of the things you have to deal with first is the employees. I make sure that the banks understand that – it’s not just about realising the asset, you have look after the people first. It’s very important to speak to people directly,” he says, adding that he brought this experience to bear when dealing with staff members in the recent case of the Burlington Hotel.

But it’s not always a seamless process, and McCann will call on the human resources function of the company he has gone into, or bring in extra specialists as needed.

Personal security is also sometimes needed. “It’s always a possibility; some of my staff have been assaulted. Emotions can run high when you’re taking possession of a premises,” he says. “You’ve got to be firm but professional, not heavy-handed.” On the other hand, there are cases when employees are relieved to have a receiver trying to rescue the company.

“I remember a hostile situation in a meat plant. There was a lot of trouble and the company directors had absconded. I addressed the 120 staff, and got a round of applause at the end of it. I think they appreciated that I explained the situation and answered their questions. Sometimes you get kudos for doing that.”

McCann also brings his own principals into how he manages each transaction. “No one should profit from an insolvency situation,” he says, adding that in one such situation he stood up to staff who were looking to exploit the process by charging double pay for their work. “Everyone’s going to try and leverage their position the best they can.”

Another challenge of the job is that it’s quite public. While other professional services experts can hide behind the name of their practice, the insolvency expert’s name is up in lights – when a receiver is appointed to a company, the name of the practitioner is always announced. This means that his work can be easily judged on the success or otherwise of the restructuring. “And it’s fair to say that if there’s litigation, it’s in your name. If you’re sued, it’s your name that’s in the papers.”

But despite the difficulties, for McCann, it’s a rewarding role. While he found his work on the Liberty Mutual acquisition of Quinn Insurance “a very complicated and difficult appointment”, overall, he found the work “very satisfying”. It has also led to the development of a new relationship for Grant Thornton with a top US company.

After all, McCann’s day job is about more than just receivership. He became managing partner of Grant Thornton in January of this year, and according to McCann, the strategy for growth is to specialise in niches. “The idea is to go deep in one area, to pick sectors that we’re able to dominate in and that have a bit of legs.”

This approach is certainly paying off for the firm – in 2011, Grant Thorntons was the best performing accountancy firm in Ireland, as its fee income jumped by 34 per cent to €71 million, although McCann notes that profitability was down. But while insolvency and recovery might be paying dividends for the firm at present, what will happen when the economy eventually sorts itself out and McCann finds himself out of a job?

“I’ll go back to corporate finance,” he says. No doubt he will be just as busy, with restructurings a likely feature of Irish corporate life for some time to come.