David Murray, CFO of BVI Medical

David Murray’s path to the top has had a myriad of twists and turns. Beginning in the Oil & Gas industry in his native Aberdeen, David then successfully transitioned into senior roles in a diverse range of industries from financial services to automotive and now life sciences.

He has also made a successful transition from blue chip multinational companies to the very different challenges of the Private Equity sector. Throughout these different (sometimes unexpected) roles, David’s career has been characterised by his willingness to move out of his comfort zone and stretch his boundaries.  

 

Transcript

Frederic Brunner: Alright, it's a pleasure today to welcome David Murray. David joins us with an incredible story and track record and successes. Today the CFO of BVI, but before that, he made his career in banking, in oil and gas, in automotive, before he really discovered a passion for Life Sciences. I'll have the pleasure to discuss with him what made him successful, things that are not always written in the books, and David is willing to share with us the story of his career. And David it's a pleasure to have you on the show today.

David Murray: Hi Frederic. Thanks, it's a pleasure to join you as well, I'm looking forward to sharing with you my experiences.

Frederic Brunner: If you allow David, I'd love to start with what I call the fundamentals. And everybody starts in a family and you received from your family a starting package, what was your starting package and what did you take away from your childhood and family setup?

David Murray: So it's a great question Frederic, and I agree with you that that really is the foundation that everybody builds upon. For me, there was really two elements, one was education, so my family were absolutely myopically-focused on giving me the best education that I could possibly have, and at the time, I didn't appreciate it but looking back, of course, it was such a strong feature of who and what I am today. And then secondly, both my mother and father had their own separate businesses, and so there was an entrepreneurial flare going through the family, and with that then bred with me just then a genuine curiosity of just business in general, and I think that that resonated with me and has stayed with me ever since then.

Frederic Brunner: Interesting. How, from that did you decide where to go, because your career obviously went through four industries, so you decided to start somewhere, so why did you start in that first industry?

David Murray: So I was born and bred in Aberdeen in Scotland. So Aberdeen is the oil capital of Europe, and I had taken some summer vacation jobs internships in both actually BP and Shell, who were both significant players in Aberdeen at the time. And so when I graduated from Aberdeen University, then it was almost natural that you would go into something oil related, and I received multiple offers and the one offer that I decided to pursue was one actually from BP, that encouraged me to get out of my comfort zone and actually leave Aberdeen and go to London. So for me, the kind of initial introduction into oil was just natural just upon just geographically where I was growing up and what I had seen build around me. So that led me to my first foray with BP and then I started in London with them.

Frederic Brunner: You mentioned going out of the comfort zone, and I know this is a topic you shared with me several times, this is one of the success elements people need to be able to go through. Can you say a few more of why is that so important to get out of your comfort zone?

David Murray: For me, it's so important because until you know the boundaries that you can stretch yourself to, then you actually don't know what to set yourself up for, and it's really difficult... I'm trying to think of... As you know, I'm an avid skier so I’ll use the skiing analogy, and when you start off skiing, you start off on the baby runs and then you progress to the next level, and then the next level, and then before you know it, you're on those black, double blacks, whichever. And so it's really like that, which is when you're on that baby run, you think, oh, this is really tough, and I'm never going to proceed beyond that, but until you pressure-test yourself and... And you will make mistakes along the way, there's no question about that. So long as you learn from those mistakes, it's amazing how you can see that progression of going from something that is deemed hard at the time, skiing on these baby runs to actually then progressing to something that is going down the vertical descent of a mountain, and it's only through trial and error that you can discover where is the edge of your boundary, and everybody is different, but it's a very difficult decision for people to make because human beings, as part of our psychology don't like to fail.

None of us want to fail, we all want to win. And so you have to be prepared for that, and so long as you're prepared for it and you keep toggling back and forth by learning from those mistakes, then I think that is what gets you to your... Everybody has their own personal optimal boundary of their comfort zone, and only by doing this trial and error testing can you find out personally where it is.

Frederic Brunner: I found it fascinating because a lot of people have a thing, this hope that they're gonna figure it out in one stop or one step. And in fact, when I listen to your story, and I think we're gonna talk about the other industries you went through, you probably went through quite a few of these steps and trials and boundaries where... Tell me maybe about how you went to either the bank or the automotive industries, which maybe some of this moves were less obvious, and I'm sure also out of boundaries or out of comfort zone, but probably very part of who you became.

David Murray: Yep. Actually, my transition from oil to banking was really predicated by the fact that I was just living in London at the time, and the financial markets were a really interesting and exciting place to be, and I thought, I'm not sure how long I'll be in London for so let's go give it a shot. But it was, of course, completely different, very, very different world, different settings, and... It's always hard to begin with. That first six months as you go into an organization and you try and learn new people, new processes, how you're working, relationships with your teams, never an easy and always a steep learning curve. But in the banking one, I loved every minute of it and actually, I was there in the crash of '87 so I saw the good, the bad and the ugly, which is always great to experience in any way. And I thoroughly enjoyed that but after a couple of years, I actually got this chance to join General Motors and, of course, completely different. And I remember going for the interview and turning up at their head office in Luton, which is in the north of London, and so here's a lesson.

There is a story to say, "Never make your opinions known by what you foresee," because you should always try and peel the onion back to really dig and probe to see what you're getting into. So when I went to the head office, and I vividly remember that the offices were falling to bits, you literally had buckets of water catching the rain coming through the roof. You had windows that were taped up with a cling film, and I remember coming away from that interview process and thinking to myself, "This is really interesting. The people here are very dynamic, they're very driven, and actually, this is a place that I wanna come to." And let's not forget, I was coming from a purpose-built, brand new building overlooking the River Thames, over at UBS, to General Motors, where the building was falling apart. But as I said, don't let first appearances put you off. It's really important for you just to dig deeper and go for substance rather than something that's just superlative out there in terms of what you see. So experiencing that in GM was fantastic, as a consequence of that.

Frederic Brunner: I found that very interesting because indeed, it's very tempting to look at the appearance or the format or the glamour, and there's a lot of executives who really make the right decisions because they're able to look at the substance and really: What is it here and what is the attraction? And what is the appeal? I think GM at the time was a quite difficult workplace for talents or that it was the so-called sink or swim. What have you learned there when you had done two other industries, you entered the automotive, etcetera? What did you take away from the GM time?

David Murray: I vividly remember one of my first experiences at GM where we were working on a project about geographic location of setting up some new car dealerships in the UK, and the sales and marketing director was very pro-this. And as I looked at the numbers, and keep in mind I was probably 26-27 at the time, I couldn't see it working. And so I'm new in the company and new into the industry, but I'm just applying my common sense and asking open questions about the proposition at hand and long story short, I actually didn't agree with the proposal, and the sales and marketing director was furious at me. He's thinking, "Who the heck is this young kid that's just come in and he knows nothing about the automotive industry, and he's now going against my proposal," but you know what, the lesson that I learned from that particular incident is that he then came back to me in the weeks or months after that and said, "I really, really appreciated what you did there because you stood up for what you believed in and you countered me with your hard facts and your opinions and you reasoned with me. I didn't agree with you at the time but actually, in hindsight, it was the right thing to do."

And what that does is it builds your credibility and, I guess, your presence in an organization. People sit up and take much more attention to you if you're prepared to have backbone. And for me, that's what a lot of people don't have particularly in large organizations. You've heard the expression before, they blow in the wind. That's not really helpful for anybody. I think it's really important that everybody has their own thought, everybody has their own opinion, and it's important to express that. So long as you do that in a very factual and courteous way, then the organization appreciates that. So that was one lesson I learned from GM. The other one is, you talked about sink or swim. It's absolutely right. I mean, GM was going through some difficult times and their motto at the time was that they put people in very stretched assignments, and then they expected you to sink or swim, hopefully you swim, and for me, that was a phenomenal growing and learning curve that I went through in that period of working with them.

And the other great thing was that I learned just very diverse experiences. Another example of GM would be that I actually came out of pure finance and went into what they called a business development role, and in that I was given the task of having Asia as my patch. So you talk about going back to our comfort zone discussion again, now I'm in an automotive company, which I knew nothing about. I'm dealing with a sector of the world that I know nothing about, and then you talk about the cultural attributes of that sector of the world, I knew nothing about. But again, for me, it was an amazing experience and a lot that I look back very fondly on and learned a lot from.

Frederic Brunner: There's one thing that... Or two things that you said that really struck me. The one is common sense. What I do see a lot is a lot of people who are young who come out of university have learned the best practices and the toolbox and I would say I always have this impression that common sense is almost undervalued or that people kind of almost feel ashamed to refer to common sense. How much has been common sense important to you?

David Murray: Often it has been huge and particularly given the transition that I've made from oil to automotive, or oil to banking to automotive and now into Life Sciences. And I remember when I joined Novartis and having the conversations, Raymund Breu was the CFO of Novartis at the time, and I remember saying to him, "Why me? Why do you think that I am the right person to bring in to Novartis?" And he said, "Because you don't bring any Life Science experiences with you. So what you can bring is the experiences that you've had from the oil and the banking and the automotive, and you can just bring a huge dose of common sense." And for me, that was really, really important to actually think about and consider as I made that transition into Novartis because I'm not a scientist, I don't have a science background, but it's amazing how these simple common sense questions or thoughts or experiences can just open up a huge amount of visibility in terms of the situation at hand.

Frederic Brunner: And did... Might sometimes always be the elephant in the room that everybody is in front of you, but you don't want to bring. And this brings me to the second point when you said, "People who are blowing with the wind and this ability to have an opinion and have the courage if something is there to stand for it." So, how much have you used that and how much are you also rewarding that when you make other people successful below you? Tell us maybe be a bit how important it is to you with people in your team have this courage to have their opinions and to talk to you and to flag these things because I think people should hear a bit how important it is, and also how valued it is and reward it is if they do that.

David Murray: Yup. So it's a great point, Frederic. I would actually go back to my GM days. This is where I first saw it really play in a very positive way, and Bob Eaton, who I think ultimately became the Chairman and CEO of Chrysler, he was the CEO of GM's international operations at the time, and the way that he would work it is if we were talking about a particularly demanding topic, he would actually go around the room and he would say, "David, what's your opinion? Tell me what your thoughts are on this. Frederic, what's your opinion?" And then at the end, he would say, "I've listened to everybody, and now this is the decision that I'm going to go with." And so long as we've got 80% of the people in the room that can support it, then that's good enough for me. So that's where I really saw it to harness in my first experiences. But the other part I'd like to bring out here is that even though I can have premeditated thoughts in my head about the conclusion of a particular business topic that we're on, I think it's important that I don't share that with the group that I'm talking with because then they blow in the wind to whatever I'm thinking.

So the approach that I take is actually to keep my mouth shut and just ask them the open questions, ask them, "What are your thoughts on this?" without giving them any steer or direction of where I am and I think that's really important for two reasons. One, because I think that, of course, we all know that the most optimal decisions are made by a groupthink, and secondly, if the team can come up with a conclusion, I think then there's a much better chance of execution as opposed to me telling them, "This is what you're going to do." Now, unfortunately, you can't always do that because if the platform is burning ferociously, somebody has to make a decision and you gotta do something now. So this doesn't work in every instance, but it works, and I'd say, two-thirds of the instances out there where you can actually bring the group together, the group could be two people or could be 15 people, and you just... You ask these open questions, you let them speak. As human beings, we also have a really hard job listening, and we're all very good at speaking, but we're not very good at listening, and so the automatic psyche here is that you get into a room, and then you just gotta start speaking as fast as you can, but it's just to really turn the room over to them, whoever they are, and let them talk. Let them come up with their own creative solutions.

And then you can challenge it by asking these common-sense questions, and I gotta tell you if I were to give you $1 for every time that I've asked somebody, "Why are you doing that?" and they would say, "Well, because that's the way it's always been done," you would be even a wealthier man than you are today. But it's true, people go into robotic mode and they do things, they get up in the morning and then they like the routine and they just do things because that's the way they've always been done. And so it's really good to challenge that paradigm and force people to really ask themselves, "Who is the customer that's getting this? Do they still want it? Is this the most effective and efficient way of doing it?" Etcetera, etcetera. And often we get so caught up in the speed and the rigor of the day that we lose all sense of that, and the common sense just goes out of the window. You go into the robotic mode.

Frederic Brunner: Yeah, and this is something that I see a lot when you think of the robotic mode, I call typically, that there is three-step think, plan and do, and it's very easy to skip the thinking step because you feel you have so much to do, but what I liked in what you said was this notion of really taking the team along with you through the open questions, so they have to do the thinking, you don't give them the thinking, you ask a question, they have to develop the thinking. And you also mentioned this 80%. 80% either of the solution or 80% of the group, and I think a lot of successful leaders are able to go for the 80% versus this, "I want the perfect 100%" that never happen. Can you talk a bit about when is it good enough and it really works versus pursuing this perfect idea where you find yourself alone, your team does not understand it, and have you seen leaders who try to hold on to things that the team cannot go behind?

David Murray: Well... I think it's first of all, important to differentiate that this 80% rule doesn't work for everything, and as we know in Life Sciences when quality or specificity of the product is absolutely key, then 80% doesn't work because, of course, the FDA and agencies around the world will come down on you like a ton of bricks, so it works in the majority of situations, but not all situations. And this desire to get a 100% precision is of course, something that I think a lot of leaders actually fall on, and they box themselves in a corner because they get so involved and driven by it, that then when they're challenged, they actually then don't want to back down because they've created this utopia place they want to be, and fear that they end up with egg on their face if they do back down, so it's really difficult.

I think that... I'm gonna use the word here 'emotional intelligence.' I think it's important that you can try and read the situation and you give... It's a bit like a game of chess. It's not always about just the next move. It's about the next five moves that you're going to make, and if you can see that somebody has boxed themselves in rather than going for the kill, then it's actually much better to actually help them navigate their way out of that boxed situation to come back to where the utopia would be. So this emotional intelligence plays a lot in just reading people's minds and thoughts and just where their inner body and inner feelings are on certain things.

Frederic Brunner: Very good. I'd love to switch a bit to Life Science because you've been super successful, you mentioned before Raymund Breu you went to Novartis and you had different things, and if it's okay, I'd love to talk about what probably was maybe a difficult moment because we never really talk about difficult moments when we look at people like you. You see the CV, you see success after success. When you were at some point interim of the Pharma, the CFO of the Pharma division, and a decision was made that somebody else took it and then you got another division that was smaller, that might have been perceived as, "Oh God, what did he now do? That job is smaller than that job." Was that the case, and if yes, what did you learn and how could such moves be actually a blessing in disguise?

David Murray: That's a great question. And so, yeah, you're right. I think it was back in 2013, I was placed as the Ad interim CFO for Pharma and there was myself and Robert Karsunky who were in the running for it. Robert got the role and he did a great job in that position, and as a consequence, I remember Novartis said, "Would you consider... " actually, they didn't say, "Would you... We would like you to go to Vaccines." And so keep in mind, by dimension, Pharma at that time was like a $35 billion P&L, Vaccines was $2 billion to $2.5 billion. Vaccines had just come out of this allegations of fraudulent regulatory work that was going on at the Siena plant. It was losing money, it was rumored to be sold, etcetera, etcetera. So everybody that I spoke to at the time said, "Why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense. You're going from something that's really big and highly profitable, it's the crown jewel of the Novartis empire, and you're going to go to something which is the exact opposite, the polar opposite of it?" And it's always about, "Is the glass half full or is it half empty?" And the way that I viewed it was actually 'the glass was half full' because here was an opportunity for me to go and learn a new division, so Vaccines is a completely different business model to pharmaceuticals.

The business was in trouble. Here was an opportunity for me to be able to go help turn it around, and thirdly, if the rumors were true about it potentially being part of an asset sale, then I would have then the opportunity and the experience to be part of that. Something that I had never done before. And in fact, we then in this space of three years, we were able to accomplish all three of those things. So I learned a new division, we did turn the business around, and then we sold Vaccines off to three different suitors out there, the largest of which was GSK at a premium multiple, so it was amazing how you come from... We go back to comfort zones again, I was very comfortable in Pharma, I knew how the Pharma business model worked, and then I'm suddenly plunged in Vaccines. Completely different, but then three years hence, I now know an awful lot more about another sector of the life science space, and it's a bit about how we started the conversation off. You ask yourself, "Where does the boundary of your comfort zone lie?" Well, you don't know until you keep pushing it, and I would say that in that Vaccines instance, then I certainly pushed it and you got fantastic rewards at the end of it as a consequence of that.

Frederic Brunner: It's interesting and I'll say also concludes also back the point of substance versus format is what you can learn and what you can become might be much better and bigger in a smaller organization or something that maybe is not as prestigious as what we would want in the first place. If we think of how that propelled you to Alcon and now to BVI, and what I'd like to go to is you're one of the few executives that have successfully been in the public listed world, when you were at Alcon, now you are in the private equity, and lots of young talent and CFOs would either aspire to be the CFO of Alcon or aspire to be the CFO of a private equity business. What would you tell them is the difference? How different is it really to work in these different environments?

David Murray: Before I answer the question, what I would say is that, of course, there's a lot of trepidation on both the private equity side and the incumbent side in terms of, can somebody like me who's worked in big multinational blue chip companies for 20 plus years, make the transition from that to private equity and TPG, who are the owners of BVI, they rightfully had that questions of me. "We don't have these big resources that Alcon or Novartis or GM has. So you have to be much more hands-on, much more your sleeves rolled up and much more prioritized in terms of what it is you can do." And actually going back to the 80/20 rule in private equity, I'd say that the 80/20 rule is actually more prevalent than what you see in the big public companies. So...

My transition actually was very difficult, but it was very seamless, and what I mean by that, it was very difficult because I started BVI just as COVID struck. So here you are joining a new company, moving from public to private, fortunately, it was in the space that I knew a lot about, but I'm sitting at home using Zoom and Microsoft Teams to work with my brand new colleagues who I physically haven't met, and not only that, as CFO having to deal with the COVID crisis that was coming and all of the challenges that that was going to present itself from a P&L and balance sheet standpoint.

So that's what I mean, the transition itself was easy, the process was hard because of COVID, and I would say that, of course, the dimensional size of the numbers is very different to what I was used to, but I would also say that business is business the world over, you make something and then you sell it and then you try and make a profit from doing that, so it doesn't matter whether you've got 100 billion sales on your P&L or 100 million sales on your P&L, it's still the same process. And I think what was also easy for me is actually the entrepreneurial spirit that is in this private equity setting, where there is less of the siloed mentality, and what I mean by that is in larger companies, you tend to... People who have got blinkers on and they say, "My job is this and I'm not doing anything else." In private equity, you can't do that because you simply... You wouldn't survive. So everybody has to chip in, and I feel that I'm feeding off of this entrepreneurial mindset where it really is, it's your company, and you can decide what you wanna do, what the direction of travel is, and the momentum that you're on.

And that for me is super exciting and that goes... We'll go back to substance again, people get transfixed and focused on, "I'm the CFO of $50 billion market cap company, and I feel really good about that." For me, I'm neither here nor there. What really matters to me is the people I'm working with, do I feel that I'm contributing actually to creating value for the company itself, and then actually growing it. It's much, much more exciting. This is the first time actually in my career that I'm now working in a company where we're growing both the revenue and the profit at double digit levels, never in my career before have I done that, and it's really, really exciting to be getting out of bed every morning, and actually doing that, as opposed to saying, "My sales are gonna grow by 3% this year." I found the transition actually very easy.

Frederic Brunner: You make a very interesting point, which is, how well does one perform whether he pursues something, which is really interesting for the nature of the job, because it's really exciting to get out of bed versus the title and the recognition is great. Which don't always go hand in hand, that the most interesting job might not always be the most interesting titles or prestigious ones. How much do you believe that your success and people's success in general, are by choosing the former because you're really intrinsically motivated and you do the right things. And because of doing the right things, promotions follow versus the title gain. Okay, what are your views on that?

David Murray: My thoughts are very firmly on the former, I think you need to go for the substance here because it goes back to... I think you mentioned the term before playbook again, where people talk about, if I'm not doing this role by age X, then I'm not on the right trajectory, that's not true. If you follow the playbook then I wouldn't have come from Alcon with a billion of sales down to BVI, which is a fraction of that, but I can tell you that, "Hey, I'm learning more because I'm less siloed." I'm really involved commercially in running the business and B, I think just the satisfaction that you get from actually seeing the growth of the company, this is you and all of the associates in the company, but specifically the leadership team that are really putting the pieces in place to actually drive the success of the company and I think the most important point for me is that the speed with which you can see execution happen. Because in large companies, with no disrespect to the large companies because I had a fantastic 30 years in them, you make a decision, but it could take months for that decision to then get executed, in private equity, you can make a decision today and you can execute it today or tomorrow, and that for me is something that I really, really like, and something that appeals to me.

Frederic Brunner: Very good. You mentioned COVID, and I would love to talk a little bit of COVID, not on the business side, but on the personal side, because it's been for many people difficult, and I'd love to hear a bit, what did you find personally the most difficult and how did you deal with it and what did you learn from that COVID as a person, what are you taking out of COVID that makes you either stronger or different that you didn't have when we entered COVID?

David Murray: Of course, COVID was difficult and challenging for everybody. I think that in the first instance, I was lucky enough to be living in the foot hills of Switzerland, so it was very easy for me to get out and go hiking and biking and walking and running, and the only thing that I would find were cows, and so there was no chance of COVID passing between us, and that was my release valve of not being constrained and just conflicted by it, I guess, but perhaps the lesson that I did learn is that virtual meetings work. There's no question about that. I'm a little bit old school in this respect, where I think you get more from people if they're connected and physically in a room together than if you are virtually, but COVID has changed my thoughts and opinions on that. And then the other thing is prioritization, because unfortunately in this virtual world, working in a global company, you could be on 24 hours a day. And that's not sustainable. So it's really, really important to say, "This is when I'm on, and this is when I'm off." And that for me was a really big learning that I took from it, just you have to curve out the me time, otherwise you can just be working 24 hours a day.

Frederic Brunner: The other thing I wanted to ask you is, I've seen so many successful executives and they're very successful in the eyes of others who look at them, but sometimes when I ask them how successful they think they are, is always interesting... The self-appreciation of the success is much harder on oneself. So my question to you is, when you look at such a brilliant career looking from the outside, how does it feel to you, do you feel successful? And how do you deal with that 'Am I successful?' question or not, for happiness and for motivation purpose, etcetera, self-development.

David Murray: So it's a great point and I guess you have to ask yourself, "What does success mean?" Because success means different things for different people, success could mean, how much money do you have in the bank, success could mean, where do you live? Success could mean, how fast is your company growing, and so it means different things to different people, but for me, I don't look upon myself as being super successful versus other peers, other friends that I have. I've done well, there's no question about that, but I think what's important along the way is this continuous learning and your ability to contribute to the situation that you're in, because everybody likes to feel good in terms of that self-esteem, actually helping people along the way. So for me, surrounding yourself by great or with great talent and helping them grow is a really, really important facet of who you are, and I've worked with some great leaders who are true leaders, they're very authentic in terms of the way that they reach out and they nurture this talent as it's coming through, and that for me is really... So that would be part of my definition of success.

Can I look back and say, I've helped lots of people along the way? I would say, yes, I can. And then it's about how you find this mix between professional and private life, because the good Lord gave us 24 hours and seven days a week, and it's up to you what you do with it, and so it's really important you try and prioritize with that. And as much as I love whichever company I'm working for, I love doing other things as well, and really important to try and make that happen.

Frederic Brunner: Very much like your point on, you need to have your own definition of success, that it should not be the whatever other people say success is, but really knowing for yourself what it is and going after it, I think it leads to first more success, but also definitely more happiness. If that's okay with you, I'd like to finish our conversation with five quick rapid fire questions, right?

David Murray: Sure.

Frederic Brunner: So the first one is, what did you want to be when you grew up?

David Murray: I wanted to be a professional footballer but was never good enough to do that.

Frederic Brunner: Okay, what would you tell your 20 old self, looking back?

David Murray: I would say, be true to yourself, and don't be influenced by the playbook or what people think you should be doing, you have to decide yourself, peel the onion back and really find out about what is the substance that makes you tick.

Frederic Brunner: Very good. If you were to do it over again, what would you do?

David Murray: I would be a professional footballer.

Frederic Brunner: Guilty pleasures.

David Murray: So I enjoy all sports out there, so golf, tennis, skiing, football of course, and I don't get much time for cooking during the week, but I really enjoy cooking at the weekend, and the guilty pleasure that goes with that is, right now I'm living in Belgium, and I've discovered that Belgium beers are fantastic.

Frederic Brunner: It doesn't sound too guilty to me. And finally, what is the moment you were the most proud in your life?

David Murray: Wow, there are lots of moments. Of course, the obvious ones of when you graduate, when you get your first job, when you get married, the children coming on board, but the one that resonates a lot for me is going back to my football analogy is... Not a lot of people know this, but in 1983, a long time ago now, Aberdeen won what is effectively the Champions League against the big Real Madrid. And this was a team of nobodies that became the emperors of Europe, and it's, really... It's a life lesson because what it was, it took Sir Alex Ferguson, who in my mind is a brilliant psychologist, to take this team of nobodies and nurture them into something that could actually conquer Europe, and that evening in Gothenburg when they won that cup, was a very proud moment for me.

Frederic Brunner: Thank you very much, David Murray group CFO of BVI, for sharing with us this very, very interesting, I would say, real lessons learned of a successful career and helping us reflect on what works and what doesn't, and being true to oneself, being courageous, going out of comfort zones and etcetera. I appreciate to have you on the podcast. To all of you, you can find more about this David Murray interview on our website. I wish you David, a very good day.

David Murray: Alright, you too Frederic, thanks for your time, I appreciate it. Bye now.