Brian Hayward can finally get off the roller-coaster.
It’s been quite a ride for the last six months for the longtime chief executive officer of Agricore United, as his company unexpectedly became the target of a hostile takeover bid from Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and then a bidding war between the Pool and James Richardson International.
Barring something totally unexpected, that wild ride appears over, with SWP and AU reaching a deal and JRI agreeing to withdraw from the scene.
Hayward joked last week that while it appears to be over, he has learned not to take anything for granted.
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“Maybe there’s a sheik in the Middle East who will suddenly decide he has a hankering to own a prairie grain company,” he said with a laugh.
An end to the bidding war will be welcomed by everyone at the embattled grain handling firm.
“It’s been like living beside a construction site,” he said the day the final deal was announced.
AU has about 2,700 employees, and while many will end up working for the new company, for Cargill or for JRI, others will be out of a job, although Hayward declined to speculate as to how many.
One of them will almost certainly be Hayward, who began working at United Grain Growers in 1981 as a grain market analyst, became chief executive officer of UGG in 1991 and kept that position when UGG merged with Agricore Co-operative in 2001 to create AU.
Hayward said 17 years is a long time to be a chief executive officer with the same company (most CEOs last five years), adding he’s looking forward to a break and a change.
“I think I had a pretty decent run and I believe I’ll be heading on to a new challenge.”
Asked if he felt any sadness about the demise of AU, a company he played a big part in creating, the outgoing CEO said that while he feels loyalty to the organization and the people who work there, he doesn’t view it in those terms.
“I simply look at it as the same company moving forward in another form.”
He likened the situation to a university graduation, where close friends and colleagues who have worked and spent time together say goodbye and move on to different things.
Ironically, Hayward’s future will be helped by the bidding war that ended up costing him his job.
The CEO owns about 80,000 common shares of AU, which he has bought through an employee stock purchase program that was set up in 1993.
Those 80,000 shares were worth about $663,000 on Nov. 6, 2006, the day before the Pool launched its takeover bid when AU stock traded at $8.29.
Today, with the Pool’s offer of $20.50, those same shares are worth $1.62 million, a return of 147 percent.
“I’ve always believed the company was worth more than the market said and I have never sold a single share,” said Hayward.
That’s probably going to change.
