About Simon Laffin
Hello
Simon Laffin is an experienced chairman, non-executive director, mentor and author. He has served on both public and private boards, as well as having worked in private equity and been a FTSE-100 CFO. He is currently chair of Impact Healthcare REIT PLC (from March 2023). Previously, he has chaired Assura plc, Flybe Group plc and Hozelock Group, and served as a non-executive on Quintain Estates & Development plc, Aegis Group plc, Mitchells & Butlers plc, Dentsu Group Inc, Watkin Jones PLC and Northern Rock plc (as part of the rescue team). His early career stretched from being a milkman, working in a post-room, to being a store manager and CFO at Safeway plc.
Simon is passionate about making boards work better, for directors to learn from their own and others’ mistakes, for greater diversity at all layers of management, but especially in the boardroom, and for regulators to participate in helping boards make better decisions (instead of taking pot shots from the sidelines). His has published a book on how to be a board director (“Behind Closed Doors. The Boardroom: How to Get In, Get On, and Make a Difference” ) and is a mentor to senior business leaders.
Kipper Williams is a very talented cartoonist, who has inadvertently been chronicling, and poking fun, at Simon’s career in a series of cartoons for the Guardian newspaper over the years;
Simon served on the board of Safeway plc for ten years, as Finance and Property Director. During this period, Safeway dropped its loyalty card
and altered its profit forecasts a number of times
Morrisons launched a bid for Safeway, and then a number of other bidders waded in too
After Safeway was taken over by Morrisons, Simon went to work in private equity
He worked on a number of bids in the retail sector (amongst others) across the world, including a potential bid for Safeway’s erstwhile competitor, Sainsbury
Eventually he left the retail sector for good
His first non-executive role was with Northern Rock. He also set up a fund with Oxfam to support the Shinyanga Region of Tanzania (contact him if you would like to support this fund)
A later non-exec role was with Mitchells & Butlers, where he defended the board in a dispute with certain large private shareholders
He fought Joe Lewis, but Joe had the votes. Other shareholders were left out in the cold
