Single mother to Emerald queen bee

By ANNE GIBSON


The diminutive - 157cm - Diane Foreman remembers a company director saying within her earshot that a blonde's place was in the bedroom, not the boardroom.

That was after her ailing husband, Bill, appointed her to the Trigon Industries board. It still hurts her to recall the hostility from men who had been guests at the couple's wedding in 1988.

Young, beautiful and female must mean a liability not an asset, right? "I don't care if you say that - they know how I feel," says Foreman, a faint note of bitterness in her voice.

She is sitting in a high-backed chair at her north-facing offices at the Viaduct Harbour, irrepressible, elegant, forthright.

Trigon was sold by the Foremans in 1996 for $130 million and Foreman is the chief executive of Emerald, the couple's international investment firm.

It has been an astonishing career, from single mother and Takapuna real estate agent to chief executive of Trigon with a worldwide team of 750 to running a big investment portfolio.

She is 40-something - age is not a topic she discusses - and the mother to six in the couple's blended families.

She is vice-chairwoman of the Business Roundtable and on the board of a philanthropic business organisation, the Robin Hood Foundation.

Emerald's interests span furniture manufacturing and retail in the US, private surgical and rehabilitation hospitals in New Zealand and Australia, a boutique hotel on the North Shore, commercial property investment, and a food manufacturing and exporting company.

She is a partner in the executive leasing business Emergent and bought into Reynolds & Young, described in promotional material as "a company that manufactures groovy, sexy and comfortable house shoes".

Foreman sits on the board of the Ascot and Mercy hospitals in Auckland and Healthcare Holdings, of which she holds 20 per cent, owns clinics and hospitals at the forefront of private surgical care.

On top of all this, Foreman is negotiating "the biggest deal I've ever done", which she hopes to announce at the end of the month.

She says a binding heads of agreement has been signed between Emerald Group and an international entity in what will be a multi-million-dollar and "supersonic" deal.

But she refuses to be drawn on the sector and warns the deal is not yet certain despite many months of work.

Diane Shirley Foreman (nee Linney) and her younger brother were raised by an Australian engineer father and a New Zealand mother in Perth, Australia, and Mairangi Bay on the North Shore. She went to Perth's Presbyterian Ladies' College and Takapuna Grammar School.

She believes the entrepreneurial streak was there from childhood - "I couldn't wait to turn 13 so I could babysit".

Leaving school at 15, she was a typist, married in her early 20s, separated and - with two young children - worked as a real estate agent in Takapuna, also waitressing three nights a week to make ends meet.

In a later speech, she recalled that as a solo mother "the high point of my life was Coronation Street, a bar of chocolate and a bottle of coke".

She said: "It was the toughest time of my life. People ask me now how I do it all but try being a solo mum with two kids and no support. That's the toughest role there is."

From real estate agent at Harcourts, Foreman went to the Remuera and Takapuna offices of ear, nose and throat surgeon Henry Glennie as typist and then practice manager.

It was there, she believes, that she got a solid business grounding.

If the receptionist told a patient she was too busy to deal with them, Foreman realised, the patients could and would go elsewhere.

Something clicked and running a business became second nature.

Not everyone in Auckland is kind about Foreman. One financier who met her briefly said she was "simply dumb".

Some mistakenly think she was a hairdresser. "Didn't she just happen to meet this multi-millionaire bloke one day when he wandered into her salon?"

Not true, but not far off.

Already well-heeled from the sale of a family business in the 1960s, Bill Foreman tried his hand at ventures from building caravans and farming snails to canning fish and exporting trees to Saudi Arabia.

Eventually, with with two friends, he built Trigon from a small Hamilton business making plastic bags into an international leader.

Founded in a tin shed with 11 employees, it grew grew to $140 million in annual sales, six factories around the world and hundreds of employees.

Bill met Diane at Glennie's practice.

The story goes that Bill's wife was dying but told him to remarry and be happy.

"Bill said 'but who?' and his wife said 'that girl at Henry Glennie's office'," Foreman recalls. A lunch invite arrived.

"I thought, 'why would the CEO of this huge international company want to have lunch with a real estate agent from Takapuna?' A girlfriend told me that he probably wanted to hire me as a nanny for his kids or as a secretary," she giggles.

Bill is now 77.

"When Bill was 60, he was stunning, but he's an old man now," she says wistfully, "well and truly retired", adding that he has suffered several strokes.

In a speech, Foreman once told of the initiation to the Trigon business and the crack about blondes and bedrooms.

"After about a two-year apprenticeship as a corporate wife, Bill decided it was time that I really understood the business and appointed me to the board as the family representative - what a disaster.

"These very esteemed gentlemen, including a portly knight of the realm, were charming to me when I could be written off as the boss's brainless dolly bird but were less than impressed when told of my imminent arrival on the board.

"In fact, on my first day they refused to say good morning or to welcome me."

She went on: "Halfway through the meeting, I needed to use the ladies loo and, as Trigon had no senior female executives, this loo had not been used for years.

"On opening the door, I found there was no light, the door handle came off in my hand, and because there were no towels my hands were wet and I could not fix the door. So I had to take off my new Patrick Steel suit, bought especially for the day, and use the skirt lining as a towel to dry my hands so I was able to screw the handle back on.

"This, of course, took at least half an hour and I have since been told that the directors thought I had fled in terror and that their cold shoulder had got rid of me - fortunately I was made of sterner stuff."

The Foremans have four houses. The main family home is at Takapuna but there are also places in Parnell and Waiheke Island as well as Port Douglas in Queensland.

In the past year, they have been spending more time in Parnell because their two youngest children are at schools on the city side.

Their children are a three-family blend. Diane's two daughters, Nikki, 24, Amy, 23, Bill's Sally, 33, and Penny, 32, and their adopted son Josh, 13, and birth child, Charlotte, 7, make up the mix.

Foreman is the antithesis of political correctness, an attitude supported by her political associations with the Act party more than any other.

She believes New Zealanders have become too risk-averse and admires National Party leader Don Brash for his intelligence and integrity, two qualities she finds rare in the political beasts here.

In fact, Act has been courting her for some time.

Asked to name close associates, Foreman immediately mentions party president Catherine Judd.

Act's Deborah Coddington is a friend, too.

Judd is extremely enthusiastic.

"A lot of men don't quite know what to expect but underneath that highly efficient and novel exterior is a very warm, lovely compassionate person.

"It would be wonderful if Diane saw her way to go to Parliament.

"I'll be keeping the heat on her and one day it might work out."

WHAT THEY'VE GOT

Some of what the Foremans own:

* Commercial property firm Saddlebrook Holdings, whose portfolio includes a Northcote office block leased to a shipping company.

* Emerald Foods and IDV (International Dairy Ventures), with brands such as Killinchy Gold, Heavenly Treats, Lite Licks, Chateau Scoop, Klondyke milk and the franchise for Movenpick. The entities manufacture and export to the Asia-Pacific region.

* Caffe Glacier store in Mission Bay, with extra outlets planned for Devonport, the Chancery and Viaduct.

* Montana Furniture Industries in the United States, which makes and distributes rustic-style wood bedroom, entertainment, dining room, lounge and office products.

* A 20 per cent stake in Healthcare Holdings, the surgical and hospital arm of the Ascot and Mercy hospitals which also has interests in Australia.

* A stake in the senior executive leasing and recruitment consultancy Emergent & Co.

* Emerald Inn on Takapuna Beach.