Marko Bogoievski, pictured at the Wellington office of Infratil. Photo / NZME
In many ways, Marko Bogoievski appears to be the exact opposite of the man he replaced.
Lloyd Morrison started a business under his own name, building it into a specialist investor best known as manager of Infratil, the NZX listed infrastructure fund.
His voice was also loud. Morrison took on nationalistic causes like changing the flag and saving the stock exchange. He was well known as a patron of the arts. And a snappy dresser.
Especially in Wellington, he was famous. A colleague once described a lunchtime run as one of life's most frustrating experiences, because of the incredible number of people he would see and need to talk to. When he died of cancer in 2012, aged 54, the Wellington Town Hall was filled.
Bogoievski has remained, by comparison, relatively anonymous. Former bosses and colleagues describe an almost peculiar lack of ego. He has a reputation for rarely speaking in meetings unless he has to (and never first).
The son of a political refugee, who admits he had little ambition growing up, bounced from job to job early in his career with little planning. He attempts to avoid public conflict, and to a large extent, publicity. He dresses casually.
But Bogoievski, who stepped down as chief executive at the end of December (he will remain as an operating partner leading the firm's digital investment), quietly led a remarkable reinvention of Morrison & Co, from a locally focused investor with looming headaches, into a firm with a reputation for spotting trends ahead of its larger rivals.
When Bogoievski took over, during the GFC when the company's founder abruptly stepped down due to illness, Morrison & Co managed less than $3 billion in assets (dominated by Infratil) and had a nascent relationship with the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, and little else.
Morrison & Co now manages more than $20b in assets, with around 70 institutional clients. Infratil, despite remaining an NZX darling, represents around a quarter of what the company does.
A long-time colleague of both Morrison and Bogoievski said the firm's founder would inevitably be the more famous, both for founding the company, as well as his enormous personality and untimely death.
"But if you look at it from the point of view of 'who made people all the dough?', hands down, it's Marko."
'There's always another opportunity'
By his own telling, there was little in his early life which suggested Bogoievski would go on to a top corporate career.
His father arrived in New Zealand as a political refugee from Macedonia and was quickly put to work as a labourer on major civil projects, including the Roxburgh Hydro Dam and the rail tunnel between Wellington and Wairarapa ("big infrastructure projects, funnily enough").
Bogoievski's mother, Greek, arrived later. "At that time, they used to basically ship over brides, I think, and that's what he did."
He attended Petone Technical College (which has since closed) and was not ambitious nor under pressure to achieve. After seeing family friends travel into Wellington to study at Victoria University, he decided to follow.
"It wasn't driven by my family. I had no idea what I enrolled for, let alone driven by ambition. I just thought it would be something that sounded interesting.
"It wasn't like there was massive goal-setting when you were a teenager. It wasn't that at all. Basically, every step was incremental. And actually, that kept happening. My first job wasn't that well thought through, the job after that wasn't. I've just always found, there's always another opportunity."
Bogoievski worked at brewer Lion Nathan and Ansett, the now-defunct airline. A stint at Price Waterhouse (now PwC) saw him move to New York, before leaving to join a client, Elders Finance, which subsequently closed.
Not wanting to leave, he decided to apply to study and was accepted into the MBA course at one of the world's most prestigious universities, Harvard.
"I didn't target Harvard. At the time I wasn't even sure it was a good idea. But it actually ended up being a really useful two years, to think about what I wanted to do next."
Next he worked for DMS, a courier logistics company, then headed by Kiwi Linda Jenkinson. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey became a colleague, reportedly after hacking the company's website.
The company floated on the Nasdaq but was not a roaring success. Bogoievski remembers the time as "not that pleasant a chapter" of his life. Two years of hard work getting the company ready to go public, and three years to unwind it. "But you just learn a lot going through that process". What could go wrong and "the things that you need to go right".
New York also introduced him to Jennifer, his wife, with whom he has two sons. She had already decided she wanted to marry a New Zealand farmer, she told him.
"She did one of these bus trips through South America, and it was led by two Kiwis, from Invercargill apparently," Bogoievski said.
"They were the ones who made her think 'these Kiwis are amazing, they can do anything'. She just thought every Kiwi was that talented, and all that number eight wire stuff. She met me [and] got a rude shock."
It was while in New York that the phone rang for a job which would set in motion a move which would lead Bogoievski from rising expat to senior executive, as head hunters approached on behalf of what was Telecom (now known as Spark), working under then chief executive Theresa Gattung.
Bogoievski described working in Gattung's senior leadership as a career highlight, alongside the likes of Simon Moutter (who would eventually return to head Spark), Chris Quin (who now heads Foodstuffs North Island) and Kevin Kenrick (the former TVNZ boss).
"That team was absolutely sensational. I've never felt anything like it, working in that organisation," Bogoievski said.
"My whole theory coming in here [to Morrison & Co] was, can you replicate that sense that you have functional roles, but your main obligation is to each other on that leadership team. And you get to know each other so well that you sort of implicitly know what you're going to do next, and 'I've got you covered, if you can't get there'."
Gattung, who has since remained good friends with Bogoievski, described him as brilliant. Incredibly hard-working, as well as loyal, he was always willing to share credit, meaning people enjoyed working with him.
Unlike many other executives, Bogoievski did not seem to feel the need to make his voice heard at meetings, but when he does, it was worth waiting for. "When he does speak, you wonder why we didn't just ask him the answer in the first place."
She also believed Bogoievski had something of a knack for seeing how the future would play out.
"He always thinks long term about things. He thinks in terms of years and decades, not in terms of days or weeks," she said. "He can be 20 years ahead of his contemporaries."
Bogoievski would eventually miss out on the top job at Telecom, with the board opting for Scot Paul Reynolds (who left quietly in 2012, replaced by the returning Moutter).
He resigned shortly afterward, and was considering options elsewhere in New Zealand and overseas, when out of the blue, an email arrived from Lloyd Morrison, who he knew of, but did not know.
"It said, 'You don't know me, but I know you, we need to talk,' or something like that, 'and by the way Telecom services are crap'," Bogoievski said of the email.
Exactly what attracted Bogoievski to Morrison is unknown, but one person speculated that the Telecom CFO was known as the guy who sold off the Yellow Pages at an eye-watering $2b in early 2007, only for the market to almost immediately realise directories businesses faced severe challenges.
Although both Bogoievski and Gattung say Telecom's senior leadership team was unanimous on the merits of a deal ("we were all already using Google," Gattung recalled), Bogoievski was the one who fronted the deal publicly.
"It was certainly a high water mark," Bogoievski recalled of the sale to a private equity consortium, smiling.
Bogoievski was invited to a meeting with Morrison and Bruce Harker, who has led Morrison & Co's energy business since 1994, purportedly about becoming a director of TrustPower, Infratil's original investment.
A short time afterwards, however, Morrison approached him for a job he had created: chief operating officer. "Lloyd was incredibly persuasive."
Hired to help Morrison grow the business, around a year later he was chief executive, when the man who hired him was diagnosed with leukaemia.
Warring princes
Bogoievski admits that when he joined Morrison & Co the staff - with a headcount not yet at 20 - it was sometimes described as a fraternity.
One colleague has described the original model of the firm as "warring princes", where a group of key staff (who tend to believe they could be the boss) compete for the approval of the leader who calls the shots.
Paul Newfield, who joined Morrison & Co in 2009 from a stint in management consulting on the back of a single meeting with Morrison, described the structure as having two levels.
"Lloyd, and everyone else, including the cleaners," said Newfield, who replaced Bogoievski as chief executive on December 31.
"Lloyd ultimately made all the decisions."
Newfield said he never left a meeting with Morrison not knowing what he thought on a subject, but not Bogoievski.
"You can spend two hours with Marko and he'll be listening, drawing thoughts out of you. Giving you affirmation. And then you might leave the meeting thinking, that was great, we had a great discussion, I don't actually know what he thinks."
Rather than leave colleagues confused, Newfield, who previously led Morrison & Co's expansion in Australia, said he felt Bogoievski had used thousands of questions to guide him, often without realising it.
"Marko, you're often not even aware of him making decisions. He's really giving you the space, working out who he can trust and give room to, and then giving them the room to deliver."
The different style meant most of the other large personalities were able to adjust.
"M&Co was such a diverse bunch of people, that if you had a CEO who came in after Lloyd who said 'I'm going to stamp my authority on this', you would have lost the magic. Marko was happy to let us gradually evolve, rather than stamp authority and that is just a remarkable absence of ego."
Bogoievski said Morrison had hired him to grow the business, which meant putting in place the kind of structures required to convince institutional investors the firm was worthy of backing.
This was not something Morrison enjoyed "and it's not something I enjoy, by the way," Bogoievski said, but it was something he was good at.
"We have auditors in here, from our clients, often. They look at the way we do business and investment decisions and they're not just ticking boxes, they're actually looking at how we go about work," he said.
"You've got no choice of being, sort of, idiosyncratic, high charisma. I'm not trying to say it's a boring place, but you have to deliver those processes, otherwise you just don't get any capital to manage. Literally zero."
Taking over meant more than just bringing more structure to the business and coping with strong personalities. While Infratil had been a strong performer since its launch in 1994, by 2009 it had growing headaches.
Its public transport business had not grown in the way Morrison had imagined. A foray into British airports was on the way to a calamitous end (Kent and Prestwick airports were eventually sold for a pound each) and Morrison & Co could see earnings at its Australian energy business deteriorating.
"It was a very risky period, I think. More riskier than probably the market understood. The most satisfying thing that we've done is managing that risk and then grow off it," Bogoievski said.
Although later investments would make the company profit, the 2010 purchase of Shell's New Zealand downstream assets - which would become Z Energy - was something of a turning point for Morrison & Co.
Purchased jointly with the Super Fund, the initial equity investment of $210m each was rewarded with a profit of around $1b by the time the shareholding was exited in 2015. The deal not only helped build the confidence of NZ Super, Bogoievski said he believed it helped win Morrison & Co the licence to continue investing.
"It was the first step of resetting and repositioning the portfolio."
From there the company has sold out of its public transport business, continued to invest heavily in renewable energy and entered the retirement care business. Tilt Renewables was spun out of TrustPower and eventually sold for around $3b.
Most lucrative though, has been the move into digital infrastructure, principally through Canberra Data Centres. The deal may represent the flagship deal of Morrison & Co during Bogoievski's time in charge, but may also sum up that the company has not quite been able to articulate its prospects in a way the market understands.
CDC now dominates Infratil's portfolio - a recent independent valuation said the stake was worth $2.76b. But when it was announced that the fund was spending A$392m (NZ$416m) in 2016, the market was sceptical.
"At the time, the reaction was, 'it's not infrastructure'," Bogoievski said. "Or, 'if it is infrastructure, it's real estate'."
Although Morrison & Co said repeatedly that it believed CDC would eventually become its largest asset, the sensitive nature of the company's work for many government clients meant the company gave little away in terms of financial metrics.
Despite having profited handsomely from Z Energy, Bogoievski was unable to convince the Super Fund to partner with it for the investment (Commonwealth Super partnered instead).
One shareholder said the complex nature of Infratil's business naturally made it a harder job to value than, for example, logistics giant Mainfreight. But even beyond that, analysts were sometimes at a loss to turn the fund's communication into an investment thesis.
"At times, the articulation of strategy to the market was deeply intellectual," a leading figure at one of Infratil's largest shareholders said. This made it difficult for analysts to form a view that the fund would continue to generate above-average returns.
"Perhaps, at times, it was difficult to know exactly what was meant when they talked about their strategy."
In the end though, those who have invested with Morrison & Co while Bogoievski has been in charge have had their capital placed at the leading edge of the hot investment trends of infrastructure.
Early in the last decade, the company struggled for name recognition outside New Zealand. Bogoievski said the first time it approached Vodafone about buying its New Zealand business, the UK company was so sceptical about it that it ultimately needed to partner with Canadian giant Brookfield Asset Management to address "the bumpkin question" when it jointly bought the business for $3.4b in 2019.
Newfield said the company's path to recognition had been extraordinary. Recently the Australian Financial Review referred to Morrison & Co as "local heavyweights". This was, he said, a far cry from when he first moved to Australia.
"I remember literally moving there in 2010, and you're trying to talk to the CIOs of superannuation funds, you were calling up the call centre, trying to talk your way up from the call centre and explain who you were."
While still niche, Newfield believed the firm was considered world-leading in the field of renewable energy development and data centres.
"We've established ourselves as global leaders. The brand's not super well known, but in those niches … my view is we're the best in the world at it and we don't have to kind of explain who we are."
While the Super Fund elected not to invest in CDC, it now has around $1b invested with Morrison & Co, including through Longroad Energy, a US renewables business that Infratil has been repeatedly hinting may be being undervalued by the market, and an Australian retirement care business.
Del Hart, head of external investments and partnerships at the Super Fund, said Morrison & Co "really stand out in terms of early recognition of emerging infrastructure themes".
She credits Bogoievski with developing Morrison & Co from a founder-led firm into a "best in class" investor with a reputation for spotting emerging investment areas before its rivals.
"I think he's very strategic and visionary in that regard."
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