Pioneer spirit
Last updated at 10:53, Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Being the belle of the ball is an unlikely preparation for a high-powered career in business. But Val Marriner succeeded anyway - and raised her family first - as Jane Loughran found out when she met Val at her home of Warwick Hall, near Carlisle
Val Marriner grew up in the most privileged circles of America’s East Coast. Her family and friends regarded education as essentially a good thing but not important enough to distract a woman from doing the season and catching the eye of an Alpha Male who would keep her in the manner to which she was accustomed.
It was lousy preparation for Val’s
future life as an international businesswoman. Nor did it teach her the resourcefulness
she now uses to run her home at Warwick Hall and its 260-acre estate, which sits just east of Carlisle.
Val and her husband Nick Marriner run their home partly as a business; Val organises the holiday apartments which are on one side of the house and Nick manages the fishing on the River Eden which runs through the estate.
Currently, Val is in the process of transforming an 18th century stable
block into more rental accommodation and a series of studios for business meetings and yoga classes.
But Val’s upbringing as a traditional American aristocrat in Massachusetts
didn’t come close to encouraging the skills
she needed in her future life when financial need forced her to take her first job at the age of 39.
In her 40s, Val transformed herself into an international businesswoman, first setting up her own company, DA Consulting Group, in 1984 as a one-woman business conducted from her dining table. Within 14 years, it became a NASDAQ-listed company which hit a peak of $100 million turnover.
It was an astonishing achievement for a woman who was raised simply to marry well. “The only person more surprised by my success than myself was my mother,’’ says Val laughing. “You have to realise that when I was growing up most interesting career paths were closed to women. A friend of mine applied to Harvard Business School in 1964 and received a reply saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t take girls’.
“I was raised to mix with corporation presidents and the business elite but I was expected to marry a successful leader rather than become one myself. The ideal for a
well brought up girl was to become like Barbara Bush rather than George.
“My mother’s generation judged other women by the men they could attract and the success they could inspire in them thereafter. If a man wasn’t doing well enough, if he drank or he wandered, it was your fault for not keeping him happy at home,’’ says Val.
After attending a New York boarding school, Val went to Boston University to read English literature having done the season. Being available for parties was more important than attending lectures and she abandoned her degree course in order to marry an attractive Scotsman who was “working in the last gasp of the old
colonial service’’.
During the course of their 20-year marriage, Val developed a taste for foreign travel. The couple lived in Nigeria and South Africa before returning to the States to raise their children, Hugh and Sarah. Val’s former husband decided to move into the oil business and, with a heavy heart, Val agreed to leave the East Coast and move to Houston, Texas, while their two children started boarding school in Edinburgh.
“I didn’t question my husband’s decisions, which was my fault. I played the role of the good wife but when we moved to Texas, I decided to find a job to help support our increasingly expensive lifestyle,’’ says Val.
She took a job in Houston as office manager for Sumitomo, a Japanese trading company. “I had no experience of anything but I reasoned that running an office couldn’t be that different from running a house. The job gave me confidence but I realised that I didn’t want to work nine to five.”
It was the late 1970s and when Val’s husband suggested a new embryonic market for documenting computer systems, they both saw a big opportunity.
“In the early 1980s, the big companies had rooms of people working on systems which couldn’t communicate. The green shoots of the integrated computer age were just beginning to show and I stumbled into the business at just the right time,’’ says
66-year-old Val.
Right time and the right place. The big Texan-based oil and chemical multinational companies like Shell, Exxon and BP spearheaded the rush to bring new technology on board; Val was in place offering to develop end user support – training and documentation and change management for the new systems. “Personally, I knew nothing about IT technology but I understood that the important thing was the impact the system had on a business process, not how the technology itself actually worked.”
In 1984, Val’s marriage broke down
after the Internal Revenue confiscated every penny they had. “Don’t ask,’’ she says. “I was left with a heavily mortgaged roof over my head and a car.
“I registered my business under my own name, borrowed $5,000 from my mother and negotiated with the IRS to be allowed to carry on my business. They were amazingly reasonable,’’ she remembers. “The first day of my new life, I had one contract for $15,000 of consulting, with my mother’s loan to cover the payroll,’’ she says.
Within 14 years, Val’s company DACG had become a leader in its field. It achieved a peak run rate of a $100 million turnover and 1,000 employees worldwide. Not bad for a woman who hadn’t thought about working until she was nearly 40. Heaven knows
what her fellow debutantes thought of
her endeavours.
“Women shouldn’t think they have got to get everything done in their 20s. Certainly, bringing up children first and then thinking about a career worked for me,’’ says Val.
She met her second husband Nick
when she was 49. Nick was a partner in a Leeds accounting firm and became the financial adviser for DACG in 1991. Seven years later, the couple floated their company on the NASDAQ exchange. Val immediately retired while Nick continued working as chairman of the public company for
another two years.
Meanwhile Val bought the Warwick Hall estate. When the couple first met, Nick owned a cottage at Talkin Tarn, near Brampton, which he used as a weekend fishing retreat and that is where they did their courting. When they were considering retirement, they wanted a place where Nick could fish and Val could garden. Warwick Hall was the perfect solution.
Nick is a complete countryman whose passions are fishing, shooting and hunting. “He really needs to get up each day and chase something,’’ says Val.
It is easy to understand why the couple selected the beautiful 1930s riverside estate as their ideal home. The estate includes two miles of excellent trout and salmon fishing, as well as open fields and private woodland. There is also a large walled garden which allows Val, a keen gardener, to pursue
her interests.
Built on the foundations of an 18th century home that burned in 1936, Warwick Hall has panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. The house is made of red Cumbrian sandstone, in neo-Georgian style with period touches.
The entrance hall is dominated by two columns, handmade using 18th century techniques and a curved stone staircase with contemporary detailing on the wrought iron balustrade. The main hall is lit by an impressive rooftop lantern which is a distinctive local landmark with its blue-green copper dome.
When the Marriners bought Warwick Hall, it had 14 bedrooms and not enough bathrooms. Now they have nine bedrooms and nine bathrooms and efficient central heating. Val also switched the uses for the ground floor reception rooms. “What is now the drawing room should be the dining room. The moulded ceilings bounced the noise in a funny way so our dinner parties were dire. Half the men we know are deaf from too much shooting and we had people bellowing away at each other,’’ she laughs.
For the past two years, Val has used the original drawing room as a yoga studio where she organised classes taught by Debz Sladen of The Place Downtown Studio for herself and for any local residents who wanted to take part. She swears by yoga as a way of managing her rheumatoid arthritis. However, the yoga classes are moving to a purpose built studio in the stable conversion, a project which is also producing extra accommodation and a conference room.
Val and Nick run the estate with the help of a full-time housekeeper, a part-time assistant, a full time gardener and a full-time gamekeeper. Maintenance costs are huge; just cleaning the windows costs £500.
To help pay for the running of Warwick Hall, Val uses her acquired business acumen. Originally, she created three self-contained holiday homes on one side of the house.
Now she is upgrading the letting accomm-odation into two five-star lets, each
with four double en-suite bedrooms, which she is now running along the lines of a catered ski chalet.
Val is also joining forces with Eden Golf Club in Carlisle to run golf workshop weekends. Guests will stay at Warwick Hall and experience “jolly dinners’’, yoga classes (Tiger Woods is a big yoga fan), back and shoulder workouts and reflexology. The participants will go to Eden Golf Club for lessons with Senior PGA professional Steve Harrison, incorporating the latest techniques of video analysis to show them where a stiff shoulder or a tight back interfere with a
good swing.
The programme will be a great mix of exercise, fun and golf, taking advantage of the many excellent courses that are easily accessible from Warwick Hall.
In between running the estate, Val also finds time to be the principal fundraiser for the Conservative Party in North Cumbria, organising a stream of events.
Looking back on her early years, she now wonders how anyone could achieve lifetime satisfaction from merely being the other half of someone else’s life.
Val says: “I enjoy the company of my girlfriends but if the only grown-up interaction you have is through a social life, things become a bit vapid. It still surprises me that at my age I can no longer do a 12-hour day – that is something I really miss.
“But the idea of getting up in the morning with your sole worry being how to match your earrings to the bows on your shoes appalls me. I need to have a list of things to do and tackle some every day,’’ Val adds.
Not surprising, perhaps, that this reluctant debutante gave up on the idle life that was once planned for her.
www.warwickhall.co.uk
First published at 12:18, Monday, 26 January 2009
Published by http://www.cumbrialife.co.uk
