Peter Thomas, Accenture’s Director of Marketing and Communications, is about to take wing and become the first Director of Communications for the Rugby Football Union. Heather McGregor charts his career:

A tin shack was once the centre of Peter Thomas’s life. When, in 2007, Dubai Exiles RFC vacated Al Awir for their new purpose-built home on the outskirts of Dubai, they left behind the place where Peter’s father with two friends had established the club in 1969, and where Peter learned to play. For him, photographs and memories are all that is left of that what was once a lone sand pitch with goals that didn’t even have cross bars.

Born and baptised in Argentina when his father was working on the construction of a major dam there, Peter narrowly escaped being called Graham. “It was a requirement that names were registered in Spanish, and they couldn’t find a translation for Graham.” So Peter – or rather, Pedro – it was. The family moved back to the UK and Peter’s brother was born in Middlesbrough before they moved again, this time to Dubai.

Dubai was a very different place in 1968. “It took a day in a 4x4 to reach the Chicago Bridge, not a 20-minute drive,” Peter remembers. His father, a former Rugby Football Union club and university player, lost no time in getting the Dubai Exiles started; it will be their 40th anniversary this year.

Peter remembers the tin shack, which served as a changing room before the game and a bar after it. Over the 11 years that the Thomas amily lived in Dubai, the shack changed into something more substantial and the pitches improved, but it made no difference to their commitment – every weekend for 11 years, the Thomas family would be there. It was the start of a love affair with the sport that would one day lead to Peter being appointed the first ever Director of Corporate Communications for the Rugby Football Union, a post he takes up in March. “Rugby is in my blood.”

Sent back to the UK to board at Cheltenham College, Peter played in the 1st XV and also the 1st XI hockey team. For rugby, he was coached by Eddie Butler, then the Welsh captain and now one of the BBC’s rugby commentator's. “I expect I will be seeing a bit of Eddie in the future.” Peter considered sitting for Oxbridge but when it was felt he wouldn't get a place for his first choice of course, he decided that if he was going to another university, then he should take a vocational degree. His four-year business degree at Aston included a sandwich year which was spent at BCCI in London. To start with at Aston he selected hockey over rugby but after a year he missed rugby so much he switched and managed to get into the University 1st XV as inside centre.

He got a taste for the elite end of the sport when, during that year at BCCI, he played at Wasps.The year taught him two things. “One was that I wasn't ready to make the sacrifices required to play at the very top level – it is a long way from Fulham, where I was living, to Sudbury, and we trained twice a week and played every weekend.” The other, with the professional game just around the corner? “I just was not good enough I'm afraid.”

Like Accenture and his many clients while in agency, the RFU has multiple stakeholders. Peter will be devising a communications strategy to reach diverse audiences

The year he had spent in a bank propelled Peter towards a career in finance. After ten months as a money broker, he was bored. “It just wasn't the right career for me.” Desk-based research at Roskill required him to write technical reports and Peter, whose first love was English, decided that he wanted to make greater use of his writing skills.This is what ultimately led him to the idea of communications and, with the help of some contacts, he joined GCI Sterling.

By then, Peter had played two seasons at Guildford and Godalming RFC. The reverse commute from Wimbledon for training in the week took its toll so he moved to Streatham and Croydon RFC, who played in the London League I. “Our most famous fixture was when we drew Bath RFC on the fixtures exchange and I spent the entire match marking Simon Halliday and Jerry Guscott. We lost 84-nil in the days before 5 point tries!”

He had greater success at GCI Sterling where he worked on the Dell Account, which was mainly conventional media relations and product reviews but also gave him exposure to crisis and issues management. “Dell’s ‘direct to market’ model showed me that there is more than one way to make an impact,” he says. The recession in the early 1990s saw GCI make cutbacks, but his experience earned him a job at Brodeur. Here, he ran the Cisco account for two years at a time when the company was growing at 100% per annum. “It was like riding a bucking bronco."

Peter worked on the Informix account almost throughout his time at Brodeur. He grew from being an account executive to running the account and acting as advisor to both the MD in the UK and the European MD. Their achievement was to move Informix from being viewed as a small channel company to being perceived as a key competitor to Oracle, positioning them as a technology leader and taking on Oracle in its own heartland. This included the de-positioning of Oracle having spotted a hole in their technical argument which they then ruthlessly exploited. He says 90% of the account was media relations, aggressively focused on the top 15 software journalists. Informix appeared every week in features, comment and opinion pieces. He also made sure that leadership opposition initiatives were always anticipated.

The Cisco account was Peter’s opener to pan-European programmes. Every product launch had to be simultaneous in every market and ruthlessly policed. During his time at the agency, as the company was representing the world's biggest technology-driven companies, Peter also developed a better understanding of business dynamics. “You can only be an adviser, bringing all your experience and knowledge to bear, if you understand the business strategy from which the communications strategy originates.” Peter worked “incredibly hard” during his five and a half years at the agency but, around the time the company sold to Omnicom, found himself questioning whether communications was the career for him. He left without a job to go to in 1997, went travelling for a while and mulled over his options, even considering reinventing himself as an investment analyst.

Back in London and still undecided, Peter received a call from a former Brodeur colleague who asked if he would cover her maternity leave at Hill & Knowlton. A month into the assignment and Giles Fraser offered him a permanent job. He didn’t look back, and went on to provide counsel, planning, content development and European co-ordination for the likes of EDS, Motorola, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard and many others.

With EDS, the task was to raise the profile of the top two European executives as the leading thinkers on the industry in the media and on speaker platforms. Peter wrote much of the content – including speeches and vertically orientated white papers – to enable them to be seen as the leaders of the third wave of outsourcing. The activities were purely targeted at the CXO audience, and Peter created case studies for use in the UK, France, Germany and Italy. The challenges included getting the engagement of country managers so that they were acting as partners and securing customer involvement. To make EDS interesting they had to agree to be provocative and be prepared to have a view. Peter followed the maxim that ‘if you want the market to talk about you, talk about the market.’ Rather than going in and talking about the product, he made sure that they defined the problem and used that as a platform for discussion.

Amusingly, given his previous involvement with their prime competitor,in his first three weeks at H&K, Peter was part of the team that pitched for the Oracle EMEA account and acted as the strategic lead throughout the relationship. Stage one was an accelerated engagement process that meant he had to get in front of all the key EMEA VPs. Initially, it meant a lot of time spent in Europe meeting them to understand objectives, take briefs and develop plans on issues as widely varying as the Euro through to data warehousing. He worked with the EMEA director of communications to build support for the function through constant interaction with senior executives and consistent liaison with the country operations.

Later in his H&K career on the Nortel account, the agency was key in helping integrate the leadership of the Northern Telecom and Bay Networks business. It provided advanced message training for all senior executives in the region, then using them in the business media and on into the CXO conference platform. Peter helped to prepare and exploit Nortel’s attendance at major events such as the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos.  

Of course all this was going on concurrently with the rugby, which never really stopped. Peter moved to the Honourable Artillery Company RFC where he played for ten years until he was in his mid-30s, including a couple of years as captain.

By 2001 Peter’s role at Hill & Knowlton was that of full time VP of the technology practice in EMEA. He put in place better sharing of best practice and brought the technology practice leaders together as a team. Peter was the agency’s face of Europe on global pitches acting as a conduit into and out of the US, which gave him indirect leadership of 110 people in 25 offices in 22 countries in the EMEA region.

By 2004, Peter was ready to go in-house and joined Accenture as its UK Director of Marketing. It was a completely new start in every sense, not least because, by the time Peter left H&K, he was so senior that he was able to work from home a couple of days a week. He had married, had three children and was living out in Hampshire. At Accenture to start with the working from home ahd tos top and it was a four-hour round trip commute to Accenture’s Old Bailey office where he sat in an open-plan area with his team.

“It was new to my team and they were new to me and many were realtively young and wanting and needing to learn, so it made sense to sit with them all and be seen to lead.” After three years, he had taken on so much additional responsibility that he was regularly popping into a meeting room to take calls. A private office was needed. “Even then, I was offered a bigger office on another floor or a cupboard near my team. I chose the cupboard.” His working conditions improved when he moved himself and his team to Accenture’s UK office in Queen Victoria Street.

At Accenture, the growth in the business overall, and particularly in the outsourcing business meant the employee numbers were increasing but also that large numbers of new locations were coming on stream - up to 75 at one point. In that environment managing employee communications to drive engagement was crucial and Peter acted quickly to upskill the internal communications function, working closely with HR, to own that engagement challenge.

Peter and his team worked within a matrix management structure. Though he reported to the Global Director of Geographic Marketing, he also had dotted line responsibilities to the UK country Managaing Director and head of operations and ownership of integrating the company's marketing efforts at a UK geographic level. And in such a high profile firm there were always media challenges to deal with. Over the 4 and a half years at Accenture Peter and his media team, globally and locally, handled a wide range of media situations and worked tirelessly to minimise the impact on the firm's reputation which is so key to a consultancy organisation.

Curriculum Vitae: Peter Thomas
July 2004-March 2009 Director of Marketing and Communications,
Accenture UK, Ireland and Nordics
1997-2004 Hill & Knowlton EMEA, Head of Technology Practice
1991-1997 Business Group Director, A Plus Group
1989-1991 Account Executive, GCI Sterling
1988-1989 Research Consultant, Roskill Information Services
1987-1988 Trainee Money Broker, Meridian Capital Markets
Education
1983-1987 University of Aston - BSc in Managerial and
Administrative Studies
1978-1983 Cheltenham College
Interests: Family, travel, rugby, skiing, golf, squash, sailing,
swimming

What made communications work at Accenture? “The trust we were given by our global colleagues, the relationships that we built as a team with the Country Managing Director and the leadership team gave us a license to operate, and there was an increasing uderstanding in the firm of how marketing and communications was key to supporting growth and maintaining reputation.” His ability to work as part of the leadership team should serve him well at the RFU, where he is taking up a newly-created position on the board of an organisation with many millions of pounds in revenues. Like Accenture and his many clients while in agency, the RFU has multiple stakeholders. Peter will be devising and directing a communications strategy to reach audiences as diverse as Sport England, the government body which delivers much of the RFU’s funding, and the thousands of volunteers who turn out each weekend to coach mini rugby all over the country. He is looking forward to the challenge.

As the father of three daughters, does he envisage that they will share his love for the game? “I am not pressuring them to get involved, even though women’s rugby is growing all the time.” But surely he will take them to Twickenham to watch a game? “Of course. I can still remember my first game at Twickenham – November 1988 I watched Will Carling captain England for the first time. It was against Australia and Rory Underwood scored an interception try.” And since it is one of the ten test playing countries in the world, he might now even get to revisit the country of his birth. From Argentina to Alresford via Al Awir, Peter Thomas has arrived at his spiritual home.