But for the head of communications at Brighton & Hove City Council, this is more than just a conversational ice-breaker. It was a formative experience – one of many tough times that have shaped his personality – and ultimately his career.

 

The injury to his father ranks alongside his oh-so-nearly sports career, his impulsive move to the other side of the world and his penniless weeks in London as experiences that have both hardened and wizened John into one of the rising stars of public sector communications.

 

A childhood memory from growing up in Papua New Guinea might seem unrelated to his subsequent career, but John readily collects lessons that might stand him in better stead in later life.

 

“We lived in a very remote area and the only way you could move around is by boat down little, crocodile-infested rivers. On the way home one day, it was dark. My father asked me and my sister to sit at the front to look for logs. But it was so dark we didn’t see one. It went under the boat, hit the motor and the chain ripped my dad’s arm right into bone from the wrist past the elbow.”

 

Nearby villages and a flying doctor helped to save his father’s arm. But it remains for John “a reminder to keep your eyes peeled – you never know what lies beneath. Particularly now, given the political situation.”

 

Too true. Like many in the public sector, John and his team at Brighton & Hove City Council face a time of unprecedented austerity. But he’s no stranger to uphill struggles – and he clearly relishes the challenge of extracting value from the public purse.

 

As a child, John was sent to boarding school and quickly became enthralled with sport. He represented Queensland in schools athletics, and was a flying winger in rugby league.

This didn’t go unnoticed. John won a scholarship at the Queensland Academy of Sport and took to rugby union, with great success – soon being chosen for the Queensland state side.

 

But, despite a rigorous regime bulking John up from 70kg to 95kg, he realised he wasn’t destined for sporting greatness. And so, after a debilitating ankle injury at 21, he decided to concentrate on his studies. It was fortunate that the Academy took its academic bent seriously. While studying, he worked in the marketing department of Nestle Australia (then Peters-Nestle), giving him instant blue-chip experience.

 

Subsequently, John took on a business degree at Queensland University of Technology (and an arts degree at the same time – effectively doubling his student workload). And the degree’s vocational slant meant he got to sink his teeth into a proper project, devising a brand strategy for a local wine company.

 

He was spotted by Brisbane-based PR firm Brumfield Bird and Sandford (BBS). “They used to pride themselves on talent spotting,” he says. “I was approached for interview and taken on. They operate by chucking recruits in at the deep end.” So John was put on the account of Westpac Banking Corporation, one of Australia’s largest financial services firms.

 

“BBS is essentially a reputation management firm,” he says. “I was asked to work on Westpac’s CSR activities, developing a programme to position the bank as a good corporate citizen. It was at a time of rural branch closures so we needed to shape their community offer.”

 

Positioning Westpac as “The People’s Bank” was a tall order for someone so inexperienced. “I was fresh-faced and just out of uni, so it was pretty daunting. But if the clients liked you, and you were delivering, BBS kept you. They were tough but supportive.”

 

And they still hold John in high regard. “From day one, we knew John would go on to great things,” says Amanda Newbery, managing director of BBS. “He was confident, but not arrogant. Charming, but not flippant. But he also had what we call the X-factor. He was also super bright and one of the best networkers I know.”

 

John was mentored by Paul Turner, BBS’s hugely respected general manager. “He was a heavy drinking, heavy smoking, ex journo, who was always effing and blinding. He was a fairly tough bloke. But he taught me the skills to negotiate and gave me real insight in the Australian political process. And he always had a nice way of telling you off. If he told you to go to hell, you’d look forward to the trip.”

 

John learnt an enormous amount “in terms of strategic thinking, the nitty gritty and most importantly the ability to sequence events. I discovered the importance of proper planning and the identifying of key influencers.”

 

“We ran focus groups to find out what residents thought and to map people’s perceptions. That way, we could feed back to the policy shapers and say ‘These are the issues that people care about. Do this and our reputation will go up’”

 

With things going well, what on earth possessed him to suddenly up sticks in 2001 and move to the other side of the world?

 

“Good question,” he says. “I just went for lunch one day and walked past Flight Centre. They had a special offer on flights to London. But you had to go by November. This was July. I bought the tickets, went back to the office and told Paul I was leaving. He looked at me and said ‘You dickhead.’”

 

John never went back. Instead, he arrived in wintery London with no job and less money than he’d hoped. “I’d saved $10,000 but I’d not really done the conversion rate properly. It was only about £3,500.”

 

He had fun though. So much so that, despite an unfulfilling data entry job, he discovered in December that he was down to his last 10p. “I didn’t want to call my dad, it was embarrassing.” So he knocked on the doors of pubs and found part-time work.

 

Performing data entry nine to five, and working in the bar until 2am, he ended up clawing back all his money. A far cry from corporate communications, you might think. “But it was a great lesson in knuckling down, and parking your ego to one side. I’d gone from a top Australian consultancy, to cleaning up vomit and serving drunks. But I learnt a lot about determination.”

 

He was soon back in PR, this time with Golley Slater, whose B2B and B2C focus was discernibly different to the reputation management of BBS.

 

“The media style was very different as well,” he says. “Australian journalists were a bit more realistic. British media are much tougher and a lot more aggressive. You have to compete much harder to get story here. GS was great though. They really did develop people. And they’re very good at what they do. Plus, there was great camaraderie, a good skill set, and really bright people leading the agency.”

 

John worked on the British Army account – “It left me with a tremendous respect for them” – but, after a rewarding 18 months with GS, John realised he missed the political environment and recognised consumer PR wasn’t his strength. “I just didn’t find it as rewarding. Something with a political dimension or social dynamic got my juices going.”

So – after taking 3 months off to travel through Spain and Morocco – he returned to London and approached lobbying agencies. “But a friend said, ‘Unless you know the political environment here, it’s going to be hard.’ He suggested I try local government to give me a good grounding.”

 

John took the advice and joined the comms team of the London Borough of Sutton. It immediately challenged his perceptions of public service. “I’d thought of people in the public sector as excessively bureaucratic and only there because they couldn’t get a job in the private sector. But it was full of really talented people who shared the desire to make a difference to people’s lives every day.” Within four years, he had risen to deputy head of communications but remained ambitious. So when an opportunity came up with Brighton & Hove, he grabbed it. “I had my own ideas of what I wanted to do but I needed the authority to do it.”

 

Still only 32 at time, he recognised that the position – head of communications – was a step up. “I was also going from a borough to a city council, a very different remit. When they offered me the job, I was literally shaking. I was inexperienced. This was a different scale altogether.”

 

His former employer had no doubt he’d go on to succeed. “John understands that relationships are at the heart of good communications and he puts a lot of effort into creating excellent relationships, with warmth and integrity,” says Paul Martin, chief executive of the London Borough of Sutton. “Someone once said that councils recruit communication chiefs to reflect their place. Think about Brighton: it’s got character, buzz, energy, restlessness, flair, ambition, youthfulness, creativity. All of this is true of John.”

 

On moving to Brighton, John joined a team that “hadn’t been taken seriously and had had no head of comms for two years so they’d rowed their own boat. Credit to them.”

 

With no predecessor, John saw the opportunity to shape something. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. He set about reviewing the comms team, benchmarking it against other similar-sized councils. He tested its skill sets and found it to be underperforming. “It wasn’t that they were poor – quite the opposite. They just hadn’t had anyone developing their skills.”

 

He remembers presenting the report: “It did not go down well. On reflection, I should have said it better. Being Australian, I’m used to being fairly robust. But I should have been more subtle, less confrontational. It upset lot of people. On reflection, I learnt a lot about how to understand people better.”

 

The report, he says, was stark and brutal. “It was interpreted that I was calling everyone rubbish. I can’t say sorry enough to the team. I didn’t mean that at all.”

But he was determined to fix the deficiencies in skills. He brought in new people to head up key functions and replaced the ad hoc approach with a more proactive, campaign-based strategy.

This, he says, was centred on research. “We ran focus groups to find out what residents thought and to map people’s perceptions. That way, we could feed back to the policy shapers and say ‘These are the issues that people care about. Do this and our reputation will go up.’”

 

A communication review has seen spending targeted towards influencing the key reputation drivers, and cutting the rest. Advertising contracts are being renegotiated and John predicts potential savings of £1 million over two years.

 

John is also seeking to add value by unifying the overlapping activities of different agencies. “We run campaigns to tackle obesity. So do the NHS and others. Why should we all compete in a congested media space? Why not come together and create unified campaigns with a shared purpose and outcomes? Then we all have more firepower.”

 

Internally, he’s leading a transformation programme to replace the traditional hierarchical approach of top-down silos with a more integrated model that focuses on outcomes. “I don’t mean fixing lampposts,” he says. “I mean: if an outcome is ‘happiness’, then we focus on which services can help deliver that. So we start with the residents’ need, then look at the resources we have that can be aligned to achieve that.”

 

In essence, John has changed the function of communications from being a standalone department to being advisers to senior management. And establishing the team as essential components in the council will have stood it in good stead.

 

“Without doubt, the whole of the public sector will face constrained finances,” he says. “So part of the restructuring was to make the organisation see the value of comms. If we hadn’t, it would have been much easier to get the chop. In order to be fit for purpose, we’ve had to show we’re driving the reputation agenda for the authority as a whole. I think we’ve done that.”

Now more than two years into the role and with several lessons learnt, it may be that John is softening his comms style.

 

Then again, maybe not. As Vice Chair of the Local Government CIPR Group Committee, he’s organising the CIPR’s Local Public Services Conference in Brighton this October. His keynote speaker? Alistair Campbell.