A week before his seventeenth birthday, Darren Leigh was handed a department and four people to run. The department was the purchase ledger at Charnos, a Derbyshire hosiery and lingerie manufacturer with three factories on one site and around 500 machinists in each.
“So just before I turned into an adult, I was a manager of four people,” he says. “I became a manager before I became a man.” Today he is group chief executive of Unipart, the logistics, manufacturing and supply chain group, having joined as chief financial officer in April 2020 and taken the top job in October 2022.
The Route In
Leigh left school at 16 and took a place on a Youth Training Scheme, the government programme that ran for only a couple of years and of which he thinks he was in the first cohort. He grew up in Ilkeston, an old mining market town in Derbyshire, in a working-class home, and finished the late 1980s wanting one thing.
“I just wanted to get going, to leave school and start work,” he says in an interview with the recruitment specialist Linda Walmsley, published on 28 July. “I wouldn’t say that I had a grand master plan, other than I just knew that my career was going to be in business.”
Unemployment was high, but he was offered five jobs as a school leaver. The one he took was not the best paid or the most obvious. It was the one that came with structure. “It provided me with what I was looking for, that structured learning, in a real-world environment; it also gave me some real, solid business foundations.” His employer let him take time off in his first month to go back to school and finish his GCSEs.
The work itself was unglamorous. “I did the filing, answered the telephone, and I guess I learned the most important skill of all, which was making tea for everybody in the office.” Within a year he had the ledger department. The detail he remembers is the walk: “I used to have to walk through the factory in my shiny silver suit aged 16 and find paperwork such as orders and invoices and get them signed. Let’s just say hundreds of machinists helped with my character building.”
What Two Crashes Taught Him
The finance career that followed took him through Rolls-Royce, Marconi, Inchcape, Freightliner, The Sage Group and Finastra, across software, logistics, automotive, rail and manufacturing. Two of those stops matter more than the others in his own account, and both were downturns.
At Marconi he lived through an entire economic cycle inside a few years, from the dot-com boom to the crash. At Inchcape he ran through the recession of 2008 and 2009, and came out of it leading the business to peak operating margins after what he calls an unprecedented collapse of local markets.
The lesson he draws is deliberately unromantic. “It’s really important to develop a clear strategy and to execute that strategy with focus and discipline,” he says. “If you do that in the right way, no matter what the circumstances are, you can emerge the other side of those challenges as a business even leaner and stronger than you were before.”
That is a claim worth testing rather than accepting, because plenty of businesses execute a clear strategy with discipline and still do not survive a market collapse. What his account actually describes is narrower and more useful: having a strategy at all is what makes disciplined choices possible under pressure, and firms that enter a downturn without one tend to make reactive cuts that cost them the recovery.
Confidence as a Working Requirement
Alongside resilience he puts self-confidence, and he borrows a definition for it. “Warren Buffett describes it as an internal locus of control,” he says. “That’s about being confident in your own ability to draw the right conclusions without relying on everybody else to guide you and tell you what to do.”
He has a specific reason for valuing it. “I remember early in my career, a lot of people telling me that if I didn’t go to university full time, I’d hit a ceiling and I wouldn’t be able to go beyond a certain point. I’m really glad that I didn’t listen to them.”
For a business owner that is more than a personal anecdote. The advice he received was the consensus of the time and it was wrong about him. Anyone recruiting on credentials alone is applying the same filter that would have screened out a future group chief executive at 16.
Mentors, Named
Leigh is precise about who shaped him, which is less common in leadership interviews than it should be. His first manager and mentor was Derek Henshaw, now dead, who he credits with giving him the confidence at 17 to take on significant transformation work.
At Marconi he worked with the chief financial officer Steve Hare, now chief executive of Sage plc. “He was a real inspiration for me because I was a budding CFO myself. He was a leader who inspired others and still does, someone that clearly articulates a vision about the future, and he’s excellent at leading teams on that journey.”
The type he says he responds to is consistent: leaders “that can combine strategic vision coupled with disciplined execution”. Vision on its own does not appear in his list.
Why He Took the Unipart Job
Asked what drew him to Unipart, he gives the culture rather than the role. The company has a codified operating philosophy called The Unipart Way, and Leigh’s point is partly that it is codified at all.
“It’s unlike anything else that I’ve ever experienced in other companies. The fact that it even has a name is unique,” he says. “It’s a framework by which we kind of guide our employees to think, work, and behave in a way that is empowering and allows them to deliver continuous improvement, for our customers, for the company, and for themselves.”
Continuous improvement as a formal discipline is a manufacturing tradition, and it has a measurable point. Firms that run it well capture small productivity gains repeatedly rather than waiting for a single transformation programme. That matters in a sector where, as the latest survey data shows, output is growing while smaller manufacturers struggle to keep pace. The difference between firms in the same market is increasingly operational rather than strategic.
How He Describes Himself
Asked to characterise himself, he offers five words: driven, curious, strategic, and then, hyphenated, hard-working and people-oriented.
The last one comes with a qualification that is the most quotable line in the interview. “As a business leader, I like to look beyond the P&L account and the balance sheet, to the people who make the numbers possible.”
Coming from a career finance executive, and from someone whose first management job was the purchase ledger, that reads less as a platitude than as a correction to a professional default. He also served as a governor and finance committee member at Sandringham School.
What a Business Owner Might Take From It
Three things in this account travel beyond one career.
The first is that the job Leigh chose at 16 was chosen for its training structure, and it produced a manager within a year. Firms competing for young staff against better-paying rivals have a real offer available to them, and it is not money.
The second is that both of his formative experiences were downturns, and in both he was working inside a strategy rather than improvising against one. That is a question a business can answer before it needs to.
The third is the ceiling he was told about and did not hit. It cost the people who told him nothing to be wrong. It would have cost an employer a chief executive.
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