Page 3 Profile: Liv Garfield, Chief Executive, Severn Trent

Liv Garfield, Chief Executive, Severn Trent (PA)

She looks like a smart cookie...

She sure is. Liv Garfield has just been appointed as the next chief exec of Severn Trent. And it’ll be a tough job. The water company has 4.2 million customers, and this year rejected a £5.3 billion takeover offer. And that’s not the half of it. The 38 year-old, go-getting mother-of-two and boss of BT’s Openreach is set to become one of the youngest-ever FTSE 100 chief executives in the UK.

Crikey! She sure knows how to make her mark.

Garfield was ranked in Fortune’s top 10 global hot shots. And ahe will become only the fourth female FTSE100 boss when she replaces Tony Ray next spring. There are currently three women who top FTSE100 companies – EasyJet’s Carolyn McCall, Burberry’s Angela Ahrendts and Imeperial Tobacco’s Alison Cooper. Garfield is the youngest.

Quite a game-changer then?

Liv is set to earn £650,000 in a pay package that could be worth £2.4 million. Not only that, the busy mother is also a non-executive director of Tesco.

How does she do all that?

With a lot of determination and nous. She once told her local newspaper that she cannot abide people who faff. Definitely not a time-waster. She read German and French at Cambridge, where she met her future husband, Morgan. Starting off at Accenture, she worked for six years with the management consultancy, before moving to BT where she rolled out their broadband model.

Is there anything she can’t do?

Doesn’t seem so… Though, she did admit, in an interview with the York Press that, apparently, her worst decision ever was buying a sports car when she was pregnant. So, she couldn’t fit in it.