Global jet setting, tough meetings, a lack a sleep and ever diminishing time spent with friends and loved-ones, the tell-tale signs of executive stress are rife across the shipping industry, but for one young CEO, the strains of everyday life became a near deadly warning to re-evaluate his lifestyle.
Lars Juhl, CEO of the Danish head-quartered company Scan-Trans Chartering, is one of the original founders of Scan-Trans Worldwide, which was created in 1993. With a busy lifestyle, juggling work and frequent business travel with his home life as a husband and father, Mr Juhl rarely took time to relax but 2008 brought a new and unprecedented layer of stress to the company, as the recession got its claws into the shipping industry. If this didn’t bring enough additional pressures, in May 2008, the company’s 3,800 dwt multipurpose vessel Amiya Scan was captured by pirates, who made a ransom demand for $3million, later reduced to $1m.
The vessel was carrying a knockdown oil rig and four Russian and five Filipino seafarers was eventually returned after 30 days, but only after Scan-Trans had spent $5m total on recovery costs, having to hire armed guards to smuggle the ransom money into Nairobi, and having to hire a plane and tugboat to deliver the ransom money, which weighed a hefty 48kg – a complex process which took 10 days to complete.
This extended period of stress took its toll on Mr Juhl’s health and his hectic working life continued, until last year, as Mr Juhl himself puts it: “On 31st October 2011, I died.” Having suffered a cardiac arrest, Mr Juhl collapsed with his wife at his side and although she had little knowledge of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), she successfully worked to bring him back.
