NEAL MERNOCK was only weeks into his new job as managing director of Silentnight Beds when a boardroom battle erupted over him.

Bill Simpson, the chief executive of the Silentnight group who recruited him, was locked in a bitter fight for control with the family of the firm's founder.

With the Clarke family owning just over half of the shares, the result was inevitable. Bill Simpson, along with chairman Keith Ackroyd, left the business with a golden handshake and a new regime was installed at the group's Salterforth headquarters.

Just a mile down the road at Barnoldswick, Neal must have wondered what he had let himself in for.

"It was a difficult time," he recalled. "I had only been here for about six to eight weeks when I became aware that the shareholders were not happy after a third profits warning.

"Various manoeuvres were taking place and the outcome was the resignation of the chairman and chief executive.

"I just report to a different group chief executive now."

Silentnight Beds, which employs almost 800 people in Barnoldswick, is the star performer in the group and is Britain's best-known beds brand.

As an advertising man, he acknowledges the ingenuity and investment that has gone into the 'duck and hippo' campaign. And he is promising to build on that success with a series of new product launches and continued investment in high-profile advertising. "I have inherited a good team and a business that has been growing," he said. "My task is to accelerate that growth."

If his earlier career is any indication, there is every chance he will succeed. At his previous job as managing director of Rexan, a drinks packaging firm in Houghton-le-Spring in the North East, he was the victim of his own success.

"We faced a massive challenge as the major competitor to Tetrapak," he explained. "After only two years, we grew the business to the extent that it had its most successful year in its 30-year history. It was so successful, the owners decided to sell it and the new owners wanted to move their own management in."

Faced with a range of job offers from China, London and Barnoldswick, he opted for the old Lancashire mill town.

Throughout most of his career, he has lived in Harrogate and commuting daily to Barnoldswick takes just 45 minutes - just half his journey time to the North East.

Neal has spent most of his working life in the fast lane. After graduating from Leicester University with an engineering degree, a short spell as a civil engineer working on an oil pipeline convinced him to look for a career in advertising.

He joined the fertiliser company Fisons in East Anglia where he spent three years under an "inspirational sales and marketing director" learning about brand management.

Wirral-born Neal returned to the North West to work for the food manufacturing arm of the Bibby group in Liverpool.

His next move was to the Manchester office of advertising agency Graham Poulter. Within six months, he had been promoted to account director at the Leeds office where he worked on the Fox's Biscuits account and handled the advertising for the National Garden Festival in Gateshead.

Five years later, he became managing director of the agency which he went on to develop as the biggest outside of London, working on blue chip accounts such as Sharpe, Trebor Bassett and McCain Frozen Foods.

Along with two colleagues, he set up his own agency, Hacker Mernock Hemingway. "We decided to form our own business and do it for ourselves rather than someone else," he recalled.

"After four years, I got rather bored with it and wanted to go back to the client side in manufacturing industry."

He joined the United Biscuits group as marketing director of KP Nuts where he spent six months before being appointed managing director of Derwent Valley Foods in Consett, County Durham.

After he had been promoted to the board of KP Foods, United Biscuits changed ownership and a management shake-up meant all the top jobs were in London. Keen to keep his family in Harrogate, he turned his back on KP and took the job with Rexan.

Now firmly established at Barnoldswick, Neal is enjoying the challenge of a working day that frequently stretches over the 12-hour mark.

His sporting days behind him, he is now an avid spectator of sports on TV, particularly his beloved Liverpool FC.

But for the moment, he is more focused on keeping Silentnight at the top of the 'beds league' than seeing the Scousers climb the Premiership.