Three Things with Sebastian James, former CEO of Boots UK

Sebastian James has the CV built for success but as he explains in this episode, being smart wasn't enough. He opens up about the early businesses that limped along in "living dead" territory, the toll it took, and how an unlikely first day at Mothercare set him on a path to leading Dixons Carphone and then Boots UK through a major turnaround. As always, the episode closes with his Three Things.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

Not very laudably, I would say. My motivation was I wanted to be famous. I saw myself as a kind of Steve Jobs entrepreneur type thing, did an entrepreneurial thing, turned out I was absolutely crap at it. I am in awe of those people because it takes a kind of special Hutzpah to start with nothing and make something. I was too frightened because that now I have 34,000 people. You're suddenly going, Cranky, if I cock this up, that's quite a big responsibility. Some people spend their entire lives building, you know, dams, and it takes 20 years to build the thing, by which time you've retired. But I really love the immediacy of you make a decision and something happens, and people, real people, walk into your shop and behave differently as a result. In my view, the the very best thing you can do to make people really happy to work for you is win.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

One, two, three, hello, I'm Jamie Mitchell, and welcome to Three Things, the podcast where we try to unlock the secrets of the founder mindset in conversations with successful entrepreneurs and business leaders. And where we insist on leaving with three things, three pieces of practical advice that you can implement in your business today. Today's conversation is a fascinating one. Sebastian James is, by his own admission, a failed entrepreneur who went on to become one of the UK's most successful retail CEOs, most latterly, of course, as the CEO of Boots. But before we start the conversation, I first of all owe Sebastian and you an apology for my twelve months of silence. Seb and I recorded this a year ago, about three weeks before my family and I packed our bags and moved to Australia. I shan't bore you with the reasons why it's taken me so long to edit this podcast, but rest assured the conversation we had was timeless and just as relevant today. Now that we're all settled into our new home, you can expect more podcasts in the coming months. But in the meantime, sit back and enjoy this conversation with the fascinating and very enjoyable company of Sebastian James.

SPEAKER_03 2:21

Do you like football?

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Not at all.

SPEAKER_03 2:23

Great. Uh not at all. I know nothing about football. Uh there were used to be two things that that everybody liked that I didn't like, and I now like one of them, and they were dogs and football. How could you not have liked dogs? Well, I didn't like dogs, but now I love dogs. And I've got dog is my screensaver, two dogs, names, types. Molly and Nell, White Wheaton Terriers, really sweet, lockdown dogs, adore them, totally get dogs. Still don't get football.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Great. They say football is a game of two halves. Yes, very true. Is a quote that may mean nothing to you. How many halves has your career had? About eight.

SPEAKER_03 2:59

Um about eight, of which about half of them have been more or less a total disaster. A game of two halves. Yeah, a game of two years. Yeah, about half of them. Fundamentally, um when I stopped being a consultant and doing the sort of very conventional path pattern, I saw myself as a kind of you know, Steve Jobs entrepreneur type thing. Did an entrepreneurial thing, turned out I was absolutely crap at it, and then went into uh corporate life. I'll let you get away with that. It's such a I was crap at Yes, no, no, crap. Crap is the I I've I've thought about the word carefully, and that's it.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

Um and uh So this I will we I want to get our conversation to the essence of entrepreneurship, but actually I'm not so interested in it in the founding a business part sense as it is the mindset. But but let's let's talk about what are you crap at?

SPEAKER_03 3:50

I am in awe of entrepreneurs, people who set up businesses, people who set up uh businesses like the ones you've run. I am in awe of those people because it takes a kind of special Hutzpah to start with nothing and make something. And actually, I think that is incredibly difficult. As it turns out, I don't have that set of skills.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

So let's just run through the list. You started with your paint business.

SPEAKER_03 4:15

So left BCG, um, went out to start a funded search company, and we had this tiny, really grotty office up 72 flights of stairs on Victoria Street. Oh, yeah, you came. Uh that was the beginning, and then we bought this business that made paint brushes because uh I had this kind of you know, this idea that industrial was the way to go. I mean, absolute nonsense.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

And we bought this business in Belfast. Although theoretically, less former consultants with business school degrees would have been going into that.

SPEAKER_03 4:43

That was definitely the thought. We've got the smarts, blah, blah, blah. But actually, it turns out that it's not really smart. I think the interesting thing about the all of the entrepreneurs who've been successful that I've met is it's not really brain power that has fuelled the success of their business. Um, for me, it's about a kind of relentless energy, an inability at any moment to say this isn't going to work. And I'm I think I'm too self-reflective and probably not um I probably don't have enough ego to, although you know I've got plenty, but to uh to really be able to say when when things go wrong or when it doesn't move, there is no way in which this fails. I get I get too reflective on that.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

You the this was like a 13-14 year period of your early. Uh not quite. It was I think probably no, not even. I think I think in the end it was about six six. I'm not talking just paint, by the way. Oh, okay, yes. No, all of the people. It was about 10 or 12 years, yeah. And what was your motivation?

SPEAKER_03 5:46

Um not very laudably, I would say. My motivation was I wanted to be famous.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

And did you know that was your motivation?

SPEAKER_03 5:53

Yes. I mean and when I went to INSIA, I had a I had an offer from um Weber Douglas that was in those days that was a well-known acting school. And uh sorry? Uh yeah, so I had a I had a bifurcation in my thing. I was either going to I had a moment where I was either going to go to NSIAD, business school, or acting school. Did you not know that? And and I mean it makes perfect sense. Uh and uh so I went to and in making that decision, you can imagine which way my parents were encouraging me to go. And um and I went to see an acting coach and I did my stuff for them. And they said, Look, you'll probably get work. You know, you might be the aging rocker who dies at the beginning of midsummer murders, you know, and so on, but you're not, in my humble opinion, Lawrence Olivier. And armed with that slightly disappointing information, I went to business school.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

So that was interesting that you But it was all in the service of you know trying to be I don't know why it was at all attractive as an idea, but I mean it's a it's an odd thing, it's a thing that is quite prevalent, has been sort of, you know, social media has made this a you know. Well everybody's an actor. Everybody is a but to be famous as a driver and to and to own that and say this is something I want. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:03

I mean I'm not particularly proud of it as a goal, you know, as opposed to curing world hunger or solving actually I have more I think I have more social goals now than I certainly I did then. Um but uh what do you think, Dre? Uh I do know I really don't know. There was something about the validation that came from public acclaim that I I I know if I had been properly mentally well, it wouldn't I wouldn't have given a damn about that. But for sure. But but um my particular quirks were such that that seemed enormously appealing to me. So having not done it, there is basically four ways you can be famous in the world. You can be an entertainer, you can be a um you can be a politician, um, you can be a sports star, out of the question for me, an old fatty. Uh, or you can be a very successful business person and particularly entrepreneur. So uh so having having the first three having been rejected for obvious reasons, the fourth one was the only one open, and I had a go at that. And uh, like I say, it turned out I was crap at it.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

We'll t we'll t we'll talk some more about it in a second, but I just just before we leave this question, because I'm fascinated by uh motivation and ambition and and how it changes through life and these conversations that we can have at this stage of life and about it. Uh what were you at school? Uh were you a show off? Were you a bullied centre stage? You were bullied. Bullied, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

No, I was very miserable at school. I was very miserable at school, and and I was pretty repellent, to be honest. Um I wasn't I was pretty repellent and crap at sport and you know, all the things that you that that have value when you are 13, 14, 15, um, which fortunately have very little value later. Uh I was not good at any of them. And so I was not happy at school. I wouldn't have a good happy school life. And perhaps that was another motivation. Just on the school topic, I went to I went to a reunion, which I would never dream of doing for a set of reasons I won't bore you with. I went to a reunion at my school about probably about 10 years ago. And first it was a bit weird being in a room of 250 men with no women. But what was interesting to me was that half the men in that room considered that their lives were a success, and the other half considered their lives were a failure. And and there wasn't very much correlation between the objective level of success of any of them and the way in which they'd internalized the the trajectory of their lives. And and it was it was very telling for me, and I think actually quite an education to realise that happiness is a choice, and you know how you internalize your own life and career is a is a choice.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

I'm amazed that as a reunion of people you haven't met for so long it was that easy to pick out the people who considered themselves a failure.

SPEAKER_03 9:39

Listen, as you walk through life as people you meet, you you can tell immediately whether they are satisfied with the way things turned out for them, particularly as we reach you know our 50s, um, by which time you've you know you either consider that you've reached escape velocity in your own eyes or you don't, right? And and I think you can spot it within ten seconds.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

I look at and back to these entrepreneurs that you that you admire, that when I wrote it down what you said, the relentless energy and belief is driven by some pretty dark demons. Yes. And perhaps you say you're you didn't have the relentless energy, the motivation. Um perhaps you just didn't have Well, it was okay.

SPEAKER_03 10:22

I didn't like school, but you know, so slightly stopped whining about it. It was fine. I I I didn't have an unhappy childhood. I was grew up in a nice uh you know middle class home with with with two parents who loved each other, and you do you know what I mean? I had a very, very conventional background. I I wonder whether slightly everybody has some trauma, right? And uh everybody has some trauma. And the point is if you then become famous, that is going to be an important part of your autobiography.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

But the ones who achieve something extraordinary and then want to do it again are the ones that I I get really interested in. Uh in terms of that, because to put that relentless energy into an entrepreneurial venture and you know the 20-hour days and the health problems that you must be giving yourself, carrying that amount of stress and all the rest of it, and then want to do it again, I find that quite well I I mean the point is all for all of us, working is a release is a pleasure most of the time, is a if we're lucky, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:16

If we're lucky, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Um well certainly if we're lucky and we and we we get to do things that we know ourselves and find out what our energy is. Yeah, you can't qualifications.

SPEAKER_03 11:26

But but the um but yeah, I in that sense I've been very lucky, which is most of the time I've enjoyed working and I couldn't imagine not working. I I met I went to dinner the other night and there was I was sitting next to him like my age, and he said, you know what, I'm gonna retire because I'm spent. I was like, what in God's name are you talking about? You know, you're in your late 50s, you just should be just getting going.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

It it's it it's I'm very, very intrigued by Yeah, but you see, I'm I I I I'm I'm working, but I'm I have been part-time ever since I went plural, and I consider that very different. And you know, if I was to ever retire, it'd be doing what I'm doing. Which is working part-time and all the rest of it. There was to for me a very large element of I just it takes too much out of me the the job. Leadership anyway, takes too much out of me to muster up the uh the energy to do it again.

SPEAKER_03 12:18

I find it energizing. I think if I didn't do it, I would quickly fall into a kind of slough of despond.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Which is very common for people in retirement, by the way. Uh no, sure.

SPEAKER_03 12:27

I would then croak it. But if you write it up, I mean they often croak, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:30

If you didn't have a job.

SPEAKER_03 12:34

If I didn't have a full-time uh full-time, if I didn't have if most of my time was not taken up thinking about some external problem, whether it be a leadership problem or a or a business problem or a business is what I've chosen, so it could be that, it could be anything else.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

But I think I would I would very quickly go into a depression. In that sense, we'd be very similar. A problem to solve a day is a good one. I found myself when I was selling the house uh recently solving the problem of installing my own electric gate motor because mine had failed and I didn't want to pay the cowboy who wanted to charge me. That was a fabulous problem to solve. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not going to turn it into a I would be absolutely terrible at that too.

SPEAKER_03 13:18

It would definitely open the wrong way if I was if I was installing your gate.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

I don't want to leave this conversation about entrepreneurship with a with a sense that somehow entrepreneurs have to uh have have dark demons to succeed. I don't believe that. I but I believe some of the most extraordinary ones do. So let's go back to um your entrepreneurial career a second. You've done lots of different ventures. So you you did a sort of small buyout of an SME.

SPEAKER_03 13:44

Yeah, we bought two or three in the end. Uh we bought rolled it up a bit, we sold it, it was okay. I didn't make any money, shareholders did okay. It was okay. That one was okay, but it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't I wasn't gonna build, you know, firstly I'd chosen to go into the paintbrush business, which is not an unerring route to being world famous. Uh the number of world famous paintbrush manufacturers, I think, is limited. I question the world famous motivation given that. Well, I you're right. I should have thought about it harder, really. But anyway, so did that for a bit. It was fine. Six years, too long, right? Too long. Yeah. But I learnt a lot of things about, I mean, it is incredibly easy for a lot of entrepreneurs, and this does happen to a lot of entrepreneurs. They leave business school, they leave university, they they leave, they do, you know, they decide, they leave their jobs, and they decide they want to be entrepreneurs. They then end up in a business that becomes the living dead, and they find themselves spending years and years and years. So my son Arthur's just left his VC house to go and join one of their investments. And it's a long shot, right? Yeah, I mean, it could be amazing, but it's a long shot. And what I said to them is that. To have your eyes open on that. Well, also give yourself a time limit and never get in the trap of saying just six more months. Because any given business in that situation will always be on the cusp of you know, of some great success.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

The the training you would have got, that you were a former management consultant, you'd worked at both Bain and BCG, you've been to NCAD, you you had all the the blueprint of this thing called business, and then you actually ran nitty-gritty business. Now I think that would have been great training. Yeah, no, I think it would be. Because a lot of these entrepreneurs who go startup tech companies only start having to think like that when the shit hits the fan and they're going, oh, what's cash flow again? Yeah, how do what cash flow is what? Working capital is it. The fascinating thing about very big businesses is I'd like to interrupt this conversation just for a few seconds to tell you about the people at All Together who make this podcast possible. Running a business can be lonely, even at the best of times. It's difficult to know who to turn to for advice you can really trust. That's why we created All Together. We're a community of founders and business leaders who've all been there, and we're here to help. With our low-cost membership, you'll get one-to-one advice from over 100 exceptional volunteer advisors. People who build businesses like Octopus Energy, Innocent Rated People and Yo Sushi. You'll also unlock exclusive events, a network of peers, and for gold members access to coached mastermind groups to accelerate your journey. It's practical human support. No selling, no agenda. Just people who get it and want to help. Head over to altogether.company to find out more. Now back to the conversation.

SPEAKER_03 16:14

The fascinating thing about very big businesses is they don't think about cash very often. Whereas little businesses have to think about cash all the time. All the time. And um and I rem I I mean I I I don't think I knew really what a cash flow was. Sure. When I left in Siad, when I left BCG. No, because you're all you're talking about grand, you know, you're drawing everything with an 11b pencil, and and actually, in the end, it's about the two-h pencil that that says I've got just enough money. My big biggest learning on that was when I joined Mothercare. And I joined, and I because I I'd looked to try and buy Mother Care because it was very inexpensive. And I was working with a with a slightly loopy lady called Anne Iverson, uh, who had run it in the past, and she and I were gonna buy it. We we'd we'd you know, we got some backing, we thought. Um, and I called the then chairman and I said, Look, uh, I'd be interested in buying your company. He said, Look, I we've just appointed uh Ben Gordon as chief executive, and and Ben, I'm gonna give him his head unless you want to make a crazy offer. The venture capital company that we were with, the private equity company we were with, said, Look, we're not gonna make a crazy offer. So I rang Ben and I said, Look, I'm I I've just spent six months looking about looking at your company and building a plan. Yeah, I'm about to shredded. Would you like to see it? So he said, Yeah, I'd love to. So I went up to um Watford and I showed it to him and he said, Well, would you like to looks like a pretty good plan, would you like to help me do it? And so I actually joined Mothercare as strategy director.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Um is that the sliding door moment, do you think? I think so.

SPEAKER_03 17:46

Yeah, I think so. You know, there are lots of people who spend their entire lives looking at opportunities and never actually doing it. Sure. And I'm very grateful to Ben because he said, Look, why don't you come and uh help me? Anyway, I joined. Yes. And Ben said, That's really glad you're here. I've got to tell you one thing that you really ought to know, which is that we can't make payroll on Thursday. Did he tell you that on the first day?

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Uh yeah, Monday morning.

SPEAKER_03 18:06

Um and so so we crafted you and I, we crafted a letter to all of our suppliers that was to go out that afternoon, which read, uh, in common with industry practice, we are moving our payment terms from 30 to 60 days. And you're sincerely Ben Gordon. And and uh about 80% of our suppliers sort of didn't respond, and that was fine. Um and suddenly we got ourselves, you know, 30 days of payroll. Retail business has a lot of money. We could make payroll, uh, but but sorry, but it wasn't gonna pay, obviously it wasn't gonna pay off until the end of the month. So we had a problem for that Thursday. And so the next thing we did is we um I discovered that that although we collected the the paper money, it was still quite cash-oriented business then, the paper money every day, and it was taken back to the Bank of England or whatever, the coins were never collected. And so we had about Oh my god, a float of hammock. We had about 800,000 pounds in coins uh sitting in safes up and down the country. And how did you find that? Uh so we we I think somebody told me, or someone said, Well, we got I think there's some coins. And and and so and so we sent a van, the the the bank, we went to the bank and they said, We'll give you 80p in the pound, we'll collect them all. And so they collect they collected them all up and they could put them through an enormous machine, and we had just enough to make our payroll, and then the following month we had the extra month of payables, so we were sort of okay.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

Did did that feel familiar from your paintbrush days? Not at all. This was at all.

SPEAKER_03 19:34

This was a sort of this I mean that was properly, you know, properly emergency. I I had never ever seen anything like it.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

It was it. Did you ever get to go back to that strategy, that business plan that you'd written and then?

SPEAKER_03 19:46

Then we did, and we executed it, I think, uh pretty well. Share price moved up uh eightfold, so it was it did really I mean from a very low base, roughly bust, and then and it was trading accordingly. And then and then as we pull, I know we have to solve a number of issues, operational issues. What I realized at that moment was that what I love doing is taking really gnarly complicated things and fixing them. And that actually interestingly, you don't get complexity until a business, real complexity until a business gets quite big. The sort of relentless drive that you need to go from naught to 100 million is is actually it's a relatively simple set of problems and it just needs push. Whereas whereas uh uh a large business suddenly need has enormously complicated problems, maybe people problems, cash problems. Uh those that what's really fun is that Rubik's Cube, which which is um which it turns out is pretty much the only thing I'm good at.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

So you're at you're at Mothercare your strategy director?

SPEAKER_03 20:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Uh the next move was so at this time you're beginning to go, oh maybe this corporate life is okay.

SPEAKER_03 20:56

So then I took a Is that right? Yeah, then I took a wrong turn. Uh another one. And uh and I went off to start a retail business with my friend Ernesto Schmidt. Um and we started So you weren't at this point convinced.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

No, no, you weren't convinced.

SPEAKER_03 21:10

What's this goal of being a few years?

SPEAKER_01 21:11

This was a startup. Yeah. Um you went and persuaded I think Apax. Yeah, Apex. To give you quite a lot of money. To do what?

SPEAKER_03 21:19

Not an enormous amount, but quite a lot. Um To do what? To do what? I know. I'm just gonna let you tell us. Uh and I I mean I'm actually blushing. Um you can't see me, but I'm actually blushing. That that uh to set up a uh a DVD retail business um at a time when DVD was relatively neat. Shop as well. Yeah, shop like not for physical shop. Well, there was no no there wasn't really any online at that time. And there were at that time, there were about 800 UK.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Where had Netflix started?

SPEAKER_03 21:47

Uh no, yes, Netflix existed, but it was a different model. It was it was the DVD it was subscription DVD, so you got sent in the post.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

DVDs were flying off the shelves, and there was no spot. Specialist retailer. There was a good rationale.

SPEAKER_03 22:04

We thought water stands for DVDs, we would have the proper back catalogue, this would be movie buffs, you know, you'd go in there and you'd have a different you'd have a different approach and so on. And one of the only thing that we were really scared of was that one day you might be able to actually download a movie. So uh never been done. And so we went, we did a lot of due diligence on this. We talked to Forrester.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

And by then you'd seen a lot of internet companies just fall over and think it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_03 22:29

Well, A, and B, they were and B and B, you know, a really big enterprise-level broadband was running at half a megabit. So I I so we went to see Forrester, we went to see all the people who were hot in those days in terms of internet specialists, and they said to us, look, it's very simple. The physics of the internet means that it will never be possible to download video content on the internet. It will never be possible. Did they say never? They said you will that I I don't I don't know because I haven't got transcripts. But anyway, what we heard was certainly it will never be possible to download video on So Armed with that reassuring um perspective.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

You opened how many in what amount of time?

SPEAKER_03 23:15

It was extraordinarily operational. Yeah, it was operationally uh and we got quite good at it. I mean we found we got good at finding sites, getting them to believe in us, you know, taking taking good sites.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Did you you your your co-founder with that business was Ernesto Schmidt. A retailer.

SPEAKER_03 23:29

No. No, he was what was his background? Uh also consulting.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

Um So neither of you had actually found sites, develop sites, no, run multi-site operations. Interesting.

SPEAKER_03 23:42

We had a chair who had. We learned quite quickly. It's not that hard.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Very quickly.

unknown 23:48

It's not that hard.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

It's not that hard. No, I'm but in it so I in my one of my worlds, hospitality, I think it's more the the the ability to get it so wrong with site selection and site development. Well, and people and hospitality is a very difficult business. It's a very different shop.

SPEAKER_03 24:06

Although it shares a lot with retail in terms of Well, it does, although retail, remember, what's happening in the store is I mean it was more complicated than boots, but but what's happening in an ordinary retail store is relatively straightforward. You know, you you get stock in, you put it on the shelves, people pick it up, you put they pay for it, and they walk out. In hospitality, you're serving them, you're feeding them.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

There's a lot of people behind the each. You're making the product in the internet. Yeah, you're making the product live, exactly. Um I'm distracted. Uh three years opening a lot of sites, a lot of fun. It was fun. It was fun. I mean, it was fun. When did it stop being fun?

SPEAKER_03 24:36

It stopped being fun when it looked like it was going down the tubes. Uh when was the first inkling? The first inkling two and a half years in. So so two and a half years in, a couple of things happened all at the same time. The first one was every newspaper, it's very hard to remember all this, but every time you bought a newspaper, you've got a DVD clip to the front of it. I don't know if you remember that period. There was a period of like six months when every newspaper would have a free film attached to the front of it. That's how they were going to sell their newspapers. And the problem with that was not that, you know, people weren't buying, because you know, not only a limited number of people were buying that film. The problem was that that was consuming that customer's evening. And I they didn't want to watch two films in an evening, they only want one film, they got one free. So that was a real problem. And the thing the second thing, which actually was more corrosive, was that the big blockbusters, the big supermarkets, Tesco and so on, as their sticker shock would put Harry Potter and the death of death or whatever, uh, would put that in for a tenner. And although it was costing them 18 quid to buy from the from the studio, um, they were putting on a tenner, and that would drive traffic to the supermarket. And so they want obviously they want to sell bananas, they don't want to sell DVDs. But but for us, deep catalogue is great, but I've got to be allowed to make something out of Harry Potter and the Death of Death.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Where was the internet at this point? What was who was selling on it?

SPEAKER_03 25:57

There was a bit of sort of online retail, but but actually we convinced the Amazon would have been pushing out DVDs by then, surely. It was very, very early, right? And we we did consider whether we should do internet.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

And uh such a such a weird statement to hear in this day and age.

SPEAKER_03 26:12

We didn't consider whether we should do this internet thing, but you know, uh we concluded yeah, anyway. We considered whether we should do it.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

We thought it would be a distraction for I mean, you know, it was 99% of the market was physical reading. The experience was meant to be a big part of it. You talked about sort of hiring nerds, maybe you didn't know.

SPEAKER_03 26:27

Yeah, no, we no, we know we did that. We hired film buffs. You did um and so the the experience. What was your inspiration? Who who was doing it? It was Waterstones. It was this idea of enormously diverse content, deep catalogue uh for people who love films. Ernesto adored films and he loved, you know, he liked he liked watching Aki Karismeki, you know, uh impenetrable Finnish films. Uh I personally I like Harry Potter. But uh so we we did hire people with with film knowledge. Of course, we had you know we hired people who are um who were good at dealing with customers, but fundamentally, what what people want when they go in a shop is someone who's nice.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

And uh effectively you just weren't getting the sales density you needed out of your site?

SPEAKER_03 27:05

We started off, took off like a rocket, we were getting really good like for like, it was all great, and then these two phenomena started happening in bulk, and our like for like ground to a halt. We were making very marginal four-wall contributions, i.e., we had half the sites that weren't. Uh and Apex, quite rightly, quite rightly, said, you know what, this is going to be hard bloody yards.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

And they were completely right. You don't see it in venture capital enough, I think, in this country anyway. I think with there's a lot of hope still in in sort of keeping on funding business that you could.

SPEAKER_03 27:37

It's one of the things I've I've um I'm back with private equity now. One of the things I find very relaxing in private equity relative to public markets, or indeed even working for a big um a big global corporation like like WBA is that there is only one metric, and that is how much value are you going to create?

SPEAKER_01 27:55

If I can, I'm gonna just end this story. Business fails, you go into administration, I see horrid.

SPEAKER_03 28:04

That's a horrid process, by the way. Uh I think a bit like every young person should spend one night in police cells, uh, every young person should try and lead a business through uh failure because you learn more about keeping your own emotions in check. I may remember you know waking up in the morning, getting the bath and then you know groaning to to try and uh to to to force myself out of the bath and get into the office, uh, knowing that the livelihoods of what was by then I don't know 1200, 1400 people? I mean a lot, right? Um, at risk. And you know, you start the day with your business failing, and you end the day every day having found a solution to keep it going for another day. And it will probably a week, actually. So you start the week, certainly thinking it's all over. How long was the really tough period? Uh really quite long. I mean, because you're always looking for you know, you carry on trading, and you're allowed to carry on trading, uh, even though you know it's not going well, as long as you think there is a reasonable chance of a solution, and you can always come up with a with a possible solution. And and so Where did your what was the source of your resilience at this point? Well, but partly my family. So Anna was amazing, uh, my wife Anna. She was like, you know what, it's not the end of the world, it doesn't matter. You know, she she put the thing in perspective. You sort of partly believe it, but it's enough, right? It's enough to at least put give some perspective as you go in. Um I had an investor, David Ishag, who to whom I owe an enormous amount. David was an investor. Yeah, he was. Oh, very much so, yeah. He's a great friend.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

Goodness me, will you please give him my best? I haven't seen him in years, but we used to speak all the time.

SPEAKER_03 29:46

He's a properly lovely person, but really fundamentally good person. And he is one of the people, along with Marc Aziri and a few others, who, when it all went horribly wrong, stepped in to help Dina McCallum, another one. Um stepped in to help in the Well, you know, when it all went wrong, and I I really was uh in despair, and I and I remember walking down, you know, once it had all gone wrong, we you know, and and and I was out and blah, blah, blah. And I remember walking down the mile thinking, oh my god, I can't, I don't know, I'm gonna feed the kids, and you know, blah, blah, blah. Dina, Dina put me onto her talent pool so that I was able to earn some money. Oh, you did some consulting with it? I did, yeah. And and David was relentlessly, despite he lost some money with us, was relentlessly um uh positive, helpful forward. And those people you never forget.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Never forget. I I mean I think so how how how bad were you coming out of that? Bad, bad, bad. Because now we we didn't and we don't have time to talk about all the other lovely adventures, but there was a secondhand online book sales marketplace. Um we're not gonna enumerate.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

It did sell. It did sell.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

I remember to Ape. I remember our very first conversation with it. Yeah it did sell to a Libris. Uh to Alibris, yeah, and then they became Ape. Um then we worked together as investors, VCs, deleted uh and tried to transform the world of government procurement uh uh and online publishing? No. Contract publishing. What else did you do there? Anyway, uh so this was venture number so I forgot what the name of your DVD shop was. Silver screen. Silver Screen. It was uh venture number, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:28

I mean there comes a moment where you've done five or six and they don't work, you think I've got to learn something from this, right? You've got to get it. It's not there, miss me. It's not there, miss me, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

It's that little thing which is if you're driving down the road and everyone's from the wrong side of the road, it's probably you. Uh you'd had your taste of of of retail now, because you'd been at mothercare, you you'd now done DVD retail. Were you beginning to start thinking actually a lot of things?

SPEAKER_03 31:50

I loved it right from the get-go. I absolutely loved it. Um Why? Um because um mediacy of retail.

SPEAKER_01 32:01

You you got the sales numbers pinged to your phone every day at Silver Screen.

SPEAKER_03 32:05

No, uh uh I got them every day, but but then when I was at uh at Boots, I got them every hour. Yeah, yeah. So so you and of course you you can't really react in an hour, particularly a company big that that size, but you um What is it about that immediacy? But there's something about because you make a decision uh on the Monday trading meeting, by Tuesday it's implemented, by Wednesday you see the results. And it it there's something very exciting about that. You know, some people spend their entire lives building, you know, dams, and it takes 20 years to get permission, and it takes 20 years to build the thing, by which time you've retired. And some people love that. They love the fact that you know it's all about the very, very long term and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I really love the immediacy of you make a decision and something happens, and people, real people, um, walk into your shop and and behave differently as a result.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

You described I think when you were at Dixon's. I think. You when you before the merger, maybe after the merger, I can't remember. When I we caught up, and and you told me then that you what you really liked was that this that you had these levers. And if you you know you pull them and stuff happens. Yes. Yes, you do. I think that's what you're saying here. It's like things like that. There's a machine that's built.

SPEAKER_03 33:14

Well, I mean, the but the point is, you know, what really one of the very few things you've got to do as a retailer, or indeed any any business that runs distributed assets, and I I run one now, is you've got to try and make the fly-by-wire work. Because the with the the you know, if you take organizations that are really complicated and difficult to manage, like the NHS or whatever, you pull the lever and absolutely nothing happens. Right. The only complicated thing about retail is, or indeed any of these multi-site businesses, is that right now you don't know what the person you employ in Hull is saying to your customer. You don't know. So you've got to create an atmosphere. So it's more like politics, you've got to create an atmosphere where everybody in the organization sort of knows what they ought to be saying and wants to do what they ought to do. And that is tremendously difficult, but also tremendously fulfilling. So you you go, you know, when you go to Hull and you realise as you walk in that the shop is clean. You've probably never been there before, right? You the shop is clean, that customers are smiling, that that people are handing out baskets so that customers don't have to carry the stuff in their arms.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Uh, you know, are they? Please tell me you uh you know the team hadn't been given advance warning, polish that thing overnight, you know, the CEOs come and get the stuff. Inevitably there's a bit of leakage, right? See that all the time.

SPEAKER_03 34:26

So I used I used to I used to every most weekends I would go and see stores unexpectedly. But sometimes you did you did tours which were advertised, and you know, of course, yeah, you get a bit the smell of fresh paint. But but actually, interestingly, the bad ones, and there were bad ones, there have been bad ones throughout my whole career, even when they know you're coming, they're still crap. So you you sort of do know when a a shop isn't right.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

So what's the what what's the secret to we're talking service here, that that element of service that is both personal and informative. And preferably transactional, leading to a sale. Yeah. What's the secret?

SPEAKER_03 35:05

Well, I don't think there's any one secret, it's a million tiny things, of course, but but fundamentally um it's I think it's it's around clarity of what constitutes great service, how what do customers actually want? I think it's about trying to recruit people who are nice people and who fundamentally like talking to other people. And and then the the third one is making it sufficiently pleasant to work in the organization that they want to exercise those skills. So it's it's a combination. Lovely. To know what they want to do, they need to be the sort of people who can do it, and they want to do it. And if they got if you've got those three, on the whole, you know, most people come to work to do a great job, right? Most people. And most people are nice decent people. And most people are nice, decent people. So so you you know you start with some pretty big advantages. You've got to be clear what constitutes great service. I I you know we expect the shop to be clean in this way, we expect it to be stocked in this way, we expect you to You have to keep that stuff relatively short and simple, though, that list of that list of things that you've got. Uh yes, and of course, the the more precise you can be, the closer you get to your ideal, the more but the more complex it is, the less likely you are to get there. So it was a balance complicated retail business company with lots of boots was was at least two and probably three businesses. So it was a pharmacy. So a pharmacy. One business. One very distinct business, healthcare business, regulated, pharmacist, you know, complicated, right? Um responsible for responsible, uh very responsible, and you know, 200 million prescriptions a year, and if you get one wrong, you could really cause some proper damage and you know, really, really careful, right? Uh one was a preventative health and and sort of you know plasters and bits and bobs business, which is sort of what I would call commodity healthcare. And one was a beauty business, and it was the beauty business that was the most exciting from a profitability point of view, but also really fun. And you wanted to totally different people, right? The people who sell beauty need to be beauty obsessed. You know, that was one of the things that we weren't as boots, but we did we were a bit ashamed of our beauty business, and because it wasn't in the roots of the business. Because it well, it it actually is in the roots of the business. Florence Boot started the beauty business in 1936, so it's getting on a bit. Um so there were two things that when I joined the business, that were self-limited beliefs. One one was that the internet was going to cannibalize our business and we shouldn't really invest in it. So we were 1% online at that time. And then the second one was that beauty was basically a male, a patriarchal conspiracy, and that it was morally, there was something morally wrong with the beauty business. So the two areas where Boots I felt was was punching well below its weight were beauty, where we were the number one, despite the fact we didn't have any of the brands that were growing and blah, blah, blah, but we were slipping, we were slipping away. And uh, and then the other one was the internet where we were 1% online. So 1% online in 2019 was shocking, really. And so now the beauty business of boots is is just under a third online. So it's uh it's because of course it's a replacement. You know, if you buy your, I don't know, your clinique moisturizer, and that's the one you want to use. Um the first time you buy it, you go and try it in a shop. The second time you couldn't buy online, why wouldn't you, right? So um so uh so those two things together meant that we could build a much more sustainably profitable and growing business over a period of time. It wasn't not that complicated, right? What didn't you manage to do? What do you know? The list is very long, Jamie. But um a big thing that you really thought needed to be. So I don't know. So one of the things that was very interesting about Boots, and I in six years I don't think I fixed it, um, was the culture. So it was it Boots is the loveliest business on earth, full of the loveliest people on earth. But but the drive to change, changing anything, was incredibly, incredibly slow. And your lever wasn't so well oiled. So the lever wasn't. You yank the lever and not much happened. And and it was definitely true. Um and it was it was bound about with ancient shibboleths, you know. Um it was it was like a sort of old tome. Um and it's just not what Boots does. We know we don't do it that way around here, you know. And and I I was interested in what why that would be. I mean, I'll give you an example. Um when uh when I arrived, uh somebody turned up with all the posters that were due to go into the shops eight weeks hence. And firstly, I said, well, why why on earth are you showing me these? Because I've got really very little to add to it to your posters. But I said, since you're here, they look a bit old-fashioned because they've got these these curvy, sort of 1980s curved edges. So I said, Well, have we thought about you know doing it in a more graphic and more modern way? And uh and they said, Well, we can't do that because that's the boots brand guidelines. So I said, Okay, well, actually, as it happens, the the lady in charge of the boots brand guidelines is is next door, in the office next door. So I'm just gonna go and get out of pop next door, say if you've got a minute, you know. And she came in and we looked at the posters and I said, Do you do you think this would be better in a more modern graphic style? She went, Yeah, no, it'd be much better. I said, Well, why don't we do that then? She said, Well, it's it's the boots brand guidelines. And I said, But but they're not given to us by God. These are not the tablets. And and we then had a we had a silly cult cultural moment where I took the boots brand guidelines, which by the way ran to several volumes, and burnt them ceremonially in the car park. Wow. Uh and and um and we we we rethought the way in which we presented ourselves into a much more contemporary style, which allowed us to then get access to uh to beauty brands. Because one of the problems with the beauty brands is that they're a bit like fashion brands. They say a lot of the new brands, the ordinary and all those people, were saying, No, thanks, boots, will work online and we'll work with with other players.

SPEAKER_01 40:50

Yeah, but then their online sales peter often they come knocking at your door and say we're gonna be able to do it.

SPEAKER_03 40:55

We need distributions. But often that's because their brands are dying at that stage. So you we have to get them on the way up.

SPEAKER_01 40:59

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_03 41:00

And and particularly even some of the brands we work with, I said Estel Order, we had STL order, and we had, you know, we had a number of the SDL order brands.

SPEAKER_01 41:05

But you were not an attractive place for the list necessarily. No, no, because we look like a supermarket and we and we look like a supermarket, and we I'm an aspi aspirational brand. I want to start at the top.

SPEAKER_03 41:13

I want to start at the top, and I want to start in a lovely place, and I'm gonna go work with I'm gonna go work with I don't know, Space NK or So you had to make yourself cooler. So we spent far too much money building in Covent Garden a beautiful concept store. Um and but even there, you know, the the it upstairs it had beautiful brick walls, beautiful old brick walls. And the boots design team were like, well, we've plastered those over. I was like, no, no, leave the brick walls. And and and and uh uh and so we we built this shop and I invited Leonard Lauder, who sadly died last week, and their creative director, John and and the UK team and everyone else said, right, come over and see our beauty, our new boot store. And they had been saying, particularly John had been saying no, no, no, to any of the new brands. Mac, out of the question, you know, etc. And it they came over and at the end of that tour, he said, Okay, I see what you're trying to do. And and we got all the brands.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

Is this a story of success or is it a store Okay, because we started as a the challenge being changing the culture. Yeah, so in this case, in this case, this is a So is the act of burning the Bible.

SPEAKER_03 42:22

Helps. So what's interesting is you can change the culture quite quickly at the top level. Yeah, sure. Um the problem is getting into the permafrost.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

And uh and while I think there are very few examples, I think, around of of actual material culture culture change in large multi-site operations. I think it's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 42:41

Is that true? I think it does happen.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

I think there's a lot There's a a lot of attempts at it.

SPEAKER_03 42:47

But I mean Well, the main thing about culture shape is you can't do it by having a session and then producing a mouse mat or whatever, whatever that may be. Post of the wall.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Or a post of the wall or whatever. You have to live and breathe in every conversation up and down a company for a long time.

SPEAKER_03 43:01

For a long time, exactly. So you have to and remember for since 1843 or whenever how long.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

That was your competition, 1843.

SPEAKER_03 43:07

But but the fascinating thing, of course, is back then Jesse and John Boot were unbelievably entrepreneurial and came up and they they were the first discounter. So if you think back to the history of Boots, right, if you were in domestic service as a ladies' maid or as a housemaid in 1843 and you had a headache, that was tough shit because there was nothing, you couldn't possibly afford the bloke in the top hat who would come around and then prescribe things and it would all be ground up in a thing and delivered to you in little paper, wax, wax paper wraps. That was impossible. The boot insight was to say, actually, I can make these in bulk, I can sell them in shilling rolls, and suddenly, for the first time ever, um that housemaid had a remedy for her headache. And Ditto, Florence Boot, you know, about 50 years later, who said Umrdinary working women cannot afford cosmetics because they come from Paris and so. Used to be sold in bricks. The idea of being the early discounter, completely changing the model, being very radical, et cetera, et cetera. Those things were in the root of the boots, but they had got lost over the years in this notion of we are, you know, we are the healthcare, we have to be super careful because we're a pharmacy. And so we were we were a good pharmacy and a safe pharmacy, but we were amateur retailers because we didn't think fast enough to be good retailers. And and I think I think we were able to make some improvement, right?

SPEAKER_01 44:28

As a leader seeking to change culture, it's it's helpful, and I think I would say it's essential to find authenticity in the things that you're trying to drive the business to. I totally agree. And so and and and the s a good story is also what people remember.

SPEAKER_03 44:43

Yeah, of course. Um so that communication, I mean the the the the way the style of communication, how you do that, and so on, makes an enormous difference. But also physical change. I'm a really big believer in in physical environments. So I I think if you work in a dump, the chance of you being really, really good at customer service is small. Right. And a lot of the other elements are still dumps, right? And so that's the other thing. We upgraded hundreds of shops.

SPEAKER_01 45:10

And did you see that immediate? It's like it's like uh an academy school. It's like you can put the same teachers into a brand new academy school and you get a very different but do you feel do you feel just literally it gives it a lift?

SPEAKER_03 45:20

Yeah. Yeah, so I mean not just not just I mean customers come in. Customers behave differently there, you get you know you get less there.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

That's a very expensive way of changing culture.

SPEAKER_03 45:27

Yeah, incredibly unbelievably expensive, but very important because you know boot the bootstores hadn't been touched for 25 years. So what I found interestingly is that the correlation between how much people like working in an organization and how well it's doing is almost 100%. People people basically like working for a winning team. So I in my view, the the very best thing you can do to make people really happy to work for you is win. Uh and of course it's a circular thing. Win. Win. Win. Win at what? Win. Win. Make be more profitable, more successful, win customers, grow market share. Because they're proud to work for you. Because they're proud to be there.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

So suddenly their mates, when they go home, are saying, Oh, I went to your new booths. Amazing. So not not seeking to make them happy, seeking to make them proud.

SPEAKER_03 46:08

Yeah, I think that's right. I think you want to be, I mean, because I think to some extent the validation you get from being proud of where you work is almost is m certainly more powerful than any kind of you know pious statements made by senior management. Or I I mean I've got one other story from from Boots, because the other thing is that we should never overestimate our own impact. So I um I I I I I've learned that lesson. Every year, every year uh we used to do this lovely thing, which is that people who were still working in the company 50 years on would come to Nottingham and they would they would uh come for a dinner at uh Lenton House, which is the the Boots old house. And um we'd set up a tent and there were quite a lot, quite a lot. I mean, there was probably 40, 50 people in the organization who had worked there for 50 years and were still working there, uh, one for 67 years. Um I met this lovely, lovely lady. We were having drinks before the dinner, and I said, gosh, you must have seen a lot of chief executives over the years. She went, to be honest, I can't remember any of them. Uh at which point you realise you are dust. And that you come and go doesn't make a blind bit of difference.

SPEAKER_01 47:17

So that's interesting. My next question was going to be by this time, you're properly famous. Nah. As famous as you're gonna be as a business person. Well, come on now. You're running a second well-known retail, having one car phone, well, third if you two phases of car phones and uh Dixons. But anyway, uh you're you're you're a famous for a businessman. Well, I get the paper a bit, but it but not not really. No, so still not famous enough. You've you've kind of taken a step back on the fame gathering, I can't. Well Anna.

SPEAKER_03 47:44

Anna, my wife Anna has has made it clear to me that that is the most stupid goal. Well, of course when did you stop caring about it? Um I I stopped I stopped really caring about it probably a decade ago.

SPEAKER_01 47:58

And is that it's not really about the fame as much as it is about the peer group, the the community, the respect.

SPEAKER_03 48:05

Of course, but that but the the curious thing is, of course, that of the people that you that I like and you like and we all like, no one uh half of them don't know what you do, and the other half don't care. And actually, we don't make friends because they are the I mean, well, at least if you're a good decent person, you don't make friends because of what they do. You make friends because you like them. And and at the end of the day, you know, that's that is the goal, and that is that the the the the the what I realized is that the validation I was seeking from that wasn't really valuable. Wasn't really valuable.

SPEAKER_01 48:38

Um I never quite got to the journey from strategy director to CEO of a publicly traded company in the UK. It's still it's still quite a big thing to have failed entrepreneur, in your own words, you're crap at it. I still don't buy it. That very quickly, it seems to me, you're suddenly the CEO of Dixon's.

SPEAKER_03 48:56

It wasn't that quick. Um so I'm very grateful to another person who was unbelievably kind, who was John Bruitt. So John said to me, Would you like to come and work at Tesco? He was at Tesco, he was at Tesco. I had a series of interviews with a number of senior people at Tesco, and in those days, Tesco was a very tough company, very tough, roughy tufty, very successful. One of my interviews, the person I was who was interviewing me let ripped the most gigantic fart in the middle of the interview. I didn't know that was a part of the process. Um, actually, had a giant whoopee cushion. It was so loud, I couldn't stay silent. I went crikey and uh I won't say who it is. Um went on to be a CEO. Um and uh uh and um anyway, it it became pretty clear to me that uh I didn't think I could work with those people. But then John left and was appointed CEO of Dixons, and he was putting together a team and he said How did you know him? Uh from BCG. Okay. And uh and he and he said, Would you like to would you like to come and join the team? And I did, and I loved every second. But uh it's another sort of just to be clear, this is another sort of Yeah, of course. It these are all sliding doors at moments, right? And this is this was a classic sliding doors. Started business development. Um absolutely loved every second of it right from the get-go. Wasn't expecting to, the office was pretty grim, but there was there was opportunity lying around everywhere. And what was interesting believers were working. Um no, they weren't working, they needed to be connected up. Okay, and but connecting them up was really interesting. And then I found a few people who I just adored working with, proper operators who taught me how to operate. The first job was to actually incredibly useful experience, was to build the new shop. So the the shops are all condemned.

SPEAKER_01 50:44

Okay, so here's and so get us a concept for the new shop.

SPEAKER_03 50:46

So get us a concept, build us a new shop. So we did that, unbelievably successful, thank God. Then we did, and then I I I was the architect of uh the only thing I can really point to is of bringing together PC World and Curries into one shop because we used to have PC World and Curries with completely separate organizations, that's the way Stanley set that up. He wanted them to compete, and we would have the trading meeting in Curries, I was in the Curries organization at that time, and our first thing was what did those bastards downstairs do over the weekend? You know, we were all trashing each other and so and and once a quarter the two CEOs would meet, and I had great admiration for both of them in different ways, and it would be like a sort of like Gandalf, you know, there'd be sort of lightning and thunder, and they would then come down with their pronouncements. But fundamentally, we were a loggerheads, and I thought, let's put them in one shop, because then we got you know half the rent or whatever, and and let's put them in one shop, and and and the the the the reaction to that suggestion both Curries and PC World furious at the idea. John Browitt, uh, God bless him, it's like a good idea. We opened in Woking, uh no, Weybridge. We opened in Weybridge with our first combined store. Everything in everybody's power was being done to prevent it from happening, and uh, you know, no people weren't providing us with information we needed. It was, I mean, it was I swear to God, it was a real struggle. We opened, sales went up 80%, and that was the end of the argument. And then all the stores became Curry's PC. Well, we were able to shut off our real estate, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:11

And that's a big that's one of those lovely moments. Yeah, there are very few of them.

SPEAKER_03 52:16

Next job was then I was given the whole services operational back end delivery, installation, etc. Really fun. Really function. I would I would have got very scared by the oh that was that was that I think I hate the back of house. Honestly, that was my best job I've ever had, I think. Really? Yeah, because it was so bad. Okay, it was so bad that uh even making relatively small changes could make a big difference. So I'll give you an example. Um we used to repair tellies. Well, we didn't. We were we were so bad at it, it took up to six months to get your telly repaired. One of the problems was that we would pick out the telly from your house, we'd load it in the back of the lorry with the washing machines and all the other stuff. By the time it got to us, a third of them were broken. Uh so we broke the screen of a third of the tellies, we then sent you a new one. Of course, if you were the lucky ones, we sent you a new one quite quickly. Um the cost of that absolutely astronomical, because that was when tellies were still quite expensive. And so one of my team, one of my team came to me and said, I've got this brilliant idea. Let's come up with a box. And they came up with a box called the Telly Tana, which had which had wheels on it, which incredibly is patented. And um and and we we put the telly in just put the telly in a box. And it didn't. It was a big, you know, foam box with wheels. And our breakage went from 30% to naught. And and you you can imagine the economic effect of that on the all the toes we did was millions of pounds. And so it was that kind of stuff that was super, super, super fun.

SPEAKER_01 53:41

Just for my sake, and we've got to stop soon. I've got one conversation I need to have, and we haven't even talked about your current role. Um, I'm still interested in this rise to the CEO.

SPEAKER_03 53:50

That was just luck. So Pete Williams at Jack Wills, uh I met him somewhere and he said, Look, I'm looking for a CEO to run Jack Wills. And we had a conversation, and I got pretty close to doing it, and I went, I was actually going to tell John that I was leaving to go and do that. And I walked into John's office and he said, and I said, uh I said, you know, we're thank you for making this time. He said, Look, before you start, I need to tell you I'm leaving to go and run Apple Retail, and you're in the frame potentially for the CEO job. So I shut my mouth and uh there were two or three of us in the in the frame for it, and um John Allen, the chairman, rang me on Friday evening saying, Listen, good news, we've decided to give it to you. And I spent the next hour with my head in my hands thinking, Oh God, what have I done? Because I've got to be CEO of this business. And huge business. It's big business, yeah. Eight eight uh twelve billion, something like that. It's big business. Um of revenue.

SPEAKER_01 54:41

It's a big change from the heedy days of your sort of startup.

SPEAKER_03 54:44

Yeah, no, and much, much, much, much more fun. I mean, oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 54:48

Um So you weren't there going, yppee, I've I've done it.

SPEAKER_03 54:51

Do you know not? Because I was too frightened. Um I was too frightened, because that now I have 34,000 people. I mean, boots are 52,000 people, but then you've got 34,000 in Dixons, yeah. Um and boots a lot more. So you you're suddenly going, crikey. Um that's quite a you know, if I cock this up, that's quite a big responsibility. And so I was I was, and again, Anna was totally brilliant, and she was like, you know, you you'll you'll you'll find a way you'll find a way. Yeah. So that was how that's how that happened. And then of course, once you break into that, you then get other ones.

SPEAKER_01 55:29

Um I want to talk about entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_05 55:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:32

I don't want to talk about founding companies entrepreneurship, but we sort of started on and the the sort of tenacity, more the mindset and more the attitude and the skill set, or um I don't know what your business school days taught you about entrepreneurship, if anything, but one of the things I remember vividly was the I think Stevenson definition of entrepreneurship as the pursuit of opportunity without regard to the resources under your control. Terrible words, but basically, success is that thing over there, yeah, and I'm gonna go for it. I'm not gonna be held back by the fact I don't have money, people, skills, yeah, you know. I mean, frankly, taking the CEO job of uh of Dixons was a fairly entrepreneurial.

SPEAKER_03 56:14

No, it wasn't it wasn't because what you've got in big corporations is the opposite. You've got unlimited resources, unlimited assets. You you have the it's more like being uh in charge of an army. You you it's about how you configure and deploy rather than about the relentless goal regardless of the resources you're disposed of.

SPEAKER_01 56:32

You you look at boots and you say, we need to have a much stronger beauty part of our business. And you've got, frankly, an entire organization designed to not make that happen. That to me is entrepreneurial. No, it's not.

SPEAKER_03 56:46

There you're taking existing assets and redeploying them. It's also a very useful skill, but it's different. Much of our world's economy is organized into large corporations. And by the way, the entrepreneurs who are able to go from that pursuit of the regardless of resources, blah, blah, blah, right the way through to running giant global corporations. We know all their names. The Bill Gates's and the Elon Musk, those people there are very, very few who are able to make that transition from one to the other. Turns out I can do the second, I can't do the first. And that's okay. I think that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 57:15

Let me reframe a question then. Do you ever want people to act more entrepreneurially in your organizations?

SPEAKER_03 57:21

And what would you mean by that if you ever said So I think that there are certain cases. One thing that big corporations are extraordinarily bad at is identifying new opportunities and exploiting them to turn them into big businesses. I mean, extraordinary bad. And in my current business, you know, we there are lots of things I would like to do. Which is healthcare, yeah. So we have 300, right? 300 eye hospitals or around Europe. So it's the biggest in the world in eye care and eye surgery. And it's it's interesting because it's healthcare. But there are lots of entrepreneurial opportunities that you you long for the business to have people in it who say, well, you know, with limited resources, I'm going to build something that's really particularly really quite major, and not be in the mindset of, oh, well, we're a big company and you know we can't do that because of this, and we can't do that because of this. So Boots was a good example where I wanted to build an online healthcare business and they've done a really, really good job. And we, you know, you get one or two people who really want to drive it and make it work. And they have access to resources, they're actually quite hard to get because you're too little in the organization to get any traction. So though the really entrepreneurial ones, they will beg, borrow, and steal. They'll they'll bootstrap in the way that entrepreneurs bootstrap. Yes. And and that is uh so, yes, is that there are opportunities for those kinds of skills.

SPEAKER_01 58:34

I I wanted to talk about this transition from really big, well-known retail to a more international private equity, but it's a whole it's a very different beast you've got into.

SPEAKER_03 58:44

So that you've you've you've put your finger on the two reasons why I've done it. So I know I'm I'm 59 years old, and I thought I've got one more in me. Uh, I've got I was very happy at Boots, very happy. Um I could have very cheerfully carried on for another two, three years at Boots. It was opportunistic, as so many things are in a career, but um, I got a call, and um there were two things that appealed to me, and you've said them both. One is private equity, which I've never really done properly at scale, and the other one was international. It's fun to deal with and to learn how to communicate with people from Spain and from Holland and from you know, and to get stuff done in those environments is really fun. And then the third thing was it's healthcare. Because what my real dream, at some stage, I will come back and say to whoever's in charge at the time, can I have a little piece of the NHS that you will let me have a go at at trying to fix? That's what I really want to do. And that they might tell me to piss off, or they might say, Great, uh, but but that's what I'd really like to do, and I need to have more healthcare credentials to do that. On that bombshell.

SPEAKER_01 59:43

Because I've got so many questions. Uh you are meant to give three pieces of advice, very actionable pieces of advice. You can do it on anything. Conversations we've had now, or it could simply be about everyday life. I don't mind. What's top of your mind? Absolutely number one for me is don't worry.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:02

It's gonna be fine. So um that there have been times in my life, and there are certainly times in everybody's lives, when you think, oh, I'm you know, we're I'm doomed and I've made a misstep, and it's all gonna get horribly wrong. Unless you, you know, you put your hand in the till and you end up in jail, you are going to find a way out of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:20

And even in those cases, you can say to someone, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. You're not gonna die. It's really hard without an anna. For sure. How do you say that to yourself? Forget a flip chart and write it on there.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:32

It's going to be fine. So when if you consider the worst possible outcome of your current situation, you get to a place where you go, This could happen, you kind of you then go, and then it'll be fine. You know, so that's the first and most important thing is the second thing is as quickly as possible. In my case, it took about 15 years. As quickly as possible, try and identify what you are not. So as it turns out, I am not an entrepreneur. I never was, and it it was very foolish to keep spending all that time trying to be one when actually I was I could have so much fun doing what I am, which is somebody who unlikes complicated, gnarly, you know, difficult corporate stuff. And if you can identify that in yourself, then that's great.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:24

There will be lots of entrepreneurs listening going, I've got big gnarly problems every every day in this.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:29

They're not really though. Because usually entrepreneurial businesses, if they're any good, are very, very simple in that what they're in the goals they're trying to achieve. And that leads me to the third one, which is cut and run. Cut and run. Cut and run. You you need to set absolutely clear time frames on a business idea. You matter much more than the idea. The idea may be a crap one. You will be it is a human nature to be extraordinarily unwilling to release an idea that you got engaged with, which uh and that will consume time that you are not getting back.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:03

And so it it's uh it's a it's a tough one, that, because the entrepreneurs who really made it have maintained their self-belief during periods where most of us would have gone. But they've pivoted.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:15

They've pivoted. And it's very it's very unusual that they've carried on the same track, which wasn't working, wasn't working, wasn't working, and then it suddenly came right. It happens, but it's rare. What they've done is they've gone, no, I've I've missed that idea. But me, I can make something happen. That idea was the wrong one.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:31

The cut and run can also be a you know, make your early call on plan B.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:35

On pivot, yeah, on plan B, on whatever it is. But because we know we it's very rare actually that that it's your first idea that is the one. And and so being willing to let go of that idea is is critical.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:46

Anyway, that for what it's worth, that's what they're you and I have known each other for donkeys years. I haven't seen enough of you the last decade or so, but I have watched with admiration. Well, I mean I haven't told anybody that, so no, with with admiration I've watched your personal pivot and excited for this current venture. I'm excited by the maybe that that future goal lying ahead of you. Oh, that I'm excited about and uh for sure there will be uh uh open doors. Uh Seb, thank you so much. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Sebastian James as much as I did. Seb and I may not have seen eye to eye on the question of entrepreneurship in big business, but I think most of that was semantics. After we stopped recording, Seb went to a whiteboard and outlined his plan for saving the NHS. I really do hope he gets the chance to implement some or all of that in the future. Watch this space. Apologies again to Seb and to you for the delays in getting this episode published. I hope the wait was worth it. I'll be back soon with new podcast episodes. Please make sure you follow to get notified when I eventually get round to editing them. And in the meantime, thank you for listening.