Big shot of the week
JILL MCDONALD, 52 CHIEF EXECUTIVE, HALFORDS
SOME people are saddled with jobs so thankless they’re written off as impossible. England football coach Gareth Southgate springs to mind. Or Diane Abbott’s image consultant.
To that list we can add the name of Jill McDonald, latest head of Marks & Spencer’s troubled clothes division.
The post has become a high street graveyard, career-wise. Once female shoppers’ dependable aunty, M&S clothes are seen as too dowdy or too obsessed with chasing teenage trends. Before this year, it reported five straight years of decline.
That popular and pleasant Jill (‘Jilly’) should want to quit her job as boss of Halfords after two successful years to pick up this notoriously noxious chalice has left City experts bamboozled.
Respected retail analyst Nick Bubb’s verdict this week: ‘Let’s see how long she’ll last.’ Charming!
While little in her CV suggests she’s suited to this role, some might say McDonald, 52, embodies the ‘Mrs M&S’ customer whom boss Steve Rowe is determined to woo back.
A well-spoken Home Counties girl with a throaty laugh (last I heard, she was partial to the odd cigarette), she has her own understated fashion sense. More importantly, she possesses a finely tuned ear for customer’s needs.
Supporters will point to her turnaround job at McDonald’s, where she arrived as chief marketing officer in 2006 to find one of the world’s most famous firm’s flirting with irrelevancy.
THE sales were going backwards. Award-winning documentary Super Size Me, which attacked the Golden Arches’ poor nutritional value, had left diners feeling distinctly queasy. Meanwhile Jamie Oliver and his ilk were encouraging Brits to become healthier in their eating habits. When she was promoted to chief executive four years later, McDonald drained some of the poison out of the unloved brand. She did this by updating its tired-looking restaurants, introducing healthier options as well as excellent coffee, and insisted upon free-range eggs and meat.
Chef Raymond Blanc was so impressed with the chain’s new image, he presented McDonald’s with an award.
Born in Birmingham but raised in Sevenoaks, Kent, McDonald obtained a first class business degree from Brighton University before becoming a marketing trainee at Colgate-Palmolive. She joined British Airways, rising after 14 years to head of global marketing. Two years later, she decided to take redundancy in order to spend more time with her unwell father, who unfortunately passed away several weeks before she left. Later that year, the McDonald’s offer came up.
By the time she was promoted to chief executive in 2010, she’d had two children with her husband David. Juggling motherhood with the travel demands that came with overseeing 3,300 restaurants and 200,000 staff, was a massive strain.
She’d tried working a four-day week while at BA, but had felt guilty about not being in the office on Fridays. Instead, David, 49, decided to sell his mobile technology company and concentrate on childcare. The couple have a detached house in a leafy enclave of South Buckinghamshire and a weekend home on the Norfolk coast where they like to sail.
She’s keen to help promote more women into management, but isn’t one to bleat on about it.
The only time she’s ever been discriminated against for her gender, she says, was while at a networking event for McDonald’s where a greying executive mistook her for a waitress.
JACKING in the top job at Halfords to be a mere department chief might appear a little dotty, but there are appeals. A million, in fact. She can expect a substantial increase on her current £850,000-a-year remuneration. And with revenues of £3.9bn last year, M&S’s clothing division is almost four times the size of Halfords.
Her chairman at Halfords, Dennis Millard, has certainly never had any illusions about his departing chief’s ambitions, once remarking: ‘She’s always wanted to be a FTSE 100 top dog.’
When Rowe shuffles off the stage, she would certainly be well placed to become M&S’s first female chief executive. Wouldn’t that be impressive?