Mary Portas
My method to being happy at work
Just after her four-year-old son Horatio was born, Mary Portas spent a few days in hospital. For the first time in years everything came to a standstill and there was time to think. “I was very successful and quite wealthy but I suddenly realised I wasn’t happy,” she says. “I had this outwardly lovely life but my soul wasn’t singing.”
She took a piece of paper and wrote “Are you happy?”. Below she listed the things that gave her a warm glow of contentment: her family, children and her wife, fashion consultant Melanie Rickey. The thing that didn’t make her happy – slightly to her surprise – was work.
In most fiftysomething women (Portas is 56) that might be their cue to seek early retirement and spend more time walking the dog. For Portas, having spent more than 20 years building up a successful business, it was time to tear it apart and start again, with some new rules.
She would no longer work with people she did not like, she would be home by 6pm – and as many people as possible who worked for her would do the same. “I realised how much of my life had been spent working and being treated like a man. Even the way I was presented on TV fitted that profile – I was supposed to be ‘scary, ball-breaking’ – but deep inside I knew I wasn’t like that.
“I’m now a fiftysomething millennial, or what you might call a slashy,” she says. “I’m a businesswoman/TV presenter/ author/charity retailer/mother/wife/ DJ/anything that comes along that inspires me.”
In the first instance, change was prompted by thinking about her own life and how to make working life more worthwhile for the women she employs. But Portas also knows how to sense a trend. Her children belong to the millennial generation of young adults born between the mid-Eighties and the early-Noughties, and they and their friends have taught her about young people’s attitudes to life and work.
Millennials think differently, work differently. What millennials want (having watched their parents work all hours) is what women have always wanted at work: some work-life balance, and an understanding that sometimes family, or just life, comes first.
Portas has reshaped her company in line with that thinking: board and management now have the right to take as much holiday as they like when they like, set their own hours and take open-ended maternity leave. Interestingly that other business pioneer, Richard Branson, has a similar arrangement for his 170 private staff.
Portas, with her trademark Titian bob, is one of Britain’s leading experts on branding, best known for the TV series Mary, Queen of Shops, in which she revamped struggling high-street retailers. She was later commissioned by the Cameron government to report on the state of the high street and has set up 21 “Mary’s Living and Giving” charity shops, which have raised £10 million for Save the Children.
What fuelled the restructuring of her own business was a determination to stop doing things the old “corporate” way, even though that meant parting company with all but two of the clients of her highly successful Yellowdoor consultancy. That took the business back to “profit neutral”. Yellowdoor eventually morphed into Portas, a new agency, in a new office, with a new ethos. Some people thought she was mad, she says, but four years on, she has a string of new clients – with working practices more in tune with hers – and is expecting to make her best ever profit this year. “The core message is that if you work around the way women want to work, you’ll create a better business,” she says. “We’ve got more chief execs in Britain called John than women chief execs and that’s shocking. Some people think women don’t want to get to the top in business, others that they can’t. I don’t think it’s either of those. The reality is the structure of the way we work, historically, was set up by men, for men, and it’s changed very little. Technical advances mean we can be remote but in the office but you still need linear ambition.”
Linear ambition, that determination to climb the ladder rung by rung, was something she had in abundance in the early years. Even after having Mylo, now 23, and Verity, 21, from her marriage to teacher Graham Portas, she worked on as if nothing had happened. “I remember sneaking out of board meetings to talk to the nanny. I was embarrassed if the children were mentioned at work.”
That was partly to do with the culture of the time and partly to do with her overwhelming drive – something she realised in hospital too, as she listened to herself being interviewed on Desert Island Discs on her iPod. “It wasn’t my ego running wild, I’d just never heard it, never had time.”
Listening to her own life story was sobering. She spoke of growing up as part of an impoverished Irish family in north London. Her mother died of meningitis when she was 16, her father of a heart attack two years later. Left with nothing, she had to turn down a place at Rada, the acting school, to look after her 14-year-old brother. She took a job in a shop, became a window dresser, and was so driven and talented she was on the board of Harvey Nichols by the age of 30.
“It hit me that, being an orphan by the age of 20, I’d worked so hard because there was always that fear I’d lose everything and be that homeless kid again.”
It also brought home to her how much she had sacrificed for success. The same week Horatio (her son with Melanie) was born, Mylo left for university. The cross-currents of joy and sadness hit her unexpectedly hard. “I cried every day that week,” she says. “I went into Mylo’s bedroom and saw his cricket bat. I remembered going to buy it for him when he was 11. Out of all the matches he’d played, I’d seen about two. When he broke the 800-metre running record for the school, I wasn’t there. Even though I had my own business I’d missed the race to see some boring CEO of a luxury brand because he was going to pay my agency a big fee.”
When her managing director left Portas she had a hunch that Caireen Wackett, one of her team, could do the job, but she was young – and just back at work after having her first baby. “I sat her down and we had an honest conversation. I said ‘You’ve just had one child, what’s your plan? Do you want another one?’ All the things you’re not meant to ask… She said ‘Yes’, so I said, ‘OK, how do we work round this?’.”
They came to a deal whereby Caireen could be out of the office on Fridays to take her child swimming. Midweek would be flexible too. When she went on her second maternity leave, “I said, ‘I don’t want to know when you plan to come back, tell us in three months when you feel human again’.” In the event, Caireen came back before her agreed date.
“This isn’t just about women. I’ve got two men and two women on my board and the men love it! This is how men want to work, too. When Mark, our finance director, had a child we said, ‘Right, we don’t want to see you in the office for a couple of weeks. I remember … I was embarrassed if my responsibility to my children interfered with my work. No one should feel like that now, not women but not men either. It’s life.”
There was a surprisingly loud cheer when she outlined some of this to an audience of young entrepreneurs at the QuickBooks Connect conference in London a couple of weeks ago and said she disliked Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s exhortation to women to “lean in” to achieve their career goals. “I am tired of reading about women who get up at 5am to go to the gym,” she says. “I don’t want to get up at 5am and I don’t think most women, or men, want to either.”
Sir Alan Sugar had spoken earlier in the day. “He said all you’ve got to worry about is the profit. I’ve done the opposite,” says Portas. But she is nobody’s fool. In short, she believes that given freedom, people work smarter – and harder. She’s examined the executive holidays in comparable businesses. In her millennial workplace, people actually spend less time away.
‘This isn’t just about women – men love it. This is how they want to work, too’