Big shot of the week
RETAIL is a tough game these days. Spiralling business rates; the living wage; online behemoths like Amazon ruthlessly undercutting you at every turn.
Why someone with Dixons Carphone boss Sebastian James’s illustrious pedigree should wish to be involved in such an increasingly thankless industry is anyone’s guess.
As the third son of the landowning Lord Northbourne, he’s hardly short on well-placed connections.
After all, he holidays with David Cameron, with whom he’s been best pals since they were at Eton and Oxford together.
Take a peek at the infamous Bullingdon Club photo which stalked the former Prime Minister throughout his political career, and you’ll see James’s cherubic face staring back at you from the front row.
He hardly looks like your average high street grafter. In fact, he’s more groovy geography teacher than buttoned-down executive.
Open- collared Johnnie Boden shirts and casual slacks are his everyday uniform. During occasional television spots, he wears a sports jacket, which might well have been flung over him by a press officer moments before going on camera.
At weekends, he tootles around the Oxfordshire countryside in a raffish, Terry-Thomas-style Austin Healey, a gift from his wife Anna last year for his 50th birthday.
If Sebastian (Seb) is in the mood to ride his fancy motor with the top down this weekend, few would hold it against him. Dixons Carphone has reported a 6pc boost in trading over the past 10 weeks, its fifth consecutive year of growing Christmas sales. If that hardly sounds earth shattering, it’s worth remembering where Dixons was when James arrived as development director back in 2008. Few who set foot inside one of its branches back then would have predicted it would still be alive today, let alone in relatively rude health.
Stores were tatty and unloved, its products over-priced. Its staff, sulky and ignorant, had become a nationwide joke. He and chief executive John Browett together masterminded a turnaround plan, retraining demoralised workers and sprucing up its product ranges. When Browett departed for Apple in 2012, James was catapulted into the hot seat.
It was his decision to embark on the £3.2bn merger with Carphone Warehouse, after hitting it off with Carphone’s founder Sir Charles Dunstone. At the time, the move was greeted with a fair few scoffs of derision. ‘Two drunks propping each other up at a party,’ was how one observer viewed this union of tired-looking high street staples.
But two-and-a-half years on, the shares in the firm – which comprises Dixons, Currys, PC World and Carphone Warehouse – are up nearly 60pc and James expects profits have increased this year to somewhere just under £500m. This year, he is on course to collect a £4.9m package as a result of the merger. A handy sum, though his fortunes have not always been so rosy.
After starting his career as a consultant, working at Bain & Company and then Boston Consultancy, he embarked on a DVD venture in 2003 called Silverscreen.
With the advent of online streaming, the business was belly-up by 2006 with James losing a substantial chunk of his own cash. With four children to consider, these were scary times. There was no redundancy money to fall back on and no immediate job prospects on the horizon.
In an interview this week, he said of this hairy point in his career: ‘I remember walking down Pall Mall after seeing a headhunter, convinced I might never get a job again. Many people were very kind and you never forget them. Some were less kind and you don’t forget them either.’
Friends in Notting Hill recall that for a time James wasn’t doing a great deal. During this period they describe his wife Anna, a former marketing director at Mothercare and Carphone Warehouse who now runs her own firm called Spring Chicken, as the family lynchpin.
THEpair met in somewhat inauspicious circumstances when Seb was at Boston Consultancy. He interviewed her for a job for which he decided she was unsuited. Fortuitously for him, his colleagues had the sense to recruit her anyway.
Once James’s career revived at Dixons, the couple decided to move the family from West London to a £2.3m home in Oxford for the sake of their children’s schooling. He maintains a small crash pad in the capital, around the corner from Dixon Carphone’s sparse Acton offices. Away from business, he has experienced a brief taste of political life after (then) education secretary Michael Gove commissioned him to review state-school spending in 2010. Might James consider following his Bullingdon drinking partner Cameron into public office?
He insists not, claiming he isn’t tough enough. Besides, the allencompassing world of politics would encroach on James’s precious downtime, which he likes to spend playing guitar with his band Numbernine (a cross between Radiohead and U2, apparently).
Like I said, a groovy devil. It’s hard to imagine the mundane world of washing machines and flat-screen TVs containing him for long.