King of keys’ cutting views on retailers
Ouch! King of keys John Timpson gives his verdict on some of the biggest names on the high street– and it’s pretty cutting
Few retailers have succeeded overseas. I won’t go outside the UK. Never, never, never
JOHN TIMPSON has spent 55 years in business building his family firm into a national group and he is not afraid to speak his mind.
The 72-year-old, whose shops dominate the market for key-cutting, shoe repairs and a host of other services, talks of how Sports Direct billionaire Mike Ashley ‘seems to defy logic’; he outlines the one ‘major error’ made by Malcolm Walker, the founder of Iceland. He is even comfortable criticising Sir Philip Green, with whom he once had a rather blunt encounter.
Timpson is in garrulous mood as he prepares to publish his book High Street Heroes: The Story Of British Retail In 50 People. It is not his first book, but it may be his most controversial.
He has not only chosen his top 50 retailers, but has rated them in order. So if you’ve ever wondered who is better, Philip Green or Mike Ashley, or wanted to know how Allan Leighton might compare against Malcolm Walker or Gerald Ratner, then Timpson has a view. For the record, he puts Ashley ahead of Green.
‘People might be surprised by my choices,’ says Timpson mischievously, ‘not just what order I’ve placed them in, but who I’ve left out entirely.’
It is fair to say Timpson has rubbed shoulders with the aristocracy of retailing during his career and has views on them all.
‘I’ve devoted a whole chapter to Philip Green which is quite brave,’ he says, from Timpson’s head office in Whythenshawe, Manchester. ‘I haven’t been totally complimentary, he’s a pretty blunt character.’
One anecdote recalled by Timpson has Green using his trademark robust language when turfing the Timpson chain out of one of his properties.
Timpson has a long memory for slights and is still annoyed that Burton’s chief Sir Ralph Halpern once arrived an hour late for lunch.
High street chains also come in for the Timpson treatment. He accuses M&S of ‘a touch of arrogance and a lack of judgment’. ‘I can’t help feeling sorry for them,’ he says and compares M&S’s recent history to watching a well-known football team that has been relegated from the Premier League.
He warms to his theme. ‘Boots and WHSmith are just high street, corporate, boring shops,’ he says. ‘Boots is getting more and more head office-driven every day, and when you think of WHSmith you think about queues. I was once queuing to buy the Racing Post to look up my wife’s horses, but the queue was so long I’d read it before I’d got to the till, so I just put it back and walked off.’
So has he spotted the secret of retail success in his trawl through the years? ‘What I find interesting is how much it’s about people,’ says Timpson, who employs 3,150 staff.
‘Whether businesses grow and are successful depends on having an inspirational leader and a great culture, and they start to struggle when the leadership is not as good or they lose the plot as to what the culture is all about.
‘Someone like [Dixons’] Stanley Kalms was brilliant at adapting and being ahead of the curve, while M&S did that for many years but then they lost the culture and are still strug- gling to get it back.’ Ignoring staff and customers isn’t something that Timpson could be accused of doing: he visits around 800 stores a year. The Timpson stable, including photo chains Snappy Snaps and Max Spiel- mann, has jumped from 800 to 1,400 over the past three years, helped by its tie-up with supermarket chains such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s.
Branches of Timpson have been opened both inside the supermarkets and also in car park ‘pods’. This helped Timpson last week reveal sales up 12 per cent to £189million and profits up 38 per cent to £18.7 million for 2014. But could Timpson fall into the classic company trap of over-expansion?
‘When we had 500 stores I thought we would stick at 900 shops, so obviously I got that wrong,’ he says cheerfully. ‘The trouble is, when you have the market dominance of Tesco, for example, then you start to get involved in things you’re not as good at. They think because they’re brilliant at what they do, they’re going to be brilliant at everything else and that isn’t always the case.
‘Ones which are consistently successful, such as John Lewis, know who they are and what they’re good at. We now do mobile phone repairs, watch repairs and dry-cleaning as well as key-cutting and shoe repairs and they’re all doing really well, but it wouldn’t have worked if we hadn’t understood the importance of picking the right people and giving them the freedom to look after customers. That is the core of our success.’
Overseas expansion is another pitfall Timpson is keen to avoid. ‘There are very few retailers who have expanded overseas successfully,’ he says. ‘Some don’t do badly but generally the overall lesson is “Don’t go there.” Goodness knows why M&S got involved with Brooks Bros [in America], which is a totally different company. I won’t go anywhere outside the UK,’ he declares, ‘Never, never, never.’
As for succession planning, he reckons most large companies fail to manage it well. ‘It’s always difficult for the new person coming in to follow what someone’s been doing and to do it even better. I’m not too sure whether Terry Leahy [of Tesco] didn’t give a bit of a hospital pass to his successor, having received a wonderful business himself.’ In the Timpson case, succession has been kept in the family with John, now chairman passing the chief executive’s job to his son James.
James is also chairman of the Employers’ Forum for Reducing Reoffending, which is a group of local and national employers offering work to ex-offenders. Thanks to its facilities in five prisons which train offenders and offer them work on their release, one in ten of Timpson’s employees is an ex-offender. Having a job after prison leads to a massive drop in reoffending rates and Timpson has been active in encouraging other retailers such as Greggs and Halfords to do the same.
The company is regularly named as one of the best employers in the UK, with staff given a final salary pension scheme, birthdays off, a hardship fund and free use of seven holiday homes.
Timpson’s younger son, Edward, is MP for Crewe and Nantwich and Children’s Minister, while daughter Victoria is a primary school teacher. They also have two younger adopted children Oliver and Henry. John and his wife Alex were foster carers for 32 years, fostering 90 children.
The ink is still wet on High Street Heroes, but Timpson is already working on a new book – How To Lose Money. ‘It’s a story of horseracing,’ he says. One guesses it’s a story of Alex’s racehorses about which he once said: ‘Pastimes don’t have to make a profit.’