Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the SFEDI and IOEE Celebrating Enterprise Awards 2014

Thank you very much for this award I feel very honoured to receive it. When Ruth Lowbridge told me about it she asked me to talk a bit about our business, so here goes.

They might not admit it, but all successful business people need a bit of luck. I had so much I never ever needed a job interview. My great grandfather started a chain of shoe shops in 1865 and the family still had a controlling interest in what was then a public company when I started as a shop assistant in 1960.

I was probably promoted too quickly and at 27 became a director just in time to be part of a family feud. An uncle, keen to take control, persuaded the Board to fire my father as Chairman - he was ousted by 6 votes to 2. We sold our shares to the retail group UDS where Timpson joined other names like John Collier and Richard Shops.

This personal catastrophe was in fact my major lucky break.

After much needed experience running another UDS company, I was brought back to replace the uncle who led the boardroom coup.

The way to survive in a group is to ensure another subsidiary is performing worse than your bit. Fortunately UDS was full of poor performers so I was still there 8 years later when the group was acquired by Hanson Trust and I got the chance to do a management buyout – and get another lucky break - due to a misunderstanding over intercompany balances the deal was £4m better than we expected so we got 80% of the equity for the management. (Remembering the Board room bust up I got over 50% for myself).

The next four years were a nightmare. The mid 1980s was a bad time for shoe shops. The market was overcrowded we made a few mistakes and were heading for a loss.

That was when I started to seriously suffer from stress. Any fellow sufferers here will recognise the symptoms. Life swinging from butterflies in the stomach to the misery of despair - unable to make decisions and convinced you are a failure.

You look at others wishing you could change places. It doesn't help when they cheerfully ask, "how are you?" and you lie by replying, "absolutely fine thanks." When stress takes over it’s difficult to think it will ever go away but I now know what to do, tell my wife Alex, see the doctor, pop some pills and be patient. One day you wake up with the tension gone and a week later it’s as though it never happened.

I got another bit of luck. We managed to sell the shoe shops - and without any detailed thought kept 150 shoe repair outlets making a profit of less than £400k a year - it was going to be a part time hobby but we soon realised the potential.

We intended to float the company – that’s what everyone did. Alex told me I was stupid, “you would never be happy being pushed around by big shareholders,” as always Alex was right.

For some years I wanted to buy the biggest chain in the UK, Mister Minit, part of a global business. When they were acquired by Swiss bank UBS I made an offer but was met with a blunt reply, "We are experts at buying family businesses and putting in professional management - you are the next on our list."

My world changed with that one remark. I suddenly had a competitor with enough money to open next to our best shops, cut my prices and poach our best staff. To compete we simply had to provide a better service. I then discovered, after 22 years running the business, the secret behind good customer care. It is so simple and so obvious. You can't create exceptional service through a set of rules the only way is to trust the colleagues in our shops with the freedom to serve each customer the way they know best. I set off on a crusade which I called Upside Down Management with shop colleagues in control and every tier of management there, not to give orders, but to help and support.

At first shop colleagues didn't trust me. To emphasise their freedom I said they could pay out up to £500 to settle a customer complaint without reference to anyone else, and I let them use our price list as a guide (they could charge whatever they wanted).

It took 5 years to change our culture and we learnt a lot of lessons along the way. It took time to stop middle management issuing orders and put their efforts behind giving praise, help and support rather than policing a process. It’s not easy for managers to delegate authority while keeping responsibility, most do it the other way round.

The biggest lesson was about our people. Our upside down way of working only succeeds with the right characters. Our recruitment was all wrong, we were looking for cobblers and key cutters, we needed to pick people with personality - we can teach a guy with character how to repair shoes but you can't put personality into a grumpy cobbler.

We devised a new assessment form – in pictures not words – a collection of Mr Men – caricatures of characters that included: Mr Quick, Mrs Keen, and Miss Happy – and less positive people like: Mr Grumpy, Miss Slow and Mrs Scruffy. Under each picture was an empty box.

We simply ticked the boxes under pictures closest to the candidate! It worked.

The improvement in the calibre of new recruits has been a major factor in our success.

We also learnt a tough lesson – even our interview technique doesn’t always get it right. Some only show their true character after they start work. You do no one any favours by hanging on to passengers (Mr Lazy, Miss Late, and Mrs Jobsworth) people who get in the way of progress and irritate your superstars. Management spends far too much time with the poor performers. There is no need for warning letters often a devious device to keep the paperwork neat for a possible tribunal. Simply tell your passenger that their best will never be good enough and to borrow a phrase from Disney say you will help them to find their happiness elsewhere - as nicely and quickly and as generously as possible.

We are tough on poor performers but go out of our way to look after our star players, the colleagues who rate 9 or 10 out of 10 - we love them to bits with free accommodation at our 8 holiday homes a special hardship fund to help them handle a period of domestic debt and everyone gets their birthday off.

Our culture works. That guy who put professional managers into a family business lost £120m in four years and we bought the Mr Minit shops we wanted for £1. We now have over 1300 shops, no borrowings and 100% of the equity so I’ve certainly had more than my share of luck. But I have something else, a guardian angel called Alex.

When I married Alex I couldn’t have guessed what she was going to bring into our life. Alex was a nursery nurse (a nanny) and when the youngest of our 3 children went to school she looked for more to do and found the perfect role as a foster carer. We came off the fostering register 31 years 90 foster children and 2 adopted children later.

Alex has given me a bit of a social conscience but also taught me how to make decisions based on common sense. Non executives, consultants and even bank managers play a part but my best advice has always come from Alex.

A common question we are asked about fostering is, "what affect has it had on your own children?" I simply point out that our daughter became a primary school teacher our son Edward is the Minister for Children and Families and his elder brother James, our Chief Executive, has masterminded a mind blowing scheme to employ people from prison. In the last 12 years he has established contact with over 70 prisons and opened 8 prison workshops. 250 of the colleagues currently working in our shops left prison within the last 5 years. The best way to start is ROTL. Released on Temporary Licence they work during the day and go back to prison at night. Most are training as apprentices, but right now 12 of our shops are being managed by someone who is still in prison. James is certainly following in Alex's footsteps.

What lessons have I learnt over the last 50 years?

Too much of today’s world is driven by process but it is people not processes that produce real success. You can't achieve perfection by issuing orders - it is much better to pick people with personality and let them get on with it.

But if you think that you can reach perfection, forget it. Despite all my luck I still worry about next year and next week.

Life is meant to be full of uncertainty - if you always know what is going to happen next there would be no thrill in achievement, no big surprises, perhaps no disappointments, but still stress - the stress that comes with boredom.

But I can finish with some good news – you don’t have to be a tyrant to be successful - from all the evidence I see you can do good and at the same time run a good business.