On Purpose

by Shaun Smith

  The emphasis at Timpson is doing a proper job for the customer. We work very quickly but there’s no rush to get it out. We don’t churn out stuff. It has to be perfect for the customer. That’s how you’re taught at Timpson. We get excellent training and it’s ongoing. We have to reach certain levels of expertise in all the core services we offer (shoe repairs, watch repairs, key cutting, engraving etc). It’s very demanding as far as quality is concerned. Everyone who is a manager is good but of course there are some superstars and they eventually become area managers. My area manager is Sid Hubbard. He is amazing. He’s not just good at the job; he’s great with people. That is the most important thing about Timpson. The way they treat people – customers and Timpson people. In some companies, if you got something wrong you would be told off or worse. That does not happen at Timpson. If you have got something wrong, if there is a problem, they teach you how to fix it. They’ll sit down and say ‘Okay, how did this problem happen, how can we fix it?’

  I look after the running of the shop, like any shop owner. I have a set wage and then, depending on how much business I am doing that week, there is a weekly bonus, It’s based on a simple formula that you can calculate yourself: it’s around 15 per cent of the value of transactions over a certain limit. Almost every week I get a bonus, and in busy times such as the run-up to Christmas it can be quite substantial.

  And as I say, this is my store; they leave me to get on with it. I love the interaction with customers. Of course you can get difficult customers from time to time but it’s my challenge to turn them round and we never quibble – if I’ve not fixed something properly, I fix it again for free; or if something is going to take me no time to fix, I might not charge at all. It’s my decision. That’s what I mean by having fun here. You are taught to do a good job, have fun and help people.

  Lee Nicholls, regional manager

  Rain is good for us, because that means the holes in the shoes will be found! I think most of our purchasers that come into our branches are grudge purchasers, you know, it’s not something you want to spend your money on, getting your shoes repaired, or getting a spare key. You don’t actually get anything new for your money that you look forward to. It’s always something that you’ve got to do, because you’ve got a hole in your shoe.

  As a result, the customer tends to come in not overly happy, so if you can put a bit of personality into the transaction, and make the customer think what a nice person, then I think that’s half the battle won. There are so many different personalities in the business, and they all attack it from a different point of view. Some are big and bold and bouncy, some are very professional, it’s just down to the individual, but they’ve got to have a bit of personality. I think that’s what makes it work.

  We drum home the personality bit for the area managers and the area teams. You know, it’s about that person. If someone turns up for an interview in jeans and a T-shirt, that doesn’t matter. It depends how that person is. If that person seems to have a personality, seems bright and bubbly, and basically their answers to questions are a default ‘yes’, then that’s the person we want. There isn’t a mandate that it has to be a certain type of person, or a certain type of service, but it’s got to be great service.

  I spend a lot of time out in the field, watching the customers as they come in and go out. We use mystery shoppers, with a little hidden camera. Then we see how the colleagues are serving, which is great, because nine times out of ten, if you get feedback that’s not good, the area manager will sit down with that particular colleague and show them the video footage, and 99.9 per cent of the time the colleague will say ‘I can’t believe I’ve just been like that.’ Then the area manager will go and see the individual colleague and they have a discussion about what went wrong and what we can do better.

  We’re quite old-fashioned, in a way. We don’t advertise, it’s just word of mouth and repeat business. Our market is the people who actually come in the door. And that person has got a husband or wife, son, daughter, cousin. So if we make that one customer happy, then word spreads…

  The turnover at the branches reflects the way the customers are being treated, because a lot of the big-turnover shops are getting repeat business all the time. If we’ve got a shop that has poor performance, the chances are that the customer service is probably not right. The loyalty comes down to the individual in the branch. When I started with Timpson I went in at branch level, and I built my branch through repeat business. So it is all about that particular colleague, and their attitude towards customers.

  Unfortunately, you can’t please all the people all the time: I accept that. I say to the guys in the shops that if a certain customer is having a bad day, it doesn’t matter what happens to that customer, they are still going to have a bad day. We can do nothing to change their personal life. So the only thing you can do is be nice to that customer for that five-minute transaction.

  We do a Friday ring around: the area manager will contact each branch on their area to discuss turnover for the week, what’s up, what’s down, any problems for the week. They then fill in a figure sheet, it’s like a Friday flash figure, if you like. They then send their complete sheet to me, and then I will just ring back the area managers if there’s one that’s particularly down. We’ll have a discussion on what’s gone wrong. And then that sheet, in turn, goes to Timpson House. If we’ve got a shop at the end of the year that’s in a minus from the previous year, we need to go and investigate and see what the problem is.

  It’s an old-fashioned bit of paper that gets sent out, and then it gets sent back. We like paper. If I had my way I think we’d have an abacus, to be honest.

  We encourage the branches to do what they want. If they want to have a special key-cutting deal this week, fine, go for it. If they want to do a special window display, or they want to contact the local council, or the local cub group, fine. They can do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it. Then their area manager will evaluate with them how well it’s working or not. If it works, tell us. If it doesn’t, let’s put it back as it was.

  I think the success of the company is because we let people get on with their business. They know best. The guy who runs things in Bournemouth will know the town far better than I ever will, so we have to empower that colleague to make the decision for his branch.

  It’s the nearest that you are going to get to having your own business without having your own business. And when they are successful, you feel that you are visiting their very own shop. They make it their own, they’ve got their own little quirky ways.

  That same philosophy reflects all the way through the company. I run a region that consists of eight areas, and just over 300 shops. And I get the same freedom as a colleague would in a branch. James Timpson, the managing director, will ask me to go and do a job, and he’ll trust me to do it my way.

  If James, or John Timpson, the chairman, see an idea, they will then encourage that colleague to have a go. John spends most of his time visiting shops doing exactly that. He’ll go in and ask the colleague ‘How are you? Is there anything we need to do for you? Can we help you?’

  It’s just a common-sense approach. It’s not complicated. The two major things we focus on are: you need to look the part, and put the money in the till. So, look the part – and everything else is up to you. Our brand promise is all to do with service. Just, as it says on the sign, it’s great service by great people. We don’t get it right all the time, but we try.

  Gouy Hamilton Fisher, director of colleagues and support

  My sole purpose is to support those great people giving great service. To do that, you have to strip away all pretence of authority and power that, often, is embedded in head-office types and in head-office culture. We remind all the people here that they are here to support. If they don’t like it, there’s the door.

  We don’t do questionnaires, except one, the ‘Happy Index’,
which is one question. The question is simply: on a scale of 1 to 10, ‘how do you rate the support you get from colleagues?’ So for the branches, that’s ‘how do you rate the support you get from your area managers?’ And these are the people who are the first line of support to the branches. They do all the recruitment and the day-to-day disciplines, and ensure standards are maintained.

  Then for the area managers, the question is; ‘how do you rate the support you get from Timpson House and all its constituent departments?’ Of which, mine is one of those departments. That is the one that we’re measured by here. We pride ourselves on having such an aggressive tool, because what it means is that the colleagues can speak and be heard. We have demoted area managers as a consequence of the Happy Index. We have more area managers in branch than we have as existing area managers. It’s used as a measure as to their compliance and demonstration of upside-down management. It’s a very blunt tool and it has a very basic message, that if you can’t support the guys giving great service and you lose their support, you’re out. It has been so effective in forcing through upside-down management.

  We have one main mechanism for internal communication, which is a weekly newsletter. We have a couple of rules for the newsletter and that is: 1) there’s no bad news; 2) it’s to be full of colleagues and their news. So that goes to every branch. If there are two things to happen throughout a Timpson week, one is that the newsletter must go out, even if there is no news. The second thing is that colleagues must have access to whomever they wish. So, often, my day starts with receiving e-mails from John or James, saying; ‘this colleague’s contacted me, can you make sure this is dealt with, please?’ – showing that colleagues don’t need to go by their line manager, they don’t need to go by colleague support here. They can go straight to the owners of the business and say they are either unhappy, or they have thought of something great that would improve the business, or it’s something that we ought to know about.

  That open-door policy is supported further by little notepads. One notepad had a cartoon picture of James on with the words: ‘Dear James, I have some news to tell you’. That goes straight to James’s hard-copy mailbox. They have access to his Twitter and they have access to his e-mail, obviously, and his mobile phone. Occasionally, colleagues will just turn up at Timpson House, and that can be quite exciting So somebody has driven all the way from Lincoln, Arbroath or Exeter, and wants to see someone, but we don’t mind.

  There is very little in Timpson that is measured, because the sheer act of measurement is often merely to justify someone’s position. And so our view is: go and ask; the job is not about preparing statistical information, but about realizing relationships.

  A great example, and one I love to repeat, is with EPOS. We acquired our biggest competitor on 8 April 2003. And all of their branches were linked up electronically through their cash tills, and that told them what to order in terms of stock, that told them what the sales were. So there was no verbal communication between management and branches. Well, that business was going so poorly because of the way it was managed that we ended up acquiring it, despite it being twice the size of us.

  The first thing James did, just to prove the point, was to get a skip, and to put all these very expensive EPOS terminals into that skip. The branches were stripped of EPOS. It was suggested that we would be shot at dawn, despite our service, if we ever, ever took any of that EPOS equipment out of that skip.

  That sort of action puts a very severe filter on recruitment to certain types of positions and individuals. So your head of IT, for example, might feel quite offended by this attitude. The head of finance, head of property, and those roles that tend to rely on information, find this policy a challenge. I despise HR practices, which are stupidly trapped in providing more and more stats, when no one really does much with them or their relationships.

  We don’t call our colleagues employees, because that tends to suggest that they’re not as equal as management. Timpson House is always Timpson House. It is never, never, ever our head office. My badge says, Gouy, and it just says I’m a fountain pen geek because I hand write my letters of condolences, and congratulations, and birthdays, and the like.

  We deliberately recruit in our own image. I remember the TV broadcaster Esther Rantzen telling me that that was risking discrimination, and we said; ‘Yes, it does.’ It doesn’t actually risk it; it promotes it. We would discriminate against poor performers, people who are not going to give us their best, or who we don’t believe will give us their best. There is no scientific method to the way we recruit. What we simply say is that interviews must be one-on-one. So we don’t carry out panel interviews to scare the candidate to death. And we don’t look to use any particular software tool to help filter. It is simply that if I’m interviewing you and we get on, then it’s 99.9 per cent certain that I’ll employ you. There is no way that we define, measure or try to track personality. It is simply that our passionate belief is that we can train all the rest. What you can’t train is if somebody has to look somebody in the eye and smile and talk at the same time. There are very few barriers to employment with us.

  Training is on the job. We don’t tend to do much by stats, but the geek in me has identified that about 47 per cent of the people that come to us, come by way of a friend. So that fast tracks the learning curve and the training, the induction, because the colleague will have talked to their friend and said, hopefully, what a good place Timpson is to work, sufficient for that person to want to apply. We pay the colleague for the referral to that person. If they stay with us 16 weeks we pay the colleague again, and again if they’re still with us a year afterwards. Most colleagues would not besmirch their name by introducing somebody that wouldn’t fit well with the business, and our success rate with the stickability of those that have remained with us, after being introduced by a friend, is far higher than any other group of colleagues that come to us.

  It is exactly the same process we use for recruiting from prison. There are 86,000 prisoners in this country of which one-third are wholly employable, and we have a couple of hundred of those, and some of those are our best managers. And the other one-third, we’re working on. So they all come under the Timpson Foundation umbrella, and that’s my responsibility.

  The route is that somebody leaving prison will go to an agency, which will put him or her on to us. We always guarantee prisoners and also ex-military people an interview. They are guaranteed an interview above everybody else. The second route is where we have academies in prisons. It’s almost like a Timpson shop, so we’re giving them the skills to be able to work in our business, should they wish to do so. If they don’t, then fine, you know, at least, that they will have skills that can enable them to work elsewhere.

  When they come to be released from prison, we give them another pledge, that they can come to us and we’ll guarantee them a 16-week trial. If we’ve got a vacancy and they are good enough, we’ll take them on, and if we haven’t, we’ll put them on a waiting list. If someone is not up to the job we tell them why and refer them to a buddy organization.

  We have a culture committee to try to protect the culture. It is formed from the people who were mentioned in the Happy Index results. So the Happy Index, as well as being a means by which to correct failures in the culture, also identifies the cultural champions. I collate those names, and make sure that the organization is aware of who the heroes are, the cultural superstars, the cultural ambassadors. The beauty of it is that it is future proofed because it refreshes itself each year, because we’ve run the Happy Index every year. It keeps it culturally aligned, it keeps it culturally relative, and it redefines what culture actually is, because these are the people who are determined by the colleagues themselves as practising it.

  I think everybody struggles with the definition of leadership. We have a very crude one, and it’s the amount of people that will follow an individual, rather than be told by them what to do. And
we try to breed leaders, rather than managers. Managers are two a penny; you can train anyone to manage. That’s not what we want.

  You know, when I did my MBA, I came away thinking, great, I shall now show Timpson how a business should be run. And what an idiot I was not to recognize that the family has been doing this so long, they do their MBA over the breakfast table, you know, day in, day out. It is so inspiring to have such leadership. It is the actions of the individuals that give value and credibility to what it is that we do.

  John Timpson, chairman

  What drives me is the fun of getting ideas to work. The whole of this upside-down management approach we have is very satisfying. I just love doing new things and coming up with new ideas, so that’s what we keep doing.

  Profit is important – that’s the measure of how good we are, but I’m not interested in financial exits; the business is not for sale. I want to make sure that it’s a business that my son James can run, and his eldest son is already starting to show an interest, so it is about keeping a family business together. We happily chat four or five times a day; we don’t have any secrets, we pretty much see it the same way. If we have the odd disagreement and if it isn’t terribly important it doesn’t matter, it’s upside-down management – he does what he wants. And it’s great – it works.

  My job is strategy and culture but culture is the most important thing because you have to have the right culture; a business is more about people than anything else – it’s certainly not about processes. Then if you can make the right strategic decisions, it makes it a lot easier for them to be successful.

  You can’t delegate forward thinking because it’s quite difficult to get people who can look ahead. I’ve got to do the risk management and try to work out where the business is going to be in 20 years’ time. For example, how will technology affect our business in the future, things like 3D printing, smartphones that become keys etc? Funnily enough – the older you get, and I’m probably older than just about anyone here, the better you are at looking at the future.