Cash is STILL King! How Simon Arora Changed Discount Shopping in Britain

Simon, how do you feel about the state of the UK right now?

Oh, that's a great question. It's frustrating, it's mildly depressing. You know, let's go straight there. My parents were immigrants in 1968. I was born in the UK. This has been a great society for me to grow up in and pursue my professional goals. And the UK that I know is welcoming, tolerant and multicultural. And yet we seem to be fragmenting as a society. And unfortunately, it's always the very vocal minority that gets the airspace and not the much nicer silent majority.

And why do you think it's so divided? Like riots and tension? And why?

So I think one of the things that as a society we need to think about is preserving social mobility. I would say that the basis of the capitalist construct is that people accept social inequality or wealth inequality, but only if there is the opportunity to be socially mobile. In other words, either yourself or your next generation have an opportunity to achieve more. And so whether that's the education system or whether it's the asset price bubble that we've had since the times of zero interest rates, whether it's getting on the housing ladder or buying a business or starting a business, it's harder than it was arguably in the 70s when my parents came to the UK. And so I think those are the sort of issues that we need to address as a society in order to create greater cohesion.

Do you think we actually have capitalism now here in the uk?

We do. I'd like to think that my experience demonstrates that the system works. I've been able to achieve my goals. In doing so, we've created 48,000 jobs over the period that I grew the business. We've occupied millions of square feet of retail space that arguably for some periods would have been boarded up and economically inactive. The business has paid hundreds of millions in business rates and PAYE and national insurance and other taxes. So it works. But clearly there needs to be other elements that are also working in order to create a cohesive society.

Do you think the taxes in the UK right now are fair?

Broadly speaking, yes. It alarms me that there's a lot of speculation around increasing taxes on entrepreneurship, in other words, capital gains tax, because I do take the view that somebody that takes their money, invests it and that money clearly is tax paid already and risks it. That's not the same as earning a salary where, frankly, if the business is doing badly, you still get your salary. Yes, of course, there might be, at the extreme case, job insecurity, but when you're taking out a second mortgage or you're taking hard earned money and risking it on a business. In my case it was a turnaround business, or before that a startup business. I would argue that it's good for society if that's encouraged through the fiscal system rather than treated as regular salaried income.

So I want to come to these proposed changes because as we sit here right now, we're in the middle between Labour coming in and then Labour implementing all those changes. And in the world of entrepreneurs that I speak to, there's a lot of fear around what Labour might do. But to be fair, they've just come in the past, wasn't really on them. But you thought, you think taxes are broadly fair at the moment that's 20%, which obviously you have to add on and you can't always claim back. Then you've got corporation tax, which is back, back up to 25. Then you've got income at 45, but if you earn 100 to 125 in that bracket, you get 60%.

Absolutely tax.

I know you know this, but then of course you get national insurance, which is double digits, and then if you employ, you pay for the employees as well. Then like you said, business rates, which even for small businesses can be 50, 60 grand a year, and then there's all the compliance and this and that. It feels like a lot.

It is. But as a society, we need a health service, we need an education system, we need law and order, we need a national defence budget, given the uncertainties in the world. So all those things come at a cost. And for me, my instincts are that the way to square the circle is we just need to be more productive in terms of the public sector. So whether it's the nhs, whether it's education, just like in business, you only have a right to succeed and to have income, to have revenue, if you're good at how you spend that revenue and you deliver in terms of productivity. So that for me is the big challenge around government.

So do you think then, at the moment, public service is quite wasteful? I mean, I think about how many in government were working from home through lockdown and have they really got back into full flow of work? Even if I take away their responsibility, is there the incentive to grow and is there the reward? In the public sector, it feels like in the public sector, if you do bad, it doesn't matter, you still get your job. If you do good, it doesn't matter, you don't really get rewarded. Is there an argument that the Public sector could be a bit more like the private sector.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned that it's actually quite difficult to get fired in the public sector if you're not particularly good at the job. My understanding is that quite often you just get moved sideways rather than actually being laid off or which has a cost. Has a cost. And then the second thing is, I think you allude to it. Are there the right KPIs for the management level within the public sector to be productive, to actually be accountable for output and the cost of delivering that output? That's where I think our politicians should direct their attention, because what we're currently doing is arguably unsustainable. As I'm sure you know, taxation levels, the taxation burden is at all time highs since the Second World War. There isn't a lot of room in terms of where to raise additional taxes from. So the only way to square that circle is greater productivity in the public sector.

Do you think productivity is kind of penalised or squashed a bit in the uk? Repressed, maybe?

I would say that most entrepreneurs intuitively are thinking about productivity all the time. They might not be using that word, but it's. The other word for it is margins. You know, what's my profit margin? Building, creating my gross margin and all that is down to efficiency and being productive in how you deliver the product or service that you're selling. That's the language that needs to be used more often in the public sector.

Do you feel like maybe places like Dubai, for example, or maybe Texas, there's other places that seem to want to attract more tech entrepreneurship, because didn't labor just pull a massive AI and tech budget, like tens of billions, I think. And does it feel like we're welcoming all the entrepreneurs and the wealth and the tech? I mean, you live here, right in the centre of London. Does it feel like that?

The narrative I'm hearing is that actually we're losing talented entrepreneurs and business people to those new locations. Part of that is tax, part of that is that those are growth markets. And in many ways in certain sectors, the UK is a very mature market. Hate to bring up the B word, but Brexit didn't help. That's the start, wasn't it? If you're a business person and you're looking to target a market, the size of that market matters. And I've got friends in, for example, the clothing industry, where they used to have a vibrant business exporting to Europe, but now it's really problematic because if the product's imported, most clothing is you pay duty when it comes into the UK and then you find yourself having to arguably pay duty again just to ship it across the Channel into continental Europe. And that sort of friction limits the size of your market.

So I want to come, I don't want to leave this because I think it's important to have these conversations because it feels like if we don't, nothing will change. But I'd like to talk a bit about you first. There's a question I have to ask. I don't like asking it, but I have to ask. I have to do my job. And obviously if you go on the times rich list, you're very wealthy and it quotes you as 2.6 billion with your brothers. I also know what you read of net worth on the Internet. You don't know, is that about accurate?

Never been asked that directly, but that.

Was the indirect way of asking.

I won't shy away from the question. Our family circumstances is that it's all in the public domain because we did a transaction with a large US private equity house that was reportable and in the public domain. And then Obviously when we IPO'd our business, that's a matter of public record. And indeed the way that the stock market works is that whenever chief exec or his family or her family sell shares in the business, that sort in the public domain. So our numbers are broadly correct.

Great. And how does that feel? Because I sit here thinking that's an amazing feat to have an immigrant family come into this country and you build from Nothing, a nearly 5 billion pound a year empire. To me, that is an amazing feat. How does that feel?

The driving force isn't the personal wealth. The driving force is to achieve your potential and to be successful, to be the best you can be. We're talking in the middle of the Olympics. My wife and daughter were in Paris yesterday and I've been watching a lot and really enjoying it. Whether your area of focus is sports or music or academia or, or medicine, I can't understand why you wouldn't want to achieve your potential. And for me, the personal wealth, the analogy I draw is that's like a scorecard for a, for a cricket batsman where you just want to get the best score you can rather than take the easy option and coast through life. And so for me, as I think about the 17, 18 years that I grew BM, it was all about just achieving your potential rather than taking the easy option. And for example, three, four years into it, the business might be making 10, 20, 30 million. There are Plenty of people who think, wow, that'll do me. I'll go buy a nice boat or I'll buy a villa in Marbella and I'll coast. That wasn't our mindset. And in fact, one of the learnings that I would like to share with your listeners is I take the view that entrepreneurs, businesses, they go through periods of bad luck and they go through periods of good luck. And the entrepreneurs that really make a difference and create great organizations are the ones that optimize their periods of good luck. They double down, they take full advantage of it, rather than thinking, well, this is fine, this is not remarkable. I'm sure it'll be like this forever. And to explain what I mean by that is that our moment of good luck was being a discount retailer. Around the time of the 2008 global financial crisis, two or three things were happening. Existing, mature, well established retail chains were going bust, creating space, growth opportunities for us. And then the second thing that was happening is that the consumer was under extreme duress and wanted to save money. And so we did a series of transactions in the three, four years after 2008 that each time step change the size of our business and we double down in that period of good fortune where all these opportunities were coming at us rather than taking our foot off the gas and thinking, oh, well, we've got to a certain level that'll do us. This level of profitability is beyond our wildest dreams. That's us done. That's not the mindset that I think entrepreneurs have.

Did you feel or sense or know in that moment, this is our time?

Yeah, absolutely. So I made it my job to skate where the puck is going rather than where the puck is. I'm sure you know the analogy. There's a famous Canadian ice hockey coach who said the best players are those that skate to where the puck is going rather than skating to where the puck is. And so in this environment where every two, three months a national chain was going bust, I made it my job to be thinking about, well, who's vulnerable? Which sites have they got that would be suitable for B and M and do my homework in advance. So should heaven forbid that business end up in the administrator's hands, I'm able to make a phone call the very next morning after the administrator's appointed and say, here's a list of stores we'd love to acquire. We'll take the staff, we'll keep the jobs. Here's a check, we'll pay you. Where can I come and sign? We're ready. I can be in your offices in three hours time. That for me is how that mindset translated in terms of optimize this period of luck. And just to remind, remind you, if you think about it, there were names like Woolworths, JJB Sports, Comet, Focus diy. The list is very long of retailers that for each.

Did you buy Wilkinson as well, was that right?

No. So Wilkos went bust many years later. That happened last year. So I'm talking about that period 2008 to 2012, this, the global financial crisis and the, the recession that came with it. But all of those businesses, they'd been around for decades and it was a positive that we were able to, for each of those examples, take some of the stores, retain some of the jobs and retain some economic activity in those locations in those towns.

How did you assure that you weren't one of the casualties? Because it mustn't have been easy.

So as I think back to my career after graduating, I had three jobs. My first one was McKinsey & Co strategy consulting. The second was 3i venture capital. And the third was Barclays bank and financial Services. I took what I learned from those jobs. First of all, strategy. Make sure you're in the right place, you're delivering the right product. And when I say the right place, I mean the right part of the market, the right types of physical locations, the right pricing strategy, that strategic stuff that needs to be right to make sure that you, you chime with what consumer wants. I then think about my time at 3 I where I had the benefit of a pretty rigorous training on P and L balance sheet and cash flows. So I deployed what I learned at 3i in terms of cash is king. Knowing what your working capital is, knowing what capex you can afford. You know, even though I was a lawyer at university, I made it my job that I understood intuitively and applied those rules day in, day out to make sure that we always had cash, you know, and that we were profitable. You know, the cliche turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality. And so, you know, I distilled all those things into a handful of KPIs, one of which was just making sure that we always had the cash available to take advantage of growth opportunities. And we never overstretched ourselves. We didn't take out a load of money, didn't pay out big dividends. One of the things that I should remark upon is that in those growth period, that growth period, my brothers and I, we were fortunate we didn't have to take a Salary from the business. We weren't salaried, we weren't taking dividends. It was all being reinvested in order to create the long term goal.

And how do you stay hungry when you've done nearly two decades and you've built it to nearly 5 billion a year in sales?

I think that comes down to upbringing. I was very fortunate in that my brothers and I, we lived in a wonderfully loving, supportive family. It was a small business family environment. I remember spending my childhood the family kitchen table, my late father talking about customer situations, supplier situations, interactions with the bank manager. You just absorb the world of business and you enjoy the world of business. It's my favorite topic. You know, my, it's no coincidence that a lot of my friends are entrepreneurs and you know, rather than talking about the soccer results, I'm just as happy talking about what's happening in different sectors and what's happening in the world of business. But the other thing that my parents gave myself and my brothers is, is this confidence that you have the potential and that self confidence that there's all, it's all there to be done is what one of the things that makes you keep going and gives you that hunger. I'd also share with you a conversation I had in sixth form at school that will never leave me. I was talking to the head of sixth form, he was a history teacher and we were debating what I should do at university when I was thinking about filling out my UCAS forms, I remember those. And he asked me, he said, aurora, I went to a school where you were called by your surname back in those days, Aurora, what you want to do in your life. And I said, actually I'd love to be an entrepreneur, I'd like to be in business. And he said to me, well, one thing you should know, young man, is that whatever business venture you try, whatever entrepreneurial adventures you have, you're very fortunate in that you will always have a roof over your head and food in your belly. And that statement just isn't true of previous generations. Your parents generation didn't have that luxury. Your grandparents generation around the world, not just in India, but in the uk, that just wasn't a given that you're always going to have a roof over your head and food in your belly at the end of an evening meal. And that's a freedom. And so why wouldn't you take risk? Why wouldn't you be an entrepreneur? So yeah, I thought that was wonderful advice and I'd like to think I've applied some of it over the subsequent decades.

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Yeah. Part of my management style, my business style, is living in a state of paranoia. Waking up every morning having reflected the night before about what could go wrong, what could go wrong today, what could go wrong in something that we're doing over the next few months? What could go wrong over the years to come? And the reason why I think that paranoia is healthy is that it, it makes you avoid those situations if you're not thinking about them, but also equally it makes you think about a plan B should that event happen. Other business leaders have a different phrase for it, I think. Is it Bezos? And I'm no Bezos by the way, but I love reading books and biographies about other great entrepreneurs. You know, I'm one of those people that believe you can do nothing but learn by finding about how other people experience their success. Bezos talks about having this mentality that even though the business is years and years established, he wants everyone in the business to have, I think day, day two mindset or day one mindset, which is go to work thinking that the business is only two days old. And I think that's another way of expressing that it's fragile, there's someone going to eat your lunch, something's going to go wrong, there's lots to do rather than a position of complacency and, and also interestingly rather being too introspective within the business, internal office politics, internal sort of machinations and processes, rather than looking outward, looking at what your competition's doing, what's happening to the economy, what's happening in terms of opportunities both in your core market and ancillary markets that you might go into. And in our case that was geographic expansion into Europe.

So how do you have a personal life or manage your own personal emotions with a family? When you wake up every day in a state of paranoia trying to figure out what's going to go wrong in your business so that it doesn't go.

Wrong, you have to pick your life partner very carefully. So my darling wife, Shalni, she, we've been together since university.

Wow.

I was 19, she was 18. I'm very fortunate in that she comes from a business family and so she gets the values. That's one of the reasons why we work as a couple. As it happens, she comes from an immigrant background herself. She's from East Africa. And actually there's a similarity. My late father was a refugee from what is now Pakistan at the time of partition, the age of four, his family had to flee on a couple of days notice. Painless. And there is an analogy in that my, my wife's family, my, my parents in law, they had to pack up and leave Kenya at pretty short notice in the 70s when, as I'm sure you're aware, a lot of East African Indians found themselves suddenly very unwelcome and had to flee. So those shared experiences, those shared values allowed her to be very understanding of the stresses and costs that comes with building a business, family business. But to be fair to her, she also, as a successful entrepreneur in her own right, she, she co founded and exited a biotech business. So, so she gets it. And I think the other thing I'd say is that I did keep weekends sacred. I tried to avoid working at the weekends other than when I was on an overseas buying trip. And you know, if you can deliver quality time with your family, that can make up for there not being perhaps as much quantity of time spent together.

Do you live your entrepreneurial life on the roller coaster, feeling the ups and downs or are you able to take a step back almost Like a crouching tiger and just observe with an emotional distance.

It is the roller coaster.

Oh, you do.

And I have to tell you that my character flaws is that every transaction or opportunity didn't go right. Is seared in the mind ten times more vividly than the successes.

Right.

There's something wrong with me.

But does that not make you why you're good and why you care?

I think it speaks to the hunger. And I'll give you an example. So one of the unusual characteristics of my career as a retail chief exec is, is that throughout the 18 years I never had a property director, I also played the role of property director, which means that I personally negotiated something like 17 million square feet of UK retail selling space. Wow. 750 large stores. @ the risk of sounding immodest, no individual's ever done that in UK retail. Sure, corporates have, Tesco clearly has, but that's been a series of property teams and property executives over decades. I did it all myself. I can tell you about the sites that I missed out on because I was the under bidder and I negotiated a little bit too hard. And then lo and behold, out the blue, a competitor's taken it. I relived those disappointments ten times more than the stores that I opened that went into the top 10 out of 800 stores. It's just the nature of, of my personality type. But I think that.

Does that sit there and drive you?

Yes, that's part of the hunger. You want to, you want to succeed, you don't, you don't want to be second best. Another, another way that that hunger expresses itself is I actually think it's really helpful for entrepreneurs who are building a business to have, and I'm putting inverted commas around this word, have an enemy. And what I mean by that is find a larger, more established competitor that you just want to beat. And it's not personal. In fact, that competitor, in each of the cases, I'm thinking about huge amount of respect for the family and the leadership of those businesses. They're successful. But rivalry and the desire to beat someone, just as it is on a sports field or in a track and field race, that's what drives performance. And that's not just in my mind. You know, I, I tried to inculcate that across the entire business so that when we opened a store in a town and there's a competitor four doors away, I'd want everyone in that store to say, we're going to start taking some of their customers. We don't want all the cake, but we want a good slice of the cake and I think it's a healthy thing. And again, it's not personal, huge amount of respect but. And I'm sure there are today up and coming retailers that have got B M in their sites and think, yeah, let's take a. They're getting, they're too big, they're getting flabby around the edges. I'd like to think B and M isn't but you know, it's part the cycle of business.

Do you think there's a bit of that that has been lost in society? Maybe you must have heard that hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. And the cycle goes around and you know, it's very easy to point fingers at lots of different governments, organizations, but sometimes I just think society was just easy for 25, 30 years and everyone just got a bit lazy and maybe it just needs to be hard again. Do you think that competitive edge is a bit out of schools and out of society now?

I think there is an element of that and it frustrates me. I'll share with you that as a favor to a niece who was studying at the time at LSE London School of Economics, reading Economics there was she invited me to come along and speak to the Economic Society, a bunch of students who are interested in the world of business and economics and they have a handful of speakers each year and it's very informal, I don't know, 50, 60 students in the room and I'm sat on top of the table at the front of the mini auditorium and I talked about our business journey and lessons learned and tried to share some of the little bits of wisdom I might have having sort of got the T shirt. One of the questions I got from a young man in the audience was what's the point? I said, what you mean what's the point? He said, well, 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion, getting to a 5 billion. What's the point?

It's kind of a good question in.

A way I didn't know how to answer other than saying when people asked the early Everest climbers, what's the point? They said, because it's there, it's there to be done. Life's not about taking the easy route. Life's not about being lazy. I call it complacency and lazy, self indulgent. Because you know something, we live in a world where two thirds of the global population are hungry. China, Indonesia, India, sub Saharan, Africa, they're hungry. And if we in the west, in yesterday Europe start becoming complacent and self indulgent, they're going to eat our lunch. These are just the basic rules of economics.

And do you think this complacency and laziness is societal or is it just because that individual hasn't yet found their thing? Because I've just tried to give you a bit of context. I actually don't think there are lazy people. I think there are motivated people who found what they want. Because I think you can give a lazy person a PlayStation, give my kid a PlayStation and he's not lazy. Is there an argument that they're just misdirected and they haven't been? Education doesn't individualize us enough to find our own talents.

I think that's a great question. I think I've got two things to say on this topic. The first is that, you know, as somebody in their mid-50s, I'm entirely mindful that these sentiments I'm expressing are the same sentiments that every generation has expressed about the current upcoming generation.

Yeah, you told me off for that.

It's always been thus. You know, I'm sure that my parents, my grandparents always thought the next generation is going to hell in a handcart.

Yeah.

So plus sachong. But I do take your point that perhaps that young man who sort of just didn't get it and I'm thinking you're reading Economics lse. This is your world. How come you don't understand that it's a good thing, that value creation is a good thing. It creates jobs, it creates tax dollars and pounds for the, for the government. I think you're probably right. He was probably just in the wrong sphere. And so you know that cliche. I digress a bit but give me a moment and I'll explain. So you know that cliche where people give career advice around, oh, follow your passions. Yeah. I saw something recently where someone said that's just hocus pocus bunkum. Not true. People don't follow their passions. That's not what you should be doing. What you should be doing is finding something that you're good at. And the example that this interview that I was listening to gave was you take the country's best corporate tax lawyer, someone who's just got the brain of Britain on understanding the intricacies of company corporate law and how to structure corporate transactions. No 16 year old or 18 year old wakes up thinking I'm really passionate about corporate law nonsense. What it is is that someone's just Found something that they're really good at. And, you know, am I passionate about Barbie dolls and pot noodles and Mars bars and garden furniture and Christmas fairy lights? No. But I recognize that being a retailer in that product arena played to my strengths and played to the strengths of my younger brothers also with that.

Because I think about that a lot because business is my passion. But also business is hard and some days it doesn't feel like a passion. And I do worry when people say, I'll follow your passion. What they're really saying is, go where it's easy and fun, and then that's avoiding the hardship and the challenge. So is there an argument when people say follow the passion? They're just saying find the easy road.

No, I don't think it's find the easy road. I think it's find what you're good at and everyone's good at something. And it, you know, for a lot.

Of people and surely you feel good when you're good at something.

Yeah, that's, that's the dopamine rush.

Yeah, when. And the self worth, which is deeper than that.

Yeah, the hairs on the back of my neck are going up, you know, so I'm no psychologist, but yeah, most entrepreneurs get a dog dopamine rush from winning, you know, more so than you'd get raving at a club or, you know, on the best holiday of your life or drinking the finest champagne. No, it's, it's winning. Succeeding is. It's fun.

Are enough people at the moment talking about just being great, just becoming great? Because we talk a lot about self worth, loving yourself. We talk a lot about, you know, treating people kindly and treating yourself kindly, you know, and I understand the place for that. I always just felt the most confident when I knew in my bones I was good at something. And you cannot kid anyone when you're not. You can try and blag, but you know, in your soul, if you're great at something, you can sit there and own that seat at the table. Is that being said enough?

Some of the phrases you use, like in your soul is what resonates with me. I'm not a fan of successful people who go around telling everyone how successful they are, frankly. There's a, there's a, an old Indian language Hindi or Punjabi phrase that says. I think it translates into English. There's an English version. Empty vessels make the most noise. One of my favorite phrases was one my late mother taught me, which is, the higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you see of its backside. So, So I, I'm a big fan.

Let's just take a moment to enjoy that one. There's, there is generations of wisdom in that, isn't there?

The reason why I don't do this sort of thing very much. And actually, as I think about when I was running B and M, I turned down going on to Dragon's Den, being considered for Apprentice, the Apprentice as a, as a guest appearance. We were offered prime time, 7pm on BBC1 fly on the Wall documentary over a number of episodes had no interest because they wanted to make it about individuals rather than just the business. As a family, we're very private, we don't like publicity, we're at our happiest just walking to the local pub and just being a regular Joe like everybody else. The only reason I said yes to this, Rob, is because I do think that having gone through a multi decade entrepreneurial journey, the right thing to do is to share a experiences for the next generation of entrepreneurs. And the way that I really enjoyed reading about and going to listen to entrepreneurs and the generation above mine, I think it's just incumbent upon me and people at my age to share that wisdom to the extent we have any. But yeah, I think internally enjoying success is important. Don't brag. That's equally important. I think having humility and knowing that you're not the best at everything, that there's lots of ways in which you're not particularly good, that actually to be successful you have to surround yourself with people that are better at certain things than you to recognize that a large part of your sex success is probably luck, probably being at the right place at the right time. So I, I believe in all those things. And then the one thing that I think today's society must be very mindful of is that some of the people that broadcast their success and their lifestyle, it's not real. And of course I'm talking about the Instagram generation where everything is manicured, filtered and made to look perfect when real life is nothing perfect.

Well, can I just take a moment then to thank you very much for doing this, as it's something you don't normally do. I feel very privileged. So I just want to take that moment.

You're very kind.

That doesn't mean I want you to kick me out. I'm not finished. So let's talk about a couple of those things you raised. How can you spot someone, you know, who's a legitimate entrepreneur with useful, valuable things to say, who's got the experience and someone who's maybe faking it a bit on TikTok and Instagram, because we do need to know the difference if we want to learn how to be successful.

So the traits I look for in someone that I'm either thinking of hiring for the business or perhaps even investing as a passive investor is, first of all, work ethic. Work is worship. You know, it's. Without the hard work, it just doesn't happen. You know, that's the. That's the foundation stone of everything that follows. I think the second thing I look for is realism rather than naivety. So occasionally I meet an entrepreneur that's got an idea and it's half decent and it's something interesting, but they're looking to raise money at such a crazy valuation that you think that's just not. That's just naive. And if, if you're displaying that naivety in terms of your fundraising, you're probably going to display that naivety in terms of how you run the business, should it get off the ground. So people who are realistic, people who've got their feet on the ground, but hard work matters.

Do you think society, maybe since Brexit lockdown, specifically in the uk, do you think the work ethics got a bit softer?

I'm not a fan of working from home, and I know that's going to alienate more.

Well, I'm not either. So we'll go down in the same ship.

Yeah. So at bm, very little working from home. Just resisted it, did you? We take the view that, you know, if 40,000 wonderful colleagues are going to stores and serving customers day in, day out, they don't have the luxury of working from home. So why should, you know, a few hundred people in the support center be able to do so? That's not what we're about. It's not fair. It's not internally fair within the organization. And as I think about my career, those first three jobs where I learned so much and, you know, I learned things that then allowed me to apply them in my own business career that wouldn't. Those learnings just would not have happened.

You need to be on the shop floor, don't you?

Or in my case, I need to be watching how a partner at the strategy consulting firm is approaching a problem. I need to be brainstorming with an associate. I need to be going out. You can't do it at home. And frankly, listen, I know that when I, for short periods, have been working from home, unfortunately, every now and then the TV's on in the background, I'm distracted by the Amazon delivery Or something. Turning up people.

Turning up a podcast.

Absolutely. And you know, on a more light hearted note, every time I walk through the kitchen, I'd open the fridge door and see what's going on. So. So, yeah, it just doesn't work for me. And you know, I'm going to. I say this with a smile on my face. Being hungry at work, it helps if you're physically hungry as well, right?

Yeah.

You're going to the fridge door three times a day, you're not physically hungry.

So you're like not eating the day.

I know it's a cliche, I know it sounds naff.

It's not.

Breakfast is for wimps. I don't, I'm not, I'm not that. I don't. For me, a coffee in the morning, practically nothing for lunch, maybe a cup of soup. Just when you're working, when you're, when you're, when you're in chi, when you're in, on, in the flow, you don't want to eat, you're working. Yeah.

Wow. And what would you say to people who's just gonna think you're a bit old fashioned? Because some of my staff do push back. We don't do work from home. Million reasons how you're going to get a promotion if you're not seen. Those conversations that naturally occur can just change something. Instead of getting an out of office. The culture, the energy, you know, if you're going to fight against a big competitor, you need energy and I've not been able to see that recreated from home. But people do say, rob, you're a bit old fashioned. You know, some jobs do need to work from home and it's a noisy office, I can concentrate better at home. So what do you say to someone who says you're being a bit old fashioned?

What I'm saying is that of course it works for certain types of organisations, but for organisations where you're talking about large numbers of people, hundreds if not a thousand plus people, the reality is it's very hard for the senior leadership, or indeed your line manager, to really know how hard you're working because, you know, people are different. There is always going to be 10% of your workforce that frankly are just going to do the bare minimum and are frankly going to be walking the dog for a couple of hours when actually they should be grafting away. And if people are in the office, you know, frankly how many hours are being put in and, you know, these alternatives like, oh, well, you can have software on the laptop to see whether they're working or not. That's Big brother. That's, that's 1984 sort of weird stuff. I'd just rather you come to work, enjoy being at work, learn from people around you, feel part of a winning team rather than being stuck at home.

How do you deal with the emotion of making decisions that cost hundreds of jobs? Because you seem like somebody really cares about the people. But you know, you see businesses go bust, you probably have to make some strategic decisions, which means you can't keep all the staff. How do you disassociate from that and make it a business decision?

You have to be very clear in your mind that you're doing something for the right reasons, for the long term health of the business. A friend of mine used a great analogy which was around, if you find yourself running a business and you're going through a downturn, the P and L is going the wrong direction, you're losing some market share, things are tough and you need to do some cost cutting. He said to me, the harder you prune the bush, the better the flowers. The next season, a rose bush. Right. And so I think what I'd say is that.

So you rip off the band aid and you do it quickly is that.

Do it quickly and don't allow yourself to get in a situation where you have to do it, do it every six months, repeatedly.

Yeah.

Because you just, you're killing the corporate culture, the, the morale in the office. Do it, do it quickly, get on with it, do it hard. Because fundamentally what matters in the long term is the success of the business over decades rather rather than over a 12 month period. And I know that sounds brutal and it sounds uncaring and I'm a big believer in loving people on the way out in the unfortunate situation that you're letting them go because it's not the right job for them and they're not right for the job, or because you're in a downturn. I mean, I'm fortunate over the 18 years we didn't have a downturn, we had 18 consecutive years of revenue and profit growth. So I've not had to do that. But as I've observed other businesses who've gone through repeated rounds of redundancies, I worry about the corporate culture and the morale in those businesses over the long term.

What was it like going through an ipo? That must have been different.

Yeah, so it was intellectually stimulating. I took a lot of job satisfaction from the fact that here's a discount retail chain from Blackpool that cost us £525,000 and we're listing on the London Stock market and at the time it was the largest ever listing of a retail business market cap of 2.7 billion. Clearly there are other retail businesses already listed that are bigger than that, but at IPO there was smaller than 2.7 billion. So that was a source of pride. I think the other thing about IPOing your business is that it's a thumbs up, that your business is a good quality one and is being run correctly. And whether that's from a governor's point of view, whether it's from a management control point of view, whether it's your financial performance, clean audits for a certain number of years, going through all the legal due diligence that goes on, that you've got all the right contracts in place, you've got all the right documentation that you're running your business for the long term. That's a great thing to sort of see that. What was a family business that you sort of took from just running around the, you know, running in your head or around the kitchen table with your brothers and is now a business that people entrust their pension, pension savings with, or insurance companies are saving with, or investment firms are backing. It's a vote of confidence. It's a great thing. And on the actual day I had my in laws there, or my brother in laws, my brothers there, my sister in laws, some nephews and nieces, it was, it was a family affair. It was, it was a proud moment. Thank you for asking.

That's okay. And how long did the whole process take from deciding to that day?

It takes a minimum of six months. And if you have any listeners that think one day they'll be having this challenge ahead of them, what I'd say is it takes a lot more time than you think. And the way I was able to make it work is to take on some people who I could get working purely on the ipo, so that I'm not providing a burden to the operational.

As in getting distracted away from the day job.

So there's a bit of a cliche about IPOs where unfortunately, some businesses, three to six months after IPO, go through a downturn. And it's typically because the management team have had so much distraction in terms of getting the IPO away that after an initial period of momentum has died away in terms of stuff they were doing six months before the ipo, the chickens came home to roost and there's a downturn, it's a well trodden path. So I tried to avoid that by taking on some experienced people who were just full time on the paperwork and left the operational team to get on with running the business.

So if the whole thing takes six months, surely though, there must be years of planning to get to that stage.

You have to have the plan. It wasn't so much planning for an ipo, but it was making sure that your business was being run in a good quality way. So as the business grew, the quality and standards of governance had to grow with it. So whether that's the quality of management information, whether that's the quality of your board minutes, whether that's the quality of your legal documentation, you know, frankly, a half million pound business, that's 20 shops has a different level of governance burden than a business with tens of thousands of colleagues and multi billion revenues. It was important to me that as we grew our business, we also grew the quality of our processes inside the business.

Did the culture or the feeling of the business and your role within it change after the ipo?

So when you're listed for the chief executive and for the cfo, yes, a percentage of your time is now on investor relations and stakeholder management, be that equity analysts, be that shareholders, be that banks, et cetera. But for me, it's very important that outside of those two roles, the rest of the business carries on as usual and isn't distracted by those issues because frankly, they need to make sure that business is delivering from a growth perspective rather than getting obsessed with presentations to shareholders.

And then the future, where, where are you planning to take B and M?

So I stepped away from B and M a year ago. The reason for that is that I was coming up to 18 years. I found myself where we delivered record year of profits. The share price was at all time highs north of 6 billion. I was comfortable that the culture within the business that me and my brothers had developed was really well embedded and that it just ran through the blood of the organization from the stores all the way through to the C suite. And also specifically, I had an internal successor candidate in my CFO as a safe pair of hands to hand the business reins over to. And so I decided to step away at a period in time when effectively is on my own terms. There was no corporate governance misstep, there was no period of underperformance in trading. There was no fallout with the board and the independent directors, and it just felt like the right time to move on. And going back to our earlier conversation, if I'm being really honest with myself, one of the factors in deciding that it was time for me to exit stage left was at the margin, I felt maybe I was losing some of that hunger.

Oh, wow.

It was starting to become a little bit Groundhog Day. In the. The joy and excitement of opening another store and putting another, another few hundred million of revenue on year after year, it was. I was becoming a little bit jaded and, you know, I'm a realist. In your mid-50s. You just don't have the energy level of a disruptor in his or her mid-30s. I mean, I am. One of the reasons why I accepted your invitation, Rob, is because you talk about disruptors. That is the basis of my business success and my family's business success. Our first business was sourcing housewares and home furnishings from Asia and supplying UK retail. And we were disrupting the supply chain. Up until that point, most housewares and home furnishings were coming from places like Portugal and Spain and Italy or, or in the uk, Staffordshire, for example, ceramics. And we could see that these products in the future were going to be made in China, Thailand, Indonesia, India, South America. It made no sense for Western Europe to making these low tech consumer goods. So we rode that disruption by acting as a sourcing house for UK retailers to bring that product in at much better prices. And then similarly, when we thought about B and M, that was disruption, because the disruption that was happening in the UK retail at the time is that the consumer was changing his and her sentiment towards discount. Whether it's Primark in clothing, whether it's Aldi and Lidl in grocery, or whether it's B and M and home bargains in general merchandise. The consumer was viewing this type of retailing as smart shopping as opposed to being embarrassed by it. Many years ago there was a running joke that people who went shopping to Primark on leaving the store would put the Primark shopping bag into an Ms. Shopping bag so that people wouldn't see as they're walking down the high street, that they've been to the discounter. That's changed. It's seen as smart shopping. So we could see that there was disruption taking place and we wanted to be part of that change. And so if you've got listeners who are thinking about going into business or in business, the first thing I'd say is that it really helps if you're going into a growing market, pick a market that's growing rather than a market that's in retrenchment, because it's always going to give you more opportunity or if that's not the Case and I accept that UK retail was very mature, you know, selling groceries and general.

Is that one of the decisions in exiting maybe timing?

I think what I'm inferring is that when I went into the business I was mindful that this is a mature market. So how is there room for a challenger, a new, a new kid on the block? But I was comfortable with that because I could see that behind that headline total market being pretty flat year on year there was disruption taking place in terms of shift from mid market retailers either to luxury or to the discount proposition. In terms of my decision to step away now, the business, even though I left a year ago, continues to grow at hundreds of millions of pounds a year where the still opening stores and it's a thriving business in the uk, in France, in Ireland and it's got a very positive future.

Do you own any of the property?

Yeah, one of the things I enjoy outside of when I was running B and M was investing in property and over the years as a bit of a sideline I've invested in distribution centers and apartment blocks, in retail property. Yeah, it's, you seem so, so blase about it. I enjoy it. I don't have any hobbies outside of business, Rob. That's, that's, that's the issue. You know, people ask you what your hobbies, you know, other than I enjoy travel and fine dining and you know, obviously I'm a very much a family person but outside of that I have not, I've never played golf. I don't really have a sport that I week in, week out, go out and watch. I love the world of business. I think it's a fascinating, fascinating topic and to the extent I have some time outside of the day job, I was happy to use it on other activities.

So that all tells me you must be planning your next disruption. There's no way you're going to kick back for 30 years. I mean surely Mrs. A is going to have something to say about that.

So the way I'm currently thinking about that is, you know, we're very much a double act, my wife and I. And my wife Shalni, she's made a lot of huge sacrifices over the years supporting the family business. And in some ways it's incumbent upon me for, to make the space for her to be able to do what she wants to do professionally rather than sort of my ego saying right, what's next for me? What's my third big business opportunity? Delighted to share with you that in a few weeks time she goes to Collect an obe.

Oh, wow.

And she in a couple of weeks ago, she came through in the post. We're absolutely delighted and over the moon. So she's been working for 13 years in the not for profit sector. Her areas of interest are social cohesion, philanthropy, healthcare, women's rights, and she's got lots of ambitions in that area and I. I want to create the space for her to flourish. Given that I've had my fair share of. Of the airtime in the. In the. Around the family kitchen table, could I.

Be mildly selfish and make one small request just to plant in your brain?

Sure.

Mentoring.

Yeah. So I do a bit already.

Right.

In the way that I see it incumbent upon people in my situation to do. To do things like this and talk about what worked for us and what didn't work for us. I think mentoring is a wonderful thing and I'll spare his blushes, but there's a young man in his late 20s, he's got a business that's a couple of years old, we meet regularly. And for those people who are considering mentoring or being a mentee, one of the things that I would say is really helpful in that relationship is, first of all, 100% confidentiality about what's said. There's a reason why I didn't tell you who he is. And then second thing, I would also discourage potential mentors from being invested in the business because actually that undermines, A, the objectivity and B, undermines the candor and openness that the mentee can talk about or talk. Yes. If they're thinking there's a shareholder that I'm talking to might have different aspirations or might feel that he or she was misled in terms of how the business performing. So if you have those two ground rules in place, I think it can be a wonderful thing for. For both sides.

Yeah. Excellent. So, back to Labour. Let's do the full circle. So they seem this. Obviously they're putting VAT on school fees, that's decided. They're looking like they're increasing capital gains tax at income tax levels. There's this right to switch off that they're possibly bringing in where you can't contact your staff, out of office hours, etc. There seems to be a lot of noise. How do you think their initial stamp of authority into office has been and how do you think it's going to be for entrepreneurs under Labour?

Great question. So I think the first thing I'd emphasize is that I'm not a particularly political person and I'd be the first to point out that certainly in terms of my career, most of our business growth happened during the Blair years. You know, it was a great time to be in business. And even if I think back to my childhood and talking to my late father about politics, I remember him saying, even though we're a business family, don't be afraid of a Labour government. Labour governments are potentially good for business because all else being equal, they'll put more money into the pockets of people who are customers. And I'm the first to accept that. If you're on minimum wage or, or if you've got a relatively low paid job, it's really hard to make ends meet. It's just really, really tough. You know, whether it's the cost of housing, the fuel crisis that we're in, cost of living generally. First to accept just how difficult it is. And to the extent that the new government can make life easier and better for that large part of our population, that's good for society and it's good for business, particularly for those businesses like my old business that serves the population, you know, serves everyone. It's not a, we're not a luxury watch brand serving, you know, sort of the 0.1% we, we sell groceries and everyday consumer goods to everyone in society. So big picture terms, it doesn't alarm me. Of all the things you mentioned, the one that I probably say looking at in practice, is that really a good idea, is the one around unfair dismissal rights from day one of employment. Everyone makes mistakes. Every business person I know will point to some mistakes they made around hiring. And I would say that for businesses not to be able to quite easily and quickly dismiss someone quite early on if it becomes patently clear that this just isn't, that was a mistake for both sides. I think that's a problem. Problem. The caveat, if I was going to put my advice in on the debate, if someone has been employed by an organization and has given up another job previously to take that role, I think that person probably might deserve more protection than someone, for example, who's been unemployed for a long time, has been out of the labour market and when they've started, it's become immediately obvious to the employer that this is a mistake, it's not going to work out. I would say that that person arguably has not lost as much as the person who's moved jobs, lost the job security of a previous employer, only to find that for whatever reason the new employer doesn't think it's the right thing to continue.

Does a lot of this that we've talked about with a focus on the workforce. Do we risk not rebuilding this country? Because I just kind of think surely we just need to build things again, need to attract overseas money investment. We don't really have any resources so maybe we're going to have to build technology, increase the overall GDP instead of just taking more tax off of us. It just feels like times are hard. Let's just be honest and everyone just, let's just work hard for 10 years together and turn this nation around. I feel like that's what we need and I don't feel like anyone's saying it.

I feel the passion in what you're saying. I think rather than work hard I'd say let's just work smart. We're not a sweatshop country, we're never going to compete with China on banging out widgets, metal bashing. We need to be a knowledge based economy. We need to take advantage of our competitive advantage around education, science, green energy, all the things that we should be world class at. And to your point, around working hard. One of my guiding principles as a leader within BM was I like to think that I respected my colleagues work life balance. I was never a believer in people having to work long hours, much past 5:36 people just because it was expected of them. I'd rather you just get the work done in the 40 hour week but just be really productive. Don't waste your time on internal presentations, meaningless meetings. People sat around and you know, you look at a meeting and you think half the people didn't even say a word for an hour and a half and they're just sitting there nodding. This is not productive. I wasn't a believer in people being required to work weekends and actually that was I think a positive because one of the things that I'm really grateful for is that as I think about the key people in the key commercial roles in the support centre over the 18 years we never lost people, we had a really low colleague turnover in those decision making roles and the reason for that is one, I was a big believer in allowing people autonomy and trust them to do the job well. That comes with a caveat that they need to be crystal clear on what the two or three KPIs are that they need to deliver on rather than being fuzzy. But if you deliver on those two or three KPIs Simon Aurora is not bothered that you're out the door at 5:30 and you're not in before 8:30 that's fine. He's not bothered that you switch off the weekends. It's quite right that you do. You've probably got a family or other things that you are interested in doing. So yeah, delegating, trusting people, being really clear on how you want them to deliver and then likewise allowing them to have a work life balance. Those are the hallmarks of being a good employer.

Is there anything about the modern world of business that frustrates you? That you think people are getting it wrong in this, in these modern times because you've got a lot of experience.

Great question. I hate meetings. I just, I would say that email is part of the problem. It's all too easy to CC more and more people and all of a sudden there's 10 people involved in a discussion that frankly two or three people need to be doing. Let me paint a picture for you. So in our support centre in Liverpool head office we're going to call it, we call it support Centre because our job is to support the stores rather than top down sort of, you know, this is this, these are the bosses in the head office. It used to wind me up if I'd walk past a room and there are more than three people sat around a table. You walk past a room and there's eight, 10 people there and they're there for an hour. For me the best decisions are made standing on your feet. Two or three people, it could frankly be in the corridor, it could be just a couple of colleagues coming into my office. There's no meeting in the diary, just going, hey Simon, can I borrow 10 minutes? We're just thinking about this, what your views and literally on our feet. Talk it through. You've made a decision within 20, 30 minutes, go out and execute, keep it simple, stupid, huge mantra of mine. And frankly make a decision quickly. Better to be fast and be right 90% of the time than to be slow and try to be right 100% of the time. Because you never write 100% of the time. You might get to 95% and then of course if it goes wrong, fail fast, cut your losses and learn. Pick yourself up and get on to something else more positive. So yeah, just large corporate itis, lots of people in meetings, people being cc'd on stuff that don't need to be. That for me is one of the frustrations about modern day business.

And what do you think about kind of the inclusion now within the workspace and the need for the company to be aware about, you know, people's mental health and everything else.

It's all about balance, isn't it? I mean, it's all these things on their own are absolutely right and proper, but it's a question of balance. Every business person, everybody works in the private sector needs to understand that it's the profit that pays for all the rest of it. If you neglect the profit, if you neglect the cash generation, you start running the risk of becoming introspective, navel gazing, not looking at what's going on around you, how the business performing, and frankly, over time, a failing business that might have had all the best policies, but you've not been keeping an eye on your customers, your top line, your bottom line. Yeah, it's all about balance.

Do you have some go to traits that you see in people, leaders that you love? Have you got a couple of things that you pick out? Yes, I want that.

So Jim Collins, who's a business guru, he talks about level five leaders and level five is the top level. I'm not a level five. I wish I was. But one of the things that really sticks with me is that when he talks about Level 5 leaders, he says there are two defining traits. The first is that the person has a absolute conviction that the organization will succeed in the long term. Yes, it might go through ups and downs, yes, there'll be challenges, but in the long term it will succeed. But the second trait that he observed is the one that's arguably a bit surprising, which is level five leaders have a certain amount of humility. They recognize that to an extent, they've been lucky. They tend to applaud the people around them and their organization and their colleagues, rather than their own egotistical abilities. Or equally, they. They do what I talked about earlier on. They made sure that they're surrounded by people that are brighter than them because they knew what they're not good at, rather than thinking that they could do every job that was in the business and that they're brilliant. So when I look at other business leaders, I'm envious of people who are able to achieve great success while retaining that humility. It's something that I always have to sort of tell myself, be humble. You're just lucky. You're in the right place at the right time. And actually the real credit should go to the 40, 50,000 people that are doing the hard work, not me.

I'd love to talk about this thing called luck for a moment because I think it's great that you're humble and you recognise that you've been lucky, but you've also worked very hard for nearly 20 years. You had three very good jobs before learning your craft. So it's not like you just, you know, arrived without any grounding. And you know, you were measured and you didn't give up and you knew it was your time and you went in and you took risks and you know, you risked the family dynamic with your brothers. You know, I don't want to make you feel too uncomfortable singing all your.

Praises, but if Indians could blush, I'd be bright by now, Rob.

So. Yeah, but, but maybe there's the je ne sais quoi of luck, but maybe you have to stay in the game for a long time to receive it.

Well, it's the golfing analogy, isn't it? The harder you practice, the luckier you get. I think the phrase that comes to my mind is there is nothing common about common sense. What I'm trying to get at is that it's not about hard work or being lucky. Yes, those things are all important. But in every decision making me and my brothers came to, as we grew the business over that 18 year period, always take a step back. Just what's the common sense thing to do? Don't allow your decision making to get too complicated. Don't allow your decision making to become egotistical or overconfident. And just taking a step back and just thinking, but what's the common sense thing to do in this situation? And the other thing that comes to mind is in every business situation, my late father taught us this. In every business situation you're in, the best thing you can do in any negotiation is to put yourselves in the shoes of the person that you're negotiating with or that you're, you've got a dispute with or you've got an opportunity with having empathy, emotional empathy, as well as IQ for what that person wants to get out of a situation and what's important to them. It's another way of saying common sense. Hugely important.

Do you have to be ruthless to be a billionaire?

So I hate the title billionaire. I cringe when you said it because as I said, that's not what it's about. If you'd asked a question, do you have to be ruthless to be successful? I would answer the question because you know, I have an equal amount of respect for successful people in other fields, academia, sports, music creation. It's just my area happens to be running businesses. I don't think you have to be ruthless to be successful, but I think you have to be determined. And I don't know if you've seen it, it's been going around on Social media. Recently, Roger Federer was giving an address to some students in the States. And he made the point that over his entire professional career, he only won 54% of the points, 46% of the points he played, he lost. And he talked about the mindset whereby almost half the time he, you put everything into a point and you lose the ability to say, okay, that's done, onto the next point, all bets are off, we're going for winning again. That to me is a perfect expression of just being determined to make it work because there were lots of ups and downs, lots of things that didn't go well, problems, operational potholes that we hit along the way. There was a three month period halfway through the journey where my brothers and I thought, we're going to lose this. We, we moved distribution centers geographically and also by a factor of three in terms of size, and it didn't work. And within a few weeks we were having our stores looking like bakeries from Soviet Russia in the 1980s. You know, just empty shelves and sleepless nights, physically sick. Physically sick with worry that 10 years work, a billion pounds worth of value, 10, 20,000 jobs are going to go down the pan because I've messed this up, you know, I've screwed up, I've done enough. No one has it plain sailing all the way through, but just that determination to get in the trenches. Some of my brothers worked a night shift in the warehouse. We were there every hour that God sends. We got the team together, everyone pulled together in the right direction and we got through it. So, yeah, determination rather than ruthlessness is the way I would describe it.

So many people say you shouldn't go into business with your family. You ignored that advice. What's it like being in business with your family? Should people do it if they want to do it?

Good question. For us, it's been highly synergistic. I'm very fortunate in that my brothers and I, we have complementary skills.

So you're very different.

We're very different, but we have the same common sense attitude. So the big picture questions were aligned. So, for example, all three of us would understand what I said earlier. Turnover is vanity. Profits, cash is king. We were all aligned that as we grow this business, we need to keep growing cash profits year in, year out. Rather than, for example, one of the siblings thinking, no, let's not worry about the profit, we're just going to go for turnover, we'll worry about that later. Or another brother saying, do you know what? We have to be online even if we don't make money out of it. That's what the customer expects. We have to do it. So on those big picture questions, we were aligned. So that's foundation one to a successful family business dynamic. The second foundation is we have a similar work ethic. I don't think it works if you've got family members, some of whom want to do 20 hours a week, others are doing 60 hours a week over time, that you're going to fall out. And then the third element, which for us was hugely important was there was a very clear delineation of who's responsible for what and trusting that sibling to get on with it and deliver. That is not stepping on each other's toes. So in our case, Bobby Arora was entirely responsible for trading all products and all prices. His decision, where we buy them from, he did it all. As an aside, Robin Aurora was in charge of all grocery trading, grocery cleaning, toiletries, drinks, confett, etc. I did everything else. So whether that's strategy, store expansion, distribution, store operations, overseas acquisitions, blah, blah, blah, shareholder management, all that stuff, we didn't step on each other's toes. So if you can get those ingredients in place, I think no reason why it can't be a great success. And I'd equally say that if you can get those ingredients in place between business partners who are just, who are friends, who might have been school, school, school day friends or might be a husband and wife team, it could be, you know, it doesn't matter. It could be a CEO and a CFO who can sort of tick those three boxes. Work ethic delineation and shared big picture. Yeah, again, as my late mother used to say, one plus one equals 11, not two.

So we have a quick fire round that we love to do, which I'm going to come to in one question. You start it all again, what would you do? And it can be going back to the start and doing the same thing again differently. Or you can just pick any new industry you might want to start again. Let's say you're starting again with all your knowledge and all that early 30s hunger. What do you do?

Great question. So I think you look at the market, you look at different areas of opportunity and you ask yourself the basic questions. Is this market growing? Is this market going through disruption? How do I get into it? Some markets you just can't get into banking, you're not going into banking, you're never going to have the money to start a bank. So just being analytical and strategic and thinking not about, well, what can I do that might make me money for the next three to six months. But thinking about where's the opportunity to create value and create a great organization on a 10 year time frame. Now I'll share with you that I was never a big believer in detailed budgets beyond a year because no one's got a crystal ball. But having some sort of concept of where, a constant rolling concept of where you want the business to be or where the opportunity is three years from now, and then working back in terms of what you need to do to make sure you take advantage of it, that's, that's really important. So sit back, observe, look for the opportunity, pick the right way of getting into it. That for me is the non. That, that's, that's the sinful note of trying to be an entrepreneur. To answer your question, what else would I not do? What else would I have done differently? I said I wasn't a level 5 leader. I have to be honest and candid in that. One of the ways I'm not a level five leader is that my actions suggest that I didn't have 100% conviction that B M was going to be around for decades to come and was going to withstand anything that was thrown at it. And the way that expressed itself is clearly whether it's through the IPO and otherwise selling shares in the company. Right. And leaving a lot of value on the table for other investors. Yeah, that's fine, that's fine. You can't have your cake and eat it. But I'm going to expand on that by showing that one of the reasons why my brothers and I were minded to sell shares in the company every couple of years and gradually reduce our ownership is because in the way that we were able to make working together as siblings really successful, I was very clear in my mind, as were my brothers, that when you think about the next generation, nine, 10 cousins, all owning one business and potentially scrabbling between them for various different roles and indeed who gets the total top job, that's a recipe for disaster. And family relationships are hugely important to, to all of us in our family. And the last thing I would want is 20 years from now a situation where I've got cousins falling out with each other because of the family business. Life's too short for that. And that's not what's important. What's really important for us is the love and affection that we have for each other as family members. And the family business is a, it's a nice to have. It's not. It's not the be all and end all.

So the disruptors round. What's the most disruptive thing you've ever done?

As we grew B and M, we decided that we were going to spend none of our turnover on advertising. We built a business from 20 shops to, as you say, 5 billion of revenues with no advertising budget. We decided that if we just keep our prices as low as possible, that's our disruption. Because the most effective form of advertising is a customer telling a family member or a friend or a neighbour, oh, there's a new store I found in town. I went in there, some great prices. That is worth millions of pounds worth of TV ad.

Wow. What's the most disruptive thing anyone's ever done to you?

Wow, great question. We bought a business in Germany. On paper, it looked like a good acquisition and we owned 100% of it. And to my horror, over the next one or two years, I gradually discovered that every time we went over to speak to the local management team, it come with the business, even though we were getting lots of nods and lots of yeses in the meeting, that as soon as we were back on the plane home, they just ignored it and carried on the way they were and the business did not change at all and it turned out to be a disaster. So I had not understood that when you're trying to manage colleagues internationally, and particularly when you've bought a business that has its own particular culture and highly embedded way of doing things, that they can disrupt my plans by ignoring everything I'm bloody saying. So, yeah, that was a painful experience.

And how did you deal with that?

Decided to fail fast. We exited, sold it back to management and then, interestingly, before we bought the next business in Europe, which is a business in France, we hired a couple of people to join our business well before we bought the Target company and they came to the UK and learned our culture, learnt our way of doing things, so that when we did make the acquisition, we had greater confidence that it was going to be done the way we'd want it to be done, rather than embedded behaviors of the past.

What's your most brutal life lesson?

Shut happens. Yeah, that's very personal. When I was 17, my father, my late father, he was 44 years old, he died out of a heart attack. Out of the blue. I get a phone call, you got to come to Delhi. He was in Delhi with my mother. Out the blue, just gone. And it. It was a black swan event, and that's a polite way of putting it. It was just horrific. Horrific. We were a very close family and he was the breadwinner. We had a small cash and carry business in city centre Manchester. My mother, a widowed sari wearing lady, she stepped to the plate. She started working full time in the business. To her credit, she allowed me to carry on with my studies and my career rather than doing the obvious thing of saying, well, sorry son, you can just work behind the counter now because we've got no choice. I want to share something with you, it's very personal. When I arrived in Delhi a couple of days after the funeral had taken place and the cremation taken place, my late father's next door neighbor came up to me to give his condolences. And he shared with me that the night that my father passed away, they'd been out for dinner, they were old school day friends, school time friends. And he said, son, your father was very proud of you. In fact, the night before he passed away, he said to me that if anything ever happens to me, me, it's fine, I've got Simon there, he's a bright kid, he'll take care of my wife and his younger brothers. That was a wonderful thing to hear from beyond the grave. And the reason why that actually was the case. And that even though I was 17 years old and doing lower sixth, I actually knew all of the family finances and where everything was kept and what we own and what we didn't own is because around the kitchen table, to his credit, my parents had, my father in particular, he took the time to explain what's going on in the family business. And I know, having been a parent myself, you've had a busy day at work, you're exhausted, you're stressed out of your head. Sometimes the last thing you do is talk about work over the kitchen table with your kids. It really takes an effort. And I credit him for taking that effort because it's sort of put me in good stead for the. The chaos that ensued when he passed away.

Wow. I held this in the whole time. Excuse me. There was such a tickly thing there.

But I'm proud of myself. You held it in very well. You want some water?

I'm good, I just finished it.

Good.

Well, thank you for sharing that. I am talk to my wife a lot about business. She's not in the business she was. And I think it's really important to be open with the children and let them hear it because it's real. And I remember maybe when I was like 26, I found out things about my mum and dad that they did and they shielded from me. And I felt like, wow, you know, that shows love. But I felt like you didn't need to shield that from me. You didn't need to shield from me that it was hard to pay my school fees because business was hard. I didn't feel like they needed to do that. And so I don't think that they made a mistake. I just think I wouldn't want to shield my children from that. I'd want to give them the lessons along the way.

I'm smiling. I have 100% empathy for what you're describing. There were times, so my brother and I went to fee paying private school, grammar school, but there were times when there were letters coming from the bursa to the parents about the arrears. And then every now and then I'd be given an envelope with a couple of hundred pounds which was a quarter of the school fees for that term. And I'd sheepishly go into the bursa office and say, sir, I've been asked to give you this by my mum and dad. And he look at the cash and realize it's light and shake his head. But you know, I think, I think you're right. It's important that teenagers, the kids understand that life is not a bed of roses and that life comes with challenges and you have to work hard and you know, there'll be challenges along the way.

Best advice you ever remember receiving.

When I was at McKinsey, I was speaking to one of the partners about whether I should go off and do an mba. This gentleman had a Harvard mba. And I explained that I wanted to be an entrepreneur at some point. And he said to me, actually he did the entrepreneurship elective whilst he was at Harvard. And I said, oh, so was it worth doing? And I was intrigued. And he said, actually I can distill it into one sentence of advice for you. I said, really? Harvard mba? The whole one year you spent on entrepreneurship? He said, yeah, basically you get taught that all businesses go through cycles, up times and down times, and the successful entrepreneurs are the ones that buy when everybody else is selling and sell when everybody else is. So just however good you are, however talented you might be, your business is going to go through good times and bad times and the ones who are successful are the ones who to transact.

And the worst advice you ever remember.

Receiving, part of large corporate good practice is to have lots of workshops and talking shops around values, mission statements, purpose, vision, all that stuff. And you know, I've had people say, oh, this is, tell me that this is really important and you need to do this in your business. No, if the culture isn't real, if the culture doesn't exist, because that's how people behave day in, day out without thinking about it. If the culture doesn't exist because you as the business leader are role modeling it every day, all these meetings and clever words on pieces of paper and colorful PowerPoint presentations. Meaningless. Has to be real, has to be authentic. And I mentioned earlier that one of the reasons I felt comfortable stepping away from B M, you know, my baby. I ran B and M as chief exec for the same sort of period that my adult daughters have been around, you know, 18 years. One of the reasons why I felt comfortable leaving is because the culture was deeply embedded, because it had been lived, exercised day in, day out for 18 years. And it wasn't some clever words dreamt up by some consultants that came in and you've got a workshop coming up with some ideals. That's not how it was.

No. What's your biggest regret?

My late father not seeing the output of the time he invested in coaching his sons, sending them to good schools and giving them confidence. So, you know, there's this phrase, the strongest steel is forged in the most intense fires, the most intense crucible. A lot of successful people experience parental loss relatively early age, and in some ways it spurs them on. I acknowledge that. But I regret that he wasn't around to see the outputs of the input that he put in.

And this is the final question, and this show is called Disruptors. What does the word disruptive mean to you?

Innovator. Courageous, healthy, disregard for the rules and the status quo.

Can I just say one thing, Simon? Because we talked before air about the interviews I like to do, and I said, I've been doing this a long time. Eight and a half, nine years.

You're very good at it, by the way. I've said things I would not have dreamt of saying until you got me going. So. So well done, you.

I appreciate that. Thank you. And I said that I fundamentally love doing the entrepreneurial type interviews, but, you know, we've had to go broad to stay relevant and sometimes we do have to chase the, you know, the drama a little bit. I try and avoid it, but we do a bit. But this is what I love to do. Doing this kind of interview, all about business, the real life lessons on the street. So I just want to say thank you for.

I also want to thank you for exhibiting one of the traits that I mentioned before, again, before we went on air. Do you remember how I said it's as important, it's as important to be interested as it is to be interesting? And you exhibit that in spades. So thank you for your interest in my story.

Thank you. Well, that was. That was easy because I loved it.

Very good.

Thank you.

Wow.

Thanks, Simon.

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