Episode 5 | FEARGAL QUINN | Former Irish Senator, Superquinn Founder & CEO

Welcome to Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Welcome to the 5th edition of Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast. And I'm really excited to be here today with Fergal Quinn, who, among many other things, has been a senator for 23 years. Chairman of An Post, has been a TV personality with a couple of TV series, but is probably best known for founding SuperQuinn, the supermarket chain here in Ireland. And really, I guess, a focus on customer service and a life that's been based on customer service and the ethos of customer service. And that's what I want to get into in a little more detail as we go through this. But First of all, thanks for having me, Fergal.

Tá léibh to be here.

Lovely, thank you.

Tá léibh to have you here.

Thank you, thank you. We might kick off with a really easy one and maybe you tell me a little bit about you. Give me the 2-minute summary of Fergal Quinn.

Well, I grew up in a holiday camp because my father had started Red Island Holiday Camp way back in 1947 in Skerries. When I say holiday camp, he didn't like the term camp because that suggests chalets and tents, but this was a big hotel with 250 rooms. Wow. And he had a good friend he'd come across who was having problems— he was having problems with his own architect because he wanted every one of the guests to have a view of the sea. And whoever was his architect wasn't agreeing to that, so he switched architects and he found a man called Vincent Gallagher, and they became great buddies over the years. So here in Red Island in Skerries was a 250-bedroom hotel that catered almost exclusively for English people. With the exception of one week of the year, 12th of July week, where there were quite a few northerners came down. But the exception of that, they were practically all, all English. But the difference was, compared that in any other holiday camps, was that everything was included. And my father didn't try to make any money from them. Once they paid when they arrived, that's all they got. Okay. And, uh, in those days, 1947, most of the English people coming were used to rationing, and they couldn't get over that you could have a second helping of rashers and eggs and sausages. And so Red Island became famous because of its food. And my father and mother used to sit at the table inside the door, so the guests leaving— there were 500 guests— as they left, they could stop and chat to my father, tell him, 'Could you do something for this?' or 'What about that?' or 'How would I go about it?' And my mother used to get annoyed that, 'Just could we not sit somewhere else?' have a quiet meal for a change. And have a quiet meal. But he, he loved that. But he ran his business on— and I mentioned it in Crowning the Customer, my first book— it's called the boomerang principle. And everything you do is aimed at getting the customer to come back again. So when I went into the grocery business, I assumed that same rule applied to everything. So I grew up in a holiday camp where the objective was to get the customer to come back again. Opened a grocery shop in Dundalk in 1960 where the objective was to get the customer to come back again. And we eventually— I got a little boomerang, so every day in the company wore a boomerang.

Okay, nice.

And it was just— it was great. Yeah. And people didn't quite understand what the boomerang was all about. But the other thing was that the grocery self-service wasn't normal. Most of the grocery shops, all grocery shops, you went in and you said to the person behind the counter, "Could I have a packet of that, a packet of this, or a pound of tea, or a quarter of sugar, or whatever?" Actually, it's a quarter of tea and a pound of sugar. And they go and get it. So to go into a supermarket, as we called it, and suddenly find that you had to do the shopping yourself—

must have been a shock.

Was. And they didn't quite understand it. And my father came down the day I opened the first shop, and he came down, he drove down, parked the car, and as he walked towards the shop He met people with the self-service basket, the supermarket basket, and he said, 'Excuse me, where'd you get that?' 'Oh, it's the new shop.' He insisted we have it. People were taking them home with them because they'd never seen them before. No, we, we had about 100. We got 100 baskets, self-service baskets. There are only 50 left that day. Wow. My father had to say, 'I think you're not supposed to take them out of the shop.' And I can remember Miss Martin giving her a lift one time. She was a former teacher, an older lady, and carrying her groceries into the— into her house. And there on the piano was the self-service basket turned upside down with flowers in it. She says, 'That's the basket you insisted on me having on the day you opened.' Brilliant. And there were stories like that, yeah, all the time. But the business was built on the boomerang principle. Everything we did was aimed at getting the customer to come back again, whereas our competitors were not quite the same. Their aim was to serve the customer, take as much money off them as you could on that visit. On that visit.

So definitely a much more strategic and longer-term perspective from you and your team than perhaps some of the other—

Well, it turned out to be, but I mean, I didn't know that. I just thought that's the way every business, because Red Island, the holding company, had run on the boomerang principle.

Yeah. And you'd learned your trade there.

So that's what I assumed every business should do. But we were very competitive. And we cut the price of everything. Yeah. In fact, there was one lovely story that the Courts had a shop and they were a grocery shop and they had gone self-service and we competed with them and John McCourt, Pat McCourt, his son, is more my age We became good friends, but we were very competitive. And to the extent that cornflakes were selling at 2 shillings, but he brought it down to 1 and 9 pence, and I came down to 1 and 8 pence, he came down to 1 and 7 pence, and eventually it was costing us 1 and 6 pence, but we were now selling it for about 1 and 5 pence.

All right, so you were losing on it.

So we were losing out, but the whole of County Louth was shopping in Dundalk because of the big battle going on between McCourt's and Quinn's. We called ourselves Quinn's supermarket at the time, and to the extent that the parish priest came down to see the two of us, Mr. McCourt and myself, to see could we, could he settle this big row that was going on between— but the two of us were doing so well.

I love it, it's so old school, the parish priest coming down to sort it out between you.

Yeah, we had to explain to him though, it's, it's working out very well. People in Drogheda, people in Ardee, people in Newry were shopping in Dundalk because of, because of the great value. So I think the parish priest had great difficulty understanding why he wasn't able to get a settlement between the two of us. The two of us were doing so well out of it.

Yeah, we're doing just fine, thank you very much.

But we sold. I remember what brought it to a head was the cornflakes are now at 1 and 5 pence, and he was selling 1 and 5 pence, and we were selling at 1 and 5 pence. And I put a sign up in the window, we will pay 1 and 6p for any packet of Cornflakes.

So you'll buy them off people?

So the man who sold newspapers across the street, he came in to me and he said, you're selling them for 1 and 5p, but you'll pay me 1 and 6p? I said, yeah. So he went down to McCourt's and he bought a load of— onto his bicycle, I think 24 packets of Cornflakes, and came up, which meant he was going to make 24 pence, and I gave him that, but McCourt's had stamped every one of them with McCourt's.

Brilliant.

So when I met John McCourt that day, he said, 'Ah, what are you going to do?' I said, 'I put them all in the boot of the car, took them down to Red Island, and took 24 packets from Red.' So that was the sort of battle that was going on.

Let me talk a little bit about, um, the difference that your people made, because I guess when you're, when you're in a world which is driven by service culture, the people that offer that service are your people, the people on the front line. So what did you do to nurture a customer service culture with your staff? What were some of the things that you did?

I think the first thing I did was I woke up every morning looking forward to coming to work because I actually loved it. And I would have probably inherited that from my mother and father. It was great fun, but I think that instilled in all of those who worked first, because when we opened in Dork, we already had 9 people working, 8 or 9 people. But by the time we'd opened second or third shop, we had a couple of hundred. We opened in Finglas, then we opened in Sutton. Bought the cinema there, and it was just a fun place to be because the important item was that everybody else coming to work and everybody else coming to shop, which was work for them, would actually enjoy the experience. I remember when we opened in Sutton, I said, how do we, how do we get publicity for this what had been a cinema was now a supermarket and other shops that had opened always had a very expensive pop star to open but I went along to Fawcett Circus and met Mr. Fawcett and said could I hire your elephant some morning for one morning just to open the supermarket. So bringing an elephant into a shop, yeah, gave some idea of the size of the shop. Yeah. And so we got quite a crowd there and quite a few people see the elephant from Fawcett Circus. Well, as far as they were concerned, the elephant was doing the opening. Yeah. And it wasn't costing anything like a pop star. The only trouble is the elephant wasn't house-trained.

That's tricky in a supermarket.

He didn't say very long, but it was still good fun and people still talked about the elephant years later.

Yeah. One of the things you said in the book I was reading there was that in the beginning, as much as possible as the business grew, you interviewed all the staff yourself.

Yeah.

And then you spent time with them.

Afterwards. Yeah.

Why was that so important, and how important was it for you to get the right staff?

I think what we were trying to do, what I was trying to do, was instill in them that making a customer welcome, having a smile, was more important than the skills. So there were people coming in who had got plenty of skills as a butcher, baker, or whatever they were doing. But if they couldn't smile, they couldn't look after the customer. So from my point of view, I was trying to instill in everybody, when you come to work, you come with a smile, and you make sure that the customer is met with a smile. And it worked.

You were hiring for attitude and less for experience?

Very much for attitude. So people coming in to work for us had to enjoy the experience, and they did. And of course, we made it attractive to them because those who came to work in Quinn's supermarket, which later became SuperQuinn, they, uh, we would make sure there were trips, weekend trips to Red Island.

And for all the staff?

All the staff. We'd close on Saturday evening, come back Monday morning, and no other shop was doing that. So people who wanted a job, see if you can get a job in Quinn's, because among the things that we paid well But more than anything else, that they enjoyed. Yeah. Enjoyed the experience.

Because I think that generally people, you know, when you look at what motivates people, money only motivates them to a point.

Yeah.

It's actually the experience they have at work and how engaged they are in their job and how much they enjoy and how much they get from it that's actually nearly more important.

And of course our brothers and sisters and cousins all went to the job. But, and we were taking on quite a few. I mean, we started with 6 or 7 people, ended up with— well, by the time we'd got 3 shops between Finglas and Sutton and Dundalk, we had a few hundred. And when eventually, many years later, when we sold the company, we had about 5,000. Wow.

I think what's interesting is that that legacy, because I'm here for 17 years now, so I'm, I guess, Irish Shire passport, which I must get around to getting actually before the Brexit thing happens. That customer service ethos has remained in our local supermarket in Sutton. I still go in there, the staff are still friendly, the manager is still out on the shop floor, the bakers are great, the butchers are great. You can pick a piece of pre-packed meat from the fridge and bring it and they'll bone it out and dice it for you. They have the skills in-house to be able to do that, but actually they have the attitude to want to. So it's amazing that that has retained over the years, even though I guess the business was sold in 2005, 13 years ago now, but that has remained. So it's testament to you and I guess what you built up there that that's lasted.

It doesn't seem like 13 years ago. I still shop in Sutton.

Yeah.

And I feel guilty that I don't get to the other shops because they— as often as I should, because I know them all and they know me. And a very large number of the staff have stayed. But we did a whole lot of other things. We changed the words, for instance, head office became a no-no. Yeah. It became support office.

I read that in the book and it's really interesting because having come from a banking background and the head office, which people out in the branch network called things like the mothership and the Death Star, and you would hear things when you went to branches, you would hear things like, you know, I believe you have very nice carpets up there and that kind of thing. And it's just odd, but it is. There was a sense of the center being in charge. And the rest almost being a flip side, actually being a support for the head office. And I think by calling your head office a support office, that kind of flipped that whole thing on its head.

Oh yeah. And one of the other words was the word staff became unacceptable. It became colleagues. So that you referred to colleagues. And of course that caused confusion on occasions. People thought referring to your colleagues, they didn't realize that they actually worked there. Yeah, yeah, but it was, it was good.

And isn't it interesting how those little changes can make such a big difference in the culture of an organization?

It's the culture rather than anything else. Yeah, but if people come to work looking forward to coming to work and they, they enjoy that. Yeah, yeah, but they, they have to— you have to make sure that leadership in whatever way you do that you're always on the stage. So whether it's at work or whether it's on television or whether it's just going along the street, you've got the responsibility of setting a standard. And those standards do exist, but they blossom. Yeah.

One of the things I loved in the book, again, having gone back through it, You talk a lot about visibility. You talked a lot about how you took away people's desks and you made managers' offices, and I quote, quite deliberately and spartan to get them out into the stores. And you talk as well about holding meetings with your staff rather than being up in an office, actually holding your meetings down on the shop floor. And how important do you think that visibility is for the colleagues in the industry?

I think it's very important. Good, you used the word colleagues.

See what I did there?

Well done.

Thank you.

Yeah. No, there were some things. I remember going to a meeting somewhere. The meeting went on and on and on. So the following week, when we were going to one of our— when the 10 or 12 of us who were the sort of senior managers come in. There were no chairs. They'd taken all the chairs away. So the meeting, you had to have the meeting standing up. Yeah. And it's amazing how quickly the meeting took place. Yeah. Because we always had our Monday morning meeting at 8 o'clock in the morning, but it could very easily have dragged on until lunchtime. But very quickly people realized, gosh, we're standing up, it's now 10 o'clock or 9 o'clock and the meeting's finished much more quickly. Yeah. And somebody who wanted to rattle on usually shut up because he was told to shut up by his colleagues.

Because they wanted to go.

Yeah. Yeah.

Interesting. And when you look now at some of the ways that people, you know, companies manage projects now with the likes of Lean and they do stand-up meetings as part of that every morning, a stand-up, and a stand-up is 10 minutes. That's it. That's all you're getting before we kick off our day. And that's oftentimes all you need.

Yeah.

Because the rest of it is just fluff and bluster and isn't really adding anything.

I mean, among 10 of us, there are always 1 or 2 who talk a lot.

Not you, of course.

Yes, including me.

Funny, funny, funny.

But If you have a stand-up meeting, it does tend to finish rather early.

Which is great. One of the things, just talking about being out on the shop floor, one of the things again, you said in the book was that communicating sales figures helps. I think you did actually say staff in the book. I'm just saying helps colleagues to see how their efforts have paid off and how more importantly for me, how they fit into the bigger picture.

Of course.

Why was that important?

Well, I think that's important so that everybody knows their role is, is necessary for success. And because you publish the figures among all the colleagues every week, everybody could see how well they were doing, how well the department was doing. And every Thursday morning the senior management went to a different shop and we opened the books and showed how the company was doing and how they— their particular department was doing and how other departments were competing with them in, in our, in our own company.

So a sense of pride, a sense of, a sense of kind of competition, I guess, between departments.

Yeah. And the measurement you had was was mainly how many customers come into the shop and how many of them actually came to your department. Because in Naas, there were far more people going to the butchery department than there were in some other shop. So they were— they became very envious of the shops that were not, not so much doing more business getting more customers. And it became a real competitive, not the amount of money you made, but the number of customers you got.

Yeah, yeah.

It's good fun.

You know what, it is. It is a bit of fun and it's a bit of competition. And actually it helps again to build that pride in your job, to help build that pride in your store. I was telling a story yesterday I was running a masterclass and Apollo House is right beside my office and it's currently being pulled down. So they're taking it down floor by floor. And this whole idea that an engaged employee is somebody that will just go, just do that extra bit, go that extra mile, run out after somebody into the car park with a pair of gloves they've left behind in the store rather than throw them into lost property. And in this case yesterday, one of the builders who's taking down Apollo House was walking along the road. He was walking towards me and I saw him and he looked down at the road into the gutter on Tara Street there, and he saw a piece of rubble sitting, a nugget of rubble, probably maybe about the size of an apple, but it would have done some damage to a car or somebody could have slipped on it. He walked past it and he was still walking towards me, and then I watched him, he turned on his heel, he walked back and he picked that up off the floor, off the road, out the gutter with his bare hands and brought it back inside and threw it into a skip. And for me, it's just that, it's those little tiny things that you must have seen all the time that makes such a difference to organizations when people are willing to do that extra little bit.

Well, that was the important element, but they only did it if they saw, if they followed the example of somebody else.

Yeah, and that's a great point. And I guess that's where that comes down to leadership.

And that is leadership. And it doesn't have to be a boss. Yeah, it could be anybody. Yeah, yeah.

Sideways, up, down.

Yep. You can see it happen.

Yeah, and actually interesting talking about that, I know that you had talked about that you don't like hierarchy, pyramid hierarchy structures. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Well, it seems to me that if everybody in the company feels part of the organization and feels that they are the boss, because they're setting examples for somebody else. So everybody coming into the company was put under the care of somebody who's already there.

Okay, so mentor, and they learn from them. Okay.

And I think that can happen in any business, and most businesses don't do that. Yeah, they— when somebody comes for an interview or when they come first day at work, they're given a list of the rules. Whereas if, on the other hand, they come to work and they're, they, they, uh, put under the care of somebody else who just sets an example.

Yeah, yeah. I can explain the rules in a human way as they go. Yeah, yeah.

They don't even have to explain it, they just do it by example. Yeah, like you With that man picking up the bit of litter. You can—

Yeah, it shows the way they weren't asked to do that. That's just the way we do things around here. Yeah, yeah.

They don't even have to say it. They just see that's what their colleagues do. Yeah. Therefore, that's what they tend to do as well.

Yeah, and that whole mentoring or buddying is very, very powerful for exactly that reason.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's something that all companies should be looking at in terms of how they kind of— and it doesn't need to be a massively formal thing. It's just a case of this Fergal, this is Scott. Welcome to the organization. He's going to be your buddy for a month, 6 months, however long it is. And it need be nothing more than that.

Yeah, it was interesting when I was asked to do Retail Therapy. That was a TV series.

This one from NACE?

From RT. No, we did, we did 12 different shops.

Ah, okay, of course, yes.

And it was just so interesting to see the different examples of people, particularly with TV camera on them, and they saw later, oh gosh, is that me? I didn't know that. And they get so embarrassed, and they see one of their colleagues doing a fabulous job and it could be one of the family. But we, we'd the examples we had, we'd one down in Limerick, in Ennis, another in Cobh, Cork, another in, in, well, they were all around the country and you could see the different members of the same family acting differently. But if you could see that the one who was setting the example set the example for somebody else. I loved going into those shops and working there myself. Now admittedly, I was at that time easily recognized, so it wasn't that easy to to pretend that I was just—

it wasn't you. You didn't go for a false mustache and glasses?

No.

A false beard?

No. But they, right around the country, you could see, you could see the, the examples that people set. Yeah. And, and it worked very well. Yeah.

I'm culturally— I think what's very interesting is that when it's the wrong people setting the example, it could go the other way. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But when they see themselves on television, they say, whoops.

It's a bit of a wake-up call.

It's a wake-up call. Yeah.

I spend a lot of time talking to people about self-awareness, and I think there's a huge gap in people's lives of just knowing what they're good and not good at. And that's such— I think seeing yourself on television and thinking, oh my God, is that actually me? Did I actually say that? Did I actually do that? Is that what I do on a day-to-day basis? Is really powerful. And somebody then actually taking the impetus to do something with that is probably the next most important step, I would think.

Oh yeah, but I can think of one particular case where they, I suppose, they the leader of the— the oldest member of the family, uh, just snubbed a customer. But we had the camera on him and he felt so embarrassed when he saw it. But you're not going to show that on television, are you?

Probably.

And of course we did. Yeah. And she He said it was the best lesson he ever got.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can imagine. I think when you see that, it is a stark reminder of what we are. Yeah, interesting. Let me talk to you a little bit about 2005, because a lot of the work that I do with organizations is around change and when big changes happen, how you bring staff on that journey. When you were going through the process of selling your interest in in SuperQuinn towards the end in 2005. How did you prepare staff for that change? What were you telling them?

The biggest— the first thing to do was to prepare, uh, family, because all of our family had worked at some point or other in the business. Could be behind a pizza counter, behind a bakery counter, behind a butcher's counter, but and some of them were very anxious to almost assume, "Oh, this is my way of life, it's natural," but it wasn't, and so to be able to explain what happened. So one of the things we did, we had joined a family business circle around the world there's one based in America and another one based in Europe. We found ourselves being invited to family business groupings, and you could learn so many family businesses, the mistakes they made and the opportunities they saw. So when we gathered, as we did on a regular basis and talked about where should we go next, what should we do. I discovered that in general the right thing to do is to move on. There were sufficient numbers members of family to whom the target were other things other than just our business, and so it was comparatively easy thing to do. To get out of the business. Once you'd gone on that journey of where you all want to be, there was no row, there's no difficulty. They all understood it and understood it very well. Good.

And how did that then translate into the staff in the stores?

Easy. Well, I think quite difficult. They couldn't believe it.

I can imagine.

When I remember the day where we announced, it was a Saturday morning that we were going out. Admittedly, the name was staying over the door, and the people to whom we'd sold— it wasn't Super Value, it was another group who had actually valued the company, mainly because of its property. And they'd made a good team, so it was comparatively easy to take it. And they kept me there with a nice title of president or something like that, even though I didn't do anything, but I was wheeled out for occasions. But it was a few years later before they sold to Super Value. Okay. And Super Value were a family business, so it wasn't that difficult for the employees, for our colleagues. To change.

And as you said, many of them have remained. I know that certainly in my office, many of them are still there.

Yeah.

Which is great to see. And says, again, says a lot about the brand and coming to work in there.

Yeah.

So just in finishing up, I'm really interested to know, because you have such a strong customer service ethos and that was a really solid foundation for your business. But who are your leadership role models? Who was it you learned most from? I know you mentioned your father earlier on, and he, I guess, was maybe one of the earlier ones, but who else is there in the mix?

Well, my father was certainly the one who influenced me most, but there were so many others, particularly people who joined our company and blossomed, grew, and have either stayed in the company or have gone on to succeed elsewhere. I think of Cormac Tobin, who left us after I'd gone, after I'd left, and became on the board of very large pharmaceutical company, and eventually on the board of the American owners, and still lives here in Ireland. But he's just an example. For somebody who woke up every morning looking forward to coming to work. And I remember when he was doing his Leaving Cert working in SuperQuilt, he felt on the last day of the Leaving Cert, which whatever, he felt, "I've done enough to pass after 1 hour." So he left after only 1 hour. Got the degree.

Over what, a 2-hour exam, a 3-hour exam?

3-hour exam.

3-hour exam, okay.

And he left, didn't do the other 2 hours because he'd done enough. And of course he did, he had done enough. He later went on and got a PhD in Stirling University. But there were a number of others like that. James Burke also with him. James Burke left school at came from Bantry, left school at an early age. Now when I say early, did his Leaving but didn't go on to college, came up.

So he'd have left at 18, I guess?

Yeah, at 18. Yeah. And came up and worked. And I remember him coming to me when he was almost 40 and he said, 'I'm going out on my own. If I don't do it now, I'll never do it.' But it was the ambition, the drive, and the belief that you could do it yourself. You didn't have to, didn't have to follow somebody else. But they're examples of young people who just came to work every day looking forward to coming to work. So if there was one bit of advice, it's that: waking up in the morning looking forward to the day. And looking back at the end of the day, said, 'Hey, that was a good day. I enjoyed that.' Because if you enjoyed it, everybody you came in touch with, it touched them as well. So I think leadership and setting standards like that, it's very important. I think the answer is There are solutions to everything. You just have to look for them. And they don't always jump at you.

Excellent. And on that poignant note, I think we will wrap it up. Frodo Quin, thank you very much. It's been really, really nice talking to you. Appreciate the time.

Thank you very much. Pleasure meeting you again.

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