We’re delighted to share a special episode of our long-running podcast, How I Grew My Brand. This time, Mary Nightingale sits down with Sir John Timpson, chair and owner of Timpson Group, the high street service brand that goes far beyond key cutting and shoe repair, continuing to thrive through its people-first culture.
John’s great-grandfather, William, started the first Timpson shoe shop with his uncle in Victorian Manchester. 160 years on, the business spans more than 2,000 wholly owned Timpson outlets, 5,500 colleagues and around 20 sister brands, among them Snappy Snaps, The Watch Lab and Johnsons Cleaners. John joined formally in 1964, aged 21, having already spent a gap-year summer working in the shops. At the time, they were largely shoe retail shops with some shoe repair; the business didn’t cut its first key until 1969.
In the episode, Mary asks John about inflection points that forced the business to change, what Piper refers to as 7, 17, 70. For John, the first was in 1987 when he made the difficult decision to sell the foundation of the original company, the shoe shops. While it seemed as though the high street was thriving at the time, John explains how he saw the early winds of change in the market. Throughout his leadership, John has continued to make brave decisions, mostly through acquisitions. In 2008 they bought loss-making photo printing chain, Max Spielmann. It is now a £12 million profit business. As John says, “It’s luck that these opportunities come, but the skill is to know how to take advantage of them.”
John doesn’t believe in five-year plans either. He’d rather write an annual report for fifteen years in the future; he’s just finished 2040’s. What guides him instead is a lesson from his grandfather: focus on people, not the numbers. When John was a boy, his grandfather toured the shops asking colleagues about their lives, not their sales figures, “He wasn’t quite looking at standards… he was talking about their families and what they were doing on holiday.” To an outsider, that would look like the wrong way to build a profitable business, but it is exactly why Timpson still works.
In the late 1990s John read about Nordstrom giving frontline staff the freedom to go the extra mile for customers, and knew it was the right decision for Timpson, “There are only two things that matter in our business. One is doing a great job, and the other is to give great service.” This idea developed into a system known as upside-down management, where the people in the shops are given the authority to run the business, “and everyone else is there to support them and make it easy for them to do a good job.”
It didn’t start smoothly. John began with two rules: look the part, put the money in the till, only for his area managers to quietly override it: “Ignore John, you’ve got to work for me.” So, he added a third rule: no one may tell anyone else what to do, stripped head office of its authority, and started recruiting purely for personality: “We want Mrs Happy, Mr Keen, Mr Helpful… our ideal is to have a business full of nines and tens.” It’s a system that has not only kept Timpson in the Sunday Times’ top ten Best Companies to Work For, year after year, but driven customer loyalty, brand value and the growth of an exceptionally large store estate without having to franchise in the UK.
One of Timpson’s most famous outcomes of this culture is the fact that around 12% of Timpson’s colleagues are ex-offenders who join the business from prison. The idea began 25 years ago when John’s son James visited a prison and offered an inmate a job when he was released. John’s wife heard about this and said, “But if you can find a job for one, you can find a job for 10 of them. Go and find some more.” It made tabloid headlines at launch, “cons cutting keys.” John had his doubts, but it has now developed into the Timpson Foundation with a developed process and management. Reoffending among Timpson’s hires is now a fraction of the national average and, until just this week, James was Prisons Minister.
It would be easy to assume a business like this is stuck in the past. It isn’t. Their vending machine offering is expanding internationally, self-service key-cutting machines are rolling into supermarkets across the country, and automatic launderettes are next. Photo, John says, has “unbelievably” become one of Timpson’s fastest growing arms.
For us, this is what a brand legend looks like: 160 years of history, a culture that hasn’t budged, and a business still finding new ways to grow. Today, turnover stands at around £450 million and profit at just over £50 million. As Mary puts it, “I think the plan is working, John.” Enjoy the listen. We loved recording it.