John Roberts, founder and chief executive of retailer AO.com, sheds light on the successful culture at the online appliance retailer and the challenges of recruitment.
When you come so far in such a short space of time, it can feel like a whirlwind, it’s a lot to process.
But we all remember career-defining moments in our life. I can trace mine back to a Christmas Eve pint I had in 1999 in Bolton with a good friend of mine, Alan Latchford. I’d worked in the kitchen appliance industry and I was talking about setting up on my own. “I bet you £1 you don’t do it,” said Alan. We both like a challenge and AO.com started trading in August 2000. The rest, as they say, is history.
AO.com floated in February 2014 and total revenues rose by 24 per cent to £476.7m in the year ending March 2015. We now employ more than 2,000 people and still have ambitious growth plans. However, success can’t just be measured by statistics and numbers alone.
AO’s growth is so fast that we really only have one opportunity each year to take stock and appreciate it, and that’s at our Christmas party. My chief operating officer, Steve Caunce, and I are always overwhelmed by our amazing team.
Culture is the only thing we worry about. Anyone can buy big trucks and warehouses but it’s people who make a difference. We know what our DNA is. We obsess about it. We hire and fire against it. Our staff understand our values and we understand what makes them tick.
If we grow to 20,000 or 30,000 staff in ten or 15 years’ time I want people to ask how we’ve maintained our culture. The answer will be that people have always been our biggest asset. Culture is our biggest differentiator and AO took the time to understand, invest in and nurture both.
Look at our response to Black Friday. One analogy we use is a gold medallist at the Olympics. They can’t perform at gold medal standard every day but they’re exceptional in the moments that matter. Black Friday is about being exceptional in the moments that matter. We only dropped two calls in the call centre that day. That’s down to having the right attitude. You can’t just tell people to be brilliant. It has to be a way of life.
They also have to care – it’s not something you can just turn on and off like a tap.
Another great example is our expansion into Europe. We launched in Germany in October 2014 and we’re targeting several other European countries and electrical categories. The Christmas period represented a big step change in retail with a growing move to online.
Our challenge as we expand is how do we sprinkle our magic dust in an AO way? We do it by being bold, smart, driven, caring and fun. In Germany we can deliver and install a washing machine before a letter can be delivered by the postal service.
That’s our people pushing the boundaries of what is possible Take our approach to our advertising. Facts are facts and stories sell. Our TV adverts depict real customers telling their stories and these were filmed by our in-house team. We tasked the guys with bringing the real delight our customers feel when shopping at AO and they came back with our most successful advertising campaign to date.
Recruitment is a big deal. We probably get 200 applications for every vacancy. Recruiting at that scale and the quality we require is a challenge but it’s getting easier as awareness increases. Being named Best Employer at the Retail Week Awards helps. It shows that we live up to our promise when employees join.
There are issues though. I’m concerned about the digital skills gap. The UK needs a minimum of 745,000 digitally skilled workers by 2017. The world has changed, but schools are still teaching our kids the way they were ten years ago. We invest in young people, our apprenticeships offer invaluable training, and our Smile Foundation offers vital support. But there’s a wider responsibility. We need to set our youth up for the future, we need investment and training in the moments that matter for every young person. How do we tackle that? £1 bet anyone?