Meet the first lady of Beaverbrooks

The windswept seaside resort of Lytham St Annes might not be the first place you’d think you’d find the headquarters of a national retail jeweller with 69 stores, a £119m turnover and nigh on 1,000 employees.

But it is home to a brand that has become a North West institution, not least because jewellery and watch company Beaverbrooks has been based in the region for its 98 year history, but also because of its inextricable links with the local community.

The family, which continues to run the business today, donates 20% of post-tax profits to charity every year and has given more than £11m since 2000 to various local and community charities.

Chairman Mark Adlestone said: “We have always been a family that has supported charity, giving money and time to different organisations. It comes from the Jewish ethic that you should give a minimum of 10% of net income up to a maximum of 20%. We want to apply that internally to the company.

“We take giving away money as seriously as we do making it. We retain 80% of our profits and support our communities with the remaining 20% – it gives us a tremendous sense of accomplishment and is really important to us.”

The company also engages its employees in the process – each has £100 to give to a charity of their choice and each also gets two paid days a year to take part in charity work in their community. Beaverbrooks also provides matched funding for employees’ fundraising efforts and is a founding partner of Geared for Giving, a tax-efficient salary sacrifice scheme which allows employees to make a regular donation to their chosen charity.

“That scheme has a take-up rate of about a third of all our people – the national average is 6%,” said Adlestone. “We are the second biggest supporter of the scheme on the high street and we want to encourage other businesses to consider doing the same. Once our match funding and gift aid has been taken into account, if someone gives £10 a month through salary sacrifice, that charity will receive £24.”

So when the family members behind a business with such a significant brand, an immoveable ethical stance and strong people-centric approach decide to hand over the chief executive reigns to someone from outside of the family for the very first time – that’s got to be a tough gig.

But it’s one that could not have been more perfectly suited to the individual chosen to grow into that role.

Few people outside of the family will know the business as well as Anna Blackburn did even before she accepted the role of chief executive in 2013.

Blackburn’s appointment followed a 15-year career with the company, when she started on the shop floor of its Trafford Centre store. After completing an internal management programme she was promoted to store manager and worked her way up within the business. She had been on the executive team for five years and had been head of retail for 18 months before taking over.

Anna Blackburn will be speaking at TheBusinessDesk’s women’s business lunch, which is supported by JMW, next Friday March 17.

Get more details and book tickets here

Adlestone said: “Choosing Anna as the first non-family CEO of Beaverbrooks was significant on many levels. Firstly, Anna is not only the first non-family CEO, but also the first female leader of our business. Anna has steered the company through several key milestones – in the last three years we have catapulted.”

Adlestone joined the family business in 1979 aged just 20 and he was a director by 25, taking over as joint managing director with his cousin Andrew Brown in 1990.  In 2000, Brown became chairman and Adlestone was sole managing director, before becoming chairman in 2012. Brown and Gerald Adlestone, Mark’s father, also remain directors of the company.

“In terms of appointing a new CEO, the option I was faced with was going internally or externally,” he said.

“My concern was that bringing someone in from outside the business without a full knowledge of our company could prove problematic. We have a special culture at Beaverbrooks and it was the right decision to put someone in that role who was already in the business. Anna was absolutely the right person for the job.”

Blackburn, who had “always loved the job”, said: “The thought of someone coming in and not understanding the culture was scary. I was excited to take the job on and wanted to keep focused on being a profitable business and a great place to work.”

The transition from being a family owned and run organisation to being family owned and professionally run has been significant.

As well as simplifying and developing the company’s strategy, Blackburn has also overseen the transition to a more professionally run business with a more collaborative approach.

She has also driven the ecommerce opportunity hard, with a dedicated ecommerce team, and says online sales are growing “exponentially.”

Blackburn said: “We have had more of a focus on the internet over the last five years and that will continue. It’s interesting to note that even diamond engagement rings, usually a large and considered purchase, do well because our customers buy from us with confidence. We now offer live chat which allows us to deliver the same personal experience online that customers receive in store.”
 
The company will open its 70th and 71st stores in Guilford and Bracknall this year.

“We are ambitious and want to open more stores, but we’ve got to have the right opportunities to have profitable growth,” said Blackburn.

Adlestone said: “Anna has brought accountability, team work and really brought people together. As well as long serving team members who have inherent tacit knowledge of our business, fresh eyes are really important. In the last five years we have brought in a number of external specialists with specific skillsets.”

This fresh approach is certainly paying dividends – the company is celebrating two consecutive years of record profits, with a £15.2m operating profit (before distribution and tax) in the year to February 2016.

It is continuing to invest in new and existing stores – the most recent refurbs have been at the Metro Centre in Gateshead and in Reading, along with the opening of a huge store in London’s Westfield Stratford City in December.

Blackburn might not be a blood relative of the company’s owners but she’s as close as you get – after 18 years working in the Beaverbrooks family the business has really got under her skin.

Blackburn said: “I always believed it was a fantastic place to work but the business couldn’t always match that with being financially successful.”

So that was her mission – to prove the connection between doing well in the Sunday Times’ Best Companies to Work For lists and being a financial success.

“Treating people right should help the bottom line and I was keen to make that connection,” she said.

Beaverbrooks continues to shine as an employer. This year’s Best Companies to Work for lists have just been published and one again the company has been featured for the 14th consecutive year, ranking 26th nationally.

Treating its people the right way has always been important to the company – Beaverbrooks has never opened on Boxing Day, for its entire trading history – just one example of how it shows appreciation for the hard work of its employees.

Adlestone introduced employee focus groups more than 20 years ago as a means to address the high staff turnover that all retailers suffer and the company has reduced turnover rates to about 18%. One in three people have been with the company for 10 years or more.

The change Blackburn introduced was to make everyone in the company responsible for making Beaverbrooks a great place to work and make this a two-way thing.

She said: “Historically it was about being a great employer but it is also our people’s responsibility to make the business a great workplace.

“There is a connection between it being a great workplace and accountability. That’s about having very clear expectations, celebrating success and recognising the good stuff. That has changed over the last few years.”

The focus is on openness, honesty, giving people the opportunity to correct their mistakes and keeping things simple so that everyone understands the company’s direction and the strategy and importantly, everybody knows what is expected of them.

Both Adlestone and Blackburn talk about the evolution of the company’s mission statement, now called The Beaverbrooks Way, with pride (see image below).

“These values have existed for many years in the company but were just not articulated in any way,” said Adlestone. “We launched a mission statement in 1998 which has evolved over the years and we relaunched it a year ago (February 2016).”

The central purpose of The Beaverbrooks Way is that of “enriching lives” – making a positive difference in everything the company and its people do. That is encircled by the characteristics of passion, trust, caring, fairness, and integrity.

As Blackburn said: “The business is ultimately about people, whether that be colleagues, customers, suppliers or communities.”

Anna Blackburn will be speaking at TheBusinessDesk’s women’s business lunch, supported by JMW, next Friday March 17.

Get more details and book tickets here