Subscribe
Timpson Blog
Why I share the secrets of success
Q. Sharing advice and your experience in books and newspaper columns is one thing but are you not worried that your competitors gain an advantage by learning your secrets?
A. Look at other shoe repair shops and you will find that many seem similar to Timpson. Over the years they have copied many of our ideas and, indeed, we have copied many of theirs.
When we turned half our shops over to key cutting most competitors noticed and nearly every cobbler started cutting keys.
In 1996 we went into watch repairs and plenty of people in our trade thought we had made a mistake, but as our watch repair sales grew, more and more shoe repairers started to take in watches.
It is easy to copy shop design and introduce a similar range of services but few companies have tried to copy our culture.
Having pretty looking shops helps but picking the right people and giving them the freedom to provide personal service is the real secret behind our success.
I wrote several books to explain the Timpson culture to colleagues. My son, James, and I have also visited several customer service champions, particularly in the US, including Ritz-Carlton, Southwest Airlines and Disney, in a search for inspiration.
We found that most of the things they do we were doing already but they were much better at talking about their culture.
Hence my books and the leadership course that we run to tell our people, face to face, about our values.
You will now find bits of our culture on display inside our shops – posters that talk about our holiday homes, or that talk about our policy of giving colleagues birthdays off as an extra holiday or our preference of promoting from within.
The more that people know about our culture the stronger it gets, so I am happy to talk at a few conferences and reveal some of our secrets in this column.
Some companies copy bits of our philosophy – such as giving staff birthdays off – but to make a real difference they need to introduce a comprehensive package which influences every department and every person in the business. It takes years to change the way a company thinks.
Talking about Timpson has helped to strengthen our culture, if we are helping others along the way that is fine by me.
