EP [number] — Grimsey argues that corporate strategy starts with fixing leadership, not spreadsheets.

Bill Grimsey unpacks why UK high streets keep failing and why most boardrooms still dodge the real work: leadership, confidence and clarity. Starting with Hong Kong turnarounds and ending with British town centres, he explains why strategy dies when leaders avoid the truth.

The conversation covers motivating broken teams, mapping strengths instead of obsessing over threats, dealing with suppliers transparently, and why councils need 20‑year commercial plans to revive towns. It also dives into AI, customer experience, and the future of retail.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Rebuild confidence inside a failing organisation

• Map strategic strengths without wasting energy on distractions

• Use transparency to improve supplier relationships

• Assess whether your town’s leadership structure is fit for purpose

• Apply AI to improve customer experience rather than cut corners

This episode is for UK operators who want a practical view of strategy from someone who has actually rebuilt failing businesses.

*For Apple Podcast chapters, access them from the menu in the bottom right corner of your player*

Spotify Video Chapters:

0:00 Why the UK high street keeps failing

1:29 Fixing leadership before strategy

4:39 Park’n’Shop Hong Kong turnaround

11:04 Customer experience vs efficiency

17:25 AI’s real value in business

23:10 Supplier relationships and transparency

27:58 Turnaround at Wickes

33:50 Trust, confidence and respect

40:48 Business rates and tax structures

52:17 The Grimsey Reviews and town strategy

1:02:20 Independent retail: what works now

1:12:09 Tech, delivery and the future of retail

1:18:55 Pedestrianisation and town experience

1:20:41 Closing thoughts

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If you'd like to be on the show, get in contact - mail@businesswithoutbullshit.me

Why does the UK high street keep failing? And why does no one seem able to fix it?

Today I welcome back Bill Grimsey, former CEO of Wix, Iceland and Focus DIY, a man who spent 45 years turning around broken retailers and telling the government exactly what they're getting wrong. He grew profits 20 times in Hong Kong. He's written the Grimz review, and he's been shouting about the future of retail for decades. So.

So the question is, why aren't we listening? This is a masterclass in leadership, turnaround strategy and what actually makes a business work.

Welcome back to Business without bs, where we equally welcome back a man who has spent 45 years fixing broken retailers. Two decades telling the country why the high street keeps failing. Are they listening, Bill?

We'll find out right now.

Bill Grimsey, former CEO of Wix Iceland and Focus diy, is the man who took park and Shop in Hong Kong and grew profits by 20 fold. That's 20 fold, not a misprint.

He's also the author of the Grimsy reviews, which basically told the government to stop faffing about and get serious on town centers. Bill, welcome back to the podcast.

That's great to be here. Looking forward to this.

Thanks so much. Well, let's start with something fun for our audience. I mean, this story that you through park and Shop, which I think was in Hong Kong, wasn't it?

Yeah.

And so you what, went, went out there in what, the, the 80s and took this thing 24. What's the first thing you think you fix when a business is in trouble?

Well, when I arrived in Hong Kong, I was 36. Okay. I had a senior job at Tesco. I was their first ever customer service director.

And my job there was to help Tesco reposition itself from pilot high, sell it cheap to a more quality based volume retailer. And when, when I did that exercise, I learned so much about what makes organizations good.

You were under that famous boss, I forget his name.

Ian McLaren.

Yeah.

Lord Ian McLaren.

Yeah, yeah. Like learning boxing from Anthony Joshua.

I'll tell you what, I learned so much in that two years. It's not true. I mean, if anyone ever asks me, what was the highlight of your career?

It was working two years Tesco, not running weeks, not rescuing businesses. It was that two years. I was like a sponge. I was ready to learn. But I was given an impossible job.

Help us become a quality retailer rather than a pilot hire sell it sheet retailer. So I was sent to the States.

I studied Disney at the time and concluded that the only way we were Going to fix this was by fixing the boardroom, not the people that worked in Tesco. Start at the top. Cause you guys are what makes things tick. You know, how do we do things around here?

Well, guess what, we do them because we're frightened. Because we get bollockings all the time. We don't get any direction, any lead on where we're headed. Where's this train going?

We just get told off by pretty aggressive people.

And believe me, this is the board in Hong Kong. When you're.

No, no, this is the board in Tesco. I had only just joined and this was.

I remember Tesco being. I still half remember it as a cheap store. I mean, it shows how hard it is to change that image because that's what I grew up with.

Yeah, well, I remember saying, I can only help you guys if you listen to what I'm about to say in the next half an hour and you decide for yourselves whether or not you're going to take this on. Because if you say you're not going to take it on, I'll just go.

Now I've arrived, I've been here six months, you've been very good, given me a budget, been off to America, learned a lot. But this is, you've got to listen to me. And if you listen and you take it on board, I can help you.

If you don't want to take it on board, I can't help you. And basically I was telling them they had to change their approach to managing the team. Now you asked me what did I do as soon as I got to Hong Kong.

Here was a business which was part of a big portfolio owned by the richest Chinese man in the world at the time. He's still alive. Li Kai Shingle. He owns Hutchison Wine, Poa Chung Kong. And this guy's off the scale, wealthy.

And owning park and shop was kind of like a badge, you know, play mahjong with his mates. I own the biggest supermarket chain. It was a big Park Shop, 250 stores in Hong Kong. Yeah.

Wow.

Oh, yeah. So I was a big fish in a small pond in Hong Kong back in the uk. I mean, Tesco is a big fish in a big pond.

So I'd had experience about how to change the direction of a business because I'd started it at Tesco.

So the very first thing I did as soon as I got to this beat up old business that had little investment in it was say to my board that I'd inherited that we need to, first of all, inject into the team that we've inherited some form of motivation and direction to be off the scale. Good. We'll tell them what good looks like once we've decided what direction is. But right now, we've got to give them confidence.

We've got the, you know, they got to go out on the pitch where they were drawing every week against the competitor or losing. Go out on the pitch tomorrow believing they could win. We'll later on, we'll give them new shirts, we'll give them a new direction.

But right now, we want you to play out. Leave everything on the pitch because we've motivated you. So how do we do that? And we ran a conference straight away called Team up and Win.

And for the very first time, all the store managers, 200 of them in a big, big conference hall, had a guilo, which is a white man in Chinese presenting to them in English. But guess what? They all had headphones on, and it was translated.

So their very first time in their lives, they've got a white man acknowledging he can't communicate with them. And guess what? My finance director was Chinese. I said, when you're speaking, you speak in Chinese.

And all the white people in here, which is about a dozen of us, all at senior jobs, we had to put headphones on and we had to listen to the translation. Now you might say, well, hang on a minute. This is a bit small stuff. It's a signal.

You got to send signals straight away of your intent to make changes happen. And if you go, and this applies to the government today, they came in and said, we're gonna make change happen.

What they should have done is immediately change some small things that people could see, feel and touch. If you do that, you suddenly get a bit of confidence.

If you start off by saying, well, we're going to do this, and then, oh, no, we're not, because our backbenchers are telling us we can't, or we're going to appoint a guy who everybody at the time thought, that's an inspired choice. And they did. Mandelson. So when you're running an organization, you've got to be able to connect with the team, and you do that.

The first thing you said, you asked me what's the first thing I did. I gave them hope. I demonstrated a difference in leadership.

And I told them that within six months of me being there, from that time, I will come back to you all with a strategy which I will have developed with my board talking to you, and you will be involved and included. And that's what I did.

So six months on we said, okay, we've now understood the whole map here and this is what we're gonna look like in three years time. And this is where we're gonna invest and this is the direction we're gonna take.

And these are the values and principles we're gonna employ in our organizational behavior going forward from now. And it's about communication, it's about innovation. Making mistakes is good. We're not going to give you a hard time over it.

In fact, we want you to try new stuff provided it's in the same direction that we've all agreed we want to go. And if it goes wrong, it goes wrong. We don't want you to make the same mistake twice, but you know, we're encouraged, all that sort of stuff.

And so training was important, all this kind of seven values we put out there. And then suddenly you've got a plan, direction, how to behave on the train and off you go. And that's what we did.

And then five years later, 20 fold profit increase and then market share changed and the whole appearance of the business was different. And we managed to persuade Li Kai Sheng to invest in it and he did. So instead of playing mahjong, I own park and Shop.

He could now say, I own Parker Shop. And have you seen it lately? It's a bit different now, isn't it? So you know, you got, you get your investors behind you as well.

So you are going to have to slow me down because again, excited, I love it.

I mean, one of the big things is saying it's the confidence that comes over. The lead has got to be incredibly confident. And I don't mean this and not that it's a bluff, but it's a kind of you've got just got to believe.

And then thereafter, every business I went into, I started off the very first day with the top team first in a room. This is me, this is how I work. I even bought a translation sheet back in the uk. You know, when I say oh, that's like, oh dear. Right.

So don't anybody get upset with my language. I don't want to hear anything. Right. This is in the 90s. If you try and do it now, you might not get away with it.

But back then, you know, if I these, if I use these words, this is what I mean.

Did you really. Is that to do? Because I found the language gap interesting. You've got, you got park and ride and you've got a load of guilos or white people.

They were More senior positions.

All the white people had the senior positions because it was an expat environment. But I, my ambition was to leave and replace myself with a Chinese.

I didn't quite make it, but the guy I'd identified who was going to make it because I came back after five years because my kids came back for university, he made it the next time around. So he got there and he's still a big friend of mine. He lives in Singapore now. You know it. You, the, you, you become this, these.

Levels of language barrier though. I mean Hong Kong, they would have spoken English or not that great or.

Not necessarily the management level, not store manager. I'm talking about executives. They, their English was quite good. I had a PA who was very, very good. Fluid.

Yeah.

And so I, I bought in a secretary and she's got. So why are you doing that? I said because you're my pa. The secretary is working for us.

You, when I go out in stores, are coming with me because I can't sit in a canteen, small canteens, with a group of checkout operators, like three or four of them and say, come on, tell me what happened. Because I can't understand. They can't understand me. I can't say. But you can do it and translate it and demonstrate that.

I want to connect and I want the feedback.

Why did you study Disney? What was interesting about Disney?

Well, because you may, you may be aware of a book once written, I forget who's the author, but it was called In Search of Excellence and there were seven companies in there that were identified at the time of being excellent and what makes excellent companies rather than ordinary companies. And Disney was one of those. Ironically, I think the other six went bust eventually, so. But it sold enough books by then to pay for itself.

But, but Disney epitomizes customer service. So I, a bit later on in this chat, I'm sure we're going to come to it. Technology and the way it's changed.

Throughout my career I was a big, big advocate of being at the forefront of change through technology. Right from the days when I first started. We used to price everything up with a gun. All right?

We used to on a till, go fast enough right through to bringing in barcoding point of sale data, capture different information and. And now look what's happened. We've got self service checkouts.

Yeah.

Great for efficiency, awful for customers. Okay? So my point would be if I were back in industry is we put a customer first in everything we do.

We want to improve their experience against what they can get anywhere else. Whether it be price, whether it be quality, whether it be experience as they go in the door and out the door. We are going to do that.

We are not going to just jump on the bandwagon and put in a load of self service checkouts and not even open any of the service checkouts.

I think that's the self service works on the basis that if I had to queue to get a human because there's not enough humans, but ideally, yeah, I'd like a human to do it.

For me, but, well, let's just break that back a bit. You are, you are doing a job that before was being done for you.

Yeah.

Right, well, don't you want a bit of a discount for that?

Yeah. Right, yeah. Maybe they could offer a discount if you use the self service.

That's just a small example. I'm not in industry.

We kind of got used to it.

But the first few times you do it, I remember everyone sort of having to learn to do it, you know, I remember they sort of introduced in Heathrow the self service baggage for British Airways. I don't know if you, you know, that period for a month, it was like, oh my God, it was hell.

Yeah. I mean, it's still not that great.

No, I mean, but the point is that, you know, if you're going to do something with technology and had I stayed in the industry, I would have been against self service checkouts. Why? I'd have said, how do we get the next step and be first? And the next step's no checkouts.

Yeah, no checkouts.

You take it off the shelf. And that's so bloody obvious. About eight years ago, that technology would have been started to be developed and existed.

Let's face it, Elon Musk can shoot a rocket in the air and then bring it back down again in doing it, he crashed a load of rockets to test it. No one told him off and now it's perfect. I would have gone straight for, and I'd say leave out that, that step.

We're going to go straight for no checkouts. And it can happen and will happen and guess what? That is going to be brilliant service.

But the fact is that if you're going to use technology, you should in service industries, use it to improve the quality of the experience, customer experience, don't.

Use it to cut costs. And actually people say this about AI. Everyone says the cleverer thing that someone said to me is, everybody's just like, oh, how do I cut costs?

And he was saying, look, you can do that. Go for it if that's what you want to do. But actually think about how do you improve the customer experience. What are your new services?

I'm chairman of a very small family business called Physical Company. It's not on your list. It turns over about 6 million a year, employs 25 people. And I was with the board.

I go to the board meeting, obviously as a chairman, and I test these guys and I said, you know what, guys? In our review this year, we're going to put AI right up there.

Not to save costs, but to find out how we can with take away mundane parts of people's jobs, the repetitive side, and free them up to be creative and add the value. Because AI can't add the value unless you brief it properly. Okay. Because it's not. It's not learned all that stuff yet. It will eventually.

My son was on to me this morning. He's in Spain. He was interviewed by an American company today by AI.

Wow.

And it was a woman's voice. And he said, dad, it was like, he's 54 now, my son. And he said, it's like she was in the room with me.

I had a conversation with her. There's a thing called Bordley, which you constantly want arts up.

It was an amazing conversation because it listens and it remembers everything you say and it can summarize. So it will listen and listen and they'll go, bill, what you've said, and it says it back. And you're like, oh, my God, did.

I say all that?

Yeah, well, you're like, nobody's ever actually listened to me before.

I'm cleverer than I thought. Yeah, but the other thing it's good at at the moment is telling you you're good.

Oh, yeah, Guess what that means you go back for more and it's learning from you all the time. So my son said to me, dad, it was good because one day we're done.

I think it's like, what would AI be good at? It's. It's like, well, imagine a CEO that's AI that anybody can access at any times that knows exactly a bill at your desk.

You can ask it whatever you want. You can spend all day. Your problem as a CEO often is you don't have enough time to talk to everybody.

Exactly right.

You have a vision in your head, but you know, someone's down here doing, you know, what does everyone love context? Doing this bit over here. Why bother? Oh, I'll ask Bill, the CEO, they say, oh, great to hear from you, Andrew. How Are you.

Now, let's talk about what you're doing now. It's a really important piece of the puzzle. It'd be amazing, wouldn't it?

You know, provided what the person responding to, Bill, the AI got something back from it. If it didn't get anything back, you think it was talking to a machine. Whereas if it got some feedback that was better than just well done.

But actually things changed as a result of what you just said or it was listened to and you got. Someone got back to you and said, we've looked at it, but we've decided not to because, well, that works. It's the whole thing. And I'm with you 100%.

How do you. How do you take the CEO and the checkout operator and do that? Yeah, and that's exactly right.

Those little moments when you did do that is when you learned the most as a CEO, didn't you?

I probably told you that I, I used to spend a week in the. Of the year working in a shop, all right, as a CEO in whatever business you. Every one of them. Okay. Including Parker Shop in Hong Kong.

It's more difficult there because I didn't speak Chinese, but I. Yes, but when I was back in weeks, of course I wore the T shirt and stuff like that. And I was. And they knew I was coming, that store we'd chosen.

And because I ride motorbikes, it gave me an excuse to ride a bike to somewhere in the country. Beautiful. And they used to have fun with me. You know, we'd do a re merchandise of a section.

Well, the first thing you do is strip it down and you have to clean all the shelves. So they love bringing me a bucket and a cloth, you know, and all that.

He's not going to know what to do with that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's going to have a shower or something, you know.

But the fact is that I collected so much information in that week that my executive team every Monday would have the executive meeting. Always in the retail business, top guys, eight o' clock more. What sales last week, feedback. What projects are we looking at? What's the week ahead?

Off you go. I used to come back from that week and I say, right, that's for you. That's for you. Oh, that's for you. They don't work.

What you've put out there doesn't work.

Right.

And I am telling you on behalf of. Of Susan, who's the checkout operator in Tottenham and she's fed up with it, so fix it.

Yeah, it's so True. It's so true that what sounds good in theory based on logic, because you're not. You're not actually the expert at all. Is it? Susan's the expert?

Not only did I work in the store in a week for 52 weeks of the year, I wore the same uniform.

Why do you think the leadership tables aren't very good at facing the truth? Or. I mean, they. There, they can't see the truth. But even if you then try and face some of that truth, do they try and run away from it still?

Well, it depends how you gave it to them. So I used to say, look, that's for you. Can you fix it?

Do me a favor.

Yeah.

You see, your reaction to the information you've got as a leader and that you want to impart to the people who can fix it has to be motivational as well. So if you came back and beat them all up for it, they'd be all sitting there saying, he's out in the stores this week.

Oh, God, I think I'll be off on Monday.

I was talking to someone about this this morning. We were talking about someone who trains people with soft skills. And anyway, there's sometimes you meet people.

I was giving the example of the misapprehension that part of business is you've got to be mean and you've got to like. And I'm like, I don't think ever have to be like that. You've got to be truthful. You got to be honest. But you got to. You got to.

I have to sometimes really think about it for a week or two.

You got to find out a way in your head to tell them this thing you want to tell them without, you know, the emotional, the anger or the criticism is it. It's sort of. It's hard to do, but you can always find the words if you think about it.

You can. And, and, and unless, unless the individual you're dealing with is going to be terminal in any case, which is a different matter altogether.

You want them motivated. You don't want them fearful of what you're about to say or they don't want. You don't want them to be scared of you.

You want them to be able to talk back to you and say, do you know what, what you just said is not actually quite right. And you want them to be able to say, you're inclusion.

That's inclusion, really.

Exactly. And unfortunately, in the world today, when you've got someone like Donald Trump out there, he's. He's rewriting how to negotiate is.

Yeah, but hard power man or strong man.

Yeah. Okay, listen, guys, you don't do what I'm telling you to do, I'm going to slap 100% tariffs on you. It's fear, all right? It's putting down a.

It's a totally different negotiation skill to the one which I used to encourage with my buyers and my supplier relationships, which is win, win. I want you suppliers to succeed. I need you there. I don't wanna beat you up. We're gonna share this cake in the right way.

So we need to negotiate a win, win. So it's not about fear and muscle. And I think today I worry whether or not Tesco has gone too far with some of its aggression.

Well, the supermarkets in this country are famous for their aggression, aren't they? And being very tough with their suppliers.

And they were back in the. When they were still growing up and this consolidation was still happening.

But I have to say, at the time, when I did my customer service work for Ian McLaurin, we did actually test the relationships between suppliers and the company as well, because that's part of the imagery. We want you to succeed because we are going to succeed.

Even to the small supplier. I mean, small suppliers struggle so much dealing with supermarkets, and they're fighting over space.

In particular, small suppliers that had creative products. You know, a lot of innovation comes, believe it or not, not from Unilever.

Isn't that your problem as a supermarket, that you get so much pressure from the major brands who are such a sort of.

Well, you used to, back in the 70s, pre point of sale data, capture the unilevers, the Procter and Gambles, the Coca Colas of the world, they led the industry in terms of analyzing data because they measured it on stock, in opening stock. Eagle was closing stock. So over a period of time, stock in his sales. Okay. And they'd have all that data for the market.

All of a sudden, overnight, a little thing called a barcode shifted the power play because the data was captured at the till in real time of what you sold. And guess, you know, before. Of course, no. And guess what the retailers did immediately. They tried to sell it to the suppliers.

The data.

Yeah. Until somebody about six months into. Hang on a minute, information. What are we selling it to them for? So they sold it. But then six months in.

I think Tesco were the first saying, this data is important. Why are we selling it to them? We can we that we. We will now determine what's advertised, not them.

So we'll put in front of customers what they want to buy, not on what we want them to buy. So Procter and Gamble want you to have to buy Ariel, so they'll buy your space in a supermarket to put it on the end.

But actually, probably people want Purcell and they prefer Persil. So why would we try and force something on people? They don't want it. Let's promote the Persil. You know, that's just a silly example.

Let's promote what sells exactly.

And not what's on the TV that doesn't necessarily sell. So there was, you know, we've gone down a rabbit hole here a bit.

But the fact is that if you're going to be successful, you need to put the customer at the forefront of what you're doing.

And just to tie it up too. You've got to go in very confident to a business, but not aloof. It's not aggression and it's not sort of.

Because when you're coming and saying, right, you're going to listen to me, that's quite like intimidating. It sounds. Oh, yeah, you've got to get their attention. But actually at the same time you're saying, oh, this is what my language means.

And you're trying to be very human at the same time.

Well, humor as opposed to human goes a long way. 100. And I used to try and make it fun because we go to work, in my case, 24 7, for 20 years. It's as simple as that. You're never not at work.

And so you might as well enjoy it and have a bit of fun. I agree that's important. And the only way you can have fun is if you show you're having fun and you say it's okay to, you know, have a laugh.

Because when we need to be serious, we will be.

We take our job seriously, not ourselves. You like to say yes. And the humor, if you look it up too, because we. It's like a fundamental principle of this business.

And I was like, I wanna give me some reasons, you know, I was chatgpt. Give me some reasons why humans really useful. And it's amazing, the science of it. I mean, there's piles of it.

People feel more relaxed, they feel they can talk. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's endless.

Yep. So why wouldn't you do it? Yeah.

We then had the funny conversation recently about a lot of people take their cultural pillars and then they review, appraise people on them and I was like, we're not appraising people on their humor. Although that is quite a funny idea to be honest with that. John, you haven't been that funny this year.

You know, I did quite like the joke you cracked last week but fell a bit flat. But you have been laughing at other people's jokes. So we'll give you a six out of ten. You know, let's.

You had been a turnaround expert to some extent. Let's just, let's just see what we can learn a little bit out of that.

You know, taking Wicks as being, you know, you survived this accounting scandal. I mean you people may have to go Google it. But quite, quite a lot went on. What back in the 90s I think it was.

It was all the board, the main board basically went and I managed to persuade the non executive directors of the board and UBS Wahlberg, who were the advisors at the time that they didn't need to go and find a CEO. I can do this because when I left the UK I had a name in the industry when I came back, Bill who five years away. So it was very different.

That was Bill of Hong Kong. Bill South Africa. Hong Kong was it? Yeah.

Well the fact is you had to.

The only way I was going to get back into the bigger jobs was to take a ship that was probably hold either below the waterline or pretty close to it and then, you know, plug it up and sail it away.

What you did, you cut first or stabilize first or what do you do when something's in the, in the, in the toilet?

Well, in Wick's the, the financial situation was terminal so we had to do a right session.

As in, as in there was no.

Cash left, no cash at all. The profits were overstated, there was a fraud and basically the shareholders were going to take a bath.

So rights issue is you go to existing shareholders and say can we have some more money? Would you like to buy some more shares? And why would any shareholder do that?

So you got a plan? Yeah, I'm not just here to ask you to give me a fiverr because I'm a nice looking guy or whatever.

I'm here to give you, ask you to give me the five because this is what I'm going to do with it. So you have to put together a plan very quickly. But that plan Will not necessarily be the plan that you.

Eventually you just need something convincing.

Did you go and work on the shop floor for that or you just said it was more, more fundamental.

I took my, my academic training, if you like, did an industry map. Positioning was all important. Okay, what if we. Where are our strengths? Weakness options.

A nice PowerPoint, basically.

Oh yeah, I had it all there. I was full of flannel and because.

You just got to persuade them that their options as a shelters, you could lose everything.

Yeah.

Or you could put a bit more in.

Yeah.

But I'm a man with a plan and here's the plan.

I'm a man who knows how to produce the plan. I haven't got it today. It might look something like this, but I'd be foolish to tell you it's that today.

So you sort of said this is where we position, this is why we're going to.

This is where we are at the moment.

Lead me to work.

This is the strengths, weakness, opportunity, threat. I think there's enough here for me to work on to put this into a unique position and to grow profitability and create value for you.

Now I need some money to do that. I'll be back once you've got me on an even kill financially with the real plan. Six months after that. Just give it to me now.

Okay, so they gave you some money and then you have to actually come up with a plan. And how the hell do you do that?

Oh, well, then the real work starts with your team to actually do the analysis.

Chatting to Susan on the checkout, chatting.

To everyone, everybody, everybody. You become like.

You create listening groups all around the organization on every topic that you can think of that impacts the customer's experience, whether it's quality, product range, price, service, branding, imagery, all, everything.

You go through everything and you look at and then you apply it to a SWOT analysis again against your competitors and you see where the opportunities are. And you know, I, I'm a great believer in, in opportunities are, are the ones that you develop. The threats that you can see out there.

You say if we need to defend, this is what we'll do. But right now we haven't got time to worry about it. Let's go for the opportunities.

That's very interesting.

Yeah.

So swat line and strength weaknesses, opportunity threats. So the effectively make sure you've got a plan if the threats start hitting you. Some sort of, some sort of business continuity kind of vibe.

Well, I used to use this analogy back in those days because I'm great. A bit of A job really about football. And I used to say, look, if. If you had David Beckham in the training ground, he can.

He's got the best right foot in the world. Most managers might start off by saying, david, can we see if we can sort of work on this left foot a bit? Right?

My attitude would be, david, I am not interested in your weakness or your threat of your left foot. I only care about your right foot.

So I want you every day to go out there and practice swinging that ball into, through threading it through the eye of a needle a hundred times a day. Forget your left foot. We're not interested. Play to his strengths. By the way, everybody pass the David to his ref.

Right foot, don't pass it to his left foot. We don't, you know, that's the way you defend that. And you give it to his strengths. And guess what? He scores goal after goal after goal.

And we win matches. So that's, that's what you do in business. You look at where your strengths are and play to them.

You look at where your weaknesses and threats are and you put a plan in place to just minimize them or to react to them. You don't work on correcting them because you won't go far, as far forward as you will on your strengths.

They would use up a lot of energy, too. It's a bit like people get very upset about competitors, you know, oh, look at what they're doing and then say they're doing, let's do us.

Yeah, play our game.

Yeah, play our game. Because you can lose so much energy over sort of, I don't know, envy, is it, or something really. And who do you trust in that situation?

So you come into a situation that's chaos.

Well, you start off with your immediate team and you start off with three things. Trust, confidence and respect.

And I used to start off on a 1, 1, 1, 1 on 1 with all of them and say, look, these are the three things that are important to me. Trust, confidence and respect. Now, I want to tell you something. You start off with my 100% trust, my 100% confidence and my 100% respect for you.

What you've done so far, that's it. You can only lose it. You don't have to earn it. But I assure you that every single minute of every day, I will work my butt off to earn your trust.

You're confident and your respect. That's my job.

So you start from zero, they start from 100.

Correct.

Then you encourage them to make mistakes. But how do I Make mistakes. When I can lose this point, I. You know, he's going to lose respect for me. I'm going to make.

You don't lose points for making the mistake. You lose points and making it twice.

Right.

Okay. And that's expl. Or doing nothing or not innovating and not pushing out. Thinking outside the box.

Those are the things that are important going forward. And you have to behave that way. Now I sound like. Know what I'm doing here. I've made lots of mistakes along the way.

I've had situations with people in my office where I've not behaved the way I should behave.

Yeah.

And so you need to. You need to recognize when you've done something that you shouldn't have done to those values and principles. Own up to it.

I mean, it's a bit like I took the advice of an advisor and I did something and it's turned out to be wrong. Guess what? I'm sorry. Well, that rings a bell, doesn't it? You know, actually, it's a big mistake.

And what you need to do is to say it was a big mistake. But guess what? A bigger mistake is for you to think that I shouldn't be here. All right? Because I'm admitting it and I'm not going to do it again.

And I'm going to demonstrate going forward, I made a mistake. I'm allowed to make a mistake. And I'm going to drive us forward because guess what? I've just done a lot.

And I hope this is kind of like ringing a bell with what's going on with our country at the moment. Who wants to change another pm? I mean, we've had nine in nine years.

I can't. Yeah, I hadn't even thought about it in those terms, but, yeah, we've had a bit of a. I mean, not.

Not that we're here to do politics, but I feel that the UK is quite spiritually lost after Brexit. Still. It's a sort of. We're trying to refind what the hell we want.

I'm with you, 100. There are two things I'd like to do, which I'm never going to get a chance to do.

I'd like to be asked by Keir Starmer to take the whole of the parliamentary Labor Party into a conference hall and give them a talk. Okay. And that talk would focus around power. You can only change things when you're in power.

You've had so many years when you weren't in power, and what did you change in this country? Nothing. So guess what? In four years time, if you carry on the way we're carrying on, you're not going to be here.

I mean, your point would be change anything. I mean, this is an interesting question.

My point would be put your principles in priority sequence and actually the ones down here, let them go. Because to stay in power we need to get results.

Do you think those principles are going to be good for business though? I mean it's not a business focused government or. That doesn't matter. I mean again, we're not here for the politics, but.

Well, my situation's never been better. I don't know about yours. The stock market's flying.

The confidence in the financial situation in this country has never been higher in the last eight years.

Yeah, I guess they've been working, Rachel, he's been working hard on that.

I think they've good, they've stabilization you. You know, first of all, we used to have this sort of three year plan. First of all, stabilize finance, get the finance right.

So I sold you about weeks. Then get your plan in place, then bring about the change to put yourself in new territory. That's the sequence.

The Labour Party have, have fought hard, I think, to get the stabilization in financial terms in place.

They've done one or two things that I think a bit silly, but you know, nevertheless, the, the markets are saying this, okay, so that's a tick in the box. No one talks about that tick in the box.

It's a bit like a lot of my entrepreneurial clients aren't loving Rachel Reeves, but like they don't want, they don't want Rachel Reese to get replaced with someone else because she's doing deregulation. Friend of the show, Alex to Pledge, who's a personal advisor, brilliant entrepreneur.

You know, they, they, you know the bit you're talking about the stock market, the deregulation they're trying to fix EIS investment. That stuff's all good, very good. People don't really understand it.

But the other thing is that, you know, take, take this issue of, of national insurance change. I, my little business that I'm chairman of. I said come on guys, tell me what this means to our business and finance. I said, well, not very much.

I said, donate. What's it costing tomorrow once this change has happened? Right. He did it. Okay. Is that gonna derail our business? Are we going to go under as a result?

This.

The answer's no. Okay, that's good because guess what that means we can contribute to the recovery of this country and we're not going to go under.

We're just going to take a little bit of a bath for a while. Those people that are struggling on the borderline, gonna go bust anyway.

Oh, okay. Is that your view?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's such a, it's, it's not a huge hike.

Yeah. It's bigger than you think is the way they change the margin. But I, I think that's an interesting question.

I would say I have plenty of clients that businesses, they're not super profitable businesses, they work on those margins in more. It affects things like you decide to hire overseas. But anyway, we're, we're drifting into politics, but.

Yeah, no, no. Well, I don't want to go into politics. But the threat side of an of, of that hike. All right. You go into defense mode, don't you?

Because it's a threat.

Yeah.

And you should be able to defend it and stay in business.

But you know, the, the fact is that the reality of running businesses is that if you're that close to the margin, so then you're in, in jeopardy anyway.

So before we crack on with the show, please consider subscribing to this wonderful channel and to our mating list.

At withoutbs.com you get free weekly classes from the best, some business and free downloadable resources to strip away the jargon and give you the real world lessons. You don't get a business school. Thank you. A lot of people feel that really they would prefer corporation.

They prefer the tax on profits to be higher rather than this sort of myriad. And I know this is a subject close to your heart. Business rates, national insurance.

I mean, anyone trying to get a business going or trying to build it up, you'll just hit left, right and center with tax.

You know, and there's an argument that we say, I'll tell you what, make corporation tax 30%, scrap all the rest and then just tax the profitable businesses.

Replace them with a direct cost of what business rates are for, which is.

Supply do, Cleaning the bins.

Yeah.

Providing water.

Cost that out. And that's the cost that you want to recover. Well, guess what? 2% Sales tax would do that. Your sales. 2% Of your sales in the bin. Yeah, that's it.

And it would, it would wipe everything off.

It's through retail on the march. It's quite tight in retail underneath it, I mean.

Well, I've Lived on my whole life on thin margins. The 2%, 3% nets margins on a turnover in Tesco of how many ever billions it is, is, is a very thin margin. Okay.

If you're a small business in retail and it's a thin margin, then you're very sailing, really struggling. They're so if you didn't pay any business rates and there's a 2% sales.

Tax, what's the difference really? Aren't you just taxing me another way? Isn't it similar.

You're taxing the customer, aren't you? Because they're going to pass it on.

Yeah, okay, right.

So you're spreading it.

You know, there's an old rule with margins as someone has been a retailer, never reveal your margin. When you were saying you collaborate with suppliers, that almost suggests, oh, let's have an open book, let's talk.

I was a huge advocate of net pricing. I want to know what's net pricing. I want to know what the cost is to you as a supplier for that product.

I want to know what the component costs are, the raw material, the production, the distribution. I want it all broken down, please. And then I want to know how much profit you're going to make out of it.

He said, I wouldn't trust giving that to a retailer because they'll just keep squeezing me for it. Maybe not you, Bill, but I don't think everyone's bill, are they?

Well, if you think they're going to put you out of business, I mean, it's kind of like, do you, you know, if you're running a marathon, you don't want to shoot your right foot off, do you? Because you're going to have a struggle after that. So people don't do that. There are businesses that operate that way. There's no question about that.

And it's a shame because it disrupts the market. If you're doing everything on a net net basis and everyone's transparent and you're on a win win situation, you're gonna get success.

There's no question about it.

So if they break it all down to you and say these are all costs, I mean, they could make it up, I guess. I mean, are you, would you audit it or anything? But you would say, okay, fine, so your margin is 10 pence a product.

Yeah, we want to also make 10 pence. We were. You're the retailer, so you probably want to make more.

I guess you would say, I mean, like, doesn't it just mean next year you say, well, I'll give you Nine pence, that's all right for you, isn't it? You know, you're so much buying power when you're a powerful retailer, aren't you?

Well, if that's volume related, that nine pence. So you could mean that I'm gonna make. Only give you 9 pence, but I'm gonna give you 15 more business.

Yeah, okay.

All right, so I've taken 10 off of you, but I've given you 15 more sales.

Yeah.

So you're better off. That's how you work together. It's called win, win.

One thing I'm really sad about, this end of my life and not not being able to influence more in the industry was this transparency. It is so important.

You've got to trust. And you're talking about these boards you're coming into and it's chaos. And yeah, everyone's.

You soon find out who you can't trust, by the way.

Yeah.

And as soon, as soon as you.

Find that out around the table or suppliers generally both.

As soon as you find that out,.

They cross you off your list.

Number one, they lose waste time in dealing with it. Every time I've taken those difficult decisions, whether it be with my people or my suppliers, it's always been later than I should have done.

We have a rule here which is if we keep talking about something, we're going to end it.

If you keep talking about a person, you might adore them, they might be brilliant, but if they keep coming up as a topic, just have to say, why do we keep, we keep, we keep talking about this person. Let's just knock it on the head.

It's difficult, but every time you do that, if you stood back and analyzed it afterwards, you could say to yourself, you know what, we should have done that six months ago. And it's the same with suppliers, same with senior directors. And by the way, I don't believe in hr.

HR is a subject that if I could change another thing going back into, I would ban it.

Don't you think these days, I mean I, you know, I work with my old man. He'd agree with you wholeheartedly. It's probably my age,.

I just done her out of the job.

No, no, it's, I, I have some sympathy. I think maybe everyone listening would have some sympathy. But what do you, when used you.

I'd say what has changed now is that employers have to look after their staff on so many levels. And I, I think, I think he would probably put it slightly down. And it's true, you know, he Would say four, division of labor.

Bloke did the work, women looked after the kids. That was it. So the bloke wasn't going on.

I'm not quite that, no.

But, you know, I mean, I'm. I'm illustrating his point, but I can understand some of the logic that it's like, why are we having to deal with all of your personal issues now?

But why do you think HL is a waste of time?

Because it's a management responsibility. I would train managers to deal with hr. You don't need HR specialties. There's a crutch. Give me a break.

You're responsible for your team, their welfare. Here are the values and principles of the company. We've all agreed them now employ them and deal with it and look after them.

I mean, you don't have to have a discussion when the clerk who's worked for a business that's even struggling, and I'm talking about a real life situation here, administration clerk has got a terminal cancer, all right, and she's run out of sick pay. The values and principles. You don't need to have HR help you with that. Come. You don't even need to come to me. Just look at my values and principles.

We pay her.

What if they're not comfortable talking to their manager about very personal issues but want to talk?

Well, you know that someone's got terminal cancer and we paid her, guess what? And we said to her, you don't have to worry. Come in when you can. And she used to struggle into work. She went on for four months.

Her sons wrote to me afterwards when she died, said, you know what? You gave her some inspiration to carry on because she'd run out of sick pain and she didn't know what to do.

She'd worked for the business for 15 years. You don't have to have HR around you to deal with that. You're sending a signal into the. The business.

Not that it, you know, you then get this welfare. Or are we a welfare country now? No, no, no, no. This is black and white, isn't it? The effort's been there, we take care.

If the effort's not been there, we don't take care.

I guess you can have quality managers, but you may have a male manager and have a female issue. You want to talk to a woman. You know, there's. There's a sort of. There's a level at which not all managers are going to be br.

They might be a brilliant manager at leading the team.

Well, there's up to them it's up to the manager of the manager or the director to understand that and to get in underneath it. It's your responsibility. Guess what? As a CEO of a company, I was responsible for everything that happened. Everything responsible.

Listen to the word carefully. Responsible. Okay? You cannot delegate responsibility.

You can only create an authority for give someone authority to do something that you're responsible for and in doing so, you create a new responsibility to you and that goes through the. So as a CEO, something happens in the organization, it's on you. Okay, simple. Don't fight it. Don't look to point fingers.

Always three point back at you when you point a finger. So the responsibility is something you take very seriously.

You delegate authority and you create new responsibilities all the way through the organization.

So if you take HR out of as a department, you're delegating to your director beneath you as a CEO, you're responsible to me now for all of the HR issues of the people that work under your part of the business. Have you got the skills to do that?

If not, let's hear how we feel them and then I want you to make sure your manager layer underneath that know that as well. And I want them trained. I don't want to pay out for HR people to come in and tell you the law and do all this kind of someone you to know it. I want.

And if you don't know it, I want you to know how to get it all right? And maybe that's AI in the future, you know. So we just uncovered a whole opportunities.

When did HR come in? Was it coming in in your career?

Oh crikey, it was in my career. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dreadful place.

One of your more controversial points but no, I mean I think it's an interesting point there. You're saying make sure the managers have the skills to deal with the issues in their team and look after their team.

So I mean you obviously read, you know, wrote such a leading report on retail and where retail's going and last time we met you were absolutely fascinating on it. You know, do check out the episode if you, if you want to hear it. Bill's explained so well what he feels going wrong.

But getting people to listen or to react was difficult.

And then I wrote the final one which was about independent businesses and where they were following the pandemic and the debt they were carrying forward. And forgiving that debt was something that should have happened and still hasn't happened.

Let's talk about that. I mean 50 a week, we're closing on average. This is very much on point for the SMEs independent business. You know, what must towns accept now?

And she said I only ordered that last night and it's come this morning, you know, or you know, it's just ridiculous.

So guess what guys, retail is not your answer for your town center and it has been for hundreds of years where all the everyone went to do their markets and all that kind of stuff. Finished. So what did it need to be replaced by? Not. How do you breathe life into a dying animal? What you do is that you put something in its place.

And what we advocated back then was every town in this country is a brand, treat it as a brand. So who can do that? It has to be the local authority. They have to take the lead and the officers, not the elected people.

They're a pain in the neck elected people. They should be like non exec directors. They're there to see that things are being done. They think they're there to make the changes.

Well guess what, it's the officers that do that. Chief executives. So the chief executives of all the local authorities needed to be changed.

Sack em all and bring in people who could manage commercial brands. Some of these unitary councils are huge, the budgets are massive. Education, health, highways, waste, all this kind of stuff.

But in addition to that is how do you make attract people to come live, work and play in these places and go into town centres and attract investors? Well you do that by driving traffic up. How do you drive traffic up? Well you make the experience so good. So what's the experience?

Well we know it's leisure now, we know that there's all sorts of things coming down the track. We know it's things like technology and virtual reality. Oh, all this kind of stuff. But in addition to that we are blessed in this country.

All of our towns have Heritage so they all have a uniqueness. So you. St Albans has one of the biggest. Is the, one of the biggest Roman towns outside of London. There's Colchester and others, but Bath. Yeah, yeah.

St Albans has got a lot of stuff.

Does the government have the power to do that? Because it would seem that you suggest they could take 200 things and say right, we're sending in someone to interview them all.

I said give me five councils, let me develop 20 year plans for them which includes replacing the chief executive. Let me do a trial and let me show you what can happen.

So if you take Dave Lewis who took Tesco when it was on its knees following Terry Lee, he's departure and Phil Clark coming in if you remember that and Dave Lewis came from Lever Brothers, brilliant guy. We'll give him a council for a start. Like my friend Andy street, you know, from Birmingham who got the booted out last time.

I mean, yeah, that's not my favorite person in the world, Andy street. But you know these mayors are doing quite a good job.

Well that should be done on a smaller scale with the St Albans of this world by good commercial people who can pull together other influences like the local schools, like the universities, all the other people.

Part of the brand or.

Part of all of the.

Do you think there's distrust between sort of, there's just a sort of complete distrust and lack of communication between the government and the commercial sector. Because these are councils, aren't they? And they're, they, they got council money and we think of council heads.

You know, until I interviewed you last time I didn't even know there was a chief executive.

Yeah, and they're paid well by the way.

Yeah, I remember you saying it's not like it's not crap pay and then the counselors want that job.

Well the councillors think they're elected and then they start to advocate strategy.

Well if any of my chief, my, my non executive directors said they, they want to actually change the strategy of where we're going, I say, well if you want my job, pitch for it, otherwise stay out of it.

Let me develop the strategy with my team and present it to you and you can question it, pick holes in it, suggest changes, that's fine but you're not responsible for developing it. I don't need you to do that, I need you to test me because after all you're going to find me if it's wrong, aren't you? Because you're a non exec.

Yeah, I remember, but I remember I had to put a new chairman in place in Iceland and I remember interviewing candidates because the non exec, the senior non exec said, you know, you better find yourself a new chairman. So I interviewed him. There's one guy coming in and said, I said, tell me about what you think the role of the chairman is then.

Actually, it's quite straightforward. All it is is eventually, eventually my job is to fire you. I said, well, you've done a good job here, haven't you? He said, what do you mean?

I said, that's what will happen eventually. I'll need to know when it's time for you to go. So that's what chairman do. And I thought, who is this guy?

Yeah, you know, what I wanted to hear was I'm here as your coach, your mentor, I'm here to listen to you, give you back my. I'm a sage, give you back my wit, some my thoughts. But at the end of the day, you are responsible for what happens, not me.

Do you know, it feels like we all need a different education. It just feels like we're not being educated how to be leaders, not being educated how, you know, to make these things function.

It's like we're not given any financial education, which is a big problem in the country. People don't understand stocks and shares and they're becoming poor for it, which is, it's sad, particularly as we've had the fintech revolution.

If 50 years ago you had 100 quid, well, good luck trying to invest it now. You can invest ten pounds if you want, you know, you can invest anything.

And it's like when you talk about this sort of people not understanding how to be a chairman, people not understanding what it is to be a CEO. Where do you learn these things?

Well, my personal. I mean, you probably gathered this, I, I don't fit the, the image of ex chief executive of the retail.

I'm not in the club, I'm not Stuart Rose, I'm not.

You're not in the club?

No, no, definitely not. I never was.

Why, what makes you different?

A bit of a barrow boy really, aren't I? A bit basic.

He worked at a butcher's or something.

I was a butcher boy. Yeah, at the beginning, you know, but, but I've just, it's never.

You see, you're suggesting a class thing there. You're suggesting what you need to go.

To a good school or. No, I just Think you don't need to be up yourself and you don't need to stay around too long. I mean, look at these guys.

And they're like a club, they all rotate round. Oh, blimey, yes, they do. I mean, Stuart Rose, where is he now? I think he's at asda. But he was at mns and he was over here and he was over there.

They all sort of. And these are, these are things.

Great.

These are in my opinion. No, no, but you know, who am I to say that?

Why are they getting picked? It's because people, people don't like making risky decisions.

They want to say, oh, well, he's been at Aston, he's been at Tesco, so now he can be at Sainsbury.

We've got this other stuff, haven't we? Called knighthoods and all that to getting a job.

You think that makes a difference?

Huge.

Does it?

At that level? Absolutely.

Oh, well, if you've got a knighthood, they're like, oh, well, we better get here.

A non executive chairman of a big PLC is probably on. I'm gonna guess. I haven't checked it out recently. Probably cut a hundred thousand a non exec.

So he's not even working full time.

No, no, no, no, no. He probably works. My chairman, non exec chairman used to work one day a week to see me and to see my finance director without me. That was his job.

And to. And to help be my mentor, be my sage, listen to, you know, my issues. I bounce things off him because he got experience. He's white hair, you know.

Yeah, I've got white hair now, but it's out of a bottle because I want to be a rock star. But you know, the fact is that that's what chairman should do. But these, these guys, I mean, I, I just, I just don't get it.

And that's why I'm not in it.

Yeah. I guess the question comes down to people running businesses and trying to have a.

The right skills themselves to be in charge, but also choose the right people to be in charge. And certainly I find it, I find it sad to hear that whether someone's got a knighthood or not would make a difference to whether you are them or not.

And maybe, maybe it looks good on the letter. I don't know. Something like that.

Anyway, I don't know. I'm not a knight, so.

Not yet, Bill. You'd never know. I mean, actually, let's just conclude what we're talking about. Independence. What.

What would you say at the moment to an independent retailer or someone producing a product, would you just say to them, get online, you know, how would you build a retail brand now? Do you have a view on that?

If you're doing something from scratch, it's very tough. The graveyard is full of startups. I mean, the, you know, the baby's born, the mortality rate is very high. So it's a tough world.

That's the first thing to say. The second thing to say, you need some luck, there's no doubt about that. You need good advice and contacts.

But most important of all, you need the brand. Do you need the product? You need something that's different. Doing the same as somebody else isn't necessarily going to work. So.

And you know, always amazes me, you take if I've taken to watching Sky News a lot more than BBC News for, for reasons that I won't go into, but the fact is that you listen to the adverts in between and you get Jane Plan in the mornings. You probably don't see it, but you can lose so much weight by Jane Plan, right? You get the meals, you get the, to deliver the food, right?

You think this woman comes and I, I created J Plan. Where the hell does she get the money to do that?

Yeah.

Right.

So if you're up against somebody who's might be married to some bloke that's got huge amounts of money and chucks it on there and they, they get, they get this national advertising, you've got no chance, have you? So, you know, you've got to analyze where's your space?

First of all, if you, if you've got something that's different, what space is it going to play in and how do you get the noise? I level up.

Let's talk about this 20 year plan. Does everyone need a 20 year plan for towns?

No question.

Is that fundamental for, for us to be able to, I guess, grow the country or grow a town?

Absolutely fundamental. You can't reinvent our towns for the 21st century without having a 20 year vision because it's not going to be fixed overnight.

So if you take a town and you look at, do a SWOT analysis on it, you produce a brand and you develop what it's going to look like in terms of its infrastructure, particularly in, in terms of the experience. Cars. Is it carbon? Is it not carbon? In fact, it shouldn't be carbon. It's pedestrians.

Carbon means how much car, how is it going to be?

How are you going to get cars? How are you going to get people into the town? You don't get bogged down with parking charges and all that stuff.

You talk about mobility and you talk about the experience. It has to be something that is hugely popular. And the pedestrianizing these wonderful streets is the only way forward.

Final question. What's the one thing every listener should do this week to help their local high street? Is there anything anyone could do?

Use it. There's an old saying, when you get to my age, if you don't use it, you lose it. All right? And it's the same with the high street.

Stop moaning about your high street decaying. You don't go there, you go out of town. You use Amazon. That's your fault. Yeah. All right, so I. And I've got sympathy with you because I don't go there.

Because guess what? The experience is not very good when, you know, you can go out of town and park and get your shopping or you can get on Amazon, I think. Yeah.

They're all coming into London, so give another reason to go there.

Yeah.

And. And it's the experience that matters.

We should end on. You bought this wonderful book with you and stuff. I mean, I. I know. I thought it was an amazing story, really, that, you know, you're.

You're embracing change massively.

You love AI I think AI is the biggest opportunity we've got going forward. It's not a threat. We've got to work with it and you've got to use it properly.

And the way you do that is you put the customer at the forefront of why you're using it. Make the experience better because of it. Don't just do it to save costs. You can't save your way to prosperity.

You can only get to prosperity through growth. And growth will come by using AI to deal with the drudgery and free up your creative human beings around you to do something different.

And this is a good example. I could even add, you're not a musician, but you can use your creativity and say what you did in terms of this book and things.

So this book, this advert, all right, this is mockers. It's a love story.

You were a mod.

I wasn't. I. Well, I was a mod and a rocker, so I was a mocker. And the. The word mocha comes from Ringo Starr in the film Hard Days Night.

He was asked on a train in the film by a journalist because they, you know, are famous on the film, and they said, is your haircut that of a mod or a rocker? And he said, mocha. Well, it never caught on. So I thought it would just use it for this, launch, this book.

Because I didn't like the film that I saw about bikers in the us. It was all about drugs and all that kind of stuff.

So this is a story, it's a love story and it got loads and loads of issues from the 60s in there that are relevant to today. And as a consequence, I've written a load of songs and then I've worked with musicians and AI to convert those lyrics into real life songs.

And I'm launching them through my website, which is coming out in sort of mid March. I'm not going through distributors and all that kind of stuff. I'm circumventing it. Put it out there. If you want to buy a track for two quid, you can.

If you want to buy the album, 14 tracks for 15 quid, you can. And I'll deal with it like that. And if. If it captures the imagination and takes off, well, that's good.

And if I can get it in front of Joe Wiley on the BBC, I will. Because for two reasons. One, I think she likes the quirkiness of stuff sometimes, and this has got this. And I quite think she's quite nice too.

I think. I think what's great about that is there's a guy said it and it's so true, is that anyone who thinks there's a limit to human creativity is an idiot.

I. E. Oh, we're not going to have enough to do. I mean, I just see that in our own business, you know, we're a professional service business and you're thinking, oh, well, AI can make us do more.

The reality, if you were brutal about it, is a lot of the time you're only doing the minimal amount that you can for a client because you've just, you know, it's all they can afford to pay for and it's all you've got time to do.

Suddenly you're in a position where you can say, well, hang on, we could build an arbot that's constantly checking their VAT returns, that's constantly doing this, it's constantly doing that. We might. Usually we would check them once a year, we would do a detailed review. Doesn't cost us, doesn't cost them.

Suddenly we're in a position where the data's better, the service is better, and now we can do more conversations. We can say, well, I haven't been stuck doing this VAT review for the last two days, John.

So I was thinking about your business and I was thinking, why don't we do This.

I can add some value.

Yeah. I can add some value, you know. Hello.

Well, guess what? You put the customer experience at the forefront of your decision to employ AI. Brilliant.

Yeah.

Hit the nail on the head. And I just think it's very exciting. So exciting that for the first time since I retired, I wished I was back in this. In the, in the swim of things.

Because you're writing a book. Wow.

You're going to do a screen.

You're going to do a. I'm doing a screenplay. I want to get a film made. But I'm under musical.

Shouldn't it.

It should be. It could be a stage show. I mean, Andrew Lloyd Webber wouldn't have to write the music because I've done it.

But you know, the fact is that I'm restricted by my biggest investor. I'm under strict instructions not to spend any of our wealth on this at all. By the boss.

Okay. Being the wife.

Yes, yes, exactly. So I do it on a shoe street, which is, which is great fun and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

And the proof of in the pudding will be in the listening, I guess.

Brilliant. Bill. We're just gonna end with a little bit of fun.

Yeah. Oh, you did this last time and I don't think I did very well.

Well, you could do better this time. Bill. Grab that paddle. I'm gonna, I'm gonna name some stuff that more for your, your industry knowledge, so maybe a bit easier.

Says, says BS and business. Hold it up clearly and, and say one of the two. We're gonna name some things you need to tell me we can discuss a little bit. You ready?

Yeah.

Okay. Number one, pop up shops. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's. There could be a fun part.

I mean pop up shops are everywhere because all the, all the retailers are empty or going the bus.

Best example I've had of it is in Stockton on Tees when they took a building and turned it into a, like a nursery for pop ups. And so they created situations where people could experiment and fail for free, more or less.

And as a consequence they got some businesses that actually took off and then went and took on leases. So it's not, it's actually works. It's a way of experimenting on a cheap situation and getting out there and testing it. And I think.

Well, a bit like going back to the shop floor for you with Susan and stuff.

I think the, the value for someone to be in front of people to try and see whether they're interested and they're not interested or they are interested in this bit, you don't really know what people like until.

Exactly.

They could pick up something that you're not even selling as a free gift and be like, oh, this is interesting.

Is testing your idea on a shoestring brilliant?

Drone delivery? Are you on drone delivery? Yeah, yeah. Coming.

It will come.

I. I find it. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be interesting when that comes in, isn't it? Bumping into each other in the air or something?

No, I don't think so. Look, I went to San Francisco during my Motorbike Wild west tour. And we pulled up and we were staying in nice hotels because we can.

And we went out to dinner and we called the. The taxis. Three of them arrived without drivers.

Waymo.

Yeah, yeah, they were Jaguar cars. He got inside, it was like the Invisible Man. And you're too young to know what the invisible.

No, no, I know very well.

Yeah, I miss it. The steering wheels come going around. It's in the traffic. It's pulling over to the left, it's pulling over to the right. It does everything.

And you sit there and you think, this is really weird. Then it pulls up outside your venue and you get out and you've already paid for it and it's done.

Well, if you can imagine that, you can imagine drone deliveries. It will come. Yeah, I think air travel will come. Using drones as well one day.

Yeah, it's getting there, isn't it?

I mean, replacing cars. I don't mean. Right. Air travel. I mean long distance, short distance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're getting there.

It will come. And there will have to be some regulation, otherwise be a lot of dead people around. But it will come.

Yeah. Back to the future, finally. Black Friday Bill.

Well, you know what? When it started, I used to be like that.

Yeah.

And now I'm in business as a chairman of something where if we don't do it, we lose out. So it's business today. But was it necessary?

I held this view, and in my very young career, I was appointed the marketing manager at my first supermarket. Group of guess what? Wines, beers and spirits. How the hell I got that? I was a fresh food specialist.

But anyway, I thought the one time of the year that you can sell gallons of this stuff, it's Christmas and we all promote the hell out of it. We're mad. I mean, you can't be a cartel because that's illegal. But why do we do it?

And you know, November, all it does is it shoves a whole load of volume through and in it and strains the the logistics of doing it, and then you sell less other times. So I thought it was that when it started, but it's a. Sorry that when it started. But today is if you're not there, you're not at the party.

So, no, it's mad how the. It's mad how America infects us so strongly with these things, isn't it? Because for us, it's not even around Thanksgiving.

It's just sort of randomly pops up. But it's quite well timed for my more organized friends and siblings.

You, you know, buying Christmas early, they're all like, oh, I'll get my Christmas done now.

But I'm a motorbike fanatic. And that bike there is a Triumph Rocket 3R. Two and a half liter engine, huge. It's five years old.

And I've said to my wife, I'm sorry, I told you a fib five years ago. And I said, this is the last bike I'll have. I want to change it. And we had a bit of a discussion about it.

And last November, that was in Black Friday in the triumph dealer. It's 23 grand. Normally it was on at 19 and a half thousand. So I guess what, because they know me, I said, guess what, guys?

When I do come and buy it, you're gonna sell it to me at nineteen and a half thousand, whether it's November or not.

Used by dates, Bill. Anyone? Used by dates, business or bullshit? Seeing as I cooked bacon this morning for my kids that was five days past, it's used by date.

And I haven't had a call from the school yet.

I think used by dates are. Are actually business simply because they are defensive, okay, against the obvious, which is you poison someone. Okay? But are they. Are they real?

I mean, could. Could they eke out another two days in fresh food and, you know, have they got them at the right balance then? I think it's because it's.

If you look at the waste that's created as a consequence of it, it's huge. So there's a balance they've got to. To. To. To strike.

Come up with a test. I mean, they had some stuff. I remember in the supermarkets and them trialing some sort of color things that would turn a different color.

I mean, you would have thought we could all at home buy a device for 20 quid that would tell you this thing's off or not, you know, and it's probably much more complicated than we realize because you're talking about picking up smells or picking up bacteria, strains or.

It's A E. Coli and it's fresh foods you're worried about because it can kill you.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's, it is, yeah. It is a bit business related when you got that kind of responsibility. If you're the CEO, you're responsible for ensuring the product.

Such a shame, isn't it?

But there's your, with your love of technology, there must be, there must be a better way. And if I was back in it, I think I'd try and find it. But I haven't given any thought to it.

So yeah, we discussed. But let's get it on the table. Automated checkouts. Bill, do you stand in the automated checkout line? Absolutely not.

Absolute bullshit. And it should never ever been a step. They needed to get, they needed to do it in a way which enhanced the customer experience.

And course, guess what they do now. Oh blimey, our shrinkage has gone up. People are stealing more. Well really.

Surprise, surprise.

I mean you created this situation and if you go into some of these stores now you can't get, you can't get out of the corral without putting the, the barcode on to open the, to get out. So you've gone through it. Doesn't know whether it's, it's what you've got in your trolley. It is absolute.

They should have gone the whole hog and said how can we use technology to actually, and I've said this four years ago. There could be a big redundancy called checkout operator. Yeah. I mean it's huge.

Yeah.

And the cost saving is massive. If it's channeled back into improving the customer's experience, it's a winner. So get rid of them because you can. No one seems to be doing.

And the last one you've already mentioned, so we're obviously on topic pedestrianizing high streets. What do you feel about that, Bill?

It's a full business opportunity to create a better experience. And the only reason people will go to towns is because the experience is good, not because of a shop. So forget your shops. They're done. They'll come.

If you get people there, guess what, you can hit some more shops there. But the fact is we need to pedestrianize. If we pedestrianize, we need to put power in under the pedestrianization. So you can have our live music.

Yeah.

Stockton on Tees has every Friday night, every Friday I don't know if they still do it, but every Friday night they used to put up a marquee in the middle of the town square and it's effectively a government run nightclub. They had a bar in there, Security, and it was for local bands. Brilliant. And the community got around it.

Now, some of the more nightclubby type businesses got a bit arcy about the competition, but so what? It's competition. Just get on.

Well, life moves on, doesn't it? People don't want to be in a sweat basement anyway.

So there's no doubt pedestrianization is a. It's good for the environment, gets the cars out of it. And you need to put.

You need to put some thought to the mobility issue of people and disabled people in that factor. But it'll work and it's an absolute must.

Thank you, Bill Grimsey. It's been absolutely brilliant. That has been this week's episode of Business without bs. Thank you for coming again.

Pleasure.

Ciao.

Good to see you.