We had the pleasure of chatting to Will Lankston - Managing Director of Timpson Direct, with over 12 years of experience across the Timpson Group. He and our CEO Phil Wedgwood discuss the differentiating factors which make the Timpson Group culture so unique and how they've maintained engagement with dispersed colleagues across 2100 shops in the UK. The meaning of upside-down management. Ex-offender resettlement and doing the right thing for the community, ethically and commercially. How to survive bad figures in a retail business and what really matters as a colleague in the Timpson Group culture.
We had the pleasure of chatting to Will Lankston - Managing Director of Timpson Direct, with over 12 years of experience across the Timpson Group. He and our CEO Phil Wedgwood discuss the differentiating factors which make the Timpson Group culture so unique and how they've maintained engagement with dispersed colleagues across 2100 shops in the UK. The meaning of upside-down management. Ex-offender resettlement and doing the right thing for the community, ethically and commercially. How to survive bad figures in a retail business and what really matters as a colleague in the Timpson Group culture.
Hi and welcome to another edition of Engaged in conversation with me, Phil Wedgwood. I'm lucky to be joined today by il Lankston from Timpson. And we're going to have a fantastic conversation about their business and how their culture is playing a very important part to their success. Will, it's great to meet you today. Thanks very much for coming to our new studio setting here in the Gotham in Manchester. Would you be able to introduce yourself for the audience so they know who you are and the sort of things you're up to at Timpsons at the moment? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, firstly, thanks for having me. Phil. I'm Will Lankston and I've been with the the Timpson business for 12 years now. I started off working all our shops. The first shop I worked in was Aylesbury and I've then spent time in all of the different businesses that we now have as part of the group. And my latest sort of job within the business is to look after all of our business to business ventures. So I look after our locksmiths business. We have some sizable vending businesses. I look after our Web teams and then a lot of our sort of supermarket relationships as well. Fantastic. And over the last couple of years, as a traditional kind of retailer, really in many respects talk me through some of the challenges that you've been through specifically over the last couple of years with the whole COVID thing. Yeah, absolutely. So I was speaking about this not so long ago, and I find it quite difficult, subject to speak about because obviously, I suppose on an individual basis, so many people had some really big challenges through that time. For us as a business, it was really difficult because we pride ourselves on treating all of our colleagues as being part of our family, and we had to make some really, really difficult decisions through the pandemic. I know that lots of businesses did, and thankfully, I suppose the has kind of come out the other side of that and we're seeing the rebound. But from from our perspective, it was it was certainly very difficult to sort of ascertain which parts of the business potentially were going to really thrive through the pandemic. And there weren't very many of them. And which parts of the business we were really going to have to downsize. So, yeah, it was a very difficult time. And so you've been at Timpsons for over a decade. It's got a really great reputation as a family business. It's on every high street, pretty much in the whole of the UK, I think. And I've noticed when you're out shopping, you're popping up everywhere in new locations. So how many locations have you got in the UK and how many staff have you got now at the moment? Yes, we're just under 2100 shops across the UK. Of those, almost 2000 of them are corporately run and operated. And then we've got a business, one of the businesses that that forms part of the group is Snappy Snaps. I don't know if you would have heard of it. It's a it's a high end photographic business, mainly based in London. And that's actually a franchise business. But the rest of the shops we operate ourselves and that's through a number of different brands. So we've got the Timpson business which you have seen on the High Street. There's actually one just around the corner from where we are here, where you can get your keys cut, your shoes repaired and your watch repaired and so on and so forth. We've got max photo business, which is it's very similar to Snappy Snaps, but it's, it's a bit cheaper and it's mainly based in the north. We've got the Johnsons dry cleaning business. We've got about 200 of those around the country which we acquired in 2017. We've got a posh dry cleaner called Jeeves, and we actually hold the royal warrant to now King Charles, in that business. Then we've got some weird and wonderful bits as well. So we've got that locksmiths business I talked about. We're actually one of the biggest locksmith companies around the UK, we offer a nationwide service. We've got about a thousand photo booths in and around supermarkets all over the UK. We've got about a thousand instant photo printing kiosks where you can go and get the photos of your mobile phone printed. And then we've got seven barber shops, the barber shops by Timpson, and we can talk a little bit about how we ended up with that. And finally, we've got three pubs. Oh wow. I didn't realize you had that. Gosh, what don't you do? I mean. Yeah, it's phenomenal. And that's one of the great things about being a family business is that, you know, why did we end up getting into pubs? Because our current chief exec’s late Mum Alex, they've got a holiday home on Anglesey and there was nowhere local where they could go get a nice meal. And so she and our chairman, John Timpson, decided to buy the local pub and they sort of did it up as a passion project and that grew into us having another restaurant on Anglesey called The Oyster Catcher, where we had an academy and we trained sort of disadvantaged kids how to cook. And then we ended up just as we went into the pandemic, actually, we ended up re-acquiring a hospitality business that we had a stake in, and that has ended up with us having the White Eagle on Anglesey, the Oyster Catcher on Anglesey, and then the Partridge at Stretton, which is sort of in between Manchester and Liverpool. Yeah, that's fantastic. And is there a plan to extend that more nationally now? Watch this space and there may be plans to expand it, whether that's at home or overseas. Who knows? Wow. I just love the whole notion that you can pop to the high street, get your keys cut, get your shoes repaired, drop off your dry cleaning, get your hair cut, get your photos printed. I mean, also... and go for a pint of Cobbler Ale. Well, yeah, go for a pint. Also get your phone fixed. Could you do that now, too? Yeah. I mean, it's a great transition development of what was what was, I suppose, quite classically a very traditional British retailing establishment, isn't it? So that innovation and that change, that you've made is really impressive? Yeah, absolutely. And you hit the nail on the head there in in that you've you sort of identified one of our biggest challenges, which is how do we communicate to all of our customers and I suppose prospective customers about all of the different services that we offer. Because if you've ever been in to one of our shops and you've already said that you have, you'll notice that they’re very small. So to us small is beautiful, real estate comes at a premium. And so we try and squeeze into a smaller box as we possibly can, which is, you know, that's also allowed us to get really close to our customers in some of the the sort of bigger cities around the UK. But that presents some challenges in that it's difficult to find enough wall space to tell our customers what we do. And we've also traditionally or historically, we've really relied on word of mouth to tell our customers about all the different services we offer. We haven't done much traditional marketing. It's something that we are starting to do more of now, but we're really still finding our feet and we want to be very careful not to end up coming across as just a, you know, look at all the different things we do and sort of shoving it down the throats of our customers. Any marketing that we do go on to do is is going to be really light touch. It's going to talk about the culture that we're so proud of within the business and not, you know, just shoving product and service down our customers throats. And I think that's one of the things that comes across strongly from your brand, that sense of culture, that sense of family, that sense of kind of corporate social responsibility. You're doing quite a lot as a brand around that. That's my take on it. I mean, talk me through that. How important is the culture? How deep is it within the organization? So culture in our business is absolutely everything. If you were to come and spend an hour at Timpson house, which is our sort of HQ just down the road, I think you'd quickly pick up on, you know, our culture of upside down management and how everybody within the office, they'll always be talking about how can we support the shops? You know, it's so ingrained within people that if you see someone walk past a phone, you know, the whole of the office kind of turns around and looks at them and they'll have to wear one of the silly phone hats that we've got hanging around the office. But no, culture really is absolutely everything in our business. And it's led so strongly by John and James in that, you know, they they do not tolerate people that sort of don't fit with the culture. So if anybody and that's one of the benefits, I suppose, that everybody really in our senior team has come up through the business that, you’re not, it's rare that you're going to have a kind of cultural misfit. But if we if it does happen, we're pretty brutal on saying you're not right for us because it's so important to the rest of our business that that we look after the culture and that we champion it in everything that we do. Yeah, we've made a number of acquisitions actually over the last probably ten or 15 years and it takes what we've learned is that whilst you'll start to see the signs of our culture in one of those businesses after a couple of years, because we put all of our benefits in the business, like the three holiday homes and the birthdays often, and all of that stuff. For all of the colleagues in that business to actually buy in and for it to be embedded takes about five years. And so, you know, that kind of helps to, I suppose, illustrate it's not an easy thing to do and that's why we're so protective of it. In terms of the CSR bit that you mentioned, it's really interesting. It's when I speak to my friends about our business and I don't know if there's anything I'm going to tell, oh, it's all about instincts and incentives. And but when I do speak to friends about the business, it's it's one of the things that I think most of them identify with most strongly are they sort of say, if I think about your brand, it's kind of all of the things that you do in terms of CSR that that kind of resonate the strongest, which is interest, because for us we don't really talk about it as CSR. One of the things that I suppose we're known for is the work that we do with ex-offenders in our foundation or without saying colleagues with lived experience of prison. And, and that just that came because James Thomson went on a tour of a prison. He really liked the guy that was giving him it all and so split them is business card and said when you're out, I'll give you a job and he's still with us today. Actually works in a shop not far from here. And so when James realized that there was, you know, there's a huge number of people within prison, that there were great personalities. We can train them to do everything that we do within one of our shops, but they're just being ignored because they've got a criminal conviction. We went after it and we went after it quickly because to us it made really good commercial sense and it was the right thing to do. But I think it's important to note we don't do anything just because it's the right thing to do. There's always a commercial backing to that as well. So it's everything that we do. In terms of CSR, yes, it be good for the community, it Willl be good for the, you know, the individual, but it's also going to be good for business. Gosh, I mean, there's so much we can talk about there. I mean, in terms of how do you drive that culture? How do you cross a few thousand staff and you talks about this upside down management? Can you just give us a bit more of an explanation on what that means and how that works? Yeah, absolutely. Upside down management is, I suppose, the concept that everybody, the people that serve our customers and kind of bring the money into the business are the most important people in our business. And so everybody else in the business, myself included, you know, right the way up to James and John Timpson, we're all there just to support the colleagues running the shops and basically to remove any challenges that they face to make their life as easy as possible so they can just focus on serving the customer in the way that they see best and put lots of money in it. So that's that's upside down management. Okay. And so how do you how do you sort of join that together across a workforce that's so desperate and so large? What mechanisms do you how do you actually do that? Yeah, it's not just is it is it disparate and large? One of the, I suppose, more unique things about our business is that most of our shops are run by one person. And so to kind of to drive that engagement in the culture is not easy. I suppose if I think about the sort of the key pillars or what really makes a difference to be able to do that. One is that we we absolutely pride ourselves on getting out in the shops. So if I go to the office today, which I am after we record this, the chances of me finding James Timpson sat in his office. A Slim Tonight is probably one in five because he spends one day a week in the office and four days going around the shops. He'll visit 700 shops a year. His dad visits 700 shops a year. And then we've got a team of amazing area managers and what we call area development managers who all they do, all day, every day is spend time with the colleagues in the shops. You know, they are not sat at the desk doing lots of kind of admin and paperwork. They're getting out talking to the colleagues on the standing, you know, both from a you know, a business and a personal perspective. Are you facing any challenges? Is everything okay at home? Is there anything I can do to help? And that really, I think, is where the kind of the the boots on the ground we're driving, the engagement that combined with sort of how, I suppose in the last three years we've started just slowly starting to leverage a bit of tech. Now, when I say that, it sounds it probably sounds more exciting than it actually is. We're using WhatsApp. So one of the tools that we used in the business to communicate with all of our colleagues quickly and we think quite effectively is to do to send WhatsApp messages. We have area groups for each of the areas around the business and that's how they sort of share good news, share issues. Talk about any challenges that they might be facing. Yeah, I mean that's very common in retail, especially use. Yeah. I mean, I see pretty much every business to be fair. So that's not a surprise that that's being utilized. So how do you train people? Because, you know, looking at it, you say the run by one person and yet you can do you choose your keys, repair your iPhone. Do you dry cleaning? How on earth does one person do all of that? Yeah. Wow. Impressive, right? Yeah. It's and it's then when you combine that with our all sort of ethos that we recruit entirely on personality. So actually, if you've been a cobbler before, the chances are we don't want you because we can train anybody to repair shoes. I say that I was actually terrible at repair shoes. If I worked in the shops. I was known as office hands because I'd sort of scratch my hand and cry about it like a baby. But I'm. Yeah, we could train absolutely anybody to to repair a shoe to cut. Okay. To repair an iPhone. That process to take you from never having done it before to, you know, basically be able to do all of those services to a high standard takes 12 months. And, you know, that's that's what enables us to recruit entirely on personality. Now if you combine that 12 month period with, you know, what the sort of normal churn rate in retail, we'd be in big trouble. And that's why culture you know, the culture that we've built is so important. It's so important our colleagues buy into that because then they stay with us for a long, long time and we don't have that that same churn rate the most reset has struggle with. So it's funny you mention that because that was going to be my my next question and still is. So in terms of churn rates because you know in retail you run can be 70%. Yeah. And you just constantly chasing its tail trying to retain and obtain talent. What is your sort of churn rate and are you able to share that with us? Do if I, if I knew the actual staff roughly. Yeah. Like it can't be 70% can. No. Absolutely not. So, so the reason I don't know the stat is because it's such a low number, it doesn't factor in really our conversations. Your poll tax or in the U.S., it's not. I mean, it's probably a stat that's buried at the back of the paper that I should have read and perhaps happened. But it's not something that features in our conversation. We are not talking about churn rate in all in our board meetings, leadership meetings, really just in any of our day today. Don't get me wrong, we talk about perhaps specific areas of the country where we're really struggling with recruitment. So at the moment, I can tell you that the Northeast is really difficult and that's right from sort of Newcastle all the way up to Aberdeen, that that east coast is just a challenge for us. Right. And then as I'm sure you can imagine, you know, London in the southeast is difficult. Yeah, but elsewhere in the country and it's getting better and, and we're seeing it sort of getting better all the time. So in terms of UK retail, you must be right up there with with that attrition rate ratio, right. Because who else would you say in your peer group there? What other brands could you think of that have done that so well in that space? Yeah, so there are lots of other brands that I can think of who would have a really good retention rate and you know, a long sort of average term of service people like Richard sounds or a business that we really admire, Greggs are doing a lot more. You know, the John Lewis partnership, there are some really and these a lot of these are really well known businesses. But, you know, we're not the only ones kind of doing great things. I suppose it's probably just because we don't do marketing about our traditional services. That sort of the thing that just most people take away from our brand when they think about the Simpson business is, you know, all the sort of stuff we do for our colleagues. And and that's the message that tends to come across. That's really interesting. So many organizations, they have big head offices and and then they have multiple premises around the place, whether that's, you know, across Europe globally or just in the UK. And that's one of the classic engagement challenges is is just that classic well, how do we reach out and connect with with the wider workforce? But it sounds like with your uptown management style that actually if I went to your head office, it sounds like there's hardly anybody there because they're all here, they're all out in the field helping you colleagues. Yeah. So there are lots of people there and we've actually really sort of driven and pushed for all of our colleagues to come into the office from quite an early, early start, kind of post-pandemic one, because it's, you know, we're there to support the colleagues in the shops. They're all out there serving our customers. We need to be there to answer the phone if they ring or, you know, basically help them with any problems they might have. So that's one reason. The second reason is that, you know, we people going into the office is really good for our business. You know, we like people to walk on their commute and batch records, get their shoe repaired. We like people to wear suits and ties. All of that is really good for our dry cleaning business. And so for us to sort of say everybody work from home is is kind of going against what we'd really like everybody to get back to doing. Yeah. That's really interesting. And so you've got very deep physical engagement with your staff. That's one thing that I'm taking away, which maybe is better than other businesses say, right? Where they do it is that wider disconnect. So what are the mechanisms? Do you do you have to streamline communications or obtain feedback because you're doing that very much at that management layer, aren't you? Yeah. And is that effectively brought back and aggregated into head office. Yeah. So we have to really important measures in the business. So we do something called the happy index. We do it once a year and effectively what we're doing is asking every colleague in the business, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you with the support you're getting from your line manager or from your area team? And so when we do that in terms of kind of how we we assess the performance of our area managers or our area teams, you can survive having bad figures in our business. You actually you really kind of I hope bad, bad figures because we know that we can help you with that. You it's really rare that you'll come back from having too bad happy index is on the chart because you know that's when we start to realize perhaps you know we and often it would be our fault we've over promoted someone into a position that they're just not ready for yet. But that's sort of in terms of a measure, the happy index is kind of what an area manager lives and dies by. So that's one really important way that we go out and get feedback, but that is only once a year. The other thing that we've started doing quite recently is how you're feeling survey, which happens once a week. And really what that is, is on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you? And our average last week was 8.6 which you know in my books is pretty good given everything that's going on in the country right now. And that's not how happier you necessarily with just about business but the way that we're using that tool is really so that when an area manager looks at those scores on a Friday, they can very quickly see if there are any shocks. And we might have a colleague who's struggling with something outside of work and straightaway they can get on the phone to sender. I've seen that. You know, you've put in a score that's not very, you know, very happy this week. Talk to me about why that is. And so, you know, if I compare those two things with traditional or other businesses, we probably don't get very much feedback at all. And we're not poring over kind of dashboards of data, but they are two of the most important measures because we know if we've got happy colleagues in the shops on a weekly basis of being looked after by their area teams, and they're all really happy with the support that they're getting over the course of a year from their line manager or their area teams, the the rest of the business can look after itself. You know, the money is going to look after them. Well, yeah. I mean, it's that plus I talk about the three C's of engagement, so that's engaging with the audiences that matter most in your business. And they are your colleagues and your customers and your wider community. And I think that resonates with any business. And the question is that is how do you break that down and how do you enable it in the most effective way? And I think with your business, you've got that nice balance there. You've got clearly got everyone knows that happy staff equals happy customers, especially in retailing, where you're directly interfacing with the customer. So, so that's really good to hear. Do you have recognition? How do you bring to life recognition through the workforce and. So we do lots of different things, I suppose because of the approach we take to running the business in general, which is we just trust people to get on with it. We have two rules. It's about the poor and that's, you know, turning up to work on time and, you know, wearing the right uniform and smelling good and all of the stuff that kind of is just common sense and put money in the till of the that it really is. Get on with it and do what you want. And so in terms of recognition, it really varies across the group. I'll talk about some of the sort of the things that we do everywhere, but it Willl depend quite, quite a lot upon who the sort of the person running that part of the business is, because we give them total freedom to sort of go on and recognize their colleagues. How do they see fit? So that might be, you know, paying them to go out for dinner with their family. It might be, you know, sending them we've had colleagues being sent on holiday and all sorts by area managers. But in terms of what we do, that's sort of everywhere in the business, we've got the scratchcards. So whenever someone's done a great job or, you know, I feel one of my team, for example, I've done a great job, you can give them a scratch card and there are lots of different prizes, tips and prizes that can be won. It's anything from a meal out on James to a couple of hundred quid. That's the sort of prize that you can win there. We've got a Dreams Come True system, which is whilst it sounds like it's sort of a by chance yeah. You Willl not win achievements come through unless you're an amazing colleague and we've done all sorts of things as part of that. So we've helped people pay for surgery. We've sent people to be reunited with their families in Australia. We've done all sorts of things and then we also have the Timpson Lottery, which is effectively every week we give £1,000 to a colleague at random. But I would tend to say again that we're not going to see any colleagues, that perhaps our superstar colleagues winning that lottery. Wow, that's great. And then there's other stuff which I've just forgotten, to be honest with you. I'm sure there's loads. There's lots of stuff that we tried to do to to look after our colleagues and tell them when they've done a great job. That's fantastic. You know, it's really coincidental. But this morning on LinkedIn, I story came into my feed about Simpson and you were being recognized, I think it was in Birmingham, one of the Birmingham stores, and someone had gone to get the Keys Cup and and then they'd gone back say four or five days later to get another set cup. And the chap was saying oh gosh, you've lost them already. You know, you were in here the other day and she says No, I've got my grandad tail and he's moved in and we, we need an extra set for the carers and things like this. And so he handed her the envelope and she went to pay and he says no it's fine, it's, it's on us. And when she opened it the key was in there with the little rainbow key ring. And I just thought, gosh, it's these powerful little stories that you're in the community where you're really impacting people's lives. Something simple like that can make a really big difference to someone's day. And it's interesting because the last podcast I did was with Andrew Thorpe and we were talking about the power of storytelling in business. And one of the things is capturing stories like that because they can be really powerful. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting that you kind of bring up that that story around the keys. It's for us. So lots of businesses because they have lots of rules and normally they've put these rules in place because something has gone wrong once in their life. You know, we need a rule to make sure it doesn't happen again, whereas we very much sort of trust people to get on with it. We don't like having rules and we just have those two that I've already mentioned because we're letting people serve customers the way that they see fit eventually, you just if you have great personalities in the business, stuff like that is going to happen all the time. And yet we do actively encourage colleagues to give stuff away for free because we know how much that drives loyalty with our customers. But we don't really need to spend too much time talking about it because we we make sure we get great people in the shops and then they know that if someone's having a really bad day or they've suffered a bereavement and they're looking to get photos printed for the funeral or whatever it might be, they're just going to say that today it's on the house. That's great. That's great. Yeah, because pret gets a lot of press for doing that. Don't they have the button on the till that says give it away, give it away. But they do dashboard in any state. And so yeah but it's really getting that balance because I'm sure it could be abused as well. So it's is hard, isn't it? But it goes back to that culture of trust, empowerment, getting the right personalities in the business. Yeah. And you know where we are supposed to degree, we're lucky and that we're not. Yeah. A John Lewis that's selling£1,000 TVs and, you know, more attractive things like your iPhones. Yeah. At the end of the day, if people are sort of abusing it in our business, they're taking home leather soles and brass key blocks. Yeah, which is exciting. I think the cash is probably the most exciting thing to perhaps tempt colleagues to steal within our business. It does still happen, right. But we we don't we're not that worried about creating a rule to worry about, you know, because people might abuse giving stuff away for free. We're more about that, you know, if if someone's having a bad day or if they're a regular customer or if you just like the look of them. Yeah. Give them stuff away for free. That's all in the colleague's gift. So I'd encourage you, you the next time you go into it's Amazon one ask for a discount. Yeah. We always we always encourage people to go and see if they can have a bit of a haggle. It's good fun if you're going to ask for discount. I suggest it on a Thursday afternoon because that's the end of weeks I've been really pushing to get the figure. And the second is, you know, so if you get free. But that's the challenge. Wow. Some great money saving tips here from. Well, thank you for those. So have you found that culture under more pressure recently with the whole cost of living and I mean both from a business level because you all operate brick bricks and mortar retailing. So you have a cost base there, don't you? But also from the from the staffing perspective apps. Absolutely. So, you know, we spoke about the the sort of the real challenges that we face going through through COVID. I suppose we've come out of that and there are new challenges. So inflation is going mad. The cost of our goods is has really increased. We're under pretty sustained pressure from lots of our suppliers all over the world. And it's it's really difficult for us to you know, you're walking that tightrope of making sure that you're still offering value for money to our customers, making sure that we're still charging enough to to run a profitable business that can look after its colleagues, but not overcharging our customers, given the current climate, there's, you know, sort of a famous quote within our business from our chairman, which is that, you know, when you're going through periods of inflation like this, you sort of go put your price up twice a year to survive. We're sort of now we're kind of we're doing that on a more granular level. So we're really looking into each product and service as we're getting new prices coming in from our suppliers. But yeah, it's really tough. It's not easy, and I think we're probably facing another 12 months of at least of of really challenging times. It is tough, isn't it? So operating the classic kind of retailing model where you're in every high street pretty much. How does that go around the whole digital enablement? Because I think with certain bits of your business where I'll give you an example, I work with printing com a number of years back and I remember they drove they closed the M6 because they they pulled in this humungous printer into traffic down the road and they broke the business model of every high street having printing equipment and changed it and said, well, actually we bring the fine into the high street, but we print it and then send it to you. And it's that sort of centralization, obviously, fueled by digital and modern manufacturing. Are there any similarities to that in your model? So I suppose I want to break that down into two bits. I think I'll talk about the digital, the sort of how the centralization piece first and then some examples of I suppose how we use digital within the group. So talk about a centralization piece. So we've got quite a sizable online photo business that sort of is in support of the photo business in the shops, and that's under the those brands I've already mentioned to Max Photo for them. We also own Tesco photo online so have go and Tesco's online that's that's actually us and then snapping snaps and what we find that's really interesting, we offer a really similar sort of level of service to our competitors. You know, you would have probably seen the likes of photo box and Snapfish and Free Prints, and they're great businesses, by the way. Yeah, but what we find really interesting is that although we can sort of match that level of service in that you can go online, you can order a product and have it shipped to your home in a few days because there are personalized products, it's difficult to do sort of overnight, 85% of all sales in those businesses go into our shops. So that's where customers are either ordering their prints online and going to pick them up in the store or they're ordering a gift. It's being fulfilled within the branch. So you might order a mug. The colleague in the store is making that mug and a cup. The customer's going to pick it up and yep, that's all sort of USP. And we're actually talking to some of the, you know, the other sort of players in this industry around how they might be able to leverage our retail estate because no one else does it quite like us. And so certainly kind of the click and collect angle is a big one for us rather than it being centralized. We do actually have a central facility, but it's more to support the shops than it is anything else. And then talking about sort of digital enablement and how we use digital across the group, to be totally honest with you, it's limited. And the reason it's limited, I suppose, is that we've always we've been very conscious historically that we don't want to remove those face to face conversations that we know is so important between colleagues and our business, most importantly, between the area manager and the colleagues working in the branches. That's a that is a really key conversation that we don't want to stop, but we have over the years, really slowly started to sort of creep digital into the business where your colleagues tell us it's going to have the biggest impact on their day to day. So one example of that would be if you went into Timpson House on a Friday or a monday about seven or eight years ago, you would have seen a sea of paperwork which had come out of the branches on being sent on the Friday morning following the end of week on Thursday night. And you know, what used to happen was a colleague in the shop closes down the week on a Thursday evening. They do that type of work. You know, the writing with the sales down on this huge A380, I used to hate completing the huge three sheet. They then put that in the envelope, send it out into the house, and then our colleagues in the finance team, yeah, they tap away. And so there's a huge amount of data duplication. So we knew we had a problem. It exists, but more importantly, we got this massive problem where the poor colleagues in the shops were having to do this massive sales pull on triplicate paper. If you made a mistake, you ripped up and started again. It was awful. And so the first thing that we actually did in our business, that was a step towards digital because we still use takes the old fashioned tells, you know, a calculator with a tool drawer was to start a digital sales report on something called Barney's Dashboard and Volumes. Just one of our lead developers who developed the on his dashboard that's why we named after him but yeah so so the first thing that we did sort of first toe that we stuck in the water was, was to put the sales report on their and then over time that's evolved. So now if you walk into one of our shops, you know, colleagues can use that to get pricing. There's trading information on the dashboard. They can use it to do that sort of bonus schemes every week. They can order their stock using the dashboard. And we're kind of we're just evolving that all the time. AS And when we get requests from the colleagues which normally driven by, you know, I do this five times today and it just really pisses me off. Yeah. And So those requests tend to be the things where we say we need to actually do something on the dashboard too that. Yeah, no, I get that we, we see that a lot. So I kind of like in that to digital enablement really the basic stuff trying to modernize that a little bit to make everyone's life easier isn't it? Rather than going stupidly to town and overcomplicating everything. Yeah. And I suppose I'm a bit of a techie so. So I have some quite big aspirations for where we could go as a business. We'd say, Yeah, then it's never going to be anything that gets in the way of the colleagues or Yeah, you're never going to walk into teams, as we said, by robot, or at least not in my lifetime, and we would never want that. But I think we do have some, some sizable opportunities in our business because we're coming from quite far behind to probably make, you know, improve productivity, improve the level of service that we give our customers and just in general offer a better experience for customers and colleagues working within the business. Yeah, that's interesting. I love the, the, the, the rates there of the customer engagement with your staff, with the physical locations. Because I think over the last two or three years we have kind of seen the rebirth of the local high street and the fact you're there and have always been there, you're like a go to trusted brand, aren't you? And the fact people like that interaction and a sense that even though you could do stuff remotely and centralized, you're just you're showcasing there they're actually people prefer that physical interaction, that picking up and speaking to somebody. And I think that's often nice because we're seeing in a lot of areas that is just disappearing in a lot of industries. And people are kind of cycles, isn't it? It's going back to that, connecting with the people, kind of having a chat, having that interaction. The fact that you're there with that location density, you're perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. Yeah, look, we've got lots and lots of shops around all over the UK and Ireland, you know, lots of those shops on the high street. And I think you're right, you know, in many cases the high street, it's getting better. Yeah, there is still some real common sense things that we feel, you know, that local councils and government can do to improve the high street. You know, we still don't quite know what's going to happen with business rates next year and that's a huge issue for a retailer like us and every other retailer of business on the high street and well, in a physical premises. Full stop. Yeah, you know, but but we've also been really lucky in that we worked really closely with the supermarkets. So we're with a number of, of supermarkets around the UK and that has been sort of pretty crucial to the, the, the rapid expansion of our shop network over the last 15 years. You know, we have a lot to thank the supermarkets for. We know that, you know, when they ask their customers what services they they see as being most important, then we're one of the most important, those supermarkets, too. So we've got a really good relationship with the supermarkets and it's it's really helped us grow as we have them. That's great. That's great. And I imagine that you'd get a lot of people wanting to work with you when you're present in those locations. Did you find that happening? Yeah, obviously. I mean, I get probably, you know, 20 or 30 weird and wonderful requests each week, you know, eat and I've got this product and I'll always look at it. So yeah, if you, I, I almost put my email address on the website the other day, which I've not got, but if you can work out why but it's difficult and you know, you do have a crazy idea. I Willl look at it and I Willl definitely give it some consideration. But yes, you know, because of where we are, all of those sort of, you know, those those little services that people want to offer customers in hyper convenient locations, you know, whether it be a charging bank for a phone or an appetizing this or an appetizing not yet one of those parcels that we actually do offer is is a parcel pick up and collection service. We're quite an attractive business for that because we tend to be well-located, whether that's on the high street and supermarket it's where better located than lots of retailers on the high street because as I said earlier, we're so small. So if you take a shopping center as an example, when we talk to shopping center planners and they're asking us, Yeah, we'd like you to act. So what we're saying, using that broom cupboard, we'll go in there. Yeah, because it tends to be well-located and it's too small for anybody else to get in it. And so I suppose there is a natural opportunity that we're thinking that, you know, let's go bigger unit because we can do more, we can do more, do you see that happening or do you think that that just keeping the size sensible is actually advantageous? Period. Look at the moment, you know, rents have really declined since the pandemic. And everybody knows that the kind of the high street rent is a lot lower than it was pre-pandemic. So yeah, some retailers might take advantage of that now. Perhaps go for a slightly larger space. I think that potentially that be a bit of a shame because you might see worse tenant mixes on the high street. I'd rather see, you know, lots of little units doing lots of different things for us. We're never going to be a big box retailer. The biggest it gets for us is having, you know, we do a Timpson place which is, you know, Subway, you've got Timpson and Max services in the same the same location. But, you know, to us, small really is beautiful. And it's been it's been really crucial to us be able to run, you know, conservative, profitable business. Because if we'd have been exposed to some of the rents that, you know, big box retailers were exposed to going into pandemic, yeah, it could have been a much worse story than it was for us. Yeah. And I noticed with the hairdressing element of Barber's barber hairdressing both, I mean it's. It's our barbershop barber. Shop. Yeah. Am I right in saying that they're kind of in a portacabin. Yeah. So you can just drop them in a location, try it. If it doesn't work, move it. I mean, I thought that's fantastic innovation. Being able to move retailing units around like that. Yeah, absolutely. So again, when I, you know, I talked about sort of all of our relationship with the supermarkets and how that's helped us, us grow. You know, a lot of those supermarket shops that we talk about are in what we call pods, those porter cabins and that yeah, yeah. You've hit the nail on the head. Being able to if a shop doesn't perform well, which to be honest with you, is rare. I mean, we don't pick them up and lose them very often, but you do have that option. If something goes wrong, you can pick it up and put it somewhere else. And so we have lots of Timpson shops in those, we've got quite a few Mac shops in those and all of our barber shops by Timpson are in the pods as well. Yeah. And you'll see now quite a few other retailers added on just. As soon as you see you just think bloody great idea because the car parks are huge army and there's loads. So you can imagine that in a few years time there'll be a whole stack of these pods from all the different brands, you know, because it's such a great cost effective way. Which is, you know, when you say that the supermarkets, they all have huge copper, you're absolutely right. Which is why we often encounter the car park planning groups of. Yeah, because it's you've got to be very specific about where you site these locations and there's quite a few other considerations at the supermarkets up to think about. But you know, there's you Willl see more and more of these pods popping out. You know, there's all the barber shop businesses that have got these pods in supermarkets. We buy any car, you see that pods popping up around supermarkets. So, you know, whilst we I suppose early adopters of the pods, lots of others are going to follow in the footsteps. Of their fantastic if there was a top tip that you could give to any business in terms of driving colleague engagement, what would that be? I would probably have to admit it's going to sound a bit obvious and it's going to sound like, you know, everybody does it. But I actually don't think many businesses do it really, really well. And that is know be uncompromising on looking after your people and setting that as the benchmark for how you measure everybody's performance. So, you know, if you do it yourself and you, you know, you make it the only option for the people that work for you. I think that you'll build a very successful business.