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Majestic John Colley

Majestic John Colley

In Retail Gazette’s latest content series, we get inside the mind of retail’s most senior leaders to find out what makes them tick. We speak with Majestic CEO John Colley.

Tell us about your morning routine.

I get up around 6-6.30am. If I have time or my schedule permits, I will do a turbo trainer (my racing bike on a machine) and virtually ride for 45 minutes to an hour. I usually pick an exotic place – my latest is Japan riding up a hill through cherry blossom! I try to do at least 100km a week in total. After that I’ll shower, have a bowl of something healthy and an espresso while reading my emails, and usually get to the office by 8-8.30am if I’m not visiting stores.

What motivates you? How do you keep driven?

It sounds like a bit of cliche, but I genuinely mean this: doing everything I can on a daily basis to make Majestic an even better place to work. I was a customer when I was 23 in our Bushey store and just loved the experience even back then. Being able to lead a business where I have been a customer for nearly 30 years is amazing and the opportunity to keep that experience growing is really motivating.

Everyone in the business works incredibly hard, but there is no other place in the UK you can go and get the kind of advice and experience you get when you walk into a Majestic store. I get emails from customers on a daily basis praising us for the quality of our wines, the knowledge of our colleagues and the convenience of our service. Delivering that experience every day for our customers gives everyone a buzz and that’s what gets me out of bed every morning. This is a brilliant business – I want to do my best to protect and enhance it so that Majestic remains as special as it is today in another 44 years time.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve ever had in your career and how did you overcome it?

It’s been the biggest challenge, but also the most enjoyable challenge of my career, and that was coming back to turn around what was a failing Majestic. When I returned as CEO in December 2019 after Fortress Investment Group bought the business, Majestic was in real trouble financially. It had been under-invested for a number of years and it could easily have gone the same way as many other retailers if Fortress hadn’t bought it. My objective at that point was to get the business back to doing what we do best – improving the customer experience, bringing back free in-store tastings, and rebuilding a market-leading range of top-quality, unique wines. Once we were winning back customers and putting ourselves on a firmer financial footing, we could then think about the growth plan – opening new shops and expanding our on-trade division.

Having led the retail side of the business previously, I had a deep emotional connection to the company and I wanted to do everything I could using all my retail experience from companies like Argos, B&Q and Screwfix, but I wouldn’t have come back without the backing of our investors at Fortress. The money they have invested, and the faith they have placed in the team to execute on our strategy, has been vital. If you look at everything we’ve achieved over the last four-and-a-half years, none of it would have been possible without their backing.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?

The best advice I’ve been given is just about always trying your best, being as resilient as possible and learning from others. It would be really unusual to find yourself in any situation in life that someone else hadn’t already experienced before, so the advice I was given in dealing with situations or ambitions is to find out how others learned and coped by asking questions. One of my mentors once told me that the most important things aren’t the ‘what’ happens to you or ‘what’ you want to achieve, but finding out ‘why’ certain things happened, or ‘how’ you will go about achieving them.

Who have you learnt most from in your retail career?

I’d say Steve Willett, the former CEO and Chairman of Screwfix. He was the real architect of Screwfix’s growth, an operational genius, and someone I learnt an awful lot from when I worked with him. But I have been fortunate enough to work with many great leaders – Sir Ian Cheshire, Kate Swann, Tony DeNunzio. I grew up in retail as my father was a director of Currys and also Dixons, so he taught me an awful lot as well from a young age.

If you weren’t a retailer, what would you do?

I honestly don’t know. Retail is the one and only industry I’ve worked in, apart from a stint as a mechanic while I was at college. I would maybe go back to that – I’m a bit of a closet engineer and like fixing things! My degree was in Mathematics and Computing, so I suppose the other option would have been something in that field.

What keeps you awake at night?

Apart from my 16-month old, Valentina, you mean?! Well, like most I think it’s some of the big things going on in the world: war, macroeconomic challenges, climate change. It’s so easy to get really really worried when you read some of the headlines, although I think the media also whip it all into a frenzy sometimes.

When it comes to business, I think we need more help from the Government, especially in retail. The business rates system is outdated and not fit for purpose, which is one of the reasons why we see so many retailers disappear. More recently we’ve had the rise in corporation tax – when this hits already stretched retailers, it’s going to have a huge impact.

What do you do to unwind?

I love cycling, so I get out on the bike as much as I can – ideally in the hills in Italy where my parents live. And watching anything car-related on TV!

What’s your favourite retailer and why?

Richer Sounds, and in particular their founder, Julian Richer. We talk at Majestic about the competition and how they might impact your business, but Richer Sounds has been in business for about 40 to 45 years as well, a bit like us actually. When you think about the big, national, multichannel players like Currys and Argos, then the likes of AO.com and Amazon that came onto the scene online, there’s so much fierce competition in their space selling TVs and HiFis, yet Richer Sounds are a thriving company. They aren’t the biggest, but I think they are the best. The colleagues are really engaging, they love working there, and they are experts in what they do – that’s what makes them different from the larger retailers. There are parallels for us at Majestic – we are never going to be bigger than Tesco selling alcohol, but why would we want to be? We want to offer the best advice and service, create the best customer experience, and sell the highest quality, unique products that our customers cannot get anywhere else.

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