People often ask me: ‘What was the secret?’” says Sir Tom Farmer, as he begins to recount the story of how he turned Kwik Fit from a depot in Scotland into the largest automotive repair firm in the world. “Our Michelin tyres were no different from anyone else’s, our Dunlop tyres were no different,” he continues. “So what was it?”
The answer is surprisingly straightforward, and it’s all about the people, insists Farmer, whose business carried a £1.2bn price tag when it was sold to Ford Motor Company in 1999. It’s a lesson he learned a long time ago and one that has stood him in good stead ever since. But while it seems like a simple enough concept, don’t be fooled. He’d be the first to tell you that when you’ve got 12,500 staff, making sure each and every one of them feels valued is no mean feat.
Exhausting opportunities
Farmer’s first job taught him many of the business principles he has come to rely on over the years. “I joined an unbelievable company,” he recalls. “They were always encouraging you to do that little bit better. They set you targets that, if you stretched and tried hard, you could hit.”
In particular, he found out first hand the power of acknowledging your team’s inextricable link to your brand’s success. “You’re not a van driver,” his first employer told a confused young Farmer, after offering him a job driving a van. “From today, you are a company representative. When you go out in this van with our company’s name on it and you go to see our customers, how you behave, how you relate to these people will be their feeling of our company.”
Kwik Fit wasn’t the first business Farmer built and sold on the premise that loyal staff who care about your business are the route to success. In 1964, at 23, he set up Tyres and Accessory Supplies, selling discounted tyres – a practice that was technically illegal at the time. But with a new law on its way to abolish the rule that allowed manufacturers to dictate what price their product had to be sold at, Farmer seized the business opportunity with impressive results.
His early success was bolstered by an accidental PR coup, when a newspaper article helped catapult his sales. He admits he may have exaggerated his plight to the reporter, without really giving it much thought. Here was a young lad who only wanted to bring down the price of motoring to the public, forced into late-night meetings in lay-bys to get his stock, while the likes of Dunlop and Michelin were trying to put him out of business. When the headline ran: ‘Tyre king Tommy, squeezed out by the big boys’, he realised the power of publicity. He arrived at work to find 32 cars waiting. “And from that minute, it never stopped,” Farmer recalls.
The business became so successful that, when he sold it for £450,000 at the age of 27, he retired to America. It didn’t stick, but provided a much needed break. After joining forces with another tyre company, Farmer found himself one of the youngest ever directors of a public company. But America offered more than just R and R. It gave Farmer the inspiration for Kwik Fit. “In America, there were people specialising in brakes, steering, engines and exhaust. We chose the exhaust business.”
He wanted to provide a service where people could have repairs done while they waited, instead of having to leave their car at a garage for days. The first Kwik Fit depot, opened in Edinburgh in 1971, was a big hit. By the time Farmer sold Kwik Fit, it was publicly listed, had 2,300 sites across 18 countries (1,100
in the UK) and was “very, very profitable”.
Man of the people
So how did he achieve such a healthy bottom line? For Farmer, everything hinged on ensuring his people were well looked after and highly motivated. And not through American-style, mantra-chanting pep-talks. Farmer’s brand of motivation involves putting programmes or incentives in place to increase people’s own self-drive. “It’s not about me trying to motivate you,” he clarifies.
He soon found that running blanket programmes or competitions to get staff to try their hardest didn’t get you very far, as different people were motivated by different things.
Kwik Fit was one of the pioneers of profit-sharing. Farmer believes everyone should share in the profits they help to create, and the company’s accounts would attest to the fact that, when people know they’re getting a cut, they will pull out all the stops to boost them. “Sometimes people are aghast when I say this, but people work for money,” says Farmer. “You’ve got to give people the right opportunities to earn so they feel they’re being justly rewarded for their efforts.”
But this is by no means all there is to job satisfaction, and people have also got to trust the organisation they’re working for, insists Farmer, who believes this will come naturally if you have an open and fair culture. This applied to customers, too, but was not always welcomed by Kwik Fit’s other shareholders. Farmer met with much opposition to his decision to put a sign up reading: ‘There’s one guarantee we’ll give you, that we will make mistakes, but when we do make a mistake we will put it right for you.’
“People said: ‘You can’t do that.’ I replied: ‘Why not? We’re human. People are not naïve. Why not be open with people?’”
You can’t get better
