Author: Martin Port

It’s not just the founder or founders of a business who determine its fortunes. The people who join along the way, believe in the vision, and add their own sparkle to the strategy, are just as vital to its growth and prosperity.

This is why I believe it is so important to hire for attitude, promote from within, and give people the opportunity to bring their best selves to work.

When I met Peter Holmwood nearly five years ago and heard the story of how he had risen through SES Home Services, starting on the tools, to become customer service director 15 years later, I was reminded of this phenomenon: the people who join our ventures can be transformative.

I’d like to tell you a bit about Peter, his extraordinary impact at SES, and the power of the intrapreneur.

SES Home Services is a home emergency insurance provider, part of the water utility SES Water, which serves parts of Surrey, Sussex, Kent and southeast London. 

Peter joined the business straight out of school, having completed his A-levels.

“The plan was to go to university and study construction management,” he says. “But I decided to take a gap year and to join SES, which would give me a strong foundation in a trade, and a deeper understanding of buildings, plumbing and heating systems.”

Just three months into his new role, Peter decided that university wasn’t for him after all.

“I signed up for a plumbing apprenticeship instead and, in 2003, started my three-year course to become a qualified heating engineer.”

Once Peter attained his qualification, he spent five years on the tools, installing and replacing boilers.

But when he tore his cruciate ligament, he had to think carefully about his future.

“It was a bad knee injury,” he says. “When I came back to work, I was put on light duties and started surveying properties instead, giving customers estimates for new boilers or upgrades. That was how I began to migrate away from the tools.”

It wasn’t an easy transition. “I was in my twenties and worried that customers would struggle to look past my age and see me as a capable engineer,” he recalls. This only hardened his resolve to provide an excellent service. He quickly found that if you showed customers that you had heard their concerns, and recommended the right solutions for their property, you won their respect.

“I never worried about trying to hit targets or make more money on a sale, I stayed completely focused on how we could help them. If another company had a better solution, I would be honest about it. That’s how you build trust.”

Peter Holmwood, SES Customer Services Director

This approach saw Peter rise swiftly through the ranks of the business, and soon he found himself managing a team. Today, he oversees 75 people.  

As all leaders know, it’s easy to be a manager but it’s really difficult to be a great manager.

“As an engineer, you could see the impact of your work every day – when you left a family warm in a home that had no heating before you arrived, for example,” he says.

“In a management role, it’s very different. Successes build gradually over time. You have to talk to your team, find out people’s struggles, and work out how to support them. It’s a much longer game but I now find it extremely rewarding.”

Peter has been an absolute champion of innovation within SES. He introduced the company to the BigChange platform four years ago, migrating away from paper-based processes and an archaic PDA system.

“BigChange has revolutionised the business,” he says. “We love that we can benefit from the learnings drawn from multiple industries through the platform and that BigChange never stops developing and improving the system.

“We have improved our first-time fix rates so that we now beat the industry average. We have also improved our planning processes using the insights the platform collects around travel times and job durations. We are always looking for ways to drive efficiency and JobWatch data is vital in achieving that.”

Peter isn’t done yet. He’s already helped SES diversify into different customer types and sectors, and he is now helping the company enter the renewables space.

“We hope to save customers a lot of money with new energy-efficient solutions,” he explains. “Prices are rising steeply right now, and we want to help our customers afford the future.” 

Peter’s meteoric rise through the business means that he is extremely keen to support and promote his colleagues throughout the business. “I feel that I have paved the way for others to progress,” he says. “My time on the tools was vital as it helped me relate to different types of people and understand every single part of the business.”

As for the degree in construction, Peter has no regrets. “There is so much I want to achieve here. The way I see it, I’ve been on the longest gap year of all time.”

The recent train strikes are causing absolute chaos across the UK. I believe it’s time to radically rethink the role of unions – and to accept that striking has had its day.

The three-day strike, which will have caused six days of disruption across the UK, saw tens of thousands of Network Rail staff down tools. Only half of Britain’s rail network is operational, running a skeleton service. The dispute centred over pay and redundancy packages – Network Rail wants to cut between 1,500 and 2,000 frontline jobs.

I hate to state the obvious, but Network Rail is still reeling from the pandemic when almost nobody used its services and passenger numbers plummeted. It only survived because of enormous government handouts, which were required to keep the freight trains running, carrying food and medication across the UK.

The Covid-19 crisis took the whole world by surprise – no one could have planned for it. Look at the international travel sector, which lost $6 trillion over two years. The businesses that were affected by the pandemic can’t just continue with “business as usual”.

There have to be cuts and consequences. Passenger numbers remain muted and are likely to remain so in this new world of “hybrid working”. No amount of striking can change the facts: for the organisation to survive, it has to evolve.

Unions must change

It is time for the role of unions, therefore, to change. So often, strikes achieve nothing – they simply disrupt services for the blameless public.

More effort should be made by the unions to foster a meaningful dialogue between staff and company bosses.

Strikes have begun to feel like a kneejerk reaction when demands aren’t met, even when the organisation is unable to meet those demands.

Yes, inflation is rising, and times are hard, but they are hard for many people across the country; the average salary at Network Rail stands at £45,000, compared to an average UK salary of just £26,000.

Network Rail’s CEO, Andrew Haines, makes £585,000 a year, which is a sticking point for many of the workers. I understand why this is a hard number to see when you’re fighting for a better redundancy package. But this is the nature of business: the top executives earn more because they are responsible for the strategy and direction of the business.

At BigChange, the strike made a significant impact. Most notably on our summer soiree, which we spent months planning and was to bring together everyone from across the business for the celebrations. People struggled to get to the party. It might sound trivial to some, but it was heart-breaking.

Boosting employee engagement is essential

I believe that unions are a relic from the past. They should be replaced with an employee engagement committee, which is in regular dialogue with the senior leadership team.

If this kind of system were in place at Network Rail, there would be no call for strikes because communication would be ongoing – there would be no surprises – and every single person in the organisation would have a voice.

This is not some utopian ideal. It’s a system we already have in place at BigChange. We call it the Big Voice. I set up the department a few years ago, and Joshua Levin took the helm a little over a year ago, and now chairs the committee.

The aim of the Big Voice is simple: to drive positive change across the business. At least one representative from each team meets the Big Voice committee twice a month via Teams. Everyone in the team knows to pass on ideas or concerns to their rep, and then these are all communicated at the first meeting of the month.

At the second monthly meeting, the proposed changes or ideas are put to the CEO Richard Warley and COO Jo Godsmark, and we have found this model works brilliantly.

Last year, we did a massive rethink of our benefits package as a result of a Big Voice proposal, improving sick pay, parental leave, and more.

The final package is one that both benefits all our colleagues and allows the business to continue growing: win/win.

I fear that if a union had been involved, we would never have reached such a sensible consensus.

Employers respect their workers

In this day and age, most employers respect their workers. Most organisations have an HR People team and there are opportunities to sit down with managers to discuss grievances or new ways of working.

We’ve come a long way from the days when people were sent down the mine by autocratic leaders who ignored health and safety concerns.

The world of work has also changed dramatically over the last 50 years. The “job for life” is dead, and people now move companies every five years, on average. Companies that do not listen to their staff will ultimately lose their top talent.

It’s time to bring unions into the modern era, and update the way that they engage with organisations because the system clearly isn’t working in its current form.

Throughout history, the best bosses have always led from the front. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon to wage war with Pompey, the ensuing civil war culminated in the bitter Battle of Pharsalus in 48BC.

Caesar was outnumbered and outmanoeuvred – his forces were being defeated. It was only by grabbing a shield and marching to the front of the line that he galvanised his legions to resist Pompey’s forces. They turned the tide and ended the four-year struggle with a decisive triumph.

In 2022, most modern bosses are no longer found on the battlefield but in the boardroom – but the lessons from ancient times are as valuable today as they have ever been.

Sitting out in the open

You need to have a rapport with your team, and you need to spend time in the mix with your colleagues to stay close to the inner workings of your business. This is why I am such a fan of an open-plan workspace, where leaders sit beside colleagues not in their own offices.

Mike Bloomberg, the serial entrepreneur and United Nations special envoy, recently posted on LinkedIn about his commitment to sitting “out in the open”. 

He said: “In sports, the coach is on the field with the players, giving directions, drawing on whiteboards, huddling during timeouts, motivating and inspiring — and encouraging someone who made a mistake. The same should be true in business.”

The first CEO I saw working in an open-plan office was Archie Norman, back when he was CEO of Asda. I was there to pitch my speciality bread business and it was just extraordinary to me that his desk was in the centre of this massive office floor, and all his papers and books were there on his desk. That was in the early nineties – he was a true pioneer.

When I started BigChange, I knew I wanted to be on the “shop floor” too.

At Masternaut, my previous business, I had my own office. It was a glass office to make me more approachable, but it didn’t go far enough – it still walled me off from the team.

The legendary football manager Kevin Keegan OBE once told me that great managers put their arms around people, metaphorically speaking. You have to be human; you have to be in the detail. You can’t do that from behind glass.

Benefits of being close to the sales team

When I started BigChange, I sat with my colleagues in sales and marketing. I wanted to be next to the marketing and salespeople because that is one of my core strengths – a place where I can add value.

Sometimes, I would overhear someone talking about a prospect, and realise I knew that person from the past and could help make an introduction.

I may have bad hearing, but I always seemed to pick up on snatches of conversation where I could be helpful! Or a colleague would ask advice about how to target a particular sector, and I would make suggestions.

One of the real benefits of sitting with sales – with the “cash register” as I used to call it – was that I could hear where sticking points were in our processes. If something was taking longer than it should, I would be able to step in. 

These insights were invaluable when building the business, and I believe that every leader would benefit from similar exposure to the day-to-day triumphs and challenges faced by team members on the front line.

The fact that my team would hear me on the phone, and be privy to my daily pressures, also helped foster a culture of transparency. If I needed to make a confidential call, I could use a meeting room, but in general, I preferred to be open about my role and the inner workings of the business.

The world of business has changed dramatically over the last decade. Old-fashioned ideas about organisational hierarchy and leaders who rule with an iron fist have gone out the window.

It’s been a great pleasure to see these changes sweep through the workplace. Teams must come together to be truly effective and great leaders foster collaboration and conversation.

It is heartening to see leadership ideals come full circle.

We are heeding the great lessons from the past – those prized by the most admirable of Roman emperors – even after two millennia.