Episode 307: Lessons in Leadership with Kevin Gaskell
In today’s fast-paced and competitive business landscape, effective leadership is crucial for success. It requires not only the ability to inspire and motivate teams but also the skill to navigate through challenges and drive growth. Kevin Gaskell, a renowned leader who has led iconic brands, has mastered the art of leadership. With a track record of turning around struggling companies and creating billions of pounds worth of shareholder value, Gaskell’s insights and experiences offer valuable lessons for leaders at all levels.
Kevin Gaskell shares his journey from being an engineer to being a leader of global brands like Porsche, Lamborghini, and BMW. Kevin emphasizes the importance of passion in leadership and highlights the key principles of his leadership philosophy: commit, connect, and create. He also discusses the concept of a thousand-day plan and the significance of engaging and inspiring teams to achieve extraordinary results.
Leaders must adapt and continuously learn to stay ahead as the business landscape continues to evolve. By embracing these leadership principles, leaders can navigate through challenges, inspire their teams, and drive long-term success.
Kevin ‘The Business Fixer’ Gaskell, a serial entrepreneur, author, and adventurer, is a renowned leadership expert who has transformed iconic brands such as Porsche, BMW, and Lamborghini. He has founded start-ups, led turnarounds, and driven major brands in various sectors, creating over $5 billion in shareholder value and winning global and national awards. In addition to his business achievements, he has climbed Everest, played international cricket, and set a new world record for the fastest row across the Atlantic Ocean in 2020. He will attempt the world record for crossing the Pacific in 2024.
Show Highlights:
- Kevin’s journey from civil engineer to CEO of Porsche and BMW
- Kevin’s leadership principles: commit, connect, create
- Importance of leading oneself first and being passionate
- The concept of a thousand-day and a hundred-day plan
- Why leaders need to engage the team and act on their ideas
- Importance of breaking down goals into days and involving teams
Links Mentioned:
Get to know more about Kevin Gaskell by visiting his website at kevingaskell.com
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Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
[00:00:00] Adam Stott: A very inspirational man, and I think you’re gonna love this session. And I say that because about a year ago, I did a podcast with this gentleman. I was seriously impressed. Really impressed. I thought that the content he gave was very high level. He’s very forthright.
[00:00:23] Was quite happy to talk about UPS, downs, twists and turns and was just an exceptional guy. Someone that I really felt when I do these podcasts that I actually could learn a lot of him. Right. Really great guy. So I’m super excited. So I’m gonna read this out for you now ’cause there’s quite a lot here that we are gonna, we’re gonna cover, which is gonna be awesome.
[00:00:47] So our next speaker has led the iconic brands. As c e O of Porsche, Lamborghini, and BMW. So he is worked with all the major brands as a leader. He’s written books on leadership, the topic of leadership which are incredible. And we’ve got some books as you can see over here today as well. At Porsche, she was the driving force of the turnaround of Porsche, and leading five years worth of record growth.
[00:01:22] I. At BMW as well, he’s recogniz recognized as one of the UK’s top 40 leaders. He left BMW to set up his own technology business, which is his first business, which he grew into an international success. Since then, he’s built and transformed 15 different companies, and his teams have created over 3 billion, not million, that’s b billion pounds worth of shareholder value.
[00:01:51] So incredible success. One of his companies recently was recognized as the best private equity investment of the year. But some of the things that I think are most impressive about Kevin, who we’re welcoming today, is that he’s played international cricket. He relaxes by playing in a rock band with his son.
[00:02:11] I think this is awesome, which I want to hear more about. He’s walked both the north and south poles. He’s climbed some of the world’s largest mountains to raise money for cancer research. He’s recently set a new world record, which he’s gonna tell us about today, which I’m excited to hear about. So, and he’s written some amazing books on leadership and an amazing book actually called Cat Catching Giants as well.
[00:02:36] Which we’re gonna talk about today. So we’ve got someone with us that really is incredibly successful in so many different areas of his life. Someone that you can learn a tremendous amount on.
[00:02:45] Kevin Gaskell: Good afternoon.
[00:02:47] Adam Stott: So, as I said, I don’t usually read the intro out and I said, it’s all right, I’ll memorize it.
[00:02:51] But then actually I realized that was gonna need to read that. There was a lot there.
[00:02:55] Kevin Gaskell: There’s a few facts in there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the trouble is otherwise people go online and they get someone from the internet. And I’ve literally, I’ve been introduced before as the managing director of Ferrari.
[00:03:06] And I happened to know the M D A Ferrari, so they said, and ladies on the managing director Ferrari. And I looked around, I thought, where’s Luca? Where is he? Kevin Gaskell. No guys. Wrong brand. Wrong brand. But
[00:03:17] Adam Stott: well, really pleased to have you today. Thank you. And I think it’s a really great opportunity for everybody in the room to learn from someone that’s created so much success in business.
[00:03:27] But then also had a real great lifestyle actually as well, which I think is really impressive. And
[00:03:32] Kevin Gaskell: my lifestyle is work. And then a bit of work, what is it? The only place that success comes before hard work is in the dictionary. So it’s a lot of hard work.
[00:03:45] Adam Stott: Absolutely. So, so really hearing about your journey.
[00:03:49] And you’ve written books on leadership, Yep. And been a leader of these major brands. Yep. Do you wanna tell us about where it started from? How did you get into this career? Build this career up? Yeah. What was it like at the beginning? I.
[00:04:02] Kevin Gaskell: So, so my first qualification, I always wanted to be a civil engineer, always preschool, medical.
[00:04:10] I can remember going in and meeting the doctor with my mom and the doctor said, do you know what you wanna do when you grow up, sunny? And I said, yeah, I wanna build bridges and roads. Don’t know why, but at that age, at four or five years of age. And he said, do you know what they’re called? And I said, yeah, Navi.
[00:04:27] And he said, no, son. They’re called civil engineers. And I said, right, I wanna be a civil engineer. And so right through school I knew what I wanted to do. And you know, you meet people who don’t quite know what they, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but nobody in my, I come from a two up, two down in Manchester, right?
[00:04:43] So nobody in my family had ever been to university. But I was determined I was going to university. I wanna be a civil engineer. And so I applied to five very unfashionable. Universities because I was afraid I wouldn’t get the grades. I went to a really rough ass comprehensive school. I mean, it was rough, and I thought, well, I’ll never get the grades to get into a posh school.
[00:05:04] So I’m gonna turn this way a bit. I’ll look at them rather than look at you. That’s fine. No problem. Much prettier. Much prettier out there.
[00:05:12] Adam Stott: Oh, that’s debatable there.
[00:05:16] Kevin Gaskell: No it’s not.
[00:05:21] So, so I went to Rough Ass Comprehensive School applied to five unfashionable universities. I got into one. Which was Bradford. I did a thick Sandwich Pro program and I absolutely loved it. I loved Bradford. I loved the course. I got a very good degree. I won a scholarship. The scholarship paid for me to do an M B A ’cause I knew I wanted to do business as well.
[00:05:44] And so in those days you could win a scholarship and it would pay for an M B A program, you know, which today, I dunno what an M B A costs now, but 30, 50,000 quid. Well, they paid for it, so, wow. I’ll do that. And I came out and I was an engineer building hole seven of the n e c, the M 54 motorway, some big jobs.
[00:06:01] And I enjoyed it for two or three or four years. And then living in a caravan with a hole in the roof kinda loses its appeal after a while. And I wasn’t I was, I had this mental image of building these amazing structures and ended up putting grids in the side of roads. You know, that’s the reality of building a motory.
[00:06:19] I thought, I don’t wanna do this for the rest of my life. And I knew I wanted to do something that gave me broader scope. And so I thought, what could I do? And I thought, well, there’s accountancy that’s kind of broad or law. And on the M B A, I’d done a bit of both of those. I didn’t enjoy law, so I didn’t wanna do law.
[00:06:37] I thought accountancy, yeah, I’ll do accountancy. So I started looking for a job where I could use. My engineering skills and some degree of accountancy, and it’s a company called Dow Corning, big silicon manufacturer, and they were looking for somebody with kind of my spec and I applied and I got the job as a company accountant.
[00:06:54] I. I went, oh shit. I went on the way home. Went into, it wasn’t, there was no Amazon in those days. Went into w h Smith’s and bought two Teach yourself accountancy books. This is Abso, this is absolutely true. Two, teach yourself accountancy books. And I spent six weeks really swatting on accountancy and I joined a company as a company accountant and I studied certified accounting at night school and it was fine.
[00:07:19] And I did four years there. And then thought, I don’t wanna do this for the rest of my life either. And, but I loved cars and I loved sport and they sent me on a career self-management program and this very highly paid careers counselor, they sent me to nice south of France. Wonderful. Four days in South France meeting this counselor and she was great.
[00:07:40] And she said to me, you know what, you should either get a job where something to do with cars. Or something to do with sport. And I thought, no shit. Sherlock great. So, so I started looking and Porsche, the company, were looking for somebody with engineering skills and financial skills to go out and teach their dealer network how to run businesses.
[00:08:00] So I applied and I got the job and I joined as a regional manager and I was teaching dealers how to manage businesses. And I grew through the ranks and the business got into trouble and in. 1992, I think about 1992 was in terrible trouble. Porsche was in dreadful trouble and they fired the board. And the Porsche’s family owned company, it’s owned by the Porsche family and the PX family, and they are cousins under Ferry Porsche, they’re cousins.
[00:08:31] PX also happened to own Volkswagen. So these are pretty wealthy people, you know. And I got invited in to meet the family and they just fired the whole board and they called for me and I was kind of the operations manager. And I phoned my wife and I said, I’ll be home in a minute. And she said, why? And I said, well, I’m just about to get fired.
[00:08:52] And we had a big mortgage and two small kids and she panicked. And I said, it’s fine. We’ll find a way. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. And I went in and met the family and there was about eight people there. And I bet a couple of them previously at board meetings. ’cause I was the one who was called in to give the bad news at the board meeting and.
[00:09:13] And to give you an idea of the trouble we were in, there were 32 brands in the marketplace at that point. And out of 32 brands in customer satisfaction, we were number 32. We were Porsche, right? This is Porsche, the great brand. We were losing 20% on every car we sold. Wow. We had three years. Three years.
[00:09:32] New car, unsold inventory. We had three years worth of cars. We were hiding cars everywhere. We had cars in warehouses, airfields, and you know, cars are not like fine red wine. They do not improve by sitting around for three years. And we were that close to going under, I mean, really that close. And they invited me in and they started giving a hard time.
[00:09:55] And I walked in with my finance colleague, who’s a German guy who’d just joined about three or 4, 5, 6 months before, I can’t remember now. And we got on really well, but he’d been dropped in by basically German board to see what the heck was going on in this British company. We walked in together and we’d had a conversation beforehand and I said, you know, we could fix this thing.
[00:10:18] We could actually fix this. And he said, how? And we’d worked up a plan between ourselves. We walked in and they started gimme a really hard time. I was 32 years old and I thought, I’ll blow this. You’re gonna fire me, that’s fine, but I’m gonna tell you what I think. And so they started gimme a tough time.
[00:10:32] And I said, look, you could fix this thing. Don’t gimme a hard time. You should be embarrassed. You are. You are the supervisory board. You own this thing. Don’t gimme a hard time. You could fix this and how would you fix it? And I said, well, here’s what we would do. And I walked in there expecting a 10 minute exit interview, and I was there for four hours drawing on flip charts.
[00:10:52] Here’s what we do. We do this, we this, we do that, we that, that’s what we do with the brand, and here’s what we do with the dealer network. And then they asked me to leave the room. Me and arming, we’d been there together. They asked us to leave the room. And I said to him, oh, well, okay, well at least we told ’em.
[00:11:05] He said no. They were listening. I didn’t speak a word of German at that point. They said, oh no. They were listening. And 10 minutes later they asked us back in the room. I thought, okay, here we go. And they said, right, we have made our decision. I thought, yeah, I’m sure you have. You are the new managing director.
[00:11:21] You are the new finance director. That’s the plan. Make it happen.
[00:11:30] Me? Yeah, go away. Make it happen. Wow. So I phoned my wife and I said, I’m not coming home just yet. Now we’ve been together since we were 18, right? So she knows me pretty well. She said, why? I said, well, they’ve just made me managing director. She said, what? I said the whole thing. It’s absolutely true.
[00:11:54] My wife is a Yorkshire lass, right? Never. My wife has never seen a glass half full. They’re always half empty from the York, and she said, They’re just looking for an excuse to fire you. And I said, Penn, they could have fired me four hours ago. And so I took over Porsche. We did what we said we’d do, and we could talk about that in a minute.
[00:12:15] But we turned the business around and four years later, we were the same team of people. We were number one in the market. We were making, we were the most profitable car business in the market, making 20% on sales. We had no stock. And we had a one year forward order bank. And we just did it by what I consider to be common sense.
[00:12:33] But by engaging the team, really inspiring the team. ’cause all the people who work there, loved the product, loved the brand. But when I asked them, how many of you, how many people? Here’s a question. How many people in this room have driven a Porsche car? I. Wow. Far more than in my staff at that point.
[00:12:52] Really? Yeah. Wow. It was very small. So the first thing, you know, we did simple stuff at first. Like take people out, driving in, tend to safe places, but drive the cars, get passionate, get excited. So we turned that one around. And then I got to the 0.5 years later where honestly I was bored. We’d done it, it was there, it was all fixed, and I was a bit bored.
[00:13:13] And Porsche said, well, we’d like you to run America. My wife said, I don’t wanna go to America. Said, okay, we’re not going to America. Well, we’d like to run Japan. No thanks. Don’t wanna go to Tokyo. So b m BMW knocked on the door and said we love what you did there. Our managing director’s moving on.
[00:13:29] We need a new chief exec. Would you come and do it? And that was basically the interview. Would you come and do it? And I said, yeah, I’d actually, I’d tell you exactly what I said. I said, if you told me the interview was in Munich, And I had to walk there. I’d ask you for 10 minutes to change my shoes.
[00:13:45] Does that tell you how keen I am? So I joined BMW Big business. It was a 5 billion, 5 billion turnover business. Porsche had been a few hundred million. And I went in there and I was given a plan and I said, there’s the plan. We love what you did at Porsche, but BMW GB is the second biggest cash generator in the world.
[00:14:04] Kev, we love what you did at Porsche, but don’t knock it off the rails ’cause it’s doing okay. And when I went in, it was doing okay. But it had kind of lost its way. It was very arrogance is the wrong word. It was just very sure of itself. It just believed that we were okay, you know? We’re okay, we’ll just carry on.
[00:14:25] And I said, no. I said, look, you know, everyone’s after our customers, Lexus had come in, Jaguars come in, Audi’s coming, everyone wants our customers guys, we’ve gotta go to a new level. And I got the leadership team together and we had the first conversation, the c o quit on me. He said, you’re crazy. You’ll spoil it.
[00:14:41] I’m outta here. He quit. The others just looked at me like I’d got off a spaceship. But I said, I think we can go to another level. And basically we did the same again, we’ll talk about it in a minute. We did the same. We did a Porsche, which was set a goal, become world class, become truly world class, look at every part of the business and let’s understand what we can do that’s different.
[00:15:03] They were kidding themselves. Who were fooling themselves. I mean, I remember asking a question where’s the corporate sales team? And they looked at me and said, Kev we, BMW, we don’t do corporate sales. That’s for Ford and Boxwell and those people. We don’t do corporate sales. I said, okay, lemme ask you a different question.
[00:15:22] What percentage of our sales go through a corporate body? Oh, 65%. I. Well, then we do corporate sales. Oh, no, but we don’t call it that. I said, okay, let’s not call it that, but let’s look at it differently. Let’s change the way we do it. So we had a major change of philosophy in our corporate sales team about providing more value and cut.
[00:15:41] Long story short, again, we’re the same team of people. Everything I do is with the same, with not with my team, the people who are in the business. I don’t go and bring in McKinsey or anything. The answer is in the room with the same team of people. The plan I was given was to grow at 4% per annum, and over the next four and a half years, I was there four and a half years, we grew at 500%.
[00:16:07] Sorry, that’s not true. We grew revenue by 80%, but we grew operating profit by 500%. And we just I thought we just did the basics. I thought we just did it, do it better, do the basics, but do them well. And customer satisfaction went up and up. Sales went up and up. And instead of growing at four pound compound, 4% compound, you know, we grew by 80%.
[00:16:37] And then I got to the age of 40. Am I going on for too long? No. I’m loving it. I’m, if I’m boring, you tell me. I got to the age of 40 and I’d been running car businesses then for 10 years I’d been in Porsche for 10 and I was in BMW Best Buy of five. And I went off of Everest. And you sit in a tent for a long time when you climb these big mountains waiting for a weather gap and.
[00:17:07] I realized I didn’t wanna go back and when I analyzed myself, I’d been driving into work in the morning into Porsche in the morning, and I’ve been diverting off and going to the gym or going, so I just, I was bored. I didn’t wanna do it anymore. And so I, we were sitting on the mountain for weeks and I decided what I actually wanted to do was to build my own company.
[00:17:30] And I started looking around for ideas and familiar. Now with kazoo and Cinch, these people who are selling cars online, they’ll fail. Just, you heard it here first. Well, they nearly failed already, but back then nobody was doing that. And so I thought, you know, it was this funny internet thing and I’m sure we could do something more with it.
[00:17:51] And I’m gonna go away and I’m gonna build an online retail business. And so I quit. And B m BMW went nuts. You can’t quit. You signed a contract? Actually, I haven’t signed it. If you look, you gave,
[00:18:06] you gave me my new contract. Oh, thank you very much. You gave me my new thanks ever so much. You gave me my new contract, but I haven’t signed it and I’m going. And so I went off and. Created a business called Cars Direct and the idea was to work with car dealers ’cause I’d been spent 15 years of my life working them with car dealers.
[00:18:29] Work with car dealers to retail cars online. But car dealers hadn’t got a clue. They didn’t understand what the internet was. I. And I got some investment from U S A and they sent me $25 million. Absolutely true. Tell us your bank account, Kev, why We’re sending you some money. Okay. Here’s the company bank account.
[00:18:50] This is absolutely true. Here’s the company bank account. Who following day got a bank on the phone? Do you know that? $25 million. This is God’s truth. Do you know $25 million is trying to get into your account? We can’t approve it. We’ve got it on hold. No, I have no idea. Phoned a company, went through all the rigmarole.
[00:19:11] They sent me 25 million bucks to get this company going. So we started the business, realized it wasn’t gonna fly for a whole bunch of reasons, and said, you know what? We can think of a different model. The Americans said, actually, we changed. We changed our mind. We don’t wanna be in Europe. Can you send our money back please?
[00:19:31] So we sent back 24 million, 750,000, whatever it was, kept a bit for ourselves as redundancy pay. We bought the business from them for a pound and we converted it into a platform, which we put behind all the big all the big leasing companies because sourcing cars. If you had a company car, at that point, you would call your, if you’re in a big company, you’d call your transport manager who would call Avis, and Avis would call 200 people who would all go trying to find car.
[00:20:00] We just created a platform and the platform became very successful and we sold that. Business five year, four years later for a hundred million quid. Nice. I only held a small percentage ’cause I was stupid. So if anybody wants to know about, if anybody wants to know about giving away equity, talk to me.
[00:20:20] ’cause I gave away a shed load of it stupidly, and then did all the work to build the business. I gave it to the investors. So my investors made a hundred x on their money. Nice a hundred x and some of them put in a hundred thousand pounds. Go work your own numbers. 10 million quid they went away with in four years.
[00:20:40] That’s not a bad return on a hundred grand, is it? It’s a nice return. So that was my first tech company, and then I went into other tech companies as an investor or as a chairman. And so now I’ve built, I think it’s 15 now. Today I’ve got five technology businesses. Two of them are in South Africa.
[00:21:01] ’cause I like South Africa. I was down there speaking at a conference like this and somebody said, you know that stuff you talk about, do you actually do it? I said, yes. That’s what I do every day. So I run five companies today. Say I run them as a grand way of saying today I’m the chairman. I have chief execs who do the job or yeah, senior execs who do the job.
[00:21:25] And, you know, we build companies. So that’s my journey. Nice.
[00:21:29] Adam Stott: So when we go back and we look at the philosophy of the leadership, you said about the common sense. Remember when we talked previously, you had some really good, simple principles that you put in place in all of that journey, didn’t you?
[00:21:44] Within Porsche, within BMW, you did the same things Yeah. In a common sense way, which I really felt. Could be transferred to businesses of all sizes, especially your planning aspect,
[00:21:56] Kevin Gaskell: which I really love the concept of. Sure. I mean, look, to put it all in perspective, I know that there are businesses in this room of different sizes.
[00:22:03] My smallest business today employs three people. You know, I’ve got small companies. My biggest business was one I took over five years ago when it was just about dead. It’s a telecoms company and it was dead. And the reason I was asked to go in there was, The investors in that business were high net worth individuals who’d given their money to a corporate finance advisor who I happened to know.
[00:22:25] ’cause he’d sat on one of my boards and he’d put 5 million quid of their money into this company and the money had gone. I. But the business hadn’t gone anywhere. In fact, it was going nowhere. And so in a bit of a panic, he called me, he said, could you just go and have a look? Go and see what you find.
[00:22:41] And I went in there and it was a business of about 12 people. Of which six quit the minute I walked in. Well, I just said, we, you can’t carry on like this. Well, we’re very happy doing it like this. I’m sure you are. Spending lots of client money, but investor money, but we need to find a different way.
[00:22:57] Anyway, that business at the time, five years ago was, had a monthly revenue of about 30,000 pounds, something like that. Last month, no, June was our biggest month. We just turned over 7 million in June. So we’re now the third biggest in the UK market. We’re a telecoms company B two B telecoms.
[00:23:22] We’re the third biggest behind Virgin Media. Oh two v m o two and Openreach. So we’re number three in the market, but I’m, what I’m most proud of in that company is not so much that we’ve grown, we’re growing at hundreds of percent a year, and next year we’ll double revenue again, and the year after we’ll double it again.
[00:23:40] And we know that. Not guessing, we know that because we’ve already got those contracts. We just have to build the network and deliver on them so we know what our growth will be over the next 1224 months. But what I’m most proud of in that business is we’re now 200 people in-house and 400 people who we work with as suppliers and contractors, and we’ve just won the prize as the best company to work for in the telecom sector against massive competition.
[00:24:08] So what I’m most proud of is we’ve been able to create the culture where people want to be there, they want to have fun. We do have fun. It’s a fun business. It’s in Warrington. Which is just outside Manchester for those southerners in the room. But it’s not a fashionable place. It’s not a hip happening, you know, tech center.
[00:24:29] It’s on a industrial estate in Warrington, but it’s a fun place. So, so the principles that I apply, I have three words, commit, connect, and create. Those are my three words. Commit, connect, create. And. They came about, those three words came about because I was asked to speak first time I ever did a professional speaking gig.
[00:24:58] I was asked to speak about rebuilding BMW, and I tried to encapsulate five years of strife into a snappy presentation. And I realized that the first thing is get the commitment. Make sure everyone, everyone in the team is committed to it. And if they’re not, then don’t be here. You know what, if you don’t wanna do it, Doesn’t make, you’re a bad person, but go somewhere else and do what you wanna do.
[00:25:20] And I’m just very upfront with people and people say to me, do you fire people? I say, well, not very often, I just help ’em out the door. No,
[00:25:32] most people fire themselves. They fire themselves. ’cause they either don’t, they don’t wanna be there or they’re not turning up for work, which suggests they don’t wanna be there, they just don’t wanna be there. So let’s counsel ’em on finding somewhere to go. That they want to do. You know, they’re not bad people.
[00:25:49] And I, I’ve, I have fired people who are still friends today, and they’re so happy they went off to do other things. So it’s not, firing is not, it’s not about firing, it’s about transferring people out and transferring people in, you know, getting the right team balance. So the first is the commitment to make sure everyone in the room, everyone in the team, understands what we are committed to achieve, and we build that together.
[00:26:11] I, I remember at BMW. Running the workshop where we decided where we were gonna go. And I had about this many people in the room. This was all the senior leadership team. And they thought I would, they honestly, they thought I’d just got off a spaceship because I was questioning what they’d done so successfully.
[00:26:29] And I described it as, yeah, what you’ve done successfully is travel up a fur lined rutt, ’cause it’s all very comfortable, but you’re not going anywhere. You’re not developing, you’re just going up this rutt. So the first is commit. What are we committed to achieve? The second is connect, and that’s about making sure everybody in the team knows what the plan is.
[00:26:50] And we make our plans really simple. Really simple. They’re on one page, they’re on the wall. Commit, connect. So the connection is that everyone can see how they make a difference. Everyone’s amazing, people know how to do their job far better than I do. I ran a boat company, I don’t know, rock all about boats.
[00:27:10] But it was, they’d made losses for 10 years, and this team was so proud of what they built. They built these beautiful yachts, but they’d made losses for 10 years. The day I joined, they’d gone through 13 rounds of redundancy. My first team meeting with everybody’s 1,300 people, which was 1,298 blokes and two ladies.
[00:27:33] It was a, and it was unionized. It was a really old school company. And when I talked to ’em about what are they committed to, I asked them, what do you wanna do? And they said, well, we wanna build the best motor yachts in the world. The company’s called Fairline. We wanna build the best motor yachts in the world.
[00:27:50] And I said, great. Why don’t you? And they said, because of you. I said, guys, I’ve been here a week. They said, yeah, but leadership management, they don’t know what to do. They dunno what they’re doing, la blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was very aggressive. And I had a, I had the production director standing next to me, he’s a big bloke, six foot four, big SC fella.
[00:28:12] And I said, Joe, stand close. ’cause I’m gonna get slapped before I get out of this room. And I said to the union chief who was standing about where you are, about there giving me abuse. And I said, look, why don’t you and me go and have a cup of tea and talk about this and let me understand what you, he said, no.
[00:28:32] I said, well, alright. No. I said, why don’t you come to my office and have a cup of tea? And he said, no. I said, why not? He said, I’ve never been to head office in my life, and I’m not gonna start now. Head office was 75 yards away. He’d never been there. He’d never been there. So I said, okay, I’ll come to your office.
[00:28:52] I don’t have an office. I said, all right, where do you wanna be? And we just broke down the barriers and we got, the commitment was there. They all wanted to build something that was special. The connection was how do you get people to work together? And that’s the simple plan. And the third piece is create, and I call it creating magic.
[00:29:09] And that’s when we’re all in this together and we’re all supporting each other and we’re actually having a laugh because you know what? You know they talk about black humor in wartime. I. This book is about something I did two years ago now, and the there are moment when you get the book, you’ll see there are moments in there which are pretty bleak.
[00:29:30] Pretty bleak, but we kept laughing. We kept laughing at it, and we get through it. So we stick together and we create magic because we trust each other. And you have to build that trust. And it’s about each of us. Going the extra, not the extra mile, but the extra 10 yards. You know, the extra bit. So the boat company, 10 years of losses and you’ll never fix that.
[00:29:55] La 14 months later, 14 months. Same team of people. We were back in profit. I didn’t do it. They did, all I did was give them the opportunity to contribute. And that is that what are we committed to? How do we connect, how do I, how do I. How do I, as a simple electrician on boats, we were building big boats.
[00:30:16] I mean, these were boats, you know, as big as this room, 78 foot yachts, $10 million a pop. And it was about letting people understand that they make a difference. So again it’s not complicated, but it is about being honest and truthful to those principles. And as a leader, and you’re all leaders, as a leader, you have to exemplify those principles.
[00:30:41] ’cause the minute you get it wrong, they throw it back at you tenfold. So you’ve gotta live those principles. And that’s not to say that I get it right all the time because I said to Adam earlier on, I’ve made every mistake in the book. In fact, I’ve made every mistake in every book I have. Got it wrong so many times.
[00:31:02] And sometimes embarrassingly so. Afterwards, you think, how on earth did I get it that wrong? But you know, we all learn. We all learn. It’s a case of picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and then going again. Just go in again. You know, if you give up, you never get anywhere. But the business the business I’m talking about the telecoms business, it’s called.
[00:31:26] I t s technology, i t s and people say, what does I t s stand for? No idea, not a clue. Even the founder of the business would never tell me he left the business, but I dunno what it stands for. But I was, before I walked in here, earlier on, I was talking to we were just in the middle of a fund round at the minute, and I was talking to our corporate finance advisor and we were laughing because, We’re growing so quickly, we’re eating up the capital.
[00:31:53] We’re, it’s not working capital. As such. We are building fiber networks, so they be, we’re turning cash into fiber networks. There are assets on the balance sheet.
[00:32:06] Three years ago, I didn’t know if we’d survive each month. I was writing checks at the end of each month to pay people, if my wife had ever found out how much money I put into that company. Oh my goodness. I’d never, well, I still never here for the last of it, but she still thinks I’m putting money, which I’m not.
[00:32:24] But the point I’m making is that company, if we hadn’t been battle hardened as a team and been committed and created such a team spirit, we could have given up. Pretty much at any time in the first three years. And people come now and we’ve just moved into an office, which is really lovely. It’s a square box on industrial side, but we’ve decorated it really nicely, not expensively, just really nicely, made it a bit wacky, and people come in and say, well, you’re so lucky to be this successful.
[00:32:56] It’s like, If you knew how many sleepless nights, how many weekends we’d worked, how many days We started at seven in the morning. At 10 at night. We’re still scratching our heads on how we’re gonna pay the bills this month. And it was that close. And yet this year we’ll make. Depends what we decide to declare, but probably, well, no, always manage your investors’ expectations.
[00:33:23] Yeah. Yeah. They think we’re gonna make 6 million profit, we’ll make 6 million profit. We could make 10, but I’m not telling them that We’ll carry a chunk of it forward to make sure we’re hit next year’s numbers. On leadership, Kevin?
[00:33:38] Adam Stott: Yeah. How does somebody. ’cause you’ve written a great book on leadership.
[00:33:44] How does somebody,
[00:33:45] Kevin Gaskell: two great books on leadership. So
[00:33:47] Adam Stott: How does someone as a small business owner
[00:33:51] Kevin Gaskell: lead themselves first? How, sorry. How does
[00:33:54] Adam Stott: somebody lead themselves first? Because before they’re gonna lead teams. Yeah. And they’re gonna build those teams. They’ve gotta lead themselves. Yeah. How would you describe that?
[00:34:03] You’ve obviously very driven. Have you experienced, did you experience challenges
[00:34:09] Kevin Gaskell: with that over time? Oh, yeah. I mean, look I said it when I got I knew when I was at Dow Corning that I didn’t wanna be a, an accountant all my life, so I walked away. I knew after 10 years at Porsche, I’d had enough.
[00:34:22] So I walked away. I knew after five years at BMW I’d had enough. I walked away, the press went mad. I’ve still got the trade press now. And they’re brutal. The trade press at the moment, well, they said they couldn’t understand, you know, this guy who’s done all this, that and other has just walked away.
[00:34:38] What the heck? What’s, I mean, honestly, the stories I’d been caught on my fingers in the till was one I’d had a nervous breakdown was another I. I’ve been having a relationship with the chairman’s wife and making a bad job of it was another, all these crazy stories came out, but the truth was, I told you, I went and sat in a tent for six weeks and decided I don’t wanna do that anymore.
[00:35:03] So I, I went somewhere else. So it starts with being passionate yourself. If you are in a business, whatever your business is, if you are in a business that you’re passionate about, then you know you’ll put up with stuff. If you’re not passionate about it, then it’s hard work. It’s really hard work. If you get up in the morning, And people say to me, define that.
[00:35:26] And I say, well, okay. I call it inspiration. I think there’s a big difference between motivation and inspiration. I can motivate you. All right. Now, easy peasy. Adam told me that I can give you all a thousand pounds at the end of this talk and you can spend it. That’s come through me first. And you can spend it on whatever you wanna spend it, right?
[00:35:48] Well, you’re motivated for a day or two. Great. A thousand quid, but that’s not, you’ll forget about it next week ’cause you’ve spent it. Whereas in business, you know, people say, oh, give us a pay rise. We’ll be motivated. Yeah. For a short while. Then you forget. Inspiration is when people are really engaged and enjoying what they’re doing.
[00:36:09] When as leaders we’ve created that culture because we ourselves are inspired. We’re absolutely inspired. The c e O of i t S technology is an amazing guy. He’s the most inspirational guy I’ve worked with in a long time, and he’s inspirational because he really wants to build, he was a Openreach, he was the c e O of Openreach Business Division, and he wants to stick it up Openreach, right?
[00:36:34] So he’s really motivated to build. Now Openreach is the, is used to be British, well, it is British Telecom, but it used to be the national provider. You know, it’s got, it owns all the assets. So Darren is very passionate about creating something of long-term value. So to manage yourself, you first gotta ask yourself, am I passionate about this?
[00:36:57] And I say, my definition of it is if somebody in my team on a Sunday night, instead of thinking, oh, Work tomorrow. They think, oh great, I’m going to work tomorrow. I’m gonna go and build that. We’re gonna go and take that forward. Then we’re winning. But when people don’t want to come in and you can see it, you know, if, particularly if it’s a small team, you see the person who comes in 10 and 20 and 30 minutes late regularly, and you know, it’s, you see people who.
[00:37:30] Aren’t passionate about it. And that’s an issue. You have to have that conversation. But it starts with yourself. Are you passionate about what you do? And I am still passionate about what I do. And so it, it rubs off on people. You know, people get excited because I’m excited and if I walked in with my chin on the floor and ooh, the world’s coming to an end, that message.
[00:37:55] Transmits through the organization and you can’t fake it. You can’t come in and fake it and then go get in the car and think, thank goodness for that. You know, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta feel it. And if you don’t feel it, be honest. I was honest at BMW I’d had enough, I’d had enough of being told what to do by a big corporate body and I didn’t wanna do it anymore.
[00:38:16] I just didn’t wanna do it. And I worked on a basis, I’m 40 years old. I’ve done it. It’s on my cv. Porsche BMW Lamborghini bought, we bought Lamborghini. Here’s the story. We bought Lamborghini, the company for a hundred thousand pounds. Bought a company for a hundred grand. ’cause it, that’s, it tells you how much trouble they were in.
[00:38:38] And it was at the same time as at Porsche. So it’s Porsche who bought it. Right. I needed another, it is in the early days when we didn’t have enough, couldn’t sell enough cars to. Pay the bills. And I wanted another brand. So bought Lamborghini and it was a car crash. But we turned it round. Look at it today.
[00:38:56] I mean it’s now owned by Volkswagen. But it was, that business was all about passion. ’cause they create anyone here who got a Lamborghini I good choice. Terrible cars. They were terrible cars. I mean now they’re Audis, it’s different, but they were terrible cars. But it was all about passion, and it was absolutely about passion.
[00:39:15] So, You start by managing your own passion. That’s where it begins
[00:39:21] Adam Stott: and turning those teams around. I remember you said to me about your a hundred days that you worked out, and I thought that was a really interesting concept that was really transferrable. Yeah. To, to businesses. Could you explain how you put that a hundred days in place
[00:39:35] Kevin Gaskell: and how that worked?
[00:39:36] So if you want all the background to this, and I’m not trying to sell you books here because you can’t buy it anymore ’cause it’s outta print, but I wrote a book called Inspired Leadership and inspired Leadership you can get as a used book, but I’m just rewriting it, bringing it up to speed with some of the new companies we built and it’ll come out next year as re-inspired leadership.
[00:39:56] But in there I go into detail all the processes about how we fixed these companies, what you act, what you actually do. It’s all very well me sitting here on this chair and spouting. But the truth is, what do you do when you go in on Monday morning? You know, what do you act? Listen, he sat there. Now what does he actually do?
[00:40:14] That’s all. That’s all in the book. Inspired leadership, but a tool that I use as well as the Commit Connect, create. The connect is a thousand day plan, a thousand days, not three years. I don’t talk about three year plans because. If it’s a three year plan, what’s a subset of three years? Well, it’s one year, so people think in years, whereas if I talk about a thousand days, we break it down into days.
[00:40:42] So every project that we’re working on and literally just, I should have shown you the photographs. I’m chairing a company right now called Radical Motorsports. We’re the world’s biggest manufacturer racing cars. And again, bit of a basket case go in there a year ago. Yeah, and the team were just shaping themselves up.
[00:41:00] Really great team, but they hadn’t got a structure. So I’ve given them a structure and I was there last week and they proudly showed me the war room, w a r, weekly action review. We call it the war room. And a thousand day plan is now on the wall. And they’re all excited and they said it’s great.
[00:41:16] Everyone’s excited. Yeah, I know. People are When you when It’s a small company, right? It’s 150 people and we build racing cars. Everybody who’s there is very passionate about racing cars, but they all want to know where the company’s going because the motor industry’s facing a lot of challenge, and I’m getting off track.
[00:41:35] I’ll come back to it. The motor industry is facing a lot of challenges right now. You know, do we, does the industry move from internal combustion engine petrol, diesel to electric? And if we do, What’s the impact? And I’m one of the people who say, well, we’re not sure yet because everyone’s saying electric’s the way forward.
[00:41:53] Yeah. But hang on, if you actually track the emissions and the pollution and everything else and the child labor and everything else that goes with getting the materials that go into battery technology and it ain’t that simple. And you know, there’s a lot of analysis that says by the time electric vehicle has got on the road, And I’m not defending one side or the other.
[00:42:17] I’m genuinely open about it. But by the time an electric vehicle’s got on the road, it’s already given off about 50,000 miles of a combustion engine, 50,000 miles worth of emissions. So for the first 50,000 miles, you’re making no gain. And my frustration is only that the politicians who were telling us to move to EVs are the same ones who 15 years ago told us we should all move to diesel.
[00:42:43] And now diesel is, know, is the horror story. So I’m just skeptical that the answer is that simple. So, motor industry’s facing a lot of challenges. Where do you go? Well, in this particular business, because they are building racing cars with internal combustion engines.
[00:43:02] They’ve gotta make a long-term decision because as we currently stand after 2030, In the UK, you won’t be allowed to sell a car, a new car with an internal combustion engine. And our race cars have got internal combustion engines. So we’re facing this strategic dislocation. Where are we gonna go? So I use a thousand day plan as the tool, and we build this very, I keep calling it very simple plan of the key.
[00:43:32] Areas we’re gonna focus on. And they have timetables against them in days. In days. And then we count down. So the plan was on the wall was there last Thursday, the plan’s on the wall. And there’s a great lady called Amber who is running the thing. I said, Amber, what’s missing? And I’d given her all the stuff and she’d got bits outta my book and I’d given her stuff up that I’ve used.
[00:43:57] I said, what’s missing? And she went around and she just fab. I mean, she’d really done a great job. I said, what’s missing? Actually, I dunno. I said, where’s the counter? Oh, okay. We didn’t have a counter. Now the counter gets the heartbeat up. So people, every day you count down, you know, today it says a thousand.
[00:44:14] Tomorrow it says 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 8, and a hundred days pass really quickly and 200 days pass really quickly. So we use this thousand day plan. To get the heart rate of the business up and let people see that we wanna do stuff in, in really short order, not drip it out over months and no.
[00:44:37] And the a hundred day plan is where we kick it off. So what are we gonna do in the first a hundred days? Now we’re launching this thing. I speak at a lot of conferences now. Go all around the world speaking at very posh, very fancy, big company conferences. And you know, the, you’ve got businesses. They might have spent a million quid, 2 million quid on this conference, flying people in from all around the world.
[00:45:01] The stage sets are amazing and the brief kind of goes like this. I say, when do you want me to speak? Oh, we want you to come on at the end, Kevin. Rev them all up. And I said, okay, show me the agenda. So the agenda is typically the c e O stands up first. This is absolutely true, and he’s supposed to, it’s usually a he.
[00:45:23] He’s supposed to speak for 20 minutes, but he speaks for 40. So I’m sitting at the back watching people’s phones come out, right? Then the C F O comes on and blinds everybody with numbers. So two phones come out, then everyone switches off. We’re talking numbers. People are not inspired by numbers. People are really not inspired by numbers.
[00:45:46] If I told my team, Hey guys, we need another 2% market penetration and another 3% return on net assets, they’d go, we have no idea what you are talking about. No, that’s, that doesn’t inspire people. So the conferences usually go c e o drips on for too long. Then the C F O comes on. Then people come on from the product and they talk about their new products, but they make it so long and boring and they’re not professional speakers.
[00:46:12] So it. Everyone gets bored and then they say to me, KEF, come on at the end and rev ’em all up after they’re all comatose. And I say, put me on at the beginning. Put me on at the beginning and let me talk about creating something extraordinary about believing in becoming world class. And I said, I don’t talk numbers.
[00:46:34] I, I won’t talk about that. But what I’ll talk about is saying to people, you could do this. You could build something that’s extraordinary and that’s. That’s where I start in business. So the hundred, so, sorry. So the, so they do all this stuff and they spend millions on this conference and then they go back to the office and I say to them, and what happened?
[00:46:53] Well, it was the same old one. It really, you know, we had, we’ve got a new strap line and what’s it mean? What doesn’t mean anything? ’cause as I say no, make it, turn it the other way around. Put the effort into engaging the people in the plan. And then we can present it in a church hall. It doesn’t matter.
[00:47:11] And so the a hundred day plan is about getting the activity level up so we agree which things we’re gonna do in the first a hundred days to make this plan come alive. And usually it’s about saying to people, what are the things that are bugging you most? What are the things I took on a data company?
[00:47:30] And the biggest thing that bugged. 80% of the people in the business, most ’cause 80% of the people were entering data was the fact the blinking computer was so slow, it was technical data and they put stuff in and then they had to wait 15 seconds for a response and it drove ’em all nuts. But we were talking about when I got there, they were talking about, oh, we’re gonna have this product and that product and this team were all sitting there saying, bloody computer doesn’t work.
[00:47:55] Right? Let’s sort that out first. So when we sorted all that out and they had instantaneous response in the computers, Well, they believe it then because we’re actually doing stuff. People say to me, what was the biggest thing that you did that made a difference? And I said, well, I can give you some examples.
[00:48:13] And one example I use is BMW. ’cause I start, I used to walk around a building. We had a big building and a huge parts warehouse. And you know why we sell you cars? We sell you cars. So you buy parts. ’cause the margin on cars is 10%, the margin on parts is 50, 60%. So we want you to buy parts. And I used to walk around the building and my predecessor didn’t, he was known as Lord, I won’t tell you his name, but he was known as Lord Jones.
[00:48:41] ’cause he was a very state, great guy. I mean, really great guy. But his approach was to sit in his office and he was very lordly and it were a cravat. And it was all very, he was all very different to me. And I walked around the building and the guys and girls in the business used to tell me what the issues were.
[00:48:58] I’d ask them, what’s going on? What would you, if this was your business, what would you change? And they’d tell me, And I walked in the past warehouse one day and I said, if this was your bit, I said, one LA we’re talking about football. ’cause you have to strike up a rapport. There’s always a scarf hanging.
[00:49:09] Oh, who’s the Manchester United Sport? I am. Why? Just asking. Rough season. Hey, who’d you support, Kev? I support leads. So you wanna talk rough season? Talk to me, mate. But in this instance, I said to him, if this were your business, what would you change? And he said, I’d take that wall out. I said, you’d what?
[00:49:29] I said, you see that wall there? Massive warehouse? Massive. He said, I take that wall out. I said, why would you do that? And he said, stand here and watch. And the warehouse was basically divided into two halves and you had forklift trucks moving stuff around. And then in the middle we had this wall, but it wasn’t a real wall.
[00:49:48] It was exp, you know, exp metal you can see through bolted to the stanchions. Don’t quite know why it was there bolted, but it created a wall. And he said, stand there and watch. And these forklift trucks were picking stuff up and then they had to go down this wall through the doorway. It was 50 yards that way.
[00:50:05] Come up the other side and do what they do. He said, there you go. He said, we just wasted a minute of that forklift truck’s driver’s time. And he does that a hundred times a day. And I said to this guy, I said, whatcha you doing on the weekend? He said, why? I said, seriously. He said, why? I said, do you wanna come in and help me turn that wall down?
[00:50:24] And he said, you serious? I said, yeah, I’m serious. So we got builders in and we took the wall out. Now, it wasn’t the fact I took the wall out. It was the fact that he’d made a suggestion and we acted on it immediately. You could see it. It was there. It was, you could watch it. The story went through the business like wildfire.
[00:50:45] And so people are coming up with ideas. Well, if people are coming up with ideas, that’s wonderful, but those ideas have got to be ideas that help you get to where you wanna go. So the thousand day plan is, that’s where we’re going. We start there, work back to here. ’cause that’s a straight line. I’m there, I wanna come back to here.
[00:51:01] But then I’m inviting everybody ’cause you know how to do your job better than I do. I’m just the c e o I don’t know anything. You know, the c e O is the only person in the business who never gets an induction.
[00:51:14] You join and everyone thinks you know what to do, isn’t a bloody clue what to do. Just be c e o. So you know, you walk in and it’s all a bit scary for a while. People know how to do their job and they know what frustrates them. And if we can engage their knowledge and their creativity, that’s the create bit.
[00:51:33] So when you start to respond to their create. That’s when the world starts to move faster. So the a hundred days is the first part of the thousand day plan. When we give people the opportunity to make a real we identify what are the things that are really upsetting you? We call it a winge wall.
[00:51:53] Again, it’s in the book winge wall. There’s a winge wall, we call it wind wall, right on there. Every wind you’ve got, don’t be afraid, just write on what cheeses you off, and then we’ll deal with it. And when we ran the workshop for b m BMW and I said to people, right, there’s the wind wall and there’s the ideas wall.
[00:52:14] For the first half a day, nobody wrote in the, you know, they’re all, I’m not gonna write in a wind wall. But once they start it, it rolls and you get all these things up there that you didn’t know we’re cheesing people off. You just didn’t know. It was, you know, crazy stuff that was easy, fixed, crazy stuff.
[00:52:33] Oh, why don’t we, why don’t we do that? I dunno. Nobody’s ever asked before. Well, can we do it? Yeah. Right. Do it. And so we literally, at the end of the workshop, and I do this in every workshop at the end of the workshop, as we build our plan, we go back to the winge wall and we take every whinge and we read it out.
[00:52:49] Right. There’s no parking. At the office. Okay, what are we doing about that? Yeah, we’ve got a plan and stuff that is often nothing to do with building the business. It’s just what cheeses people off i t s technology. The biggest issue in the last three months is we’ve built up the staff and people are getting parking tickets.
[00:53:12] ’cause you’re not allowed to park in this industrial state except in the car parks. And so our staff are getting parking tickets. Well, we’re nice people, so we pay the ticket for them, but we know we’ve gotta find a solution. So what we’ve done is negotiate another car park that’s, I don’t know, 150 yards away.
[00:53:29] Oh, and there’s another thing. Talk about living the principles. When I first started going there, they’d reserve a space for me next to the door. There’s the chairman space. And I said, take that away. If I’m not there early enough to get a parking space, I’m 120 yards away with everyone else. It’s no big deal.
[00:53:47] It won’t kill me to walk 120 yards, but don’t reserve a space right outside the door for me. ’cause that’s not on that’s not who we are. So just little things, principles,
[00:54:01] Adam Stott: which I think really helpful for everybody in the room to start to understand. I love the concept of a thousand days.
[00:54:07] Breaking it down. I think no matter what size your business is, for you to forward thinking that and cross the days down with your objectives will get you so much more focused. And if you start to involve your teams in that, it can create a massive impact for you and your businesses. Something you should all be looking to implement and do.
[00:54:23] A hundred percent. And we’ve got this wonderful book, Kevin,
[00:54:26] Kevin Gaskell: that we’ve brought in as well. So outside business, you know, what do you do for downtime? What do you do? My, my head is full. I’m not an early morning person. I’m really not. But I wake up at five o’clock thinking about business and
[00:54:42] To get myself away from that. I go off and I do expeditions and expeditions, whether it’s Everest or North Pole, south Pole, whatever it is. This one they take a lot of planning this one called Catching Giants. This book was of an expedition we did in 2019 into 20. And I’ve done the mountains, I’ve done the poles, done various other things.
[00:55:13] And then I’ve got a mate who said to me, Kev, I know what you should do. What’s that? He said, you should row across the Atlantic. And I looked at him, guy. There’s a guy called Peter Vanette. He’s a professional adventurer. That’s what he does for a living. And we were speaking together at a conference in South Africa and he said, Kev, you should row across the Atlantic.
[00:55:33] I said, Peter, I don’t know anything about rowing. I don’t know anything about the Atlantic. I don’t know anything about navigation survival at sea. Yeah, but you’d love it. And so I went away and I thought, Bloody madness. Absolute madness. And then I was speaking at a conference in Monaco at the Monaco Yacht Club to a maritime audience, all the, all suppliers to the marine industry.
[00:56:02] And when I speak with slides, I use some photographs from the expeditions to make points. You know, if I just showed you a picture of an office, it’s boring, isn’t it? Where I show you a picture of me and my son hanging off a mountain at 10,000 feet and I talk about trust. You know, it kind of makes the point.
[00:56:21] I, I’ve got one picture where Matt, my son’s called Matt. Matt and I are crossing between two mountain peaks and the drop is 2000 meters and we’re just on a rope. And you know, I make the point that when he says to me, is that rope safe?