FOCUS: How do we overcome the barriers to doing business in Jersey?

Tuesday 27 June 2023

It’s no secret that doing business is a big challenge these days: from the tides of covid, Brexit and the Ukraine war to escalating inflation... and that’s against the backdrop of Jersey’s perennial problem with productivity, which has been declining steadily since 2007. Yikes.

So how does the island go for growth in these circumstances?

Tell us a bit about your business background, and what you’ve learnt about barriers to business and improving productivity along the way?

I was really pleased to be Chief Exec of Onogo, which is an e-commerce operator that's been in Jersey for 15 years now. I actually met the founder, when I was first in Jersey, 18 years ago.

I'm really proud to say that went on to found a great business in Onogo, and actually we kept in touch ever since. 

I joined the team to think about how we could grow. One of the essences of growing it was about developing the team, developing the culture, and developing the productivity of the organisation. The reason we had to do that is because it was operating on 19 Different marketplaces all over the world, selling 6,500 products, making a sale every 15 seconds. 

If you allow just people in team to do that, that's almost an impossible task. What we needed to do was drive productivity gains, both to make us make us work and profitable, but also to make sure that the individuals doing all that wonderful work were capable of doing it. 

We did a number of things to remove some of our barriers or constraints to enable that. We developed a software platform to enable us to do multiple things and multiple listings at vast rates and vast fields repeatedly over over time. So, you know, a million transactions a day on a piece of software that we developed. 

Then we worked very hard at making sure that we had principles of continuous improvement.  

We started with around 15 people, and built it up to just over 70. In the last year, we pivoted the business. So that actually a lot of the product then was coming out of the US, the UK and Europe. And that's where they stand today. 

…The team in Jersey [has now] shrunk a little bit, but the organisation has grown by its footprint to include the US, UK, and Europe, where physical product is now set, which actually means that the long-term success is is much improved as a result. I won the IoD Director of the year 2022, which I'm incredibly proud of, I don't think of that as an individual achievement, I think of that as a collective reward for all the great work that all of the team did.

This is actually my second time in in Jersey.

I was in Jersey over 18 years ago, running another e-commerce business. Then I went off and did a couple of different things in the in-between, which I think add value to why I'm here in Jersey Business now.

One of them was a rather large manufacturing and distribution business. For those of your readers who know and love CDs, we used to produce a million CDs a day for the Universal Music Group. That was a business that was based in Germany. And so there was a million CDs produced every day, the catalogue was 63,000 items. 

That meant that we had to store, manufacture, replicate, and distribute all of those products on behalf of Universal Music all over the whole of Europe, on a day-to-day basis. Blimey, it was quite complex. It meant that we had to be highly productive, highly agile, highly automated, highly systems-based. Obviously, there was a lot involved in that. 

I'm really proud to have worked there, because it gave me great insight into large-scale manufacturing solutions, service to industries, distribution of product… and actually working within an organisation that was established in 1898. So quite a big history of success. 

…Then I moved into a large technology organisation, and I was the Vice President of a training division called Open Market. We were a technology solutions provider around the mobile space., and operated what's called ‘software as a service’, or ‘SaaS’, a cloud solution tech product.

It was about 250 people, $700 million division and part of a larger organisation which is called Amdocs, which is a NASDAQ-listed $3.6 billion business with 21,000 people in it and we helped many of the leading brands on the planet with their communication strategies, be that internal communication or external communication, so customer or employee-led around how they could use mobile communications to enable better communication.

I was really pleased to be able to have understood how people like Apple work, Amazon, Sky in the UK and in Europe, and this gave me great oversight into some really good global operators and what they did.

Now, to bring you back to speed, one day in an airport - I think I was in Seattle - I got a call saying, ‘I'd really like to grow Onogo. Would you like to come back?’ And I said, ‘You know what? I have gone all over the place - I had an office in Seattle, one in London, one in India, and also one in Sydney, because I worked across all of those - and yes, I would love to come back.’

So a lot of corporate learning in there. So, why is any of that relevant?

Why it's relevant is because it gave me a lot of different levels at which I've operated from a personal point of view, and some of the skills that those organisations had, I've been lucky enough to be able to either be part of or observe. 

The one big thing I noticed was that there's this repeatable formula in all of them: that's about making sure that you've got a really great team, really good culture, making sure that you value that more than anything else. 

The one distinct difference I've always seen in those organisations is most of the services and products can be replicated - what cannot, is the teams. That's the unique advantage that some of those players have got. It's just the team. So I brought, some of that, I hope, to Jersey to share. 

And then there's some technical expertise in some of that, that I think is also really valuable. 

…I’m also here to try and support business industries, people and individuals to, to develop themselves. Personally, I get a huge sense of pride in being able to do that. It's not about being in front. It's just about understanding, and really helping and support. 

One ‘barrier’ to Jersey’s success has been its declining productivity since 2007. What work has Jersey Business been doing around that?

We've been running productivity events since 2018. We've been running that programme, which we started as a pilot in 2018 - 60 individuals have been on it, 47 companies, 16 Lean Six Sigma Belts have been certified. 

We have also looked at the savings: £2 million-worth of industry savings have been achieved over the duration.

…On 27th June, we've got a big productivity conference planned, and we're really proud to be doing that. That's a tentpole event, but consistently through the rest of the year, we'll continue to run the business improvement programme and what we now call the ‘Productivity Circle’ [a free development and networking forum run by Jersey Business for people who want to drive business improvement].

‘Productivity Circle’ enables us to broaden that to include pieces and elements that perhaps people don't always associate with productivity - for example, team wellbeing. 

If the team is engaged, and feels great, and the culture is good, then of course there's a lift. The opposite is also true. 

What do you anticipate might crop up in the ‘Barriers to Business’ review you’re conducting for Government? 

I think a lot of people are aware is that, from a Planning point of view, there's been a number of opportunities for industry growth, sector growth, that for lots of different reasons, haven't necessarily passed Planning. I think there is some opportunity to step back and think about observation, shared learnings, and how that might be improved. So I'm pretty sure that that's going to come up on the agenda. 

I'm also pretty sure that that some of the challenges around input costs for businesses is going to be high on the agenda and how, as a collaborative group, we can tackle that. 

I still think productivity is part of that answer. But that's certainly going to be that is going to be an ongoing challenge. 

I want to try and remain reasonably open-minded as to what's going to come up because our job is really to listen and extract. I think the beauty of the project, is that actually really allow us to walk through using different lenses and different tactics to really get to a really grounded view. 

What will the output of the review look like?

There will be three ‘buckets’: short-term wins, mid-term wins, and long-term wins. 

We hope we can take those to Government and industry and not only say, ‘This is what they are’, but also how they are going to be worked upon, by who and how. That's the outcome that we'd love to achieve. 

We’re trying to keep it as simple as possible, because we're going to go through quite complex process, but the intent is to try and simplify at the end, so that we can share it in a form that everybody can can understand.

It is still early days for you as CEO, but what is your ‘North Star’? What do you hope to have achieved when you look back?

I'd like to make sure that our reach and our influence from a collaboration point of view is something that continues to grow. Our job is to help businesses thrive, so, at the end of it, the important thing is to look at how we've performed on that.

There's a number of value metrics that you can put around that. I'm quite data-driven in terms of my logic and how I look at things. Data doesn't always have to be numbers. It can be qualitative data, which is just as important. So, as an outcome, if I could validate the value we've driven through qualitative or quantitative data, be able to share that and be really proud in terms of an insights dashboard, I think that would be a brilliant result. We're on that journey - it's not like we're at zero - but there's some way to go.

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This article first appeared in the May edition of Connect Magazine, which you can read in full below...