Mountain Warehouse and Mark Neale

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0:52How did a physics graduate from Oxford end up building one of the UK's best-known high street chains? I'm Graeme Ruddick, and this is the Business Leader Podcast, where we explore the stories and strategies behind modern businesses. Mark Neal founded Mountain Warehouse in 1997, and he's still the chief executive of the business today. Mountain Warehouse has more than 400 shops in the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and they sell outdoor equipment and clothing. The story of this business starts with Mark Neal graduating with a physics degree and going into management consulting.

1:29He wanted to start his own business, so he opened a shop. But this wasn't Mountain Warehouse. The shop sold rollerblades.

1:42Well, I wasn't very good at physics, and I knew I wasn't going to be a physicist. And I'd always wanted a business. I didn't know what I was going to do when I graduated. I managed to get a job as a management consultant, which was a really good grounding in business more generally. And I did that for about five years, learned to read a P &L and get a really basic understanding. But I'd always wanted a business. And this was 1994, so it was well before the internet or anything like that. I didn't really have any money. It was sort of relatively straightforward to set up a shop. and I thought, well, I didn't have much money.

2:26And if you have a shop, then if it goes well, you can sell the stuff before you have to pay for it. And I also felt that I wouldn't be a very good salesperson myself. And so I was thinking that people would come in and buy things and I wouldn't have to, because in the management consultancy, as I was getting more senior, people were saying, oh, you've got to go and sell projects. And I felt I was a bit fraudulent doing that because, you know, I was relatively fresh behind the ears and trying to give advice to people. And so I didn't feel comfortable selling consulting projects. And I thought if I had a shop, wouldn't need much money and hopefully people will come in and buy things.

3:05Why did you always want to be an entrepreneur? Where did that come from? Because your parents both worked in the steelworks. Well, yeah, everybody in Ebervale worked in the steelworks. And so my dad was in the sales office and my mum was in the typing pool. but that was that was you know that was before i was born and uh by the time i was growing up my dad was the sales director of a furniture company in the midlands selling uh three-piece suites and upholstery so he he was uh he was a businessman really and so i think i probably got it got it from him so did you go to university and go to management consultancy at that point were you giving up on the dream of going to business or did you see that as a stepping stone no i saw that i I needed to get a job.

3:50And I think I applied for 11 jobs and I got one. So that was the one I ended up doing. There's a small consultancy called the Cobra Group. It was a spinoff from Bain that had sort of got going a couple of years previously. And it was my only option at that point. But it was brilliant and had a really interesting time there with a really, really interesting group of peers. Also there at the same time was Peter Williams, who went on to found Jack Wills. Emma Wormsley, who subsequently became chief executive of GLAX. So, you know, we were all there. We were all 21, 22 in our first jobs and learning a little bit about business in the early 1990s.

4:36Why rollerblades then? What was it about that product that was? Well, they actually started off with kites and juggling. and rollerblades were a part of the mix. So it was a slightly more eclectic mix than just rollerblades. But rollerblades became such a big thing that they sort of went up to be 80 % of the sales. And that actually made me worried about it because I knew that rollerblades weren't going to last forever. And if 80 % of the business was dependent on rollerblades, what was I going to do next? And so in a relatively short period afterwards, I ended up selling that business. I had four shops, I think, and I was worried that rollerblades were going to, you know, go down the hill having come up it.

5:23So I sold that and put some money into an educational toy shop called Bright Sparks, which I was following some businesses in the U.S. that were selling educational toys reasonably successfully. And I thought there was an opportunity there. But that was really, really difficult. It's very difficult selling toys. Basically, most toys get sold in December. It transpired, maybe I should have known that. And in December, literally everybody in the high street is selling toys from Booth's and W.A. Smith. And back then, Woolworth's and literally everybody. And then I still had my toy shop in February when nobody wanted to buy any toys.

6:03So toys was very hard. I then had a gift shop for a while, a card and gift shop in the city. and that was sort of okay but I only had a short-term lease and we got kicked out and then I stumbled across the business that eventually became Mountain Warehouse. That business that Mark Neill says he stumbled across was not called Mountain Warehouse at this time. Indeed it didn't really look much like Mountain Warehouse does today either. What he came across was Carrymore, the outdoor brand which was looking to open its own shops to sell surplus stock. I got introduced to a guy called Andrea Bonomi, who was an Italian businessman.

6:44And his fund, which was called 21 Invest, and I think subsequently has become, changed his name to Invest Industrial. They had recently bought Carimore, the sort of UK rucksack brand. and he was looking for someone to do some retail shops for carrymore and i had my sort of startup retail experience had a few you know the the rollerblades the toys the cards nothing had really gone anywhere but i had some retail experience some startup retail experience and so we got together and set up a set up this business that is now mountain warehouse essentially to run shops for carrymore and he owned carrymore separately and and so the first shops were were only selling carrymore products and that's how it all began what was it that attracted you to that opportunity that's interesting i mean it you know one thing leads to another and it was the opportunity in front of me at the time i think rather than necessarily sitting down and thinking what are all the opportunities available, which one shall I go for?

7:56You know, I think the most important thing for me in some ways was giving up my job in 1994 in the beginning and not therefore relying on a monthly paycheck. And I think, you know, I'm doing that at a time when I didn't have a wife and a daughter and a cat and a dog and a mortgage and a Volvo. Although, you know, I only had, I was in a shared house with three other guys. And so long as I could pay the rent every month, then I was sort of all right. And so the most important thing was making that decision. And then after that, one thing led to another, really. You know, that was an opportunity in front of me.

8:36It was a door that looked like it was half open. So I pushed on it. He was a, it remains an inspirational character, Andrea. and we we set up the the retail business um together how um we'll come on to the rest of the story but just looking at today how different is the business today compared to this initial idea oh completely completely different the the business plan we had was night and day from what the business is now i mean in in we we were operating right at the beginning in factory outlet centers only. We started off with Carrymore and the business model actually was to run different factory outlet stores for different brands.

9:20And so right at the very beginning, we had maybe five shops with Carrymore above the door. We then got a deal with Musto, the sailing brand. And so we had a shop with Musto above the door. And through Andrea's Italian connections we we had a deal with Capa and so we had two shops with Capa above the door and they were all in factory out of centers and the business model was to create a an operator of outlet stores for brands anyway that was moderately successful but for a whole host of reasons various bits of it didn't didn't really work and so the evolution from that initial business model to where we are now is is is completely different is it right that you only started stocking other brands when you started to have supply issues with carrymore yeah so so because we were selling we were operating outlet stores and outlet stores are very new in back then it was sort of the start at the start of that and this happened with carrymore and with musto and with kappa and was basically illustrated the flaw with the model which was that in the beginning each of those brands loved us because we were turning up and they had all this old stock in their warehouse from previous seasons and we were buying it and putting it in the store, and then some of that would sell and some of it wouldn't sell.

10:40And I'd go back and I'd say, right, Carrie Moore, we need some more of those navy fleeces in size large, please. And Carrie Moore said, well, you've taken all of our old ones of those, so you can only have current season ones now, but you've got to pay full price for those. And I'm saying, well, no, I'm running an outlet store. I've got to be 30 % below the normal retail price. So I can't buy your new ones. I need more of the discounted ones. And they said, well, we haven't got any more of those. But don't worry, we've still got some of those pink ones in XXXL. And I said, well, you know, I've still got those.

11:13Those haven't sold. And so the idea of operating an outlet store for another brand fundamentally didn't work beyond the first couple of seasons because you cleaned up their warehouse for them. but then you couldn't get access to commercial product. And the same thing happened with Musto and the same thing happened with Kappa as well. It was great in the beginning and then it became increasingly difficult. There was a big turning point for Mountain Warehouse in 2003. It decided to start making and selling own label products. This evolution of the initial idea would prove to be crucial in scaling up the business.

11:53it was an enormous change really that was the first time we went to china we had been experimenting with some other people making own label product for us in the uk that had been quite difficult to do and so we went to china ourselves and and that was really a completely uh transformational time in the business what what happened how did it come about that you decided you would do own label well we needed we we'd already closed down the the uh the kappa and the and the muster shop so we're focusing in on the on the outdoor business we had changed the name from carrymore above the door to mountain warehouse above the door mountain warehouse was going to be a collection of brands sold at outlet prices was was the general idea and we we we brought other brands on board so we had carrymore burgh house regatta crag hoppers spray wave various others but the same thing sort of happened which was we started running out of commercial stock from all of these brands and so it was a very hand-to-mouth it was really hard to plan we we had a good season on footwell when everybody else had a bad season because they had lots of clearance products but it was it was it was difficult to scale it really and and so the reason we decided to do our own brand was in order to have continuity of stock.

13:10And it was really just to make sure we had a navy fleecing in size large available, you know, at all times. But when we started doing it, we found that by doing our own brand, we were able to offer better prices to the consumer and make much better margins, both of which were massively important. But then even more important, I think, was the fact that we were much closer to the customer ourselves. And so over a period of time, we found that we were able to design and manufacture products that we knew were going to sell to our customer base. And so by going directly from the factories, primarily in the Far East, through to our own stores and then subsequently our own websites, without having anybody in the middle of that chain, meant that we were much closer to what customers wanted.

14:07We knew what price points we needed to hit. We knew what colours they wanted to buy. We knew what features they wanted. And it was a much more direct relationship with the customer than many of these other brands actually had. And I think that's what, so a combination of better selling prices to the customer, better margins for us, and a closer relationship with the customer has helped to make the business as successful as it has been. You mentioned going out to China then. Was it transformation because that's when you realized actually you could produce high quality product effectively at lower prices than you thought?

14:40Yeah, we had no experience at all in that area. And I think in many ways that was a real asset because we just turned up and went back to first principles. And every time they told us something was$10, we said, well, that's too much. and eventually you could, you know, you work out what the real price was. And we learned a lot about garment manufacture and about what the value chain is there and very much from first principles. And we tried to work as much as we possibly could directly with the factories themselves rather than through agents and trading companies, but directly with the factories.

15:21You know, in that period, I was going to China six times a year, I think, for three or four years. whilst we were sort of building the product range and picking off different parts of our product range that we could make. We never, ever, ever intended to be a 100 % own brand. It was really just to have this staple in stock all the time range of products. But, you know, we did 10 % and it went quite well. So we thought, well, we'll do some more, got up to 20, thought, oh, maybe we can get up to 50, got to 50, and then thought, well, why don't we do more? And at the time, in the beginning, we thought we needed the third party brands in order to bring people in.

15:59But it turned out that people much preferred the quality and the value of our own products and the prices. And that was more important. And it's not a market where people want really big logos across their chest. It's a discrete logo, value for money, quality product market. And we stumbled into it in many ways uh but but we definitely ran with it when we got there how quickly did you realize after that moment in 2003 that you might have you might have stumbled onto something and that this business might evolve in a way that you hadn't initially anticipated i think everything's gradual you know it's it's sometimes people come into this office and say oh my god how did you do this and the reality is you know we didn't do this in one go we did it in thousands and thousands of little steps along the way, you know, one shop by one shop, one colleague by one colleague, one product by one product.

16:58And so when you sort of look at this today and you think back, then, okay, that's a big change. But it didn't happen in one go. It happened, you know, massively gradually. And so I suppose I've never really looked too far beyond, you know, the next couple of years. And my wife, who has her own fragrance business, always said 10 years for an overnight success. And 2003, we were not 10 years in. We were six years into Manning Warehouse at that point. And it was not completely clear that it was going to work then. I think the real turning point, I suppose from that point of view, happened in about 2007.

17:46at that point we'd been doing our own brand for three or four years the margins had been creeping up the sales had been getting better and I think our EBITDA we've always had private equity investors and so we always talk about EBITDA and our EBITDA in one year went from half a million to two million and when you've got half a million EBITDA two million is a lot and so the business became a lot more profitable sort of relatively quickly when all of those product related things started to come to fruition and and that was a big turning point in those opening 10 years how close did it come to not progressing when you've said previously it was touch and go at times yeah it was it was very uh it was very difficult i mean we were constantly short of cash.

18:36We had one big supplier who sent their financial controller into our reception every Friday afternoon and who refused to leave unless they went away with a check. I remember we had a guy on accounts payable, an Irish guy called Greg. There were only seven or eight of us in the office at the time. Everybody used to answer the phone. And he had a thick Irish accent. He was in charge of paying our bills. and I walked past his desk and he was answering the phone in this sort of fake posh English accent rather than his normal Irish brogue and I said Greg what's with a funny accent he says well when they ask to speak to me I can tell them I'm not here when they're chasing money and so you know it was very difficult and and you know and I spent quite a lot of time thinking you know what am I doing with my life?

19:29Why don't I go and get a proper job? All my friends from university were sort of moving their careers on in, you know, their banks or accountants or wherever they worked. And I was sort of, you know, still had this pretty small and pretty middling business. But it's quite hard to get out of it, you know. I mean, in a normal situation, you'd go and get another job. But, you know, I had employees and I had leases, I had investors. And so I was pretty committed to it. And so, but, you know, there was quite a lot of self-searching in some of those days as to whether it was ever really going to work.

20:11Now let's talk about the Mountain Warehouse shops themselves. Firstly, what makes a good location for a shop? I look at who's walking past and I still I still go to nearly all of the sites before we sign a lease and you stand outside and you see us walking past and if they're wearing a mountain warehouse type of jacket it doesn't have to be a mountain warehouse one but but that type of jacket you know you're in with a with a good shout and I learned this a long time ago where we opened um we opened two shops in the same week and one of them was in brecon and one of them was in bristol and i think the rent in brecon was you know about 25 000 pounds a year and the rent in bristol was about 125 000 pounds a year so you know you'd think right bristol you're gonna take a lot more money in bristol than in brecon it turned out anyway brecon was taking a lot more money than the shop in Bristol.

21:15And the reason being is if you've got to Brecon, whilst it's not that busy, literally every single person there, whether they live in Brecon or they're a visitor to Brecon, they're a potential customer. Whereas if you stand outside the shop in Bristol, you've got a whole load of people walking past who are just not mounting warehouse customers. They're younger, they're more into fashion, they're wearing different sorts of clothing. And so the people walking past are clearly the most important. We very, very much like tourists and visitors. So, you know, places like the Lake District or, you know, as we go internationally to places like Banff in Canada or Whistler or Queenstown in New Zealand.

21:59So visitors to outdoorsy sort of towns are great customers for us. And for people who don't know, your geographical spread is such that you have more shops in the Lake District than you do in... Yeah, we are definitely not a London-centric brand, even though our office is here. But Lake District, Wales, Scotland, Yorkshire, Peak District, all of those sort of places, very good for us, Devon and Cornwall. And two-thirds of our business in the UK now. A third is outside the UK. So our second biggest market is Canada with lots of outdoor activity and great scenery and visitors and good weather for us as well, particularly at the moment.

22:44And similarly in New Zealand as well. That's our third biggest market. You've said in the past you're prepared to be patient with the shop. I think you've said a shop is for life, not for Christmas. You just explain your thinking there and why do some people get that wrong? Yeah, so I don't know about patient necessarily. I just mean slightly slightly takes me back to the toy shop days really that which is you know a shop is for life not for Christmas you know it's easy to make money at Christmas but you've got to have you know you've got to pay the rent all year long and so I think you know we collect these shops and we are some of these shops are you have to wait a very very long time to get like Betsy Coyd in Snowdonia.

23:29there was a shop you know it's a it's a great town for us visitors uh mountains and we got offered a number of shops there but we were holding out for the for the right shop uh and i think it took us about 10 years to get that shop in the end but it was the right shop to to wait for and we could have compromised and got another one and i think that's part of the whole if you're a hired in three-year ceo to a business and and you're just trying to improve the numbers over a short period of time then you'd probably take a a compromise shop because it's gonna it's gonna be okay and your numbers in three years will be a bit better than they are now but but we were prepared to wait for much longer to get to get the right shop that we hopefully will have um you know for for a very long time as you were opening an expanding shop how important ultimately was it that other retailers run into trouble woolwoods millets blacks and and opened up places on the street before Mount of My House?

24:24Well we've definitely taken advantage of some of those situations when they've happened. Whenever a retailer gets into trouble, goes bust, goes into admin there's always a huge amount of publicity about the shops that are going to be closing and the people who are going to be losing their jobs. There's often very little publicity about the people who are taking many of those shops and employing new people or sometimes the same people in those shops. And so I think we've got, you know, we've got over 10 shops that used to be Woolworths, some of our best shops in places like Keswick in the Lake District that used to be Woolworths, Buxton in the Peak District, Fort William in Scotland, St Ives in Cornwall, and a whole load more of Woolworths shops.

25:13And then there have been other people along the way. More recently, we've done quite well out of former Arcadia shops, Topshop and Outfit on some of the bigger shops that we've been doing on out-of-town retail parks. Even more recently, we've been looking at Poundlands and Wilco's. And so, you know, I think it's part of the churn of business, isn't it? And, you know, some people are disappearing, but other people are growing. When you look at the UK, how many more shops do you think you could have? We've got about 300 in the UK now. So I used to say that the maximum was 200. So that's clearly proven to be wrong.

25:56I think there's probably at least another hundred based on our internal lists. We've been opening on more retail parks in recent years. And we look at adjacencies as well. It's hard, going back to what I said earlier about seeing who's walking past. it's much harder on a retail park uh because they're coming in their cars and and they're going to a specific shop so so it for a long for a long while we we didn't do that uh and so we look we look more for adjacencies on retail parks and so we quite like an m &s we quite like a pets at home uh we quite like a costa um because we think those are the sort of customers why pets at home dog walkers yeah who is who is your modern customer because you you things like you talk these days about things like glastonbury rugby matches places where you can expect to see people wearing your brand we've got we've got a we've got a you know a very very big wide range of customers now but you know it's it's not it's not a guy hanging off a glacier with an ice axe right uh that that is not really who we're going for we are much further down the mountain than that so I used to say I wanted my mum you know to feel comfortable coming into our shops and you know and my mum is not going to spend 300 quid on a technical jacket she has never heard of half of these technical features but she you know she had 49 59 69 quid to keep her warm and dry when she was walking the dog and I want my daughter who's a student at university to feel comfortable in the shop and she's maybe buying a backpack for college or a sleeping bag for a field trip.

27:42So, and then everybody in between. So it's not really about coming in and talking about what's the snow like at Val d 'Isere at the moment. You know, it's not like city boys going skiing for the weekend. It's a more down to earth sort of middle England market. And that's a much bigger market. How often are you in stores now? I like going to stores. I think when I most recently worked it out, I go to about 100 stores a year. I was in Canada about a month ago, and I went to 18 stores there. And I'm not just going for vanity reasons. I'm talking to the store manager and the other guys in the shops.

28:27Because they are talking to the customers day in, day out. And so it's my way of getting to the customer is to talk to the store manager, ask them what they're thinking about, you know, new ranges. I always ask what people ask for that we haven't got to see if there are new opportunities for things that we can develop and just generally getting comments about, you know, ways of shaping the range, moving the range forward and things that we're missing out on. Mountain Warehouse is one of very few UK retailers to succeed overseas and it's done this by starting from scratch in these countries, not just by buying businesses there.

29:06Well, we did it from first principles. I mean, I think in some ways we sort of found it easier because we'd set up a mountain warehouse in the UK from scratch. And so we set up in Canada from scratch and that felt quite comfortable. In some ways, I find that starting up from scratch more comfortable than working out how to do some of the, you know, the more corporate stuff that comes with having a big business. And so we started literally with one shop and a small team. And we've ended up adapting the format significantly for that market. If you think about the UK business, for a long time we were very dependent on outerwear.

29:54And in the UK, give or take, you can reasonably depend on 11 months of rain or 11 months of drizzle. And so usually, you know, we'd occasionally have a bad spot when the sun came out. But then normal, so the rain would be resumed pretty soon afterwards. And then we went to Canada and we found out it didn't rain at all. Or, I mean, obviously it rains a bit, but nothing like here. It's just very, very cold in the winter and pretty hot in the summer. And so we had to develop a lot of different ranges to suit the Canadian market. but because we'd done that in the UK we were we were reasonably comfortable at doing it for a new market and so the um the offer that we've got there you know was different and but but then a lot of that offer we brought back to the UK and it's it's been successful here as well.

30:42Which international market did you find the easiest to crack and which has been the hardest? Canada was really successful from day one I mean we opened the first shop I literally had no idea how it was going to do. I was sort of hoping that we could do$3 ,000 in the first day, and I thought if we did$3 ,000, then we could work up from there over time as we got better known. I was sort of secretly hoping that we could do$5 ,000 because I thought if we could do$5 ,000 on the first day, then we would really have something to work with. And then we did$21 ,000 on the first day. So it was, in fact, we lost track of how much money we'd taken and I didn't know until the next day what it added up to.

31:28So it was a phenomenal success literally from the first day onwards. Was that because you just got the offer and the range right straight away? Yeah, and I think the Canadian customer, they're quite outdoorsy. They're not flash. They appreciate the value and the quality of the product. And I think they quite like the fact it's not American. And so, you know, they like the Brits and the British. I mean, this was, you know, more than 10 years ago. I think right now, even more so. But so good weather, customers suit us, and an offer that suits them. And which market's been the hardest? US has been hard.

32:14So we started there more or less at the same time, and that was much more difficult. I think opposite to the Canadian customer, the American customer does like brands and does want a logo more. And our sort of relatively discreet branding, playing for the quality and the price rather than the brand, has resonated less strongly. And so what we've done there, slightly opportunistically, is last year we bought a business that had gone into Chapter 11 called Eastern Mountain Sports. And so Eastern Mountain Sports is quite a well-known brand in New England. It started in Boston and then in New Hampshire and Maine and Vermont and upstate New York.

33:06it's quite well known. It actually down as far as New Jersey did have a couple of shops in Manhattan for a while. At one point it had over 100 shops. And so we've got six shops under that brand name and we're going to try and make that our vehicle for the United States because Mountain Warehouse has up until now not been that successful. As you have heard, one of the keys to the story of Mountain Warehouse has been how the business has kept evolving. This is still going on. Today, 30 % of its sales are online, and its range of clothing has expanded beyond walking gear to running, general activewear, and children's clothing.

33:46Indeed, Mountain Warehouse is sometimes the biggest clothing shop in a town. Mark Neill has worked with different investors to build the business, but in 2025, he bought back a minority stake from the private equity firm Inflection, which means that he and the management team own 100 % of Mountain Warehouse. I'm interested to know who he learns from. One of these people is his wife, Michelle Feeney, who is also an entrepreneur and was the chief executive of the beauty brand Saint Tropez. One of the benefits of being here for such a long time and for being private is that we can try things. and that has always been one of our philosophies is is to you know try and do a lot of different things explore different growth handles don't do anything perfectly because if you try and do things perfectly you won't achieve very much so if you can try and do quite a lot of things to about 80 percent and work out which ones are working quickly which ones aren't working equally important and then carry on doing the ones that are working you know push your doors that are half open don't bang your head against doors that turn out to be closed sometimes you don't know that they're going to be closed until you try and and I think doing that in a in a private environment is is clearly much easier than if if we're a public company and you know and some people find that difficult in the business because it does mean that things change quite a lot it means that you know the you know because we're trying things and if they're not working we drop them and then people find that frustrating sometimes it's it's a different sort of business to um to work in and you know and lots of people thrive with that and other people find it more difficult is that is that fundamental to how you approach running and leading the business this idea we should always be evolving learning yeah i think you evolve or die uh and so we're definitely always evolving definitely always learning i'm definitely uh you know learning every day and i I think if you, you know, why are we here?

35:51Fundamentally, we're trying to make this season better than last season. We're trying to make next season better than this season. And to get more customers, to sell more product. And, you know, we're not here to do a very nice PowerPoint presentation. And some people, you know, are better at doing PowerPoint presentations than necessarily moving the business forward. who do you learn from you you said you've said previously that you've never had a good idea in your life which i don't believe is true but nonetheless who do you who do you look to learn to learn from and for other entrepreneurs and founders why is it important that you look for inspiration elsewhere i think there's nothing wrong with borrowing ideas from from other businesses and and i you know i travel really quite widely and looking at at other retail businesses, you know, not in our sector, in other sectors, and seeing what other people are doing in all sorts of different geographies or different sectors.

36:53I definitely learned a lot from my wife. She had a long career in New York in the beauty industry, doing a number of different things, but working for Estee Lauder companies for a long time. And she was very instrumental in encouraging us to go outside the UK in the beginning. You know, I think when you're in the UK, it's interesting in the UK because it's sort of big enough to have quite a big business without having to go overseas. And I think a lot of people, therefore, get to a certain size and then sell. Because you wonder, why are two of the biggest retail businesses in the world from Sweden, you know, in the shape of Ikea and H &M.

37:41That's a bit weird, isn't it? But I think it might be because you can't get a big business just in Sweden. And so they have to go international relatively early on, whereas I think a lot of UK businesses can get to a certain size just within the UK and therefore the entrepreneur doesn't need to look beyond. But at the end of the day, you know, we're a small island and there's a big world out there. and so she was um sort of encouraged me probably earlier than we would have done to to push the international side of the business what's it like um having a wife who's an entrepreneur how much you've been able to sort of share ideas and and learn from each other it certainly makes for some interesting uh discussions i mean her business is very different from mine her background is very different she's very much about the brand i think mountain warehouse we've sort of become an accidental brand if you like by just becoming everywhere over over a long period of time and so so we have lots of interesting discussions about branding but i think uh you know she said this is the biggest business i've ever worked for and she's got a lot of experience of bigger business than me how much has your role changed from the day of being the founder to today when there's way over 4 000 people in the business yeah it changes all the time you know my well People don't really have business cards anymore, but my business card has said the same thing for the last 27 years.

39:06But in reality, what I do day to day has changed enormously and continues to change. And actually, that's the beauty of it. That's why I love it. I mean, if I was doing the same thing as five, ten years ago, then I'd probably want to do something else. But I'm not. But of course, it's massively different. How do you adapt to that? how do you know when it should be evolving how do you make sure that you're not being too slow to adapt that makes sense i think you've always got to be evolving uh how do you know how much to evolve i don't know uh you need a you know you need a list of things each year that you're focusing on i mean number one for us every year is is like for like sales and has been for ages you know and so many businesses that seem to have taken the view oh don't worry about the stores because all the all the business is going online and online will pick up the strain but but we have we definitely haven't taken that and we we're focusing in on how we're going to grow the store sales you know quicker than the costs are going up and and you know and particularly in the last year the costs in the uk have gone up by quite a lot you know we start with a list of initiatives that are going to drive like-for-like sales in the stores uh and you know and quite often they're around product and new products or different ways of presenting things or around the training of the staff in the stores and that kind of thing like for like sales is always top of the list.

40:33You mentioned there you have you have a list as well does that mean that you're always able to sort of stand back and look at the longer term priorities from the business as well as being hands-on in the day-to-day? Yeah I think one of the one of my roles in more recent years I've seen as being making sure that we've got enough runway uh so what do we do when the growth in the uk begins to tail off in terms of in terms of new stores you know where do we go after that and i know that um you know stuff takes time and so it's no good saying right we finished our roller in the uk now let's go somewhere else and so we've constantly got a few things that we're you know we're experimenting with that we can scale up if they're ready and if they're needed so for instance we opened our first store in Australia last year now we didn't really need a store in Australia we've got plenty of growth still in the UK but I knew that one store in Australia is is you know it's no good doing that when the UK is finished and say right now let's to Australia because Australia is going to take time to get right we're going to have to go through the whole process that we did in canada of working out what products they actually want there why they're different from the uk how the model needs to needs to evolve and so and so we we opened um the first store i think we're now up to six we've got three more actually opening in the next month in australia so we'll be up to nine stores by the end of the year and and we're starting to we're starting to starting to make it work that kind of leads me on nicely to our next question which is what's next What's the next evolution?

42:10What sort of things are you looking at at the moment? Well, the two big things are whether we can make the United States work with Eastern Mountain Sports. And that's been a bit slower than we would have hoped because of the tariff situation, which was a bit of a spanner in the works. And so we were planning to open two more stores this year, but we've put them on hold because of the uncertainty over the tariffs now. It seems like the tariff situation is settling down. I'm not sure it's resolving, but it's settling down. And so I don't think we can put that on hold forever. So I'm hoping that we'll open a couple more stores over there for them next year.

42:55We'll be cautious because of the tariff situation, but I think we're confident enough to try. And clearly the United States, if we can make that work, is the biggest market in the world by far and potentially completely transformational. So we'll have to see how that goes. And then the other thing that we're spending a lot of time on is our animal brand. So we bought the animal lifestyle brand that many people will probably remember from years ago, a couple of years ago, sort of lost its way. and we're trying to reinvent that for a new generation of slightly younger customers. I think we've got nine standalone animal stores now as well.

43:39So that's a big opportunity for growth as well if we can make it work. So those are two things that are there. We're working hard on them. We have a lot of effort going into them. Either one of them could be really big if they work, but we're not betting the house on either of them. And what about you? Can you ever envisage doing something else or can you envisage handing over to another CEO? I think I'd struggle to do something else. I'm probably unemployable now, but I'll have to work out about succession and handing over at some point, I guess. But I'm only 57 and I don't play golf. I'm not overly welcome back at home, I don't think.

44:27for more than more than strictly necessary so uh and then we've just got so much going on and it's um and it's it's just so much fun so i'm carrying on for now the team around you what do you look for when you're hiring people to report into you well we've got a pretty settled and long-standing team of people who've been here for quite a long time and i think that's one of our strengths really You know, including our head of product who has been with me since the very beginning for over 25 years and, you know, a bunch of other senior people who have, I think, the newest person on our executive board has been here for four years.

45:08and so we like continuity, we like learning from our mistakes and we just like the power of cumulative returns really. This year a bit better, as I said before, this year a bit better than last year, next year a bit better than this year and if you just do that for long enough then the cumulative returns pay off.

45:35You've been listening to the Business Leader Podcast. with me, Graham Ruddick. Our producer is Anushka Tate. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to get all of Business Leader's content, including more stories about why businesses succeed and fail, sign up for our regular newsletters at businessleader.co.uk forward slash newsletters.

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