00:05   Traci Chernoff

Hi everyone, welcome to Leading the Frontline, sponsored by Legion. Thank you so much for being here — we have a fabulous episode for you today. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you’re catching this episode, and if it’s one you love (which I know it will be), be sure to share it with a friend. Whether you’re watching or listening, you’re going to have a fabulous experience either way.

On this episode, I’m welcoming Mark Simpson to the podcast. Mark has been in retail for over thirty years, twenty of which were spent at a major retailer that’s part of a family we all know — Walmart. Mark has served in key operations roles across his expansive tenure, and now he’s focused his career on helping tech companies better understand retail and how they can provide critical technology to retailers.

Mark, welcome to the podcast!

00:54   Mark Simpson

Great, thank you very much, Traci. Lovely to be here.

00:57   Traci Chernoff

We are so excited to have you. I personally love a retail-to-tech story — and of course, you’re still in retail. I like to say “retail adjacent”; that feels the most on the nose.

I always ask every guest the same two questions, and it helps us get to know you a bit better. So first: what was your very first hourly job?

01:26   Mark Simpson

I was about 14 years old. I’m based in the UK, and I grew up in a small town in Lincolnshire, if anybody knows where that is. I worked in the Chinese takeaway there on Saturday and Sunday evenings, from 6:00 until 11:00 at night.

I was the one who took the orders — you’d come in and order your chicken chow mein, or chicken curry and chips if you’re in the UK. I’d write it down, run up to the kitchen, and hand it to the owner. He and his wife would make it, then they’d shout “Mark!” and I’d run back, collect it, and hand it out. I worked every other weekend, about ten or eleven hours — biweekly, I think you call it?

02:19   Traci Chernoff

Yep, biweekly — exactly. This isn’t one of my standard two questions, but I’m sure everyone wants to know: did you get free Chinese food when you worked there?

02:31   Mark Simpson

Yes, I did! I could either eat something there or take it home at the end of the night. So I used to take it home and feed my mum, who was also up at that time waiting for me to come home.

02:46   Traci Chernoff

Right! My mom always said that when you become a parent — which I am now — you’re not going to get good sleep for the rest of your life, because you’re always wondering where your kids are or when they’re coming home. So I love that that’s part of the story of your first hourly job. And it started in retail, essentially — retail and food, hospitality, the general industry.

The second question I always love to ask: would you mind sharing your background and what ultimately led you to your current leadership role?

03:23   Mark Simpson

When I left university, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. But there was a small electrical store about 10 miles from where I lived that was advertising for an assistant manager. I applied and, amazingly, got the job. I worked with a great guy, Stuart Kirk — I remember him to this day — and essentially helped run his small electrical shop.

What was interesting is that they were very focused on customer service. They mainly dealt with the older generation who wanted a new television or — for those of you who remember them — video recorders, and then the launch of DVDs. These were the big square televisions, not the modern flat ones. I’d drive around, collect televisions that were broken, get them repaired, then deliver them back and make sure they were working. Or if somebody wanted something new, I’d deliver it, get it set up, and make sure the new owner knew how to use it before I left. I worked there for nine months and really enjoyed it. As you do, I ended up opening the store, locking it up, and on Sundays just running it myself, because it was quite a quiet little town.

I loved retail, so from there I applied for graduate schemes and was lucky enough to be accepted onto the Asda graduate scheme. I started at Asda probably about thirty years ago, in the North East of England. My first job was in our Peterlee store, where I ran what was called provisions — essentially fresh food, back in the day. I ran all the cabinets — yogurts, cheese, ready meals — and the deli counter, a serve-over counter where you’d come and order, say, five slices of a particular cooked meat. I did that for a year and loved it.

Then I moved to a bigger store in the North East as grocery manager — a much bigger department — and did night shifts for a period of time. Over the course of about two years, I became deputy store manager. Then I went away for two days for a store manager assessment, to see whether I was ready to get my own store — which I was. So I became a general store manager and ran a number of stores in the North East.

From there, I moved into finance and did two years working with the commercial department. Then I moved into productivity, and that’s where I got involved in workforce management. I ran all of workforce management — building the labor plans and looking after where the hours were in each store across the Asda estate. That’s also when I worked very closely with the Walmart teams. Walmart International was trying to standardize the operating model across what they called the Walmart family around the globe, and I worked closely with the international teams.

That role kept getting bigger and bigger — if you do a good job, you get a bit more — and I ended up running central retail operations. That’s the glue that holds the stores together: making sure whatever the commercial teams were doing was right for the stores, making sure store feedback was listened to and implemented, and running central functions like loss prevention, productivity, communications, and a few others.

From there, I went on to run our supply chain. I was Chief Supply Chain Officer at Asda, looking after how we flowed product all the way from the supply base — Procter & Gamble, for example — into our stores. That was 28 distribution centers and depots and twelve and a half thousand colleagues, and I led them through the pandemic, which was a very interesting time in the world of retail, as you can imagine.

Then I moved into transformation, which was something completely different. I looked after our technology teams, our shared service operation, even financial services for a while, and format development as well. I’m not a technologist, but I really enjoyed that side of the business and got to learn a lot more about it.

After twenty-eight years at Asda, I decided it was time to go do something new. I took a bit of time out — did some cycling, running, and traveling — and then set up my own business, where I predominantly support technology businesses and their interactions with retail: helping them really understand what retailers need, and helping them with business cases and road maps. I love it. You can always learn new things — I’m over 50 now, and I still learn something every day when it comes to technology.

08:51   Traci Chernoff

That’s an amazing background. What’s so profound is that you saw so much growth within one part of retail, with really one main company. It’s kind of everyone’s dream to keep finding new ways to stay interested, challenged, and captivated by their work. And I think that points to what someone can expect in retail: it changes so constantly and moves so fast that there’s a natural relationship between retail and technology — whether it’s workforce management, payroll (I’m an HR person, so I always think of that first), or even monitoring store traffic. There are so many facets of retail that technology supports.

We could all think of a few retailers off the tops of our heads who set the stage for what technology looks like in their businesses, and they’re the ones raising the standard every single year. You hear it on investor calls — they’re not struggling in the same way as others, because they see technology as a tool. So I love hearing about the growth in your career and how you’ve now applied your expertise to help tech companies build the understanding they need to make things happen for their customers.

I always like to dive into these conversations through the lens of leadership. If you think about your very first leadership role compared to the leader you are today, how has your leadership style evolved?

11:10   Mark Simpson

When I first started out, I’m not sure I had a leadership style I could write down on a piece of paper. I turned up and decided I needed to understand the business I was now involved in. I knew a little bit about retail, but not a lot, so I rolled my sleeves up and got stuck in.

I remember I had a team of 28 people in a store that had been around a long time, and a lot of the colleagues had twenty years’ service. They knew the job and knew what they were doing. They wanted somebody who could support them, represent their views, make sure the shifts were what they wanted — in a fair way — and make sure the holidays they wanted were booked. Generally, they wanted to come in, do their hours, have a bit of fun, and go home. I decided from day one that I would try to help facilitate that, and I loved it.

Over time, you build your skill set, you learn new things, and you work with great people who teach you things. In the last five years, when I ran the technology side of the business, I was working with people who had spent years learning their trade. I found that you talk to people, you ask questions, you listen, you challenge where appropriate, and you support people when they need your support.

You’ve probably read a lot about the Walmart approach of servant leadership, and I’m a big fan. If I had to put a phrase around the way I work, that’s it. I want the teams and colleagues who work for me to come to work, enjoy themselves, feel valued, and get personal fulfillment from it. If you can do that and move the business forward at the same time, I think you’ve managed to pull off exactly what you want to be as a leader. It’s been successful for me.

There’s been a bit of luck in it as well — the right jobs coming up at the right time. I’ve had some great bosses who’ve said, “Here’s something, Mark. We think you’d be good at it. Go and give it a go — and if it doesn’t work out, don’t worry, we’ll make sure you’re looked after.” They encouraged me to take a risk and do something different.

Probably the biggest jump was moving from central operations, which I knew inside out after doing it for about fifteen years, to running supply chain. I’m not a logistician. That was my first time leading a department where the team beneath me knew so much more than I ever would, because they were specialists. So for the first three months, I went out to the depots, walked around, talked to our colleagues, our pickers, and our drivers, and spent time in the cabs with drivers. You learn loads. They tell you what’s great, but they also tell you it would be a lot better if X, Y, and Z changed. From there, you can build your hundred-day plan, for want of a better phrase, make the changes, and start to show you’re making a difference.

15:00   Traci Chernoff

That’s an amazing reflection point. Servant leadership is something people can really feel — we know the difference between servant leadership and the lack of it. There’s a distinct feeling you walk away with as an employee when someone is thinking about your overall experience and well-being and giving you the empowerment to make decisions and do the right thing. I love that you think about your whole career as a way to do that and to help people grow in their own roles.

Something you said at the top of our recording is that you’re still learning something new every single day. That curiosity and constant learning can be a differentiator between someone who continues to lead and someone who feels they’ve reached the end of their career — because leaders who remain curious and keep learning tend to inspire others to do the same.

In that same breath: what’s a leadership lesson you’ve learned the hard way? Maybe a failure or something you struggled with — maybe moving into supply chain, for example — where you thought, “I really learned this on the job.”

16:46   Mark Simpson

The biggest one: you can’t do it all yourself. Earlier in my career, in more junior roles, I could roll my sleeves up and work late. If I was building a labor plan for a particular store, I could pretty much do it myself over a long weekend — I’m not saying you should, by the way. But as you move into more senior roles, it’s impossible to deliver the scale of change you need without getting your team on side, getting them to want to do the work, and having them deliver it to a high standard.

Sometimes it feels like you’re not doing anything. You can go home at the end of the day without having typed on a keyboard, but the reality is you’ve spent the day talking to people, understanding the challenges, and supporting your team where they’re having difficulty. That mindset shift is probably the biggest learning I’ve had over the years.

And especially working in technology, the world is very different nowadays. Years ago, when I did store rotas, you’d do them with pen and paper and pin them on the wall. People would say, “I don’t really want to work Saturday afternoon,” so you’d get your red pen out, put a cross through it, and ask who else could do it. Nowadays, with automated schedules and everything else, it’s a completely different world.

We used to order on pen and paper, too. Every morning for two hours, I’d manually do the stock and orders for fresh food — walk around, see how many were on the shelf, look at how many sold last week, write down that we needed three of those, and hand it to an admin clerk upstairs, who would type it in and order it, and it would turn up two days later. Nowadays it’s all automated replenishment systems pushing from DCs, mainly centrally driven.

You mentioned earlier seeing retail grow in scale. When I first started my retail career, online didn’t exist. In the UK, we started with picking from stores and delivering, before we did collection at stores. You’d go around the store, pick the order, and deliver it on a van to someone’s house. I was involved in the first pilot of that, probably around twenty-two years ago — I might get the year slightly wrong. Now in the UK, we’ve got some stores where over 50% of their volume goes through online fulfillment. So I’ve seen it grow from nothing to just a way of life. My children, who are 17 and 20, don’t really go into supermarkets anymore — they order online and expect it to be delivered to the house without setting foot in a store.

20:07   Traci Chernoff

It’s a totally new world. I’m inspired by this train of thought about the evolution of work and technology and how it all blends together. It’s part of our show name — Leading the Frontline — and something we really try to do on this podcast is keep hourly and frontline workers in the frame of our conversations. The person delivering groceries to someone’s door is likely an hourly worker, maybe even a gig worker doing this for multiple companies at once. The person picking the order is certainly an hourly worker, and of course we have managers on the frontline as well.

When you think about that evolution for frontline teams — beyond what’s already shaping work today, like the instant gratification of online ordering — is there a trend companies may not be seeing? Something they think they don’t need to jump on, but should start paying attention to, because it will be a transformational moment for the workforce?

21:44   Mark Simpson

I think the challenge today, versus twenty years ago when I was actively in stores every day, is that a certain level of productivity is now needed in big retail units to make them economically viable, for want of a better phrase. The big watch-out is how you do that in a way that’s still engaging and provides enjoyment and satisfaction for colleagues. We call them colleagues — I’ve called them colleagues my whole career.

In the old days, as a checkout operator, you had a one-to-one relationship with the customer. You’d talk to them as you bagged their shopping and help them on that journey. Nowadays in the UK, customers do probably 75% of transactions themselves, and colleagues’ interactions with customers are very different. Retailers need to be careful that there’s still that level of customer interaction and enjoyment for colleagues in the industry — that we don’t just drive the productivity angle and do everything to make our stores efficient.

It’s balancing efficiency with enjoyment. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive — I think you can do both. Having worked ten years in the productivity space, you always try to make the job simpler for colleagues and give them tools so they can do their jobs quicker and get more done. But balancing that with keeping hourly jobs enjoyable and fun, for want of a better phrase, will be a real challenge for retail over the coming years. If I were leading a retail business today, it would be top of mind.

23:53   Traci Chernoff

That makes a lot of sense. Interactions are so much more limited in some cases. If someone does step into a store — which is less likely than five or ten years ago — how do those interactions resonate enough to encourage them to come back, rather than just ordering online or doing curbside pickup? And with how fast technology grows — just look at how different the AI conversation was five years ago — it’ll be really interesting to see how retail centers itself in those changes. That could be a whole other episode: what the next five to ten years of retail look like.

As you were speaking, I had a moment where I thought about millennials — which I am — and Gen Z, and maybe even Gen Alpha. We’ve grown up with a certain level of technology, and one day we’ll be the elders in the community. If 75% of checkout is self-checkout, I think about my almost-101-year-old grandma, who absolutely needs a cashier. If I get to 101, I’ll know how to use a self-checkout — but will my grandchildren be saying, “Grandma only knows how to use self-checkout; she doesn’t know how to use this hoverboard”? What will the technology even be?

25:56   Mark Simpson

The biggest department in a UK supermarket, by number of people, is now the online fulfillment team — and twenty years ago, it didn’t even exist. Back then, the biggest department would have been checkouts and cashiers, and now that’s one of the smallest. In a big UK supermarket, you’ve probably got 500 people working there, and getting on for 100 of them work in some way, shape, or form in picking or driving for the online operation. It’s changed dramatically over twenty years. You’re right — in twenty years’ time, who knows what it’ll look like.

26:35   Traci Chernoff

We’ll have to come back in twenty years and re-record an episode — I’ll mark my calendar! I really appreciate all the insight, wisdom, and background you’ve shared.

I like to ask everyone two closing questions. The last one is super fluffy, so we’ll save that for the end. The first: what is the best advice you’ve ever received and continue to live by?

27:06   Mark Simpson

Oh.

27:07   Traci Chernoff

I know — take a moment.

27:11   Mark Simpson

Take a calculated risk when something gets presented to you and you’re not sure. I wouldn’t have moved from being a store manager to working in finance otherwise. I’ll name her — a lady called Judith McKenna, who was the Asda CFO and ultimately became the Walmart International CEO. She was walking around the store one day and said, “Have you thought about coming to work in finance?” I said, “No chance.” And she said, “Come on — go and give it a go.”

I learned so much in a year and a half of working in finance. I’m not an accountant — I like numbers and I’m good with numbers, but I’m not an accountant — and everybody there was an accountant apart from me. I learned loads, and they learned a lot from me about how shops work, so it was a quid pro quo relationship.

So in your career, if somebody offers you one of these roles, it’s a bit of a risk, but trust that your boss has your best interests at heart. They’re not doing it for some crazy reason — there’s normally a logic to why they’re asking you to take the jump or change direction. You should really, really think about it.

28:35   Traci Chernoff

Love that. The last question, as I mentioned, is a little fluffy — it gives you a break from the hot seat. Where can everyone find you, follow your work, and connect with you — and, if they’re technology companies, work with you to better understand retailers?

28:55   Mark Simpson

I’m on LinkedIn, and I run my own business, Simpson Retail Advisory Limited. You can find me on LinkedIn and make contact that way. I’d love to talk to technology businesses that are working in the UK with big retailers.

29:12   Traci Chernoff

Amazing. Mark, thank you so much again for joining the show and for sharing all that you did — it was an awesome conversation. And to all our listeners, please don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you’re catching this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in — and Mark, thank you again for your time.

29:29   Mark Simpson

Great, really enjoyed it. Thanks, Traci.