Leading online powerhouse Asos has brought new perspectives, The Clarity Retail Leader of the Year winner Nick Beighton tells Becky Waller-Davies.
Asos boss Nick Beighton is in the unusual position of having succeeded a business’ founder and taken it to new heights.
He joined the etailer as chief financial officer in 2009, took on extra duties as chief operating officer in 2014 and succeeded founder Nick Robertson in 2015.
While he made it look easy from the outside, on the inside it has been a different story.
“I didn’t want to be CEO,” he admits. “It was totally daunting. I was quite happy being number two and at the side of the throne.
“Not having to do the jazz hands, not having to lead the team, not having to do all this kind of stuff.”
“I was quite happy being number two and at the side of the throne. Not having to do the jazz hands, not having to lead”
Nick Beighton
This ‘kind of stuff’ means sitting in a meeting room discussing his leadership abilities with a journalist. Not that Beighton is shy and retiring, but, as he says, “I just didn’t have that need in me”.
“It was a bit of a bad day when Nick [Robertson] came in and said, ‘Look Beefy, I think I’m going to go’,” he recounts.
The nickname gives you an idea of how close the pair were and how much the dynamic of the business’ leadership has changed since its founder left.
Ritual and routine
Beighton began his career in KPMG’s Nottingham offices – a world away from Asos’ factory-style Camden HQ and its millennial staffers.
Regional accountancy may not have been glamorous, but it has had a lifelong influence on him. “I loved how it trained my mind to think,” he says. “I loved the mental discipline it taught me.
“When I am stuck now, I have a level of confidence that I will get to the right answer by stepping back and getting out of the way of my brain.
“Because somewhere in that training there is a structured thought process that says, ‘If I get out of the way of my brain, it normally gives me the right answer or the right questions to ask of the people around me’.”
It was also at KPMG that Beighton began “to think about the context of a number and what a number means and how a number arrived”.
Thinking that way is central to life at Asos, which runs on cold, hard numbers as much as it does on creativity, fashion trends and socially conscious marketing.
After six years in practice, Beighton – who had always worked in retail sector teams – made the jump into management, joining Matalan as finance boss in 1999.
At that time, the business was changing the market, with talk of it transforming the retail landscape with its out-of-town format and membership business model.
Innovative as it might have been, however, Matalan still functioned on the same basic rhythm as the rest of retail – and Beighton found this “compelling”.
“I realised that retail is a 24/7 machine,” he says. “My ritual and routine became a 7am text message on yesterday’s trading, which dictated how I would react to the day’s work.
“I had never had that before and I found it compelling because the machine was turning.”
The first hurdle
After Matalan, he had a stint as a finance director in the entertainment industry before returning to the retail fold by joining Asos in 2009.
He joined a management team comprised of founder and chief executive Nick Robertson, international director Jon Kamaluddin, and trading and product director Robert Bready, alongside chairman Waheed Alli.
Beighton describes those years as “transformational” for both product and ecommerce, but they weren’t without their challenges.
“I remember after three months I met Waheed for breakfast,” he says. “It was a pretty stripped-back conversation and he asked me what I learned in the three months.”
Beighton reeled off a list of jobs that needed doing, including faster processing of management accounts and better business planning.
“You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And then, once you are, you can stretch yourself”
Nick Beighton
“Waheed paused and he said, ‘Is that all you’ve learned, Nick?’ And I went, ‘Err…’,” Beighton remembers.
“He said, ‘Nick, you’ve not learned anything about the organisation. It works on momentum, it works on people, it works on belief, it works on fashion. What you have just described is outputs.’ I had failed the first test.”
But Beighton took the time to digest Alli’s words. “It’s one of those bits of advice that you refuse at the time and then you look back at it and realise it was really wise,” he concludes.
Over the next six years, the Asos management team shrank from four to two, with “the two Nicks” or “NickNack” acting as the left and right hand of the business.
But when Robertson first asked Beighton to take the reins, he turned him down. “I never, ever thought I’d be his successor,” he explains. “There were board processes on succession planning that named me as his successor but, you know, that’s process and due diligence – you don’t expect it to actually come to pass.
It was only two weeks later, when his wife asked when he was going to “stop messing around and say yes”, that he began to come round to the idea. “She said, ‘You know you can’t leave that. You know you won’t be able to let someone else do it,’” he recalls.
“I found it very humbling because Nick is one of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met, and he demonstrated an awful lot of belief in me because he wanted me to take the business he founded onto a new place.
“But it took a little while for me to get to that place. It was not something I had equipped my brain for. Eventually, Nick and I settled it one Friday afternoon over a few bottles of wine – in true Nick Robertson style.”
The story behind Asos’ guiding belief
“Our purpose is to give people the confidence to be whoever they want to be.” Like most mission statements, Asos’ was honed by a branding team. Unlike most, though, its inspiration was an orphaned refugee turned principal ballet dancer.
“There was a moment when I really understood that I had to do this job,” Beighton says. He was sitting at a Google conference when a 23-year-old woman took the stage.
Michaela DePrince had been orphaned at a young age when her family was killed and her village burned to the ground in Sierra Leone’s civil war. She was then sent to an orphanage where, because of her skin condition vitiligo, she was taunted and bullied.
Later adopted by an American family, DePrince is now a soloist for the Dutch National Ballet.
“I was in tears within five minutes,” Beighton admits as he recalls watching DePrince speak. “I sat there, listening to her, and I didn’t know how a 23-year-old could go through all that and have the courage to share it.
“I went up to her at the end and said how inspiring I found her talk, how emotional it was. I basically ran out of words to say so I told her that I loved her dress. She said, ‘Oh, thanks – it’s from Asos, it gives me the confidence to tell my story’.
“She had no idea who I was, but it was six months into my time as chief executive. If that’s not a message, I don’t know what is.
“That’s the impact of what we can do. That’s the reason we’re here. That is why we get out of bed in the morning.”
Scaling up
Decision made, Beighton was now faced with taking the organisation to that next level while trying to protect the values and culture embedded within it.
During his three-year tenure, revenues have grown from £1.1bn to £1.9bn and staff numbers have swelled to 4,000 in London and Leavesden, Hertfordshire. He is “really proud” of this, because when he joined in 2009 there were only 178 people at head office.
Asos has also intensified its innovation in tech, now billing itself as being as much a technology business as it is a fashion business.
In the last quarter of last year alone, Asos released around 700 tech updates, all geared towards improving customer experience. Four years previously, tech releases over the year numbered fewer than 100.
Meanwhile, the etailer has exited China and international sales have nearly doubled.
Asos also faced allegations – which came to nothing after an investigation by MPs – that its distribution centre staff were being mistreated. Nonetheless, Asos responded by bringing the union Community on board.
“I am not going to suggest that we are there or that we have everything nailed. As long as we are making things better every day, that’s all I can ask”
Nick Beighton
It’s no surprise, then, that Beighton has learned a host of lessons along the way.
“I have learned that I am used to getting comfortable in a very uncomfortable position,” he says. “I never expected to get comfortable, but I did. But you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And then once you are, you can stretch yourself and see what you can really do.”
He also stresses the importance of admitting your mistakes as leader – “expressing your humility and vulnerability is really important. But hard” – and says that guiding and leading are two different things.
“Asking the question and listening is more important than leading,” he remarks. “Guiding is very different to leading. That way, you build trust among teams and they end up learning themselves.”
He has also invested in Fashion with Integrity, Asos’ corporate social responsibility programme. This emphasis on ethical manufacture and trading marks Asos out among fast-fashion etailers and is an astute approach to selling to a socially conscious generation.
Social conscience
“They don’t have to worry about whether their clothes have been made by people involved in modern slavery or people being underpaid,” Beighton argues.
“They don’t have to worry about what we are doing on plastics or whether cotton has come from a sustainable source. Because we are taking care of it.
“I am not going to suggest that we are there or that we have everything nailed. We will probably be doing it forever, but as long as we are making things better every day, that’s all I can ask.”
An uncomfortable lesson has been coming to terms with the level of exposure and criticism a chief executive can face.
“I never realised the level of scrutiny from all kinds of areas that a chief executive has to endure,” he admits. “I wanted to feel like the same person I always was, just with a different job title.
“But sometimes that’s a little bit of a simplistic view of life. It’s like the westward winds of change that blow you around – you have to be very clear on where you’re going and what you stand for and be steadfast.”
All in all, it’s not a bad result for a chief executive who admits his career has been “a happy accident”. He may have been reluctant at first, but he’s ended up a winner.
Clarity
Clarity is an executive search firm specialising in the retail sector. We have an unrivalled track record of identifying outstanding leaders of today and tomorrow for our clients – large and small, public and private, UK-based and international.
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For a list of all the award winners in full, click here.
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