Cash is STILL King! How Simon Arora Changed Discount Shopping in Britain
Disruptors
Rob Moore
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2024
⏱️ 83 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rob Moore talks with Simon Arora, the entrepreneurial mastermind behind B&M's UK growth. From where it all started, to building a multi-billion-pound retail empire, Simon shares his knowledge and experience on business strategy, family dynamics, and personal growth. This episode is a must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs, offering a rare glimpse into the mind of a retail disruptor who transformed the UK discount sector.
Simon Arora REVEALS:
- How he changed discount shopping in UK retail
- Why productivity and efficiency were key to B&M’s shopping success
- The importance of maintaining a "paranoid" mindset in business
- The key to work-life balance
- Why cash is king
- Why CEOs have to trust employees more
- The challenges of international expansion
- What he learnt from his failures
- The role of luck in anyone’s success
BEST MOMENTS
"Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity. Cash is reality."
"My character flaw is that every transaction or opportunity didn't go right... is seared in the mind 10 times more vividly than the successes."
"I like to think that I respected my colleagues' work-life balance. I was never a believer in people having to work long hours... I'd rather you just get the work done in the 40-hour week, but just be really productive."
"The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you see of its backside."
"We did a series of transactions in the three, four years after 2008, the each time step changed the size of our business. And we double down in that period of good fortune where all these opportunities were coming at us rather than taking our foot off the gas."
"As we grew B&M, we decided that we were going to spend none of our turnover on advertising. We built a business from 20 shops to five billion of revenue with no advertising budget."
"I personally negotiated something like 17 million square feet of UK retail selling space. 750 large stores at the risk of sounding immodest. No individuals ever done that in UK retail."
"The entrepreneurs that really make a difference and create great organszations are the ones that optimise their success. That periods of good look, they double down, they take full advantage of it rather than thinking, well, this is fine."
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ABOUT THE HOST
Rob Moore is an author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, holds 3 world records for public speaking, entrepreneur, property investor, and property educator. Author of the global bestseller “Life Leverage” Host of UK’s No.1 business podcast “The Disruptive Entrepreneur”
“If you don't risk anything, you risk everything”
CONTACT METHOD
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LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robmoore1979
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Simon, how do you feel about the state of the UK right now? |
| 0:05.0 | Oh, that's a great question. |
| 0:07.0 | It's frustrating, it's mildly depressing. |
| 0:10.0 | You know, let's go straight there. |
| 0:12.0 | My parents were immigrants in 1968. I was born in the UK. |
| 0:16.2 | This has been a great society for me to grow up in and pursue my professional goals and |
| 0:21.2 | the UK that I know is welcoming, tolerant and multicultural. |
| 0:26.5 | And yet we seem to be fragmenting as a society and unfortunately it's always the very vocal |
| 0:32.2 | minority that gets the airspace and not the much nicer silent majority. |
| 0:37.0 | And why do you think it's so divided like riots and tension and why? |
| 0:44.0 | So I think one of the things that as a society we need to think about is preserving social mobility. |
| 0:50.1 | I would say that the basis of the capitalist construct is that people accept social inequality or wealth inequality, |
| 0:58.8 | but only if there is the opportunity to be socially mobile, in other words, either yourself or your next generation, have an opportunity to achieve more. |
| 1:07.0 | And so whether that's the education system or whether it's the asset price bubble that we've had since the times of zero interest rates. |
| 1:16.5 | You know, whether it's getting on the housing ladder or buying a business or starting a business, |
| 1:21.0 | it's harder than it was arguably in the 70s when my my parents came to the |
| 1:25.6 | UK and so I think those are the sort of issues that we need to address as a society in order |
| 1:30.0 | to create greater cohesion. |
| 1:31.3 | Do you think we actually have capitalism now here in the |
| 1:35.2 | UK? We do. I'd like to think that my experience demonstrates that the system works. |
| 1:41.0 | I've been able to achieve my goals. In doing so we've created 48,000 jobs |
| 1:49.4 | over the period that I grew the business. We've occupied millions of square feet of |
... |
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