Is this the hardest-working individual in North West business? Michael Taylor catches up with a man sitting atop two companies thinking clearly in the current climate.
Peter Cowgill has always seen himself as an outsider. And everyone else you speak to sees him as one of the hardest working men in business.
These two observations are core to understanding him, and they aren’t unrelated. He holds down two essentially full-time jobs – chairman of JD Sports and senior partner of accountancy firm Cowgill Holloway.
When he started his own accountancy firm 25 years ago – known informally as Cowgills – it was because a gap had opened up for him in Bolton, but also because he began to believe in his own abilities. He was offered a senior role at Hacker Young while still in his mid 20s and cut his commercial teeth selling clothes in a boutique called Playmate. But instead he set up the practice above a barbers shop on Chorley New Road in Bolton with partners who are still in the firm, Graham Hart and Adrian Westwell.
“We attracted the new breed of clients,” he says. “The vibrant, more enterprising and socially interactive businesses. We didn’t attract the ‘Old Bolton’ people - typically ex-Bolton School - who had long established and waning businesses in textiles. We basically worked like stink.
We started at eight in the morning and worked until 10.30 at night when we went to the pub, where we still talked business. We fought hard for new business. We recruited people with that same work ethic. Rivals thought we left the lights on to wind them up.”
One of his personal clients was footballer Sam Allardyce, who relayed to him that a rival regarded Cowgill as “that little man on the corner” - just the kind of snobbery that fired him up.
If everyone is against you then stick close together and be the best. It certainly works for Sir Alex Ferguson, a man whose methods Cowgill admires from the main stand at Old Trafford every other week.
And to reinforce his sense of not being like the rest, he’s also never done a formal sit down interview with the press before. “This is the first and the last one,” he says.
He was proud that “my first love” Cowgill Holloway, swept the board at Insider’s Lancashire Dealmakers Awards this year – but he’s better known for the incredible turnaround at JD Sports, where he’s been in and out of three times, twice as finance director and now as executive chairman. He even manages one of his throaty laughs when he says: “I got fired twice.” The business was one of Cowgills’ first clients back in 1983 as Mossley Sports and Model Shop. Fast forward to 1996 and he’s finance director as it makes a stock market debut. When he left in 2001 his joshing banter on a conference call with financial journalists was blown up into a “clash” with chairman John Wardle over the terms of his pay off.
But back he came the first time with the support of directors, including Alan White, who is now the chief executive of N Brown. But in 2004, when Wardle and co-founder David Makin needed help, he came back again. Debt had reached £70m and profits were just £5m on a turnover of £400m.
“I’d only been back a day and the first call was from the bank saying I had to get down the next day and meet them as the situation was serious. I got two weeks to present to Barclays as the lead bank and four weeks to present to the others on how I proposed to turn it around. They wanted £1m for a three-month extension. I said I would be out if they did that. I left the room and they settled on £200,000,” he recalls.
A common tribute paid to Cowgill is his ability to understand the essence of a business. To cut through everything else and work out what needs to be done. He may speak slowly, but his mind works quickly.
The key to transforming JD was information. “I gave them about ten key points. The analytical information I get now is second to none so I could understand what was happening. I closed stores that were cannibalising each other. We reduced the level of stock and refreshed the stockholding. Capital expenditure was within depreciation so we were cash positive.
“Some of the strategies of previous management were ‘blue sky’ rather than recognising that the business was in the trenches. I curtailed the growth of the fashion division. Then I went out and negotiated with suppliers and without going into detail I improved the terms so we shift more of their stock and protect their brands. We reduced stock by £25m. The art is reducing stock and increasing sales at the same time, but you can only do that if you have access to detailed information about what’s selling and what your stock levels are.”
Further growth will be hard, he warns. “If you throw a ball up in the air it will eventually come down. We’ve got stores in every corner of England. So we can’t easily open new stores as we’ll erode our store base,” he says.
JD has a stake in JJB that Cowgill is mulling over what to do with. It has also bought a French retailer Chausport for £7m as a step into Europe. Growth can come from Bank Clothing, the chain JD bought from Phoenix Capital for £18.5m in 2007. “It kept me awake for three nights and I know we overpaid for it. I made the finance director the managing director. Is it fantastic? Yes, as a retail concept, but not on a pure financial basis. And is it making progress? Yes.”
But for all of this he quickly points to others who have made this happen, such as Barry Bown, the chief executive of JD Sports. He puts great store by being normal, applying common sense and keeping his feet on the ground. Being made to feel welcome by old pals at the Spread Eagle pub in Kearsley means more to him than joining the top table of business.
“I don’t have a need to mix with massive hitters and I don’t look down on anyone. At Cowgills we try and make people feel at ease. We have clients who are dead nervous because they’re out of their comfort zone. We have a tax department that’s second to none, but we don’t market it. We rely on client recommendation and client retention, that’s our model.”
It sounds common sense, but is hard to apply. It’s typical of how Peter Cowgill operates. But the biggest issue facing businesses is still expectation: “I see countless guys who have got caught in a lifestyle where the tail wags the dog. But you have to live within your means.”
Also in: June 2009
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