{audio:0:00:03} A very good morning to you Ronny, it’s a delight to have you with us. Before we dive into the salient aspects of the discounter business model, could you tell us a little about your experience over the last few years in food retail, with a couple of highlights?

{audio:0:00:20} Good morning Will and thanks for having me, and good morning or whatever the time may be to the listeners. I’ve spent most of my career with a discount grocery food retailer called Lidl. For the last 16 years, I’ve been working with that German giant. When I joined them in 2000, it was a known business model in Germany and in quite a few parts of Europe I would say, but it was not so well known in the UK or not so established. I worked through the ranks. This is very typical for the 3 or 4 discounters; they’re trying to grow their talent from within rather than bringing in many people from the external world. They’re trying to grow their people by making them appreciate how tough the working environment is in their stores: work as an area manager become a regional director.

At some point, I was lucky enough to run the UK, as CEO, from 2010 until the end of 2016. And in that time, we managed to grow that business, mainly through like-for-like growth, from about £2.5 Billion to around about £5 Billion, which was phenomenal at the time and I’m sure caused quite a few of the incumbents a few headaches.

{audio:0:01:51} That’s north of 14% growth per annum.

{audio:0:01:55} It was huge growth with all the associated problems as you can imagine: finding staff quickly enough, not having enough warehouse space. From an external point of view, it sounds like a phenomenal story, and trust me, the appetite internally would have been even bigger. But, sometimes, even though you’re working for a very big corporate business, it felt like a start-up business, with all the headaches associated. And maybe we could have squeezed out a few more percentage points market share. We just couldn’t find enough staff, we just couldn’t get enough warehouse space built quickly enough and a few other things held us back from growing faster.

{audio:0:02:45} That’s quite an incredible growth track record for a business operating in what was considered one of the most mature food retail markets in the world. So, Ronny, let’s talk a little about the business model and the core elements of that business model and strategy that allowed you to deliver this growth.

{audio:0:03:27} I think it’s worthwhile mentioning some key aspects of what differentiates the discounters, the Lidls of the world, from some of the established hypermarkets in Britain. One key aspect is a reduced range of assortment that is made available to the consumers. Traditional hypermarkets have everything between 20,000-40,000 products, SKUs (stock keeping units), on sale, whereas the discounters these days have 1,500-1,800 SKUs available. So a very, very reduced range of products but they would argue, this offering most comfortably serves what the majority of the British population or the German population needs for their weekly shopping and their weekly food consumption. Now what they do not do with the reduced range of SKUs obviously is that they do not serve specialty needs. They might have 5 or 6 different types of bread on sale where the traditional hypermarkets might have 40. With that additional offer and choice, an increase in price usually occurs and this is the main differentiator.

Aside from the SKU count, due to their lean operation, the discounters usually manage to offer the products at a discounted price of around about 15-20% below what you would have experienced at the hypermarkets. And clearly, over time, this resonates more and more with the customers. If they then learn to appreciate that the quality is by no means lower and that the discounters by no means allow themselves to put cheaper quality in because of a reduced price, but sometimes even putting better than the branded quality into their private label product. Over time, this is something that starts working more and more with the consumers. It took a little bit longer in the UK than it’s taken on the continent. But, as we can see, it starts working better and better with the British consumers as well.

{audio:0:05:49} This element of quality often arises as a misconception. So you’re suggesting that in this ‘good, better, best’ hierarchy that the hard discounters are really aiming at the better and best part of the tier. Is that fair?

{audio:0:06:06} With their standard private label product, they always aim for the top two tiers. Just take it from a very personal point of view, if you were to sell a product that was of a very poor quality, but you had it at a discounted price of 20 or 25%, this is something that would be communicated around and between the customers and consumers in Britain quite fast. People would have picked that up, that you actually can just buy a poorer quality at a cheaper price. But the opposite is the case. Both discounters, and other discounters in the world, are known to try and put in the same quality or better than branded quality into their private label products so as to not give any excuse to the customers not to come to their stores, but to say, “Listen, we’re saving on everything but the quality. We’re saving on having Santa Claus waving at you when you’re leaving the shop before Christmas or something like that, but we never save on the quality of the products.”

{audio:0:07:31} On the structure of the business that allows this price discount to be delivered to the customer, let’s get into on the level of the operating cost structure of the business, store formats and real estate.

{audio:0:07:46} From what I have seen in retail, and I’ve seen different types of retail proximity discount model hypermarkets, the operating format is the most well thought through business model from the customer all the way back to the product, or if you want to think of it the other way round, from the product all the way to the customer. What I mean by that is obviously everything is being lined up to satisfy the customer from the start. So the products that are being put on sale in a discounter will have to deliver much higher unit sales per store per week than they may have to do in a hypermarket. They just need to turn over much quicker than in some traditional retailers. But discounters will go into much greater detail in optimizing packaging, the size of the shelves, et cetera, to make everything very productive when working with the products, getting them onto the shelf and making sure the product can sell in the fastest way possible. So you will find that the product at the discounters probably sell 2 or 3 times faster than some of the products you can see in the traditional hypermarkets.

Because of the reduced SKU count, you obviously start with a much-reduced headcount in your headquarters. For 1,500 or 1,800 SKUs you need fewer buyers in your organization than you’d need to source 20,000 or 30,000 SKUs. You need less experts for packaging. You need less airtime in marketing, et cetera. All over there, this is where you save a lot of time, whether this is via people headcount, whether this is via commodities, which you are able to put back into a reduced price or an increased quality, if you like.

And then it goes down to the operating model, the physical store environment. The discounters are aiming to have a similar look and feel store everywhere across the country: ideally in a rectangular shape with the products positioned in every store in the same positions, if possible, so that when the products are flowing through supply chain, from the warehouse into the store, they are landing in the store in the most effective way. Then they can be worked in the most effective way. So that the pallets arriving are being carried through the store in exactly the same way in every single one of the 600-800 stores, and are worked onto the shelf in the most productive way. If you can set yourself up in that way, it becomes almost like producing the Ford model T, because you’re kind of operating like a conveyor belt all the time, moving the products onto the shelf. The only thing which interferes with that is the customer who picks the product up and goes to the check-out.

And, even there, the German discounters would have installed some very, very lean processes to make sure the customers are flowing through there in a very, very fast way. To give you an example: at the check-out you can spend a lot of time queuing just because the two or three people in front of you are offering the cashier some change. So you're paying £23.45 and everyone keeps looking for the 45p change. Lidl and Aldi would encourage their cashiers to always have enough change in their cash drawer – now, we all know we’re going a bit more towards card payment, but historically this was a big issue – if every second or third person looks for those 45 pence, that is an easy 1 or 2 minutes added for every second or third customer. This takes a lot of time if you have hundreds of thousands of customers running through your check-outs and it’s a lot of time you can save because your cashier can hand out the correct change much faster than you can find the 45p in your wallet. Not to mention that sometimes you only find 44p and you say, “I’m sorry, I only have 44p, I can’t give you the 45p,” which is even more time wasting if you like.

{audio:0:12:31} So I think this is illustrative of a mindset that’s pervasive in the business that we can get into now, having set out the fundamentals of the model. Let’s talk about the vision at play in these businesses and how that vision and mission are articulated by senior leadership.

{audio:0:07:31} Well, they obviously have a shared vision and mission statements but as a brief summary, what both retailers really believe in is that they can be relevant to every household across the country. What they’re trying to replicate with their offering is what the majority, let’s argue, 80% of people, consume 80% of the week. And, if you’re trying to build this up then you’ll find that they are satisfying that more and more. They are not going after one key clientele. They really believe that they can be relevant to the whole population, not for every need but for the majority of what people consume. And their shopping mission is to give the best quality to the customers at the lowest price, the best value for money proposition in the market, it’s as simple as that. Always at the lowest price but always aiming to be the best quality proposition. What I mean by that, of course, is that you need to compare like-for-like. I would not be sitting here saying that for every private label product that you buy at the discounter, that this is of a Marks and Spencer quality, but of course, there is a bit of a price differentiation.

{audio:0:14:29} Right, so it’s a really big story about price, price leadership and value. Then, on a practical level, how is that brought to life for staff? Or how is that communicated and how does that fit into an internal communication strategy?

{audio:0:14:49} Well, an internal communication strategy probably works best if the people who start working with you understand that from the very first day. I needed to learn that the hard way when I joined Lidl in 2000. When you work on the shop floor, you really want to make sure that every single way you work in a store – because this is where your core workforce is employed – that every single way that you work and walk is of an effective and efficient nature. So the people in the store learn to think about cost in the way they operate the store right from the very start. They learn to walk at a pace which would probably be 2-3 times faster compared to the hypermarkets. When you watch the people in some hypermarkets, it just seems to me that the people in the discounters walk faster and work faster than the people in some of those. It’s the DNA that is being communicated to you: that this is a job which every day consists of running a little marathon in a store. You are exhausted after a day but if you push yourself harder in those stores, you get rewarded, I would argue. I believe the best way of communicating this is that what they’re doing is living and breathing the discount idea. One fundamental of that is saving costs in the way you operate a store and the best way an employee can do that is to work faster or work efficiently, to throw less away, to think. To make this tangible, if you’re going to pick something up from a warehouse, think about what you could take on your way into the warehouse so that you’re making your journey into the warehouse useful whilst you’re picking something up to go put it back on the shop floor. This is ingrained into what people get taught when they start with the discounters to make sure that every single way, no matter where you go, where you were, what you do is of an efficient nature because this ultimately resonates in a lower percentage personnel cost, which is the key advantage both retailers have in their operation over some hypermarkets: a 30-40%, sometimes 50% lower, personnel cost per store than what the established players have.

{audio:0:17:35} Right, so there’s this extent to which this focus on cost is embedded in the DNA of the business and trained into the employees. How do the harder incentives match up with that to really drive that reality into behavior on a daily basis?

{audio:0:17:57} The incentive scheme at Lidl is not a very complicated system. It’s a very easy incentive system. You’re paid top wages – and that’s probably the same for Aldi – within the industry sector. If not the top one, you’re always in the top 3. But you’re being asked to deliver top performance every single day. You want to qualify for Champions League football every single day by the way you perform. And quite simply, the discounters will scrutinize hard and look for the non-performers, for the people who relegate. They will try to give them a chance, to see if some bad performances are maybe down to a misunderstanding in procedures, maybe see if people could do some other jobs and still perform at an acceptable level. But let’s make no mistake here, the people who do not start performing and drag the store performance down, and with that the personnel cost of that store up, will at some point have to leave the business, because they are not performing to the high level of efficiency or speed, whatever you want to call it, that they need to keep the business model running.

{audio:0:19:37} So the carrot of industry leading wages and the stick of a rigorous approach to talent management and a means of relegating underperformers. Is that fair in a nutshell?

{audio:0:19:52} What I would say is people at the discounters probably get feedback about their performance much more often and in a much more straight in the face way. So, in a Lidl and in an Aldi, you probably get to hear once a week or at least once a month whether you’re doing well or not and what you’re doing and you don’t wait for your annual review and to see if you’ve received a bonus.

{audio:0:20:21} And what would one of those conversations look like?

{audio:0:20:24} One of the conversations would be: if I was your store manager and you were let’s say an employee who has potentially been working with the fruit and veg pallets today, then Lidl and Aldi would have calculated a certain amount of minutes of how long it takes on a high aiming average to work such pallets. Let’s argue it should take 45 minutes for a pallet of fruit and veg. Let’s say you have 3 pallets there, you can calculate how long it should take the employee to work those 3 pallets. So, if I, the store manager, was to pick up that after 3 hours you still have not managed to work those 3 pallets – I’m not arguing even 5 minutes or something here, but I’m arguing that you’ve potentially wasted 45 minutes because you have spent an extra 15 minutes per pallet or more – then I would come to you and say: “What were the difficulties today? Were the pallets unstable? What has caused you to take that long on it?” And I would have to be fair with you to find out whether you’ve been called to the checkout on many occasions, which obviously wouldn't have enabled you to work those pallets. But, if there wasn’t any fair reason, I would have to point it out to you and say, “Listen, other people in the store manage to get the pallet to be worked in 45 minutes and can you please try to look to get the pallets worked a little bit faster.” And if you have that ingrained in the DNA that you find out if someone struggles for certain reasons, you’re aiming to educate the person to the best practice level, but you do that on a daily basis and you don’t wait for a year to come back and then to say, after a year, “Oh, we’ve found out that you always work the fruit and veg pallets at the lowest pace.” Then you’ve wasted a whole year. Whereas the discounters would have it in their DNA to have that conversation on a daily basis. And everyone has to look at that on a daily basis.

Now, let’s be honest, this isn’t a conversation everyone wants to have: not the people who receive the feedback, nor the people who have to give the feedback, because it’s not in everyone’s DNA to confront people with underperformance. But this is something the discounters are very good at. It particularly suits the Germans because they just take it and try to improve. But it’s also got to be said that the people are encouraged to educate employees on how to get better and to be realistic about what’s achievable. If you were to say, “If you could just please work the fruit and veg pallets in 15 minutes,” that wouldn't be possible. The targets given are actually measured times that well-performing stores achieve. This isn’t something picked out of the air. This is taking targets from stores where in the best performance they could probably work such pallets in 35 minutes. You take an achievable target and you try to do well in encouraging your whole workforce to make sure this target is achieved and you do not wait until the end of the year for this. So the incentive is, keep your job, keep getting a good salary, potentially getting a wage increase in most years, but you’ve got to keep performing well. This isn’t just average and going down, this is keeping with the average and maybe exceeding the average.

{audio:0:24:17} On compensation for star performers, is there an important or meaningful variable compensation dimension?

{audio:0:24:26} No, there’s no variable compensation, not for the store assistant all the way up to the CEO. If you take back what I’ve just said that people are incentivized by staying with a very successfully developing business and – this has got to be said – if you do perform, you very often get the chance to progress within your career. That is an incentive you know. How many grocery retailers can seriously talk about growth in the UK these days? Probably only one or two in bricks and mortar and maybe one in online. So, for all the others, it’s more or less a question about reducing workforce. So with the discounters, you really have a realistic and fair chance to still have a very good career.

{audio:0:25:33} In terms of access to talent, you mentioned the importance of the DNA and the importance of these cultural norms and really living them, what happens when someone from a mainline retailer comes into the business? Is that at all a practice or seen much, where employees from incumbents are hired into these businesses?

{audio:0:25:55} It does happen, but maybe in only 10 or 20% of the cases. And, obviously, it wouldn’t be fair to put a stigma on it. For most people joining from some of the incumbents, at least this is the case for the UK, their experience was in working in a completely different environment, you could call it a less ‘straight’ acting business model. Obviously, as I’ve just explained, you would be trained to change from a incentivized model of performing across a year and maybe getting 30-40% bonuses, rather than an environment where you need to perform every single day and where you’re being told straight to your face that certain things are not working. I would argue that the people are used to a slower work pace and you have to add 40 or 50% speed in a day-to-day routine and sometimes maybe also less ability to decide for yourself. The discounters are, let’s say, stronger because they have lean processes and they operate in a way where people are employed to execute rather than to think about the processes in every store individually. This is sometimes different in the hypermarkets where processes are defined individually in every store it seems. The people have to adjust to a business model when coming from the incumbents, where you just have to be good at execution if you were to run a store. The higher up you go, you have to be a people manager but you don’t have to be a manager, let’s say, in a way that means you have to do nice presentations or something like that, where you have to be the best presenting person. So you have to be a people manager within the stores or an area manager with many store managers. That’s something you have to do well but you don’t have to come up with the greatest ideas on the planet yourself and that’s a different type of demand. Saying that, for the people who newly join, officially you need that talent. And that’s something I felt the discounters are struggling with as well because of course, you are limiting the ability for talent who bring intellectual skills with them. If you’re limiting their ability to decide for themselves and develop new ideas themselves then of course at some point they might get frustrated and say “Listen, I don’t just want to execute, I sometimes want to develop and have an impact on the development of that brand as well,” which I’m sure is sometimes more the case with the hypermarkets.

{audio:0:29:22} Were there any substantial evolutions in the way the business was operated while you were in a leadership position or throughout your career in the business in the UK?

{audio:0:29:30} If you take evolution in terms of becoming more relevant to customers then there’s constant evolution. I would argue that the more points you change in the interest of the customer, the more you actually disrupt the other competitors. One major point might be that in 2010, Lidl was selling standard loaves in Britain, we didn’t have any fresh bakery in store. I’m not even talking about from scratch, we just didn’t have any fresh-baked bread in store. We’ve rolled that out and with that alone we’ve had for 2 or 3 years, year on year, every year between 15 to 20% like-for-like in customer numbers just due to the installation of some ovens, some new lines. It just meant that customers could come to Lidl stores and buy fresh croissants and other fresh products, like baguettes for example, in the morning, which they were usually and traditionally going to some of the hypermarkets for.

{audio:0:30:40} Right, so innovation in the name of the customer is actually commonplace, you’d suggest?

{audio:0:30:48} To just round off a couple of quick points before moving into a few protagonist based questions and wrapping up. We spoke about retention, we spoke about the appeal of working within a fast-growing business and being paid industry leading wages, could we round off the topic on talent acquisition and ongoing training. Could you explain the philosophy and practice of leadership development and ongoing training for employees as well as the acquisition component?

{audio:0:31:30} I’ll start with the acquisition component, which for everyone in retail is not the easiest thing. Retail is not the most appealing sector. These days, people would much rather work in an office environment. You know when you’re going to start your work in an office, you usually know when you’re going to leave. You’re not going to get your hands dirty. You’re not going to cut your fingers. You’re not going to potentially have interactions with sometimes some not so friendly customers. Let’s be honest, that’s not changed over the years. So the competition for talent between different sectors is definitely there. The advantage grocery retail in particular has got is that people will always need food. And that’s going to stay that way. This is not going to ever collapse by 20 or 25% year on year or that people will consume 20% less. It maybe shifts from one retailer to another but it’s going to stay. So the jobs in the retail sector in total numbers are probably roughly going to stay the same, the more efficient and the more discount it goes, let’s say there are going to be less jobs per pound spent potentially.

Talent acquisition was also not easy for Lidl for the reason I’ve mentioned, that people know that this is a tough environment and you have to work very, very hard but – and this is similar to my reason when I joined – people get rewarded very well. You’re coming fresh from university, if you want to become an area manager, you’re pretty quickly being offered some responsibility for some stores and some store managers. And with that starts what is key to the discounters, Aldi and Lidl: a very rigorous training regime. It starts with store assistants. There are very dedicated training plans all the way from a store assistant, to a deputy store manager, to a store manager, to an area manager, to a sales manager and so on. Both retailers invest hundreds of thousands of hours every year in training and constantly re-educating their employees in updated procedures or for new recruits who’ve started with the businesses in how to act correctly in accordance with the procedures.

If they found a procedure which they want to apply in all their 10,000 stores, then the difficulty is obviously how do you get every employee to understand and execute in exactly the same way. Because of that, they keep investing a lot of hours in training and raise the bar every year in training. So the employees would have a constant training regime of things to happen, where they’re being educated on new things but also re-trained on already established procedures. If you were to go through the ranks, if you were to come from university then one of the first jobs could be an area manager and you usually only get your area after, let’s say, 6-12 months, where there was a very dedicated training plan where you would run some stores yourself. So you’re trained in every aspect of the jobs of those who you might lead in the future. So you would never judge a store manager of underperformance if you’ve not done the job better yourself. So the people go through tough times coming from university and again that might not be so appealing to some people.

But to others, it just means it gives you a very nice basis and gives you more comfort when having a discussion of underperformance with your store managers in the future. And if you were to go through the ranks, you would constantly be moved between certain areas, between areas of responsibility, with the aim to educate the whole workforce in a way that you’ll never be in a position where you are lacking talent in any sector. So it could mean that an area manager is being asked to go into a warehouse and become a section manager in a warehouse, a section manager can become an area manager, a store manager could go into a warehouse to become a supervisor there, et cetera.

This is a constant movement left to right, right to left, the further out you go, this could involve people being moved across the country, from one country to another, all with the aim to train people up cross-departmentally. What that means is that you achieve a better skilled workforce who have more knowledge and understanding of the organization from different angles rather than just people from sales who know everything about sales but don’t have an idea about the warehouse or the logistics or the expansion side of things. They really put a lot of time in it, a lot of money in it. Sometimes you have to say this is being forced on people, saying, “If you do not move to another country, if you do not move into another position, we cannot guarantee you a career.”

But this is made clear to people right from when they start: that this is fundamental to creating a better skilled workforce who understand more about the interlinks of departments and it reduces the hurdles of silos. If everyone was to understand what is a fairly simple operating model a little bit better, you can argue that people will argue a little bit less between themselves because they’ve all been in a different pair of shoes before and therefore understand what their counterpart is going through when they’re facing some difficulties.

{audio:0:38:07} Looking at the incumbents in the UK over the last few years, there’s been store footprint rationalizations, range rationalizations, I could go on. But I’d like to ask you, as we approach the end of our discussion, if I were the CEO of an incumbent, what aspects of the culture that you’ve described, which is so powerful in driving the discount model and the performance they’ve achieved, what aspects can I adopt, should I adopt?

{audio:0:38:47} I think the one thing you can adopt is what I’ve argued the people joining Aldi or Lidl adopted: the cost DNA. If you never start applying that in your organization, that people are more cost conscious, then people will just treat the money, i.e. the way they work, always as an external, as an outsider. And they never feel the money spent, the slower they work. In that sense, they almost cheat the business. But this is something that will take an easy 5, 10, 15 years until it resonates in such a large organization. So this will take generations or more of people who have to leave those business, but I would argue you had better start applying that at some point. What I mean by that is simple things like: what till speed do cashiers work at in one of the big four supermarkets? How many items per minute are being scanned at a discounter versus Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons or any other supermarket? There’s no reason why those cashiers should scan at a lower rate. The people shopping in the big four supermarkets should have a right to be served in exactly that same speedy way as they’re being served in the discounter, I would argue. And you will have to put the measures in now. You will not hit the rates of the discounters immediately and maybe you never will, but you will be able to get closer, step by step, over time. And if you don’t start, it will only go one way: it will get slower and slower if you never focus on those things.

So, cost is something I definitely would argue you should put more emphasis on in your daily operation, and reducing the silos. The other big thing, I believe, is a range rationalization and defining how big hypermarkets can be relevant in the future again. There is a general trend towards more supply and demand in the world, consumers want to have trips that are shorter and more often to grocery retailers. This contradicts the big footprint of the hypermarkets and you’ll have to find a way to make those big food halls more interesting again or you need to give customers a reason to come to them again. Rather than shopping in closer vicinity grocers, proximity retailers or discounters.

{audio:0:41:46} So managing cost, managing range, managing the store footprint, these are all possible. What have you found is really the hardest to translate from the discounter model to an incumbent or one of these famous big four in the UK?

{audio:0:42:04} It’s that first point about cost consciousness. But this is also the reason why I’m putting that first one to you to start with because I know it will take the longest. People are used to not thinking that way in the hypermarkets. There are silos between supply chain and between buying and commercial and retail worlds where people are just optimizing their own departments. But the domino pieces, as I call them, are being perfectly put in line in the discounter’s in-store operation.

So if you tip the first one, the last one is going to fall. Some of the big hypermarkets have some golden looking domino pieces and nice apps and whatever but the domino pieces are not in line, and they’re not going to all fall in line in terms of the supply chain and making sure you’re running an efficient operation. This is something which I believe that hypermarkets have gone away from in their business model because of them growing bigger and bigger. This is one of the first things to start with, but this is also one of the most difficult ones.

Imagine you have a cashier who has served for 20 years in one of the big hypermarkets and he or she has never had any conversation about how fast he or she scans the items over the checkout. And all of a sudden you come and you say, “You need to scan faster.” They’ll just look at you and be gobsmacked and say, “What?” It’s almost as though you brought your kids up in a way where you’ve never taught them to clean their shoes and one day you ask them to and they’ll say, “What do you mean you want me to clean my shoes?” I know it’s maybe a weird comparison, but you have a huge workforce in those organizations who’ve been brought up with a much less efficiency-orientated nature than what the discounters have; and those kind of things will have to change dramatically to come even close to the cost levels of the discounters.

Lidl and Hard Discounter Culture

The central aspects of the hard discounter business model that distinguishes it from the set up of mainstream retailers (competitive positioning, pricing, format & real estate strategy, operating cost structure & labour productivity, supply chain & logistics)

The principles of organizational culture by which a hard discounter like Lidl is run and how these differ from mainstream retailers (incentives and company values, talent acquisition and retention)

The leadership and cultural values at hard discounters that contribute to discounter success that are applicable to larger incumbent retailers

Lidl and Hard Discounter Culture

Former CEO, Lidl UK

inpractise.com/articles/lidl-discounter-culture

Why is this interview interesting?

Executive Bio

Ronny Gottschlich

Former CEO, Lidl UK

Interview Transcript

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