Naked Wines: A Testing Culture

In terms of building that from the start, you mentioned how a couple of things with Naked, where you all had equity, so that created a culture of, we’re all aligned. Is there anything else that you designed, from the beginning, to make sure that you could naturally be the leader, to begin with?

There had to be an element of, we’re in this together and this isn’t a situation where different people are going to get different rewards out of it. Everybody is going to be treated fairly. Part of that is, you’ve just got to work bloody hard and people have got to see that you’re in it together. Part of it is, when it comes to Christmas and the shit hits the fan and the call center or the warehouse hits something, the management team roll their sleeves up and come and join the call center or go and pick wine in the warehouse and are not just sitting, twiddling their thumbs and saying, you guys aren’t doing a good enough job. We used to have a thing where, if there was a very difficult customer on the phone, anybody could just send the customer to me. We wanted people on the front line to know we were never asking them to do something that we weren’t prepared to do, as well.

The final piece was, the testing culture, where there were a bunch of really good ideas that were implemented, that came directly out of customer-facing roles, like the call center. That was because, firstly, we systematically collected those ideas and got opinions from other people, from their colleagues, as to which of these ideas people really believed in. But then we tested a lot of them. If we were implementing something that wasn’t just something done at face value, to go, ooh, aren’t we a lovely, inclusive employer. It was because we’d tested it and measured that it actually worked and so we were implementing it sincerely.

When people can see that the route to the top is a meritocracy, that their ideas are taken seriously, their concerns are taken seriously, and the people at the top are prepared to muck in and help, when things get tough, you don’t need to do much more than that. Particularly, you don’t need value statements or any of that, which we never managed to nail, successfully. It was more just a case of, we are in this together.