And Tim Waterstone? The 66-year-old retailer, founder of the bookshop chain that bears his name, has never been ambivalent about it. He now chairs Chelsea Stores, the company behind Early Learning Centre and Daisy & Tom, but aches, it seems, to get his bookshops back from their current owner, HMV.
Unfinished business? “Yes, yes, I suppose it is,” sighs Waterstone.
Just look at the history. He founded Waterstone’s in 1982, sold it to WH Smith in 1993, bought it back — with HMV — in 1998, merging it with Dillons, then parted company with HMV in 2001, and since has made it plain, whenever asked, that he doesn't like the way the book chain is run. But he cannot do anything about it.
HMV's poor results this month — including a fall in sales at Waterstone’s — and the resignation of chief executive Alan Giles, were more salt in the wound. “Giles is an extraordinarily nice man,” says Waterstone in his plummy tones. “He was just wrong.”
Wrong in the way he centralised the book operation, wrong in the sort of appointments he made to run the chain, wrong in the way he allowed the stores to chase the mass-market — Waterstone could go on.
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He details recent profit and market-share figures for the book chain, compares them with the figures projected in 1997. This is more than a sentimental interest.
Sitting in the central London boardroom of Chelsea Stores, just off the Strand, Waterstone looks exasperated. He is also frustrated by endlessly being asked to account for something that bears his name but is no longer under his control. It just niggles under the skin.
“It happens every day, people ask me about Waterstone’s, about my shops. I’ve stopped correcting them, I just let the conversation run. I take the compliments and the brickbats,” he says.
Perhaps he is mellowing with age — or perhaps not. In the past, Waterstone has often been too blunt for his own good during a topsy-turvy career. He left Allied Breweries, his first job, after a nervous breakdown. He was later sacked by WH Smith before setting up Waterstone’s.
He then alienated many in his three-year stint as chairman of HMV — from 1998 to 2001 — with his constant chivvying of Waterstone’s management in the press. His frankness has not always won him friends.
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Yet that’s his character. Big, bald and genial, but with a passionate edge underneath, Waterstone has always been happy to dissect his entrepreneurial career, his marriages (three, producing eight children), and his drive to get things right.
He even has a business book out this month, Swimming Against The Stream, giving his tips on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Waterstone is an English literature graduate and frequent conference speaker, so not surprisingly, it is a fluent read, though not as revealing as a full memoir could have been, for he is still fizzing with indignation about people who get it wrong.
Like the newspaper columnist who recently wrote that he underpaid staff at Waterstone’s. Don’t get him started. He says he tracked down the columnist in the Garrick Club — “not what you are supposed to do there” — and had it out with him.
“I said, ‘What the hell did you write that for?’ He said sorry, but it was really irresponsible. For God’s sake, you don’t earn in bookselling what you earn in the City, but staff weren’t underpaid.” (Others who worked for him suggest pay only started to look miserly when HMV “corporatised” the chain.) If nothing else, Waterstone is a man of conviction. It underpinned his drive in taking Waterstone’s from a one-shop start-up to a chain of 80 sites before WH Smith made him an offer he couldn’t refuse — £47m, of which Waterstone got 25% — first time round.
It has also driven him on, building up Chelsea Stores. First he founded Daisy & Tom — which sells children’s clothes, shoes, toys and books — then he bought in the Early Learning Centre toyshop chain, backed by venture capital, in a £62m deal in 2004.
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Before that he failed in a bid for Hamleys, and failed in earlier bids for Early Learning Centre. He has also, in his time, tried to bid for WH Smith, and been linked with a host of other possible transactions.
Those who have done business with him suggest he is a deal junkie, “with an ego the size of a planet”, forever excited about possibilities. It is tougher on colleagues, who rarely know where his focus will turn next.
He shrugs when I put it to him that he was not a loyal chairman to Giles when they worked at HMV.
“Was I difficult? Yes, but he was wrong and history has vindicated me.” The book retailer’s profit now, he points out, is hardly bigger than it was in 1998.
Likewise, Nigel Robertson, his chief executive at Chelsea Stores, laughs when I ask if Waterstone is easy to work with. “Tim is stubborn and if he wants to get something, he refuses to see obstacles. That’s the entrepreneurial character. But I really like him.”
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Waterstone is certainly a believer in upmarket retailing. He is helping to revive the opulent feel of the Early Learning Centre’s 220 shops — cost-squeezed by previous private-equity owners — and he is convinced that Waterstone’s will only prosper if it shuns the mass market and gives its store managers more control over what to sell.
And the conviction that big corporatism dulls choice makes him bitterly opposed to the proposed merger of Waterstone’s with Ottakar’s, currently being considered by the Office of Fair Trading. Waterstone’s, he says, needs competition to keep it up to the mark.
“And this market really matters. Waterstone’s does more for the day-to-day cultural life of the nation than perhaps anything or anyone else.”
Really? It seems an extreme claim, but aggressive self-confidence is part of his style. He set up his original bookshop chain, an idea he had touted first to WH Smith, motivated more by gut feel than rational logic.
And many are prepared to back that to the hilt — Christopher Thomson, press-shy head of the Scottish publisher DC Thomson, is a regular investor. Waterstone even dedicated his new book to him.
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The Scottish connection links neatly with Waterstone’s roots. He was born in Glasgow, the third child of an English tea planter, but has spent most of his life, like his siblings, outside Scotland. Elder brother David went on to head the Welsh Development Agency; his sister Wendy became a doctor in Canada.
His parents, says Waterstone, thought he would be the least able of the three. “But I always felt a winner, to be honest.” He worked in India after university, then came back to Britain to join Allied, where he started in marketing as “bag-carrier” for Derrick Holden-Brown (later chairman and chief executive), “a total hero of mine”.
His career, however, hit the buffers when his first marriage collapsed and he suffered a breakdown. “Total wipe-out. Took me six months to get back to the working world, but it never dented the confidence.”
He left Allied and joined WH Smith, lured more by the pay than the company. “I profoundly disliked Smiths but I had God-knows how many children and was addicted to the income,” he says. He moved to America for the firm, then had a bust-up when results there slumped.
“They fired me. The chairman said, ‘I don’t care what you do now but it’d be better if you didn’t open any bookshops’. I had already advocated it to them — from that moment I knew I was going to do it.”
He never looked back. His early employees describe him as a terrific leader, incentivising store managers on sales, and allowing each to tailor their shop to local tastes.
“He was almost evangelical,” says Andrew Stilwell, who now manages the London Review Bookshop. “He encouraged all of us to be independent bookshops and good businessmen.”
Waterstone also adored it, and yet he sold out. Why? “Because,” he says, “we had shareholders who wanted out, and I had another broken marriage.”
Since then he has been in and out of Waterstone’s again, making yet more money. He is now happily married to wife No3, a 41-year-old television producer, and lives comfortably in London’s swanky Holland Park. He is helping to make Chelsea Stores a success but still, you sense, there is that “unfinished business”.
Will he try to buy Waterstone’s back again? He hums and haws, shifting his big body uneasily, before saying: “If the opportunity presented itself, yes, I would like to go for it.”
Whether his backers at Chelsea Stores have it on their agenda is another matter. But Waterstone, like many entrepreneurs, is not the sort to ask permission. He created Waterstone’s, he loves the chain, it’s his name above the door. Don't count him out just yet.
Vital statistics
Born: May 30, 1939
Marital status: married three times, with eight children
School: Tonbridge
University: St Catharine’s, Cambridge
First job: broker in India
Salary package: £260,000
Home: Holland Park, London
Car: black Mercedes S320
Favourite book: The End of the Affair, by Graham Green
Favourite music: Elgar
Favourite film: Annie Hall, by Woody Allen
Favourite gadget: e-mail
Last holiday: Crete
Interests: reading
Tim Waterstone's working day
THE Chelsea Stores chairman wakes at 6.30 most mornings. He drops his youngest child at school on the way to Chelsea Stores’ head office near Charing Cross.
At work, Tim Waterstone will look over a host of matters. “Branch performance, range performance, size of overhead, how we can get the gross margin up — all the usual things. Nigel Robertson runs the firm but he talks to me all the time.”
Waterstone entertains contacts for lunch at Orso in Covent Garden. He is frequently approached by bankers and retailers with possible deals.
He rarely works late in the evening, but still attends book-trade functions. He likes journalists describing him as a “self-styled maverick”, though he adds: “I never know where they get that from”.
Working space
TIM WATERSTONE works from a plain office at Chelsea Stores’ base on the second floor of a refurbished block in Buckingham Street, off London’s Strand.
The white room is virtually anonymous, with not a hint of anything personal — only three chairs, a modern desk, a computer, and cabinets with files. There is nothing on the walls, no books visible, nor any products from Daisy & Tom or Early Learning Centre — they are on the display in the boardroom round the corner.
Beyond his room, an open-plan office runs through to a view of the Embankment gardens, and the river Thames beyond. His office, on the other hand, overlooks a block of mansion flats, many of which have a clear view of Waterstone at work. “As you can see, I didn’t take the river-view suite,” says Waterstone, with a droll laugh.