About

What are the most important transactions, litigations or other major projects that you have been involved in during the last year?

Responding to the pandemic and preparing for Brexit aside, our most significant project in 2020 was the renewal of our main trading agreement with our independent retailers – something that I initiated not long after taking the position.

We have 1,500 independent retailers and, in my view, the core agreement required updating to better reflect the working relationship between Costcutter and independent retailers. The pre-2020 contract had been drafted with a view to resolving disputes rather than facilitating a productive relationship. Rather than just re-draft, I facilitated a ‘work-out’ event with internal colleagues and external advisers. We mapped the independent retailer’s journey from the first contact, through contracting with Costcutter and onboarding, the relationship during the contract term, and then finally renewal or exit. The aim was to understand the end-to-end relationship and how value flows or does not flow from that relationship due to mistakes, delays, and bottlenecks.

With the insights we gained, we were better able to prioritise what was important to retailers and to ourselves to make things work better. We subsequently simplified, developed or redesigned procedures, removed unnecessary admin and organised internal communication channels to improve workflow. This was all done through the lens of our purpose: ‘helping independent retailers thrive’. By doing things differently, we have removed risk where feasible, and the simplification and efficiencies gained have helped us to maximise opportunities for both Costcutter and its independent retailers.

What were the main difficulties your company faced during the initial Covid lockdown?

Independent retailers operate the vast majority of our stores, so day-to-day retail is their business. We do not control our independent retailers, but as part of our business support, our role is to provide clear and actionable guidance. There are inherent challenges with this approach during normal times, but the pandemic amplified these.

We have retailers and colleagues who were dealing with members of the public in a changing and uncertain climate, so it was essential to put all related guidance into an easily digestible format. For us, it was about understanding the 5pm government press conferences, working out what it meant for our company-owned stores and independent retailers, and then translating everything into actionable and straightforward terms that evening so the businesses could understand what was needed for the day ahead.

Costcutter was one of the first to support social distancing measures, alongside facilitating access to PPE providers and suppliers of safety measures such as protective screens to their independent retailers.

Did your company have a surge in business during the pandemic? If so, how did you adapt and what were the main legal implications of this?

The pandemic caused a shift in consumer behaviour, with increased demand into the convenience channel taking business from the big multiples. This created an unprecedented demand on supply chains.

Costcutter was also the only symbol group retailer to sign up for the “Feed the Nation” campaign. The campaign, backed by twelve retailers, urged customers not to panic after people started buying high quantities of items as the pandemic worsened.

Costcutter has a centrally delivered range of products through its supply agreement with Co-op and Nisa and direct store supplies. It was essential to ensure that everyone got a fair share of supply and worked hard to ensure that we offered alternatives. Our independent retailers, by nature, are entrepreneurial and were agile in finding solutions as well.

Has working from home inspired any innovation in terms of the way you or your team work? Are there any standout product or tech you now use that you never did before?

Pre-pandemic, we had already begun to look at how we collaborated and whether remote working could be better used to achieve higher productivity and a healthier work-life balance.

The first lockdown, with its increased workload and mandatory remote working, undoubtedly accelerated our thinking. The thinking we had already begun, however, was invaluable. We held tight to the strategy that repetitive admin work that doesn’t require legal training must be automated if at all possible. This has freed my legal team to focus on better quality work that is unpredictable and requires the critical thinking, experience and knowledge of trained lawyers.

To deliver this automation, we have invested heavily in HighQ and use it extensively as a collaboration tool, a single point of truth, and to automate workflows. We have also developed the use of HighQ in part with our external law firms to reduce costs. We have collaborated to standardise instructions on low-level work and automatically making available a package of supporting information and documentation.

How did your team’s approach – to both working habits and the legal tasks at hand – differ or adapt from the first lockdown to the second and third? What have been the main lessons learned?

As a food retail business, our workload increased greatly in the first lockdown and we had the obvious challenges of moving to remote working and juggling homeschooling while dealing with an increase in queries from colleagues across the business.

After the initial move to remote working, we have continued to look for incremental improvements, focusing on such things as meeting cadence, balancing the need to stay connected and the risk of Zoom-burnout. Work was regularly reviewed and distributed across the team to help with childcare responsibilities when team members contended with homeschooling.

We seized some unique opportunities as a result of the first lockdown. One of our law firms furloughed some of their trainees, so we agreed to a vastly reduced secondment rate for a couple of trainees. It was a win for the firm who was otherwise unable to provide enough work for the trainees, and a win for the trainees who were eager to continue their training without interruption. It was also a win for Costcutter as we had a cost-effective additional resource during a critical period.

Likewise, we seized the opportunity to bring an Australian-qualified lawyer living in Barcelona into the team on a project basis. She has brought a tremendous amount of value to the team and the broader business. Had we not been 100% remote working, we probably would not have been open to that way of working. It has been a great success, and we will certainly be open to similar opportunities in the future.