These sorts of ‘jollies’ were commonplace in the 1990s, but this one became a transformative experience, because Biltcliffe saw a device that would eventually evolve into the e-reader of today.

The former graduate trainee went back to his then bosses at BPC and told them that their world was going to change fundamentally, and that they needed to develop electronic catalogues and the like. However, after a year, they told him they weren’t going to pursue it.

So in the mid 1990s, Biltcliffe left BPC with £10,000 in the bank and freelanced as a print sales agent for a year, while continuing to work on key BPC accounts.

In that first year of going it alone Biltcliffe had another epiphany that led him to set up, in 1996, the lovechild of Marxist capitalism and print management: Webmart. 

Now on the verge of leaving its teenage years behind it, the £28m, multi-site print management business, focused on “truly expert consultancy”, is poised for the next stage in its development: the ‘pioneer years’, complete with themed meeting room (see image above).

While the destination and route will be decided by the management team, as Biltcliffe looks to take a step back and focus on his next start-up, if the past 18 years are anything to go by, the firm’s ecosystem of staff, suppliers and customers are in for an interesting ride.

Darryl Danielli Can you explain Marxist capitalism to me?

Simon Biltcliffe Well, to put it simply, you use capitalist principles, which everyone is very comfortable with in this market, but you have this concept of ‘enough’. That’s what capitalism on its own doesn’t have, which is why we have the world we do. So you decide what is enough for you personally and what’s enough for the business to give it stability and enable you to reinvest, and then you share all of the surplus with the team. All Marxism says is that, basically, those that create the wealth should get a fair share back. Happy fucking days.

Steady! Just to warn you, a couple of our readers might be of a sensitive persuasion, so feel free to turn the air blue – but we’re not going to print it all.

I seem to use swearing unwittingly as a form of emphasis when speaking, rather like italics or underlining in an email would be used. The more passionate I am about the subject, the more it happens.

Fair enough. We’ll take it as read that you’re passionate about print. I’ll just ask the readers to use their own imaginations – I might even run a competition so that they can guess how many times you swear in the interview. Getting back to the model, though, it sounds like common sense, but it’s fairly radical surely?

Not really. Basically, when you get enough on a personal level and enough on a business level, then you have this beautiful, wonderful entity sitting there gleaming and shining to create unlimited opportunity for all.

You mean the staff?

In some respects, but also customers and suppliers. We want to create a sustainable ecosystem for all.

That sounds great, but that has to be driven by you. What happens if you want to take a step back from the business?

I certainly think, on how we got to where we are, that my personality had an impact. But where we go from here will very much be the other way around – the team will take the business forward.

That’s interesting, but how will it evolve? Because handing over some of the responsibility of a business that you created is a lot of people’s worst nightmare?

Absolutely. I can understand that. But we’re doing that right here, right now. The reason that this room we’re in is called the Pioneers’ Room is because we wanted to set a new course for the business, and history is one of the things I love. So I use the analogy of the great explorers of the 1500s and 1600s, because back then there were masses of opportunities. But they were physical ones; these people went out and discovered new worlds. So what I’ve done to frame it for the leadership team, is quite literally frame it for them – I’ve put their heads on pictures of explorers all around the room. These are the Webmart pioneers of the future.

But presumably that’s a risk and is only possible because of what you have achieved?

Of course it’s a risk, but we’ve always done that – it’s cause and effect. We’ve always factored a high degree of uncertainty into the way the business has been set up – but we have financial integrity as a countermeasure. In a Maslovian hierarchy, if you haven’t got security then you have no chance of getting the best out of people. So the first priority is making sure that we’re not betting the farm financially. Because in our ecosystem we’ve got 257 people – in terms of employees and their families – and I’m not going to risk that.

How many employees have you got then?

47.

So when did you work out that it all adds up to 257?

I know the team, I know the people and I know everything about them – it’s a family in the best sense. We have this paternalistic view of people, rather than seeing them as just a unit of manufacture or profit. There’s a strong correlation between the more we pay people then the better they perform, so why don’t we pay people more? The average income within Webmart is £73,000 and the average age is under 30 – that isn’t the conventional world of print.

But presumably pay has to be related to performance? You can’t just throw money at people and all of sudden they become perfect employees?

Well, no, but it’s cause and effect. You build a business that creates value and then you attract the right behaviours. And the more individuals deliver to the team, the more they get back. It’s not driven by individual performance though, it’s about team performance. That was illustrated by the World Cup: you can have gifted individuals, but it’s teams that win. This isn’t just glib words, it’s embedded in every bit of DNA of Webmart – KPIs, performance management, all the accountability and responsibility that disseminates through the business.

But isn’t there a danger that you inadvertently create a ‘boiler room’ environment that makes it hard to maintain a team ethos?

No, because transparency of performance at an individual level and business level is an incredibly valuable thing. We have screens throughout the office that show where we are in terms of individual and team performance that are updated in real time. We even measure happiness in the business every day. We also do a survey on the most influential people in Webmart, where everybody scores everybody else – so you can mark the influence of each person. These are the people who are most appreciated in the business.

And how often do you do that?

Twice a year, and that’s fed into their review. It’s not about how well they perform in terms of their KPIs, we have dashboards for that anyway, but how much of a team player they are. I can see who has submitted information about who and what the comments were about that person, but not what one individual has said about another – that’s encoded in the software and encrypted. It’s then indexed dynamically against the average. None of the criteria are about making money, they’re about things like how well someone shares knowledge, the reliability of work, teamwork and how they problem solve with people, perception of their self motivation, friendliness, acceptance of new people, communication effectiveness, how well they take a joke, working above the call of duty, attention to detail, passion for Webmart, the trust you have in them, attention to detail...

Looking at your scores, it seems your attention to detail needs a little work...

I tell you what, I try every time, but it’s always that, and effective communication, I score badly on. You know what though, I’m doing my best – I can’t do any more.

Do you do psychometric testing?

Yes we do, when people join.

Then you know that if everyone scored brilliantly in every area you would probably have a dysfunctional team?

Absolutely. There are people here whose attention to detail is off the chart. We then index that against the average, which we feed back into the review, and also against how that person scored themselves. So if you take me, that means that if I was being reviewed then the reviewer would effectively have 17 people sitting in our one-to-one. The only scores that are made public, though, are mine.

Are you involved in everyone’s appraisal?

I was, up until about two or three years ago. It used to kill me – imagine doing 30 or 40 appraisals on a quarterly basis. That’s when you start to realise that you’re in danger of becoming ineffective. It was the hub and spoke model, everything revolved around me and that was because of the absence of quality systems and the right people in the right positions. You have to have that or it means you can’t let go.

Did it take a while to realise that?

It was my biggest balls-up. I was so focused on having money in the bank for the security thing, we overused it. So we overused holding back on money to the point it became a weakness. Remember, I come from the print industry, where cash was always a worry. So I wanted to make sure that my business could always pay suppliers on time. What that meant was that I could only afford good people; well, good enough isn’t good enough – it never is. You have to get the best you can afford. I finally realised that about five years ago. It has made a world of difference. Now, every time we replace someone, their replacement is better by a quantum. Then everybody ups their game, because the new person raises the bar – it creates a ground swell of improvement in the business.

But again, you can’t just throw money at people to get the best team. Surely you’ll just get the best negotiators?

No, it comes back to the emotional, intellectual and financial aspects. They have to have the right core values for the business – because we’ve had some expensive people that didn’t have the right values and it kills the business, because they’re pulling for ‘me’ not pulling for ‘us’ – the team. They have to be intellectually curious and able, and they have to want to push the boundaries of their knowledge. If they are mentally indolent, they will die here. And then financially you have to be the sort of person that wants to make the most of the opportunity in this world, not just for yourself and the team, but for our suppliers and our customers. We’re not introspective like most companies; most companies know everything inside their little box, but they don’t know what’s going on outside of it. For us it’s 80/20 – 80% of our time is spent looking outside. 

That’s easy to say though, but hard to do day-to-day surely?

Not really. Most businesses probably do it, they just don’t realise it. You’ve got to spend time talking to your customers and suppliers to understand their businesses, their customer bases and their pain emotionally, intellectually and financially because if we do that then we create a sustainable business model. If we can aggregate that knowledge, then we know that we can offer the best possible solution to customers as well as to our suppliers – there’s no way we can’t. I have never understood, and no one has ever explained it to me as anything other than short-termism, why you would want to screw your suppliers over – it’s just the most ridiculously short-sighted, idiotic way you would ever want to work with people. If you look at the world-class companies, every single one of them respects their suppliers as partners. It’s common sense.

What else does it take to be a world-class company?

Having no fear of failure. If you’re in an environment where getting things wrong is not seen as a failure, where you’re incredibly tolerant of failure, or the perception of it at least, then that breeds success – just look at Silicon Valley. I actually went over in April with UK Trade & Investment, because I thought there had to be something magical there I could learn from. There wasn’t; it’s just industrial estates. The only difference is they enjoy failure, they praise failure. They’re willing to invest in failure because they know that if you’re looking for innovation and not just doing what everyone else does but a little bit better, then doing something genuinely new or in a completely different way is inherently difficult with a high degree of uncertainty. By definition, new innovation is contrary and difficult. If those are the parameters of sustained comparative advantage, then it really doesn’t lend itself to external or short-term investment – but in Silicon Valley people will look at it and give it a go. That is the only difference, and here at Webmart we can do that too because we don’t have any external investors, we don’t have any loans or borrowings. Instead we have a bunch of people all pulling in the same direction. If we want to do weird stuff that might or might not work, we can. There’s no such thing as failure. We laud failure, because you learn new things by failing.

But that’s a cultural thing surely?

Absolutely. But it stems from transparency and sharing.

Is it a coincidence that everyone here seems to have multiple computer screens?

These screens are really important for sharing, because everyone gets to see the business’s metrics. When we get money in, it flashes up. When we make a charity donation, it flashes up. When we get orders in... So it’s building a picture in real time, for everyone to see, of the service and development that we’re delivering to our customers and suppliers. They’re windows on the world of Webmart, if you like. Basically, if something isn’t shared in some sense, either on those screens or one-to-one, it’s meaningless – it’s just another report to be ignored. The more you share then the stronger you are, both internally and externally.

Do you really want to share everything, though? Isn’t it data overload a distraction?

Not if you do it the right way.

Did it take you a while to figure out the right way?

Hell yes, and it never stops. The way I look at it now is that we want to build a new business model of how people work together, and democratise it. You don’t drive change by telling people or imploring them, you do it by proving the new way is better. If what you do is the most effective and efficient way of creating value in your company across multiple levels, and people can see that, then you will attract the best talent, you will work in a supportive and friendly environment and you will make a load of money. The alternative is do something that gives you more stress, where you have to shout at people.

I guess you could shout at people and you probably would get an instant result, partially driven by fear, but it’s not sustainable.

Precisely, and it’s the law of diminishing returns: you breed resentment. You have to look at long-term goals. That’s why I hate financial advisors – these alleged ‘professionals’. The first thing they ask you is what your exit plan is.

That’s one of my questions, actually.

Why would I want one? Let’s say we go for an infinite view; what’s to say this business can’t last 100 or 200 years on a solid financial basis?

But aren’t you sort of creating an exit plan by empowering the directors and giving them the opportunity to take it to the next level?

Absolutely.

So you have a personal exit plan, potentially…

Maybe, but it’s not a business exit plan. We’re not going to sell the business, we’re going to create something very special, invest in it and empower the people intellectually, emotionally and financially so that they are here for the long term – so it changes the dynamic. It also changes the dynamic for the suppliers, because they know that we’re not just here to drive down the prices for a short-term gain. We want to create value in partnerships to deliver increased profitability to our suppliers, while at the same time offering better value to our customers than they could get direct.

Is that possible?

Of course it is; it’s what we do – it’s what we live and breathe. Suppliers don’t have to work with us, they want to. The same goes for our customers.

Okay, but getting back to your earlier point, why didn’t you just create Webmart as a co-operative, in terms of business structure, to really empower people?

We could have done that, but as recent history proves, there are massive drawbacks in the co-operative movement. To be honest, I didn’t know what this was going to become when I started. It would be easy to say ‘it was coherent, it was cogent, I knew what I was creating’. Nonsense. When you’re creating a business you bounce from one crisis to another and just hope you learn something from each one. We have a momentum now; we have stability and the best team we can find, and we deal with customers and suppliers in the most enlightened and transparent way we can. But is this the finished article? No. We’re probably 10% of what we could be. Every single day there are improvements we can make. I visited a Toyota plant and every member of staff has a KPI that every month they must identify and implement two improvements. There were 600 people in that factory – you do the maths.

That’s terrifying. I appreciate that they can be tiny things, but even so.

But 1,200 improvements a month is not tiny. And then they share those improvements across all their sites. We’re not there as a business yet, but we will be one day.

How do you plan to do that?

We’re now empowering the team to work differently. It used to be me at the top, then Paul [Seaborn, chief operating officer], then team leaders and then teams. That will finish at the end of August. In the future management meetings will be the only time me and Paul get involved. It will be the teams and the team leaders who will design and improve the changes to the business. So we’re basically inverting the business model. So I’m now here to support Paul, Paul’s job is to support the team leaders, who are there to support the team and the team will have responsibility to improve the business – because they’re the people that know what needs to be done. 

Does that mean you won’t be involved day-to-day?

We’re just here to mentor them on demand, rather than tell them what to do – we’ve set ethical guidelines, but how they set and achieve targets is up to them, provided they operate within those guidelines. If you do that you don’t end up being another Enron or whatever, because the truth of the matter is that if you look back at some of those firms, they were often fantastic businesses. Enron in the 1980s was just wonderful. But if you lose the moral compass, then greed gets in. When that happens – and you have really bright, effective people going the wrong way – it spirals out of control in no time, and there are myriad examples of that. The basic rule is that if you would be proud of what you’re doing being in the public domain, and your mum would be proud of it, then do it.

So how does it work? You and the management team set a budget and then in effect the team have to reverse engineer the business to achieve that target? Because that’s just normal isn’t it?

We have set a three-year plan of what we want to achieve, that’s what the Pioneers’ Room is all about. We’ve been working for the past two years on empowering the team. I say we, it’s Paul really who is building the team competencies and expertise. We haven’t brought in any external managers, we’ve done all this from within, with the exception of Jacques Hauwaert, our first chief financial officer. That’s a new role, we just had an accountant before, but we needed a new skillset to help take us to the next level.

Have you never used business consultants then?

Never.

But you mentioned Kaizen earlier, and visiting Toyota and Google... Have you never adopted a single business methodology?

We’re very open to best practice from any source, but there are very few businesses that are run this way, so I don’t know what such a methodology would bring. Ownership always becomes an issue, and we make sure it isn’t one by stating that the firm’s never going to be sold. If you sell a business like this, what are you selling? The people. It’s like servitude – that’s not going to happen. Instead we have an IPO every year.

How do you mean?

The ‘Sexi’ [senior executive incentive] scheme. It’s the Marxist part of the business that redistributes wealth. So everyone who has been here two years [80% of staff] got a 33.4% bonus [of their basic salary] because of the team performance in the last financial year.

But you don’t want to run Webmart for ever, do you?

No. There are other things I want to achieve in life. But the DNA is in the team, so I don’t have to be here for ever. I want to do another start-up. Refining what we’ve done here.

Do you mean a start-up like this in terms of what it does, or just like this culturally, but in a completely different field?

I mean a start-up that gets the best bits out of this, but starting completely afresh and making it even better. So using all the experience that we’ve built to deliver an exceptional business in the same way and in a similar market Ω that’s what Printelligence will be. It will be, if you like, an enhancement of what we’re doing here. I also have other areas I’m interested in, like politics. I’m also a non-exec chairman of a publishing company, which is interesting because in some ways I’m looking from the outside in.

Who’s the publisher?

It’s a history magazine; I love history, and this title has been around for 50 years. It’s global, multi-channel and it’s fascinating to be involved with the running of someone else’s business. Funnily enough we have a three-year plan there now, and part of that plan is doubling the operating profit. And if we double it, then half of the value of that goes to the team. It’s owned by a trust, so their shareholder objectives aren’t just to maximise short-term profits. So it’s a good fit, culturally.

Is there anything else you would like to achieve?

I know that there’s a model here somewhere in what we’ve achieved. So in the third stage of my life I would like to run a charitable trust that will help to deliver that out to the masses and show people that there might be a better way of running a business. Perhaps set up a Marxist capitalist venture capitalist fund, so we can say to people ‘If you run it this way, we will give you the seed capital. You don’t have to go to these wankers that want to get out in three years’ time with four times the money’. Yes, we will be shareholder, but we will be a passive shareholder and the value you create will go back to be reinvested in other businesses.

You’re clearly very open to learning from other businesses yourself, but can you quantify how much time you spend on that?

As much time as I can. If you look at my diary, I’ve got DIY MBA days in it. That’s my outside time and it’s for my personal development. I might have to cut it short sometimes, but it’s always there. It might be out in the camper van on a mountainside drinking tea, reading books, reading articles, brainstorming, it might be visiting another company, it might be at the British Library.

Do you visit print companies as part of that or just companies from other industries that interest you?

It’s very rarely print industry companies for those days. I invest time in people relationships in the industry, but in terms of strategic thinking, I look for an outside perspective.

That’s incredibly disciplined though, because most people would just say that they don’t have time.

Make time. You can block book. If you look in my diary those days are booked in a year ahead. It’s really important and it costs nothing, but if you spend your life musing about current things, then your focal length is too short. You need to look long and be open minded and create space to think. You can get inspiration from anywhere.

You’ve talked about transparency and sharing, which is still fairly unusual in print. Do you think the culture in the print industry, to resist that, is holding it back?

Massively. If you look at Germany, it’s completely different. 

I guess that’s perhaps because the UK industry has become so cut-throat after the challenges of the past few years?

But it has always been that way. People are so desperate to chase money they fear giving away what they see as competitive advantage. Money in itself never gets you satisfaction, being the best that you can be does. And if you become the best in the market then the money chases you; it finds you.

Are there many companies out there like that though?

There are lots of good business out there – Inc Direct, Bishops, I could name dozens. They don’t have to be run the way we are to be good, but they all invest in people. Things are changing. Nowadays you don’t get the angry type of management style winning; success is about inclusiveness, a paternalistic, engagement-driven management style. The winners will give more, not take more – they will be the people and businesses that win in the next 10-20 years and then it will be in the DNA of the next generation of leaders. Command and control rarely wins unless you’re in a war and we’re not in war now, we’re in a new age of enlightenment as an industry.

And to steal your words: happy fucking days!

I couldn’t have put it better myself. 

Biltcliffe’s inspiration tips

www.edx.org MIT and Harvard’s free learning resource where you can access papers, videos, lectures and even complete courses

www.khanacademy.org A free resource offering world-class education for all, from children to adults returning to learning

www.ted.com A free resource “devoted to sharing powerful ideas” usually in the form of sub 20-minute video talks from leading figures, covering topics from science to business to global issues