It can be quite odd in the years where everything goes as expected. When all the numbers come in according to projections, and everything goes smoothly, no-one really wants to see communicators. I suppose it makes you feel a bit unloved: like a fading popstar. But we’ve been blessed with interesting times at Kingfisher.”

 

You’d expect that for most communicators – especially those with responsibility for investor relations – years of plain sailing are to be celebrated. But Ian Harding, group communications director at Kingfisher plc, isn’t like most people in his position. Kingfisher is the leading home improvement retailer in Europe operating brands such as B&Q, Screwfix, and Castorama. As its go-to man for investor and media relations since the early 2000s, Ian has thrived in an occasionally acrimonious climate.

 

He took a roundabout route to his current position. As a schoolboy, Ian did well in his O- and A-Levels, but his plan to do an accountancy degree was thrown off course. “The summer I left school, my parents died, and shipping off to university no longer seemed appropriate,” he recalls. “My elder brother and I had to deal with the business, as neither of them had left wills.”

 

It must have been a personally challenging time for Ian, but there’s little hint of it in his voice as describes it. It seems that the levelheadedness he now displays was present in his younger character as well, since the abrupt change in circumstances didn’t faze Ian for long. Rather than the initial plan of taking a full accounting degree, he chose to do a year’s foundation course at City Polytechnic, before taking articles over four years at an accountancy firm. The firm in question was liquidating Ian’s father’s business at the time so, he says, “it actually dovetailed beautifully.”

 

Ian calls this period of his career “a slight dogleg”, as he was soon back on track doing what he’d expected to all along: joining a big accountancy firm as a fully qualified financial advisor, in this case PwC. He would stay there for eight years, rising up through the management grades. “I ended up as a senior manager, with responsibility for about 30 people. We led retailing audits – and Kingfisher was a client.”

 

Ian had been looking for a new opportunity when the serendipitous relationship with Kingfisher came about. “At senior management level, moving up in a company like PwC becomes really tricky. The next stage – the last stage – is basically a partnership lottery, a game of ‘dead man’s shoes’. So when I was approached by Kingfisher, rather than hang around, I decided to go for it.”

 

This was 1996, and Ian joined Kingfisher in a role that was closely related to what he’d been doing at PwC, as the financial controller of Superdrug (then still owned by Kingfisher). He acknowledges that the brevity of his CV might look curious, but in his 15 years at Kingfisher Ian has held several different positions. He became group financial controller after two years, but realised in 2000 that he wanted to change gear.

 

Ian says he realised that he was only enjoying what he estimates as 5% of his day-to-day job at the time: not the best of ratios. “I just hated 95% of what I was doing,” he now says. “I really enjoyed presenting to the board, and turning the financial numbers into messages. But the rest of the time I felt like I was sitting in a dungeon with an Excel spreadsheet, churning out the facts. I noticed that the chaps in IR got to spend their whole time talking about numbers, and talking about the business, which was the only bit I liked in my position at the time.”

 

 

A vacancy in IR came up, and Ian credits Geoff Mulcahy, Kingfisher’s chief executive at the time, as being bold enough to allow him to make an unexpected departmental move. And it seems that he took to his new role with great alacrity: “I absolutely loved it, from the very start. I was briefing to stakeholders, travelling around the globe talking to our shareholders, explaining the business. I now see that my financial background was very useful, but I was so happy to be out of that Excel dungeon.”

 

He’s keen to emphasise that although moving from an internal financial role to one in communications seems unusual, it had distinct advantages. “The stated wisdom is that you want stockbrokers on your investor relations team, ex-analysts, other City types, because they know the financial markets. I think that what you actually want is someone who knows the business really well, because when you spend all your time talking to fund managers and accountants – as your investor relations people do – you’re qualified to talk about its trajectories: I was able to bundle together strategy and finance.”

 

However, Ian’s enthusiasm for his newfound IR calling would be tested in his first year in the role for Kingfisher, as the company went through some drastic changes. In 1999, an agreed merger with supermarket group Asda fell through at the 11th hour when US retailing giant Wal-Mart stepped in with a multi-billion pound bid, leading to a sharp decline in Kingfisher shares and embarrassment for the company. Coupled with a protracted battle for control of the French home improvement retailer Castorama, Ian’s new prominence in the company came at a time when its IR was under fire from several quarters.

 

“At the time, Kingfisher was operating general merchandise retailing (including Woolworths and Superdrug) and electricals (Comet), as well as its DIY properties,” recalls Ian. “Pretty much as soon as I moved into the IR function, we announced the first demerger.”

 

The demerger of the general merchandise business to form Woolworths Group plc came as a shock to investors and analysts, meaning that Ian was much in demand. “It wasn’t as though I left on a Friday as financial controller and came in on a Monday as director of investor relations – there was a good foundation put in place – but it was something of a ‘sink or swim’ position. But everyone wanted to talk to me! The company really needed a spokesman for IR at that time.”

 

It’s undeniable that Ian rose to the challenge presented to him in his new role. While the general merchandise demerger would be followed in 2003 by the demerger of the electricals business to form Kesa Electricals plc, by that point Kingfisher’s IR had moved on substantially. 

 

“We went from being the subject of a Stock Exchange investigation, on charges of not communicating as well as we should have been with the City, to winning two of the major awards in the IR world: the Extel award for Best non-food retail IR in Europe, in 2002, and an Institutional Investor Award.” Ian feels this recognition showed just how much Kingfisher’s credibility with investors had improved in a relatively short period – and the company’s IR function has continued to win multiple prizes. His pride in the team is evident: “It was a very interesting time, but we’ve pushed our investor relations into the high quality bracket. It’s a very slick, well-regarded, battle-scarred operation now.” 

 

One of Ian’s first undertakings was to step up the department’s grasp on technology and how it could apply to comms. He then got on the road. “The previous incumbent had been a stockbroker,” he recounts, “and wasn’t very good at dealing with people one-on-one. I’d audited the company for four to five years while at PwC, and had been involved in its internal finances since 1996, so I was extremely comfortable with having in-depth conversations: we brought up the level of those conversations by using technology, such as introducing quarterly conference calls with investors, and we’ve continued that in our social media usage, but there’s no substitute for getting out there and talking to people.”

 

In 2003, media relations was incorporated into Ian’s job. He says that eight years on, he’s still learning about communications, and he clearly relishes the continued broadening of his experience. “The first thing I did when I took on the group communications role was to recruit quality help in the form of Nigel Cope and Sarah Gerrand, who look after the day-to-day running of media and investor relations respectively,” says Ian. “It was a very steep learning curve for me, but again I think that having come into comms from finance helped. I was good at looking at a sea of detail and seeing a message that conveyed why Kingfisher’s prospects were good, but I could also get across lots of information in that message.”

 

His belief in the importance of really connecting with stakeholders has led to Kingfisher adopting Cisco TelePresence, which Ian describes as “Skype, bigtime – it recreates a TV boardroom. It’s a whole new level of teleconferencing.” The company is currently trialling telepresenting all its meetings throughout the IR roadshow, enabling it to connect with investors across the globe. And beyond talking to investors, he emphasises the importance of a continuum in the narrative of a business. 

“A business is a living organism, and it ebbs and flows. Communicating is an incredibly human process, because although tech is great for getting data across, audiences connect with people and issues – not with slides.” The length of time Ian’s spent at Kingfisher contributes, he believes, to the depth of his connection with stakeholders, and moves the business of communicating with them onto a relaxed, personal process.

 

Ian now sits on the Retail Board, which meets quarterly, a marker of how seriously Kingfisher now takes its stakeholder relations. Having communications personnel on boards is still highly unusual, particularly in FTSE100 companies. “It keeps me well plugged-in to the business, because I’m directly involved in the approval of budgets and setting forecasts. Analysts and other stakeholders often say that they want to meet with the CEO, particularly in times of turmoil, so it helps with the external aspects of my role as I’m positioned as senior management. That external credibility helps hugely with getting meetings booked.”

 

Kingfisher is also notable for its strong approach to sustainability, which Ian credits to “people far cleverer than me.” But he advises the sustainability team on its communications, and finds it a very exciting area.

 

“We’ve recently updated our communicating sustainability strategy,” he says, “and simplified the message so that it focuses on what we’re bringing to the party. Because we sell products to people with homes, the impact that Kingfisher can have on the environment is huge, so it’s important for us to get it right. For instance, 100% of B&Q’s wood products are now made from sustainable forests, but we’ve only just started talking about it because now there are concrete results to share. We’ve got something important to say.” 

 

He sounds almost wistful at times for the tumultuous circumstances of the early years of his tenure at Kingfisher – which comes into sharper focus when he reveals that he’s also a qualified commercial pilot, who flies himself to roadshows in Northern Europe and owns a Russian stunt plane, which is often seen performing aerobatics over the North Sea near where Ian lives in Essex. “In some ways, I suppose that explains why I quite like the heat of a crisis. I’ve spent most of my adult life flying small planes and dealing with issues that are far more stressful than work, such as engine failures,” he explains.

 

So his nostalgia for the “surreal times” at the turn of the century, when Kingfisher’s communications strategy was “in tatters”, becomes clearer. The lessons from then haven’t gone to waste, however: “We couldn’t hide away then, and we can’t now. To build trust and credibility, you have to deal with people consistently in a fair and straight way – I learnt how important that was for communicators.”