Neil Clifford, the boss of Kurt Geiger, one in all Britain’s best known shoe brands, began his profession miles away from the glitz and glamour of fashion.
As a baby, the CEO failed just about all of his exams due to his dyslexia. After leaving school with only an art degree, Clifford went to the job center and located work at a Fiat automotive dealership, earning £25 ($33) per week.
“That was my first job in August 1983, so I guess I did pretty well,” Clifford said Assets.
And he actually did it quite well: The 57-year-old has worked his way up from automotive sales and bathroom cleansing for extra pocket money to move the Kurt Geiger company, which has an annual turnover of £330 million ($432 million) – and has done so for greater than 20 years.
His profession took a brand new turn after a friend got him an interview for Burton’s menswear at Debenhams in his hometown of Portsmouth.
“Suddenly I went from delivering paraffin wax to selling suits,” he recalls. “I realized I was really good at selling things because I could convince people how great they looked.”
There, Clifford had his big breakthrough, which paved his way into the high-profile world of fashion.
Clifford’s career-defining moment
After working at his local department store for a number of months, Clifford noticed that the then CEO of Burton and founding father of Topshop, Ralph Halpern, had made a habit of walking through the shop most Saturdays.
Clifford knew he needed to seize this chance to face out from the tons of of other staff across the UK. His plan? He would have the courage to place his ambitions on to the boss.
He waited for the precise moment to strike – when his manager was on vacation.
“I knew that when he came in today, I would already have my speech in my head,” he recalls. “I knew that this was a moment for me. It was a bit like being a footballer who came on as a substitute and had to take a penalty.”
“I had this half-hour opportunity to chat with the really, really big boss,” he adds. “I knew I wanted to ask for advice, but I also wanted to express my enthusiasm, ambition and energy… So, yes, that was a moment for me where I knew I had to perform.”
The advice that stuck with Clifford was: “There are plenty of jobs, but you have to move to London. You won’t make it in Portsmouth.”
It was the push he needed to go away his sleepy hometown and throw himself into the hustle and bustle of town.
The move to London modified Clifford’s profession
“I applied for a job in Woolwich that week,” Clifford recalls the defining moment of his profession. “To be honest, I didn’t know where Woolwich was, but it had a London postcode.”
The role offered him the prospect to run his own boutique as an alternative of a food stall in a department store – it was a giant step forward and to his surprise he was offered the job immediately.
“I was the only applicant,” he laughs. “Nobody else applied for the job because, as it turns out, Woolwich was a pretty rough place in 1986.”
And identical to that, Clifford traded the security of Portsmouth for one in all the roughest parts of London and never looked back.
“The entire staff was stealing, so I had to replace the entire staff,” he says, adding that this gave him the chance to show the business around and make a reputation for himself.
At the top of the 12 months, the shop was probably the most profitable and highest-revenue store, based on Clifford, who was only 19 years old on the time.
“I won this big award, store manager of the year; I was earning £9,000 ($12,000) a year. I was the king.”
This experience quickly put him on the road to success and Clifford received one promotion after one other before being poached by Kurt Geiger in 1996.
“In the end, within 18 months, I was managing the company’s largest store in Bromley with 40 employees, [turning over] £4 million [$5.2 million] “At 21, I was earning £1.5 million a year – I was the youngest flagship store manager in the entire Burton group.”
The CEO of Walmart had his big break in the identical way
Like Clifford, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon got here from a humble background, starting his profession in the corporate’s warehouses in the summertime of 1984 on the age of 17.
Since then, he has worked his way up the retail giant’s hierarchy, from unloading trailers for $6.50 an hour to becoming the corporate’s youngest CEO since its founder, Sam Walton—with a salary of 25 million dollars to point out it.
He, too, had his big break when he got involved during his boss’s vacation and left his mark.
“One of the reasons I got the opportunities was because I always raised my hand when my boss was out of town visiting stores or something,” McMillon recently revealed.
“I then put myself in an environment where the risk of promotion was low because people had already seen me at work.”
