"Selling isn't for everyone; it's about finding the ones who truly appreciate our value."
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Jim Stevenson, Founder and CEO of Bletchley Group, is a proven Strategic Advisor and Inspirational leader who drives business growth through complex, challenging, or uncertain times. With a career spanning 20+ years, he focuses on strategy, organisational transformation, and growth, adding over $700M in value to clients.
Several years ago, he joined Spark International as a Partner, a boutique fundraising and M&A firm, recognising the value these brought to his clients in their growth journey.
He is known for creating innovative solutions and strategies, turning challenges into opportunities, and supporting organisations to implement these strategies to realise their ambitions and grow their businesses.
Jim’s innovative approach fosters a customer-centric, data-driven, and agile culture across entire organisations, leading to double-digit growth and increased business valuations.
Throughout his career, he has launched and grown products and businesses, including launching The Guardian in America, transforming M&S, adding £116m revenue to their e-commerce team, leading the move to online for Bacardi globally, writing the AI and personalisation strategy for a large retailer and turning around challenged PE-backed businesses.
He also supports start-ups and small businesses in finding their vision, creating go-to-market strategies, finding their product-market fit, and moving on to sustainable growth and profitability.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Jim Stevenson: I have a varied career through differing roles and sectors. This is the biggest thing that has kept me interested and added so much value to my clients. A friend once told me that I build things and get bored easily, which has borne out with my career.
I started my working life in Scotland in construction. It was a very commercial role that gave me an entrepreneurial mindset.
Back then, I would have been called a Super User, someone who worked with technology, but it wasn’t their job. I wrote my first business program as a macro within Supercalc in the late 1980s, although I had been writing code for 7 or 8 years at that point. I know I’m ageing myself.
I enjoyed this so much that I moved into a technical role, which ultimately led me to create Bletchley Group, named after Bletchley Park, where Alan Turning, Tommy Flowers, and others created the modern computer that broke the Enigma code.
I love technology and like the idea that technology can and should be used for a purpose.
As I mentioned, I have a varied career, which explains how Bletchley Group has evolved from a tech-focused firm to its broader business focus today.
As the business world moved from e-business to digital, I had the opportunity to work for the UK Office for National Statistics, working on vast amounts of data before the ‘big data’ era.
I then moved on to Bacardi, initially moving the digital team from Washington, D.C., to London before leading their global digital efforts.
My experience with Bacardi, which owns several whiskey brands, led me to the M&A team at News Corp, which was interested in creating a Sunday Times Whisky Club. While the Whisky Club didn’t go ahead, it did lead to an introduction to Andy Hickey, the CIO, and to delivering a few of their more challenging projects.
A friend who had recently moved from News Corp to The Guardian asked if I could help launch The Guardian in the US market. I loved working with The Guardian. We led the way in implementing agile product development practices, which were new to the UK then.
From the Guardian, I moved to M&S, restructuring their e-commerce team. I helped them focus on their customers, use data-driven decision-making, and implement agile management. As a result of this work, M&S reported some great results to the London Stock Exchange.
Through an introduction from an ex-colleague at the Guardian, I had the privilege of working with Scout24 in Switzerland, leading a transformation initiative. This work allowed me to work with several companies in Switzerland, a fantastic experience.
All of these experiences have led me and the Bletchley Group to where we are today. So while Bletchley Group still has a technology focus, we have gone beyond this to become a wider business-focused Strategic Advisory and Growth Consultancy firm.
We work with leading companies across Europe and the US to drive strategy, transformation, fundraising, M&A, and commercial success.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffett, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Jim Stevenson: Wow, I would be speechless if I were in an elevator with Warren Buffett.
Bletchley Group is a strategic advisory and growth consultancy. We focus on Strategy and Transformation.
We make growth the objective of your strategy and the result of your transformation. It’s a straightforward proposition, which I like. It is bespoke to the nuances of each client and is very effective.
What advice do you wish you had received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Jim Stevenson: I think improving is a continuous process, so we try to learn and improve daily and with every client.
Lots of advice I have received over the years has only been possible as new thinking, processes, and technology have become available.
The one piece of advice I always go back to is from a friend and early mentor I had. I struggled with sales, the very notion of selling, and he helped me understand that what we do is not for everyone to sell.
He advised me to adopt a non-selling sales process. It was very simple: explain to potential clients the problems we solve and the results we achieve. If that’s a problem they have, they will want to know more so we can chat.
We have a great network in Europe, with previous clients recommending us to new clients. As we expand into the US, we are building this network. That will be our focus for the next quarter and, most likely, beyond. Of course, we are always happy to hear from potential clients from anywhere.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Jim Stevenson: What a great question. Bletchley Group specialises in all of these areas. One of the positives, if there were any, of the COVID pandemic was the acceptance of virtual meetings and remote working.
We operated this way for years before the pandemic, but it did make it more accessible as our clients got more used to this way of working. As for expectations, these are mixed.
Over the last year or two, the economy has taken its toll on many companies.
We are conducting strategic reviews of companies as the owners explore options for moving forward, including the possibility of restructuring or divesting.
Other companies are much more optimistic as they seek growth. For some, this means fundraising to support M&A and management buyouts or public-to-private acquisitions to create new global platforms.
A consistent at present is AI.
All companies are considering it and looking for ways to leverage it, based on Open AI’s Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity and other Large Language Models publicity.
Companies’ approaches to AI vary, from helping their workforce become more efficient to identifying ways to build AI into their workflow.
While everyone is talking about Generative AI, which is good and will become dominant, there is still a lot of upside for Predictive AI, especially for retailers. We wrote the AI and personalisation strategy for a large retailer a couple of years ago, and that still has a much better ROI than Generative AI, at least for now.
Leveraging AI will be a significant focus for all companies over the next few years. However, it does bring challenges around infrastructure and costs, access to and quality of data, and use cases that add value.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Jim Stevenson: The real challenge businesses face is the complexities of the rapidly changing global landscape, geoeconomic uncertainties, technological advancements, including AI, and ever-more-demanding consumers.
Include the need to raise funds to support growth and business leaders have an extraordinary challenge to navigate.
About ten years ago, we started to consider how we could support businesses in a VUCA world. VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, which perfectly describes the world businesses must operate within.
We found that our experience, in fact, the very core of what we do, supports businesses through these challenges, helping them find the best strategies and transform by embracing digital, fostering resilience, and becoming agile.
These are key to not only addressing these challenges but also thriving within them.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Jim Stevenson: I think Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It’s not that strategy or operations within a business are not important, but that culture, or rather a good culture, can address many of the issues created by a mediocre strategy or poor operational processes. On the other hand, an inadequate or even mediocre culture can cause significant problems and poor performance.
Good culture goes beyond the standard superficial perks and social events and impacts employee engagement and performance. It will impact your customer teams and, so, influence your customer experience.
It will be a visible expression of the company’s leadership and, therefore, influence retaining employees and recruitment.Some studies suggest neglecting a business culture fit can cost a business up to 50-60% of an employee’s annual salary.
I often tell clients that their business has a culture; the real question is whether it is one they want and will support their business growth or if it just happened.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Jim Stevenson: The obvious answer would be to see the future or predict market trends accurately. However, I suspect that is cheating, so in a more pragmatic vein, I’d go with clear communication.
So many business problems result from a lack of clear communication.
One person has an intent in mind when they say something, while the other hears something entirely different or applies what they hear to a different context, changing everything.
With clear communication, strategies would be understood, objectives clearly defined, and day-to-day interactions would be meaningful and, dare I say, enjoyable.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Jim Stevenson for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Jim Stevenson or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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