The people business

"Putting the customer at the centre of every single decision you’re making is absolutely imperative,” explained Manchester Metropolitan University alumnus Anthony Hucker.

It’s an approach that has paid off. Hucker is President and Chief Executive Officer of Southeastern Grocers, one of the largest conventional grocers in the United States, which operates three brands in the country’s southeastern states.

South Wales-born Hucker can trace the client-centric philosophy back to the retail marketing degree he finished in 1989.

Hucker said: “What was attractive to me was that the course was four years and provided such an effective balance of real work experience and classroom theory.

“If we were doing, for example, a lecture on HR, we learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but then we’d go to Leeds and meet the ASDA regional HR management and say, ‘What happens in the real world?’.

“We’d come back and put on a suit and use an old overhead projector to deliver a presentation and then we were graded as a team. That whole model was so applicable to me as an individual, and was eventually the foundation of my career,” Hucker added.

The first of two industrial placements was at a wine merchant, where he ended up transforming the fortunes of a southwest London branch, featuring on FTSE 100 company Imperial’s published report, and the turnaround story was presented to the Board of Directors.

“They were going to close the store,” Hucker explained.

“I was the first placement student for the company, and I don’t think they knew what to do with me, so they gave me the store to run as my project.

“We ended up saving the store. We turned the sales numbers around by over 100 per cent. We changed the opening hours, the merchandising assortment, we changed the staff. “It was a tremendous first-hand experience.”

Hucker’s second placement was at the Institute of Grocery Distribution, where he applied the strategic thinking aspect of his studies by analysing the pan-European food industry and UK food retailers.

He said: “It was fantastic: from the shop floor, sleeves rolled up, cleaning the toilets, stacking the shelves, running the cash register at one end, to reporting to the City of London’s retail analysts on the other.

“If you ever learn to play the piano, you have to first learn the rudimentary principles of what a piano does and what music is, in terms of the notes in a scale. Manchester Metropolitan gave me the same rudimentary skills of retailing.

“It was a practical application of the theory, whether that’s in finance, green screen computers, personnel, buying, merchandising or marketing.”

Those formative years spent on the former Aytoun campus in Manchester city centre – and in industry – proved vital.

After training in Germany and the USA, Hucker joined the graduate scheme of German supermarket Aldi as one of the founding members of the team that set up Aldi UK. In the early 1990s, Aldi was a newcomer just setting out on British shores. He remembers other supermarket chains lobbying manufacturers not to supply Aldi due to its small size in the UK.

“We would say: ‘Listen, you need to stop thinking of us as one store in the United Kingdom’,” Hucker said.

“You need to start thinking of us as 4,000 stores around the world. And suddenly they were interested.”

By the time Hucker left Aldi, he had been part of the firm’s expansion to 240 sites, including in Wales and Scotland, and four large regional distribution centres.

Around the turn of the millennium, he wanted to experience working life outside of the UK and moved to California to a job in technology.

However, he missed retail and moved back into the sector four years later, holding a succession of senior executive positions with various American supermarket chains, including Walmart, before joining Florida-based Southeastern Grocers. His successful stewardship of Southeastern Grocers has become a Harvard Business School case study.

We’re a very people-intensive industry. You need to have exceptional emotional intelligence

Hucker’s life on the other side of the Atlantic means he has visited or worked in nearly all the American states, and lived in eight.

Shops have had to adapt to challenges such as internet shopping and social media; global financial downturns; emerging food allergies and diet trends; diversification of products, huge volumes of customer data, and the issue that Hucker believes will have the largest impact: automation.

And, of course, COVID-19.

Yet underpinning everything is the connection with consumers and the staff who serve them.

Hucker said: “We’re a very people-intensive industry. You need to have exceptional emotional intelligence.

“What we say is that we are in the people business — we just happen to sell groceries.

“No matter whether the customer is purchasing something from a floral department or getting medication from the pharmacy, something is going on in their life. Whether it’s birth, marriage, death, a christening, graduation, pets, something has gone on that allows you, along with smart localisation, connected personalisation, and your omni-channel presence, to build a relationship.

“We go up against some of the biggest retailers in the world, like Walmart, like Aldi, and they don’t have the ability to build a relationship with the customer the way we do; they are transactional versus relational.”

Hucker continued: “The United States is really 50 different countries and each market behaves very differently, and understanding that – a concept we call precision retailing – gives you insight around that customer on a very local basis.

“Again, we have the right balance of scale and neighbourhood appeal, and that makes us nimble enough to keep the national players on their toes. That’s the intimacy with which we want to get as close a relationship with the customer as we can. You have to put the customer at the centre of every single decision you’re making. That’s absolutely imperative.”

Plans in the pipeline for Southeastern Grocers include more than 50 new stores planned in 2021, and enhancing its digital offering and reward programme, all during the global upheaval from COVID-19.

Hucker added: “We stayed true to our commitment of putting people first, and that guided each and every decision we made about safety protocols, preventive measures and policy evolutions in our stores – we wanted to keep our people, customers and communities safe, healthy and well provided with the essentials they needed for their families and loved ones.

“The true measure of an organisation’s culture is made during times of challenge and change, and I’m massively proud of how our people and our culture persisted in the daunting challenges of 2020. We strengthened sales, market share, and perhaps most important, our belief that we’re stronger together.”

Hucker, who is a sports fanatic and Manchester United fan, remains as passionate and motivated about retail as ever.

“I’m as hungry today as the day I started in Manchester, the day I started in America,” he said.

“We’re in an extremely competitive marketplace. And I want to win, but I want to win through people.”