Magical turn around for troubled toy store

The story sounds familiar. A fine, old English institution in disarray, having under-performed over recent years. Its fourth manager in as many years is an outsider who is charged with the task of turning it around. One could be forgiven for thinking this was the England soccer team, but it isn't.

However, the similarities between Hamleys, the prestigious toy retailer, and the English team are remarkable.

For some time Hamleys has been living on past glories. For most of its 241-year history the Regent Street store was renowned as the world's finest toyshop. But by the mid- to late 1990s, the company had lost its way and stagnated, profits dropped and its share price had plunged from more than £4 to around £1.20 (€6.34 to €1.90).

The man charged with turning around Hamleys is Dublin-born Simon Burke - a man with more than 20 years' experience in accountancy, corporate finance and retailing.

While it may seem fitting that Mr Burke, who as a boy played at shopkeeping and kept meticulous books for a teenage business, should find himself working as an accountant, he said on leaving school he "drifted" into the career.

"My next-door neighbour was a partner in a small practice. He invited me in one evening to tell me about accountancy. I didn't realise I was being interviewed at the time," he said.

Those early days working as an accountant in Dublin have stood him in good stead, he said.

"The work I did was business-orientated. At that level, in a big firm you do very technical accounting work. You get no sense of a wider picture. You don't really get involved in the business process. After a couple of years, I was the senior person going into firms to do the books. I think it was an enormously helpful education in business. It has been said accountancy is a real stepping stone to senior management and that sort certainly is," he said.

The small firm eventually came under the umbrella of the UK company Binder Hamlyn. On secondment to London for six months, Mr Burke was approached by a recruitment firm, which recommended him to Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers). Coopers offered him work in an investigations unit of its corporate finance division.

"For what was one of the biggest decisions of my life, I didn't think about it very much. I just thought this sounds great. I'll do it," he said.

Mr Burke stayed with Coopers for five years, tackling one-off specialist work such as preparing companies for flotation, takeovers or providing advice.

During his time there, he also spent a year on secondment with troubleshooter David James, specialising in corporate rescue projects.

Mr Burke expected to follow a path to becoming a partner at the firm. But a bizarre incident led to him changing career direction. He was a senior member of a team picked to work on the privatisation of Rolls Royce. As he was an Irish national and much of Rolls Royce's work is of a military nature, security at the firm would issue him with a pass only if he had positive security vetting. This would have taken six weeks to complete, meaning he would have to cease working on the job.

"Coopers caved in and I packed my bags and went back to London," he said. "What really hit home was that I was just another cog in a wheel, that it was a totally depersonalised environment."

It was the only time he had ever encountered what could be remotely described as anti-Irish prejudice. In fact, being Irish has helped his career in the UK, he said, and has allowed him to take a different perspective on UK business.

"There is an informality about Irish people generally," he said. "In business where so much depends on personal interaction, I think having an informal style and being willing to interact with people on all levels is fairly helpful."

This informal style fitted in nicely with his next career move. Leaving Coopers, Mr Burke joined Virgin as a business development manager. Within a year he was made managing director of the retail business, which he described as the "black sheep" of the Virgin family.

"There were all these companies in different countries running megastores, none of which made a profit ever, and gradually, one by one, with the help of a number of very able colleagues, I took them on and turned them around."

Over the years, turnaround work has become his speciality.

Such experience would prove invaluable when he made the move to Hamleys in 1999. Joining Hamleys, he was forced to issue two profits warnings.

Immediately he set about making the necessary changes. Within three months, two of Hamleys' executive directors had left the company. "While we would all like to perform prodigal son-like turnarounds on people and convince everyone to work in a different direction, sometimes there plainly isn't time, so it's relatively rare in these situations for a majority of the very senior management to survive. "I don't take any pleasure in coming in and doing this sort of thing, but, nevertheless, the changes have to be made," he said.

Other changes followed as Mr Burke sought to rejuvenate the Hamleys name and leverage the brand. Brand development, something about which he gained a lot of experience in Virgin, is a topic to which he constantly returns.

"The brand is the biggest asset of this company," he said. "Hamleys is supposed to be this premium, the ultimate in toystores."

Mr Burke said he has sought to return the store to its roots and to bring back what he called "some of the magic" to the store, turning it into a wonderland for children. The layout has also been improved, the escalators and lifts rearranged and the presentation upgraded - moving displays, a haunted staircase, a big model railway running around one of the floors and talking books. Trials of the group's Bear Factory soft toy shop have been very encouraging, according to Mr Burke, and the group will now convert 12 of its 16 Toystack shops to this new format by August. The remaining Toystack shops will be closed.

He plans to extend the brand by using the Internet and catalogues to sell products that will compete on quality and exclusivity rather than price.

"In business terms we want to transform Hamleys into what I'm calling a branded multichannel retailer. Without ever opening another shop, my hope is that I can bring the Hamleys brand franchise to the whole world," said Mr Burke. His changes are already having the desired effect.

The group recorded strong Christmas trading, and sales have been buoyant since then, according to Mr Burke. Market expectation is that Hamleys may clear profits of £4 million sterling this year, compared to less than £1 million last year. The share price has also improved.

Mr Burke is also conscious of delivering value to what he called the "long-suffering" shareholders in the group. So much so that Hamleys ended discussions about the possible sale of the business earlier this year.

"Nobody came to me with a proposition which I thought was good value for shareholders," he said.

Mr Burke now feels he has brought a clear, strategic vision to the business.

"The important thing is to know it has been stabilised, it's got a future and we can say we're one of the best retailers around and eventually have a share price to reflect that."