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At Timpson, the bosses are under strict instructions not to tell anyone what to do.

The company’s frontline colleagues have only two formal rules: “Look the part and put the money in the till.” Beyond that, they are trusted to use their judgement. Managers exist, in Sir John Timpson’s phrase, to “look after the people who are looking after the customers”.

This ‘upside-down’ approach has helped turn a Victorian family shoe business into one of the UK’s most successful retailers, with over two thousand branches nationwide. 

“We fly in the face of what everyone’s being taught, but it works,” he says from his office at Timpson HQ in Greater Manchester, where he still serves as Group Chairman. “If you do exactly what everyone else does, you’ve got much less chance of being successful.”

The roots of that conviction reach back to the º£½ÇºÚÁÏ, where Timpson studied Industrial Economics in the early 1960s. The department was just 10 years old and the degree was unusually broad for its time, encompassing topics such as economics, law, psychology, distribution and transport.

“There weren’t many places at that time where you could go and do a course which really did talk about business,” he says. Timpson had spent a year in the family firm before university and, while studying, ran the university’s dry-cleaning, shoe-repair and laundry service. “Which would seem to be quite appropriate!” he says.

Yet it was the psychology taught on the course that endured. “That’s the bit I’ve used more than anything else,” he says. “Instinctively, it’s the people bit that matters much more than the numbers. They come first to produce the numbers. Without them, we wouldn’t have anything to add up.”

His tutor, Don Varley, a founding figure in the department, inspired “a certain amount of fear” at their fortnightly meetings. “He didn’t hold back when he thought I got it totally wrong,” Timpson says. “But one thing he did hold was respect – tremendous respect in the department. He was very much at the beginning of Industrial Economics at Nottingham, and it needed someone like him to establish something which was very worthwhile. We owe a lot to him.”

Timpson’s transition from university back to the family business was not smooth. Soon after he joined the board, a family dispute ended with his father being dismissed, and the company passed out of family ownership for a decade. Timpson later returned to run it, led a buyout and sold the shoe shops, judging conventional footwear retail to be a poor long-term prospect. He concentrated instead on the smaller repair business and began to discover the value of key cutting.

The organising idea remained: put authority as close to the customer as possible. That depends on hiring the right people. About 30 years ago, Timpson concluded that the company had been recruiting for the wrong qualities.

“We were looking for shoe repairers and key cutters,” he says. “We didn’t want shoe repairers and key cutters. We wanted people with personality.” Skills could be taught; disposition was harder to change. “If you employ someone who’s a very skilful but extremely grumpy cobbler, you’ll still have someone grumpy at the end of the day.”

The same willingness to judge the person rather than the label led to Timpson’s best-known social policy: recruiting people from prison. It began nearly 25 years ago when his son James attended an event at Thorn Cross prison near Warrington. Impressed by the inmate showing him around, he handed over a business card and offered him a job on release.

One hire became a programme. About 12 per cent of Timpson’s workforce now has experience of prison, and several ex-offenders have risen to senior positions.

“Over 60% of the people leaving prison will reoffend within two years,” he says. “But if they’ve got a job, that percentage drops to under 20%. So having a job is really, really important. Less than 3% of those that join Timpson from prison reoffend."

The moral case is clear, but the success of the programme has proved its commercial logic, too: prisons gave Timpson access to overlooked talent. Sir John suspects the business has probably benefited just as much as the ex-offenders it helps.

Customers, too, confounded his expectations. He had assumed some would object to being served by someone with a criminal record. Instead, the opposite happened. “Very few people say, I’m not going to have a key cut by someone who’s been in prison,” he says. “So many say, one of the reasons I come to you is because I admire what you do.”

The business remains resolutely a family one. James led it as CEO for more than two decades before his appointment as Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending in 2024, and two of Sir John’s grandchildren now work in the group, raising the prospect of a sixth generation of family ownership.

“Family businesses are not appreciated as much as they should be,” Timpson says. “They are the backbone of the economy in this country.”

At 83, he is still visiting shops, still hosting annual long-service lunches at his home – two a year now, because there are too many long-serving colleagues to fit into one. More than six decades on from running the student laundry service, the lessons he took from Nottingham have endured.

“You can be kind and still make a lot of money,” he says. “Kind to your colleagues and kind to your customers is a much better idea than being hard-nosed. It works.”