The Courts CEO who’s a little bit of a maverick

The Courts CEO who’s a little bit of a maverick

At 17, he dropped out of school to work. At 20, he got married and became a father four years later. And by 32, he was Managing Director of electronics and furniture retailer Courts Singapore.

BY NEO CHAI CHIN –

15 HOURS 30 MIN AGO

At 17, he dropped out of school to work. At 20, he got married and became a father four years later. And by 32, he was Managing Director of electronics and furniture retailer Courts Singapore. Mr Terry O’Connor, the Chief Executive of Courts Asia today, has not achieved the milestones in his life in the most conventional timeline or order. So it is rather appropriate that the latest feather in his cap, a pacey and engaging book that chronicles his adventures and that of the company, is titled: Why Not? The Story of a Retail Maverick and Courts. Launched this month, the first print run of 2,500 has already sold out.At 45, Mr O’Connor is still taking on life with guns ablaze. Courts Asia re-listed on the Singapore Exchange last October and he is leading its expansion in Malaysia and Singapore, as well as its re-entry into Indonesia next year with the opening of the region’s biggest megastore east of Jakarta. In the last financial year, sales amounted to S$793.8 million and net profit rose 5.1 per cent to S$41.4 million.

The Englishman is one of the most recognisable and quotable corporate bosses in Singapore — a fact that dates back to his decision in the late ’90s to make himself personally accessible to the media, which was (and still is) relatively unusual for a CEO.

Back then, journalists were going to Courts’ competitors for stories on the festive season or Great Singapore Sale. “I was quite fed up. I asked the journalists, why don’t you call us? And the answer was, ‘Well, you’re not accessible. We’ve asked Courts in the past for quotes, we don’t get it.’

“So I made the conscious decision, there and then, with the whole team to say you can’t pick up media relations and put them down again when it suits you,” he says. And so these days, journalists know he or his team will always be on tap — that “we’ll give a quote which is not vanilla, we will actually give a real opinion.”

WORKING TEEN

The candour and focus of his answers is evident in our interview, as he talks about his somewhat rough childhood.

His parents divorced when he was 11 and Mr O’Connor began earning money for the family from age 13.

His parents divorced when he was 11 and Mr O’Connor began earning money for the family from age 13. His father worked at a fairground in New Brighton, across the Mersey river from Liverpool, and Mr O’Connor stayed with him on weekends, working at the same fairground operating rides.

It didn’t pay very much — but the perk from the age of 15 was meeting girls.

After his ‘O’ Levels, Mr O’Connor worked for a stone cladding company, canvassing door-to-door to set up leads for the firm’s salesmen. He was “pretty good at it”, once closing four houses in a row and had the salesmen clamouring for him to be their canvasser. He was making good money for a 16-year-old but the high-pressure sales environment was discomfiting.

Into his ‘A’ Levels school term, the money from his summer job ran out. With the need to pay the bills and support his younger brother and mother, who was unemployed, he left school.

“I didn’t have any lack of confidence about finding a job, and I was a pretty practical guy,” he says. “You don’t have to do (your) education between this age and this age … I made the commitment to myself that I wouldn’t give up on education, it just wasn’t for me right (then).”

He pauses, then adds wryly: “I probably wouldn’t have the same logic with my kids — but it worked out okay (for me).” He did indeed hit the books again, at 27, earning a Masters in Business Administration.

SINGAPORE CALLING

After dropping out at 17, he did a brief stint at an ocean transport and trading company (“the most boring job I ever had”), and eventually landed a job as trainee buyer with retailer Colourvision.

Colourvision’s Chairman Neville Michaelson — whom he found intimidating initially, but would become a father figure and lasting presence in his life — was “very outgoing and was a little bit outspoken”.

When the company was between marketing directors — “and (Mr Michaelson) was generally in between marketing directors, having fired them because he wanted to do it himself” — the young Mr O’Connor took on marketing duties.

But when the company had a new managing director several years later, Mr O’Connor felt the entrepreneurial and close-knit culture Mr Michaelson had built was shifting. He heard through business partners that Courts was looking for electrical retail professionals for their top markets.

Offered a job as Director of Electrical Buying for Courts Singapore, at age 25, Mr O’Connor and his wife packed their bags and arrived here in 1993, with an 18-month-old son in tow.

OUT OF ADVERSITY

The two decades since then have been eventful, to say the least. One key event was steering the company through a “traumatic experience” in 2004 when Courts’ business in the United Kingdom went into administration.

Courts Singapore had a healthy balance sheet but came up for sale to repay its UK parent’s debt. Mr O’Connor had been Managing Director for about four years then, and “in a normal career trajectory that might be time to leave” — but he didn’t.

Courts Singapore had about 450 staff at the time, and one told Mr O’Connor that he was their “parent” now. “I guess that kind of almost parental responsibility says everything else has got to be set aside — what we’ve got to do is convince stakeholders, suppliers, media, banks, that we’re in good shape.” And to get his own team to stay on, he first pledged to stay the course.

The company exploited the opportunity to reinvent itself, rolling out initiatives that might not have been allowed by its parent before. It refurbished stores to lead with electronics and relegated furniture to a secondary position, “which didn’t reduce the furniture business … but massively increased the electronics and IT business”. It also applied for the Economic Development Board’s warehouse retail scheme to build its Tampines megastore.

STAYING FRESH

The company subsequently attracted private equity investors in 2007, which also bought Courts Malaysia. The Singapore and Malaysia businesses then privatised and merged. The entity tried to list in 2010 and finally did so last October. “So, (the last) 20 years has been quite varied … it kind of feels that I’ve worked for three or four different employers but it’s all the same brand,” Mr O’Connor says.

The company keeps itself sharp by benchmarking against the best overseas. It does regular study trips and keeps abreast of what players like Best Buy in the United States, Dixons in the United Kingdom and Gome or Suning in China are doing. “Let’s face it, there are only two ways to keep yourself fresh. Either you move company, or you expose yourself to lots of other companies and bring their thinking and developments back into your organisation.”

He sees Court’s entry into Indonesia next year as a “tipping point” — a third market will make subsequent expansion easier, making it possible to “consider things like mergers and acquisitions, not just store-by-store expansion”.

IN POVERTY OR IN RICHES

All said and done though, what still gives him the most satisfaction out of life is family, he says.

The love story began in his late teens, while he was working at Colourvision by day and at a bar at night. He would frequent a Chinese takeaway after bartending, and there he met Janice, who was from Hong Kong and visiting her mother, who owned the shop. The young O’Connor found himself ordering items that took longer to cook, just so he could have “more chat time” with her.

The fact that she was 13 years older was no issue for him. They went out for six weeks, then she returned to Hong Kong to have a think about the relationship. She left him her car and car keys, however — “a pretty strong hint she was coming back”.

On marrying at 20, Mr O’Connor says coming from different countries “probably has an accelerator effect on the relationship”. He explains: “You end up deciding very quickly — is this relationship going to work, do I want it to work and so on … We met September 1987 and by March 1988, we kind of realised we could probably court for another two years, but we already pretty much knew.”

So they got engaged and, two months later, registered their marriage — although Mrs O’Connor’s mother thought her daughter was taking a risk marrying a “poor guy”.

GOOD TO START FAMILY EARLY

Twenty-five years on, the marriage is still going strong. And Mr O’Connor, who became a dad at 24, says he is a big fan of early parenting.

“I don’t think we missed out on too much as younger parents. The benefits now are huge. I can help them with their career while I’m still working, while I’ve still got a network and access to resources of friendships built up over many years … I could list countless benefits,” he says.

Daniel, 21, is going into his final year of politics and philosophy at the University of Exeter; while Jennifer, 18, has graduated from the United World College here and will be studying fashion at Central Saint Martins.

Mr O’Connor admits he used to be a workaholic and would feel intensely guilty after being away on holiday for more than a week. Yet he has always integrated the different facets of his life. His involvement with the British Club (he was president from 1999 to 2002), for instance meant that when he had club engagements, the children could swim and have classes while his wife would meet up with friends there.

He is also immersed in charity and fund-raising initiatives — his and Janice’s annual parties have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for various non-profits since 2001. All author proceeds from his book, now into its second print run, are also going to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

DARE TO BE DIFFERENT

Mr O’Connor sees himself as “the founder of Courts Asia in its modern day form, if you like”. “My job feels like more than a job, in terms of responsibility for the lives of other people and not just my immediate team, but all the families involved with Courts.”

And there is a lot more to achieve, he believes. In his book, he writes that there were times when the idea of publishing a memoir at his age seemed a tad vulgar or self-indulgent. But why not, when “I’ve proven repeatedly that I can achieve the unexpected when I set my mind to it”.

“Ultimately, it’s a story that hopefully inspires, in some small way, executives to think through the possibilities of how to make the best of humble backgrounds, corporate roadblocks, market turbulence or other setbacks,” he writes in the introduction.

“I hope to show that somewhere in between the traditional toe-the-line, command-and-control way of moving up an organisation and today’s Gen Y touchy, feely, bruise-easily attitude, there’s a middle ground that says you still need to work hard, you still need to do the right things, but you can actually dare to be different, you can challenge the norm. You can be a little bit of a maverick while taking controlled, intelligent risks.”