Lyssa McGowan
Appearances
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Rather than this idea of perfection that no one likes that cow. Yeah.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, there's a couple of things. So I hate it when people say I've got imposter syndrome because it sounds like it's a syndrome that's like, okay. It's like a disease. Exactly. You can't have imposter syndrome and be a CEO because then you're thinking about yourself all the time. You're thinking about what's everyone thinking about me? How am I showing up? How am I feeling?
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And as a senior leader, you can't be thinking about that. You've got to be thinking about how's this person doing? What's this person taking from me? How am I leading this person? How am I showing up for this team, for this organization? So one thing is like, stop focusing on yourself. Stop worrying about your confidence. Think about other people and what you owe to them in a leadership position.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
and and then you kind of your frame of reference again has changed the other thing of course is just fake it like yeah just fake it till you make it I was once on this training course where there was this really geeky guy really like shy and unconfident and we were given like it was a it was really early in my career I was like 21 they they gave us all a status card and said act this status because
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
you know, they were sending junior consultants in to talk to CEOs. They wanted us to understand the kind of status thing. Anyways, this guy, he's like really shy and geeky. He's given the card 10 and immediately he's like, shoulders go back. And he starts like being this CEO-like character. I'm like, dude, you just need to do that your whole life. Be that person. Yeah.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And I think there's like you just if you fake it for long enough, the people respond to you in the way that you're appearing and therefore that builds your confidence. And eventually you forget you're faking it and it just becomes normal.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah. Anyway, it's a hard one because so many people feel it. But top tips. Thank you. Those are great.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, it's tricky because Pets at Home is a hugely successful business. And, you know, the number one pet care retailer, the number two biggest vets in the UK. It was number three when I started. It's number two now. We've got number, you know, one spot in grooming, you know, accessories, nutrition.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Like it's a huge business, hugely successful, way bigger than the next kind of two or three bricks and mortar competitors combined. And a very proud business, proud of its heritage. And it managed the pandemic brilliantly. So it was open throughout the whole pandemic. And the culture is very strong at Pets at Home, incredibly pet centric.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
This purpose of creating a better world for pets, the people who love them runs right through the company. You know, we've got 16,000 expert colleagues, whether they be veterinary surgeons or nutrition experts or experienced groomers or right the gamut, but they get up and come to work every day to create a better world for pets, the people who love them.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So you've got this incredibly purpose-driven organization that was open all through COVID and then this massive pet boom. So the dogs and cats were just walking in the door. The biggest stress was how do we get stock on the shelves fast enough to service it? And it was this huge thing.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And actually, when I came, everyone was really tired, especially the vets, because we were one of the few vets that stayed open. They'd been under a lot of pressure. They'd given their all. I'm rightly proud of how we'd performed.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
But then you had this cloud on the horizon that was coming and the strategy that we needed to deploy going forward was much more about the skill set that I bought around technology, consumer insight, data, digital, building platforms, but without breaking the brilliant stuff that was going on in vets and retail. So it was very much a jigsaw piece to kind of bring in those new skills and
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
sort of changed the culture a bit so that we were a bit more, we had a very high support culture, but not a lot of challenge because it had been, you know, very much about how do we service pets.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
The new world, the new level of competition, the headwinds that were coming required more challenge in the culture to get to a high performance culture, but without breaking all those things that were really special and that lovely pride in how well we'd managed the pandemic. So
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I thought of it really as a tightrope, you know, and it was a tightrope on many dimensions, you know, keep the support, but add the challenge, you know, keep all the brilliant retail and veterinary skills, but add the, you know, the capacity and capability around technology and digital and data.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So it was a real balance, sort of keep the pride in what had been achieved, but be honest about the challenge that faced in the future. And I think in some ways, That's harder than a burning platform because a burning platform is just clear, right? You know, stop doing all of that. We've got to do this. And in a crisis like COVID, things become boiled down to their essence.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And I think when you're in a growth, great culture, lovely culture, but you've got to be different, that balancing act is tougher.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I would have every sort of quarter I'd have hour-long calls with my top 40 people just to kind of check in. And I think because, you know, a lot of times CEOs talk a lot to their exec team. But I think going a level down and even a level below that and just building those relationships with long-serving, long-standing people and just getting that feedback.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I also spent a lot of time out in stores and bets. And that was for two reasons. One is to gauge what's going on at the front line. Um, but the other is to be visibly out there and be seen to be there at the frontline because you, you want, you know, in a business that's rightly proud and very connected to pets, you want to be out there feeling that.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So I don't think there's any substitute in a multi-site operational business for spending a lot of time at the frontline. Um, so yeah, I think those things, and then I made sure that in my team, I had those culture carriers. In fact, I promoted one of them to be our chief people and legal officer.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
She's fabulous, but she was a real culture carrier for the business and a kind of lightning rod and very much kind of, you know, could just sense because it was such a different culture to Sky. And such a different culture to McKinsey where I'd done the big stints in my career. I needed that help and just figuring out what was going on bubbling under the surface.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
We are the biggest funder, grant maker to rescue charities across the UK. We support over 800 rescues and have donated £50 million over the last decade to supporting them. And we also, in the cost of living crisis, launched a scheme to feed pets because human food banks were reporting that humans were
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
People were taking food and sharing it with their pets because they didn't want their pets to go hungry. So we stepped in and did it with the Blue Cross, did a food bank. So we're pretty close to those issues. And I think what actually happened is during the pandemic, you know, all the shelters emptied as all the pets got adopted.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And then afterwards, there was an increase, but actually only in proportion to the pet population. You know, the big stories about all these abandonments, they're not really borne out in the numbers. I mean, they make a good newspaper headline, but Most people, as you would know, Simon, would not give up their pet unless they absolutely had to.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And some of that might be cost of living and some of that might be, you know, they took on a pet while they were working from home and they really don't have the capacity to care for them. Equally, they may have become too elderly to care for them. I mean, these are things that have been going on for years and years, but people are really reluctant, rightly so, to give up their companions.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So it's not that there was like this wave of adoptions. And we did respond, we have an adoptions club, so you can get all the benefits of our puppy and kitten club. But yeah, I'm really proud of the work we're doing with the Blue Cross to keep dogs and cats in the homes with their owners rather than having to give them up for adoption.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I know, when Barney ate my brand new shoes, I was a bit like, oh, I don't know, but yeah.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I think of it as a bit of a jigsaw puzzle in that the business skills and capabilities when I turned up were amazing, right? So, you know, really well-invested national footprint of pet care centers, which had vets and grooming and retail, really strong culture, great category authority, and
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
you know a joint venture vets model which is is really unique and and very powerful and so the sort of core veterinary and retail skills were there and and the job there is learn them so i asked a lot of questions spent a lot of time like working in vets in the distribution center cleaning out fish really understanding from the bottom up how that stuff worked
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
and preserving that but then wrapping around that the kind of digital technology marketing customer insight skills that the business needed to go forward and bringing in people to do that so you know the jigsaw puzzle the two pieces needed to come together and so the vision that that we set for the business was to become the world's best pet care platform And that is a omni-channel platform.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So you can do, obviously you can walk into one of our pet care centers and that's really powerful. And face-to-face treatment, medical, buying big 15 kilogram bags of dog food. These are things, getting your dog groomed, they're all things you're going to always want to do face-to-face.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
But wrapping around that, a digital experience, which is not just e-commerce, but advisory, telemedicine, e-pharmacy, virtual, hybrid. So all of that omni-channel and
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
We've got huge economies of scale there in terms of our distribution, in terms of how far we can amortize a digital platform, because digital platform doesn't really care if I'm doing a post-surgical consult with a vet or a nutrition advisory with a colleague in store. It's just, it's a functionality.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So there's real economies of scale in that omni-channel experience and being there where the customer wants to be. And then in terms of the integration, so having vets, grooming, retail, all of this, because there's a spectrum of, you know,
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
cardiac surgery on a hamster all the way through to probably not on a hamster actually but you know on a cat all the way through to buying a tennis ball for your dog and all of the supplements and wellness and food and nutrition everything in between so to the extent we can integrate that and make that a super easy experience and get customers to spend more of their share of their pet wallet with pets at home that's a really important part of the platform so omnichannel integrated and the third leg is um
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
It's consumer centric. So we have an enormous amount of data. We've got 10 years of data on half the nation's pets, more than half the nation's pets. We know what your dog's vaccine record is and what it ate for breakfast. So if we can leverage that into really great advice, support.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
um you know and triggers to get you more engaged in the platform and do everything that you can so you know if we know your cat or your dog came in for a gastric issue in the vets we should be marketing you know the particular sensitive stomach food to you and probably giving you a discount because you're a club member and so it all comes together into this platform and that's what we're trying to build but it has to wrap around
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
a core business that's really working and then you bring in bring in the rest of it to make it hum so again it's slightly that tightrope of how do you stretch resource uh without just kind of adding a load of cost to build the future but make sure that the core business is still humming
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, it's a funny thing. I mean, I've spent my life building consumer-centric, technology-enabled businesses, but... Consumers can tell you some things. I mean, I can't remember the old Ogilvy quote, but they can tell you what they like and what they don't like.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
They sort of can tell you what they would like if you give them some really clear options, but they can't really imagine a future that you're imagining and tell you they want that. So I think it's really important you get consumer insight and deep consumer understanding of where consumers are. But I don't think they can tell you what they don't know.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And if you're trying to build something that no one else has done before, you have to find proxies for what you think consumers want and a little bit of gut feel and understand. So, you know, when I built the mobile business... At Sky, we came up with this concept of a piggy bank.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So the issue at the time and still now is you pay for these big data packs because you're terrified of running out and having to pay a load of extra money for extra data. But then it's really annoying because you know you're overpaying, but you need that buffer. So we have this concept called Roll. So any data you didn't use rolled into a piggy bank at the end of the month.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And anyone in your family could draw down from that piggy bank. Now, that insight didn't really come directly from consumers going, what would you like to do with your data? But it came from looking at adjacent industries like with rolling, kind of charging, understanding consumer behavioral economics.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
It was from my experience of my daughter spending £400 with Vodafone because she was watching Dance Mums in her bedroom and the Wi-Fi was too slow. So all of these things, you get insight from consumers, but you have to put it together, understanding your P&L, your technology capability, your economics, and project forward what you think the experience is.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
When I turned it up, we had actually a huge number. As you would expect in a company that's sort of got purpose, it's just like a lot, like tens and tens of sustainability type kind of objectives. And so we cut it. I kind of work with the board and with the business to cut it into three clear pillars. So people... pets and planet.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And I think if you want a sustainable business, you actually, for us, we need to work across all three of those. So it's not just about environmental sustainability. And so on the people pillar, it's very much a commitment to being the best promoter and developer of pet care talent. So we invest in graduate programs for vets.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
We invest in training and development, social mobility, bringing people through, working with charities, because Quite often people that have found other jobs challenging for various reasons find their home in pet care because they just love animals. And we find people just flourish in pets at home that maybe haven't been so happy elsewhere.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And we've got really low turnover and really high tenure. And that's part of it. So the people pillar is really important. We also invest in workshops for pets.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
long-standing relationship with the scouts and we do the half term so kids can come in and learn about handle some guinea pigs and learn about taking care of animals and that's part of our developing the pet care owners of the future then we have our pets pillar and that's about you know welfare standards the work i talked about the foundation that the fundraising the grant making and
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And just that is in everything we do every day, making sure that we take care of pets. That's what most people in my business get up to do hands on every single day. And we also work with, you know, government and with a bit lobbying to sort of make sure that pets and advocate for them as a big voice in the industry. So that's the pets pillar.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And then the planet pillar is pretty broad, actually, again. So in the vets, we're working with low flow anesthesia because actually anesthetic gas is quite a big problem for the atmosphere. We've got a...
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
partnership with a company called meatly which is making cultivated food in labs so that you know one day hopefully we don't have to slaughter animals to feed pets um and importantly we've got a commitment as you say to to carbon net zero the biggest thing we can do there is get dogs and cats meeting wet food to dry food because dry food is actually about an order of magnities better in terms of environmental sustainability so that's a real direction of travel for us as well
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, well, we have these debates at the board all the time, actually, which is great. My view is I think we should be slightly ahead of the consumer. not miles ahead of the consumer and not behind the consumer, but a little bit ahead.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And I think we have a real role given the expertise of our colleagues, given, you know, the advice of both of our vets and our retail colleagues and our grooming colleagues to really help educate consumers. They already come to us for advice. That's one of the big reasons that, you know, 40% of puppies and kittens in the UK will become a Pets Club member. Did you just say 40%? Mm-hmm. Wow.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Amazing. Because they come because a lot of first time pet owners or they, you know, they just want that advice. They can talk to them about nutrition, about grooming. You know, I've done, I obviously do shifts from time to time in the retail side. People ask me all these questions.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
got a clue and every time like everyone else is like oh yeah you need this or that and i'm like it's it's crazy the depth of knowledge we have so actually environmental is no different our colleagues care greatly about the environment and so we're we're um footprinting all of our food or fingerprinting i can't quite remember which one you do one or the other poor printing poor print that's it poor printing all our food
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
to figure out very, we'll be talking to our colleagues about that over the coming months so that they in turn can say to customers, you know, if you switch from this to this, then it halves your carbon emissions, for example.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, we did some research actually before we launched our All for Pets campaign and we are seven times more trusted than our nearest competitor. So it's an enormous bank of trust. I mean, we've both got older pets now, but I remember when we first had Freddie, I mean, we were in all the time asking because we had no idea, right?
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, exactly. And then we had Barney. We're still in all the time. We're like, really? What have we done wrong with this one?
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, no, exactly. And, you know, it takes decades to build and it's very easy to destroy. So it's really important. And part of what I want to do is bring that to life online as well. So when you turn up onto our online experience or app experience, it should feel as advisory and warm as when you walk into our store and our colleague says hello to your dog and then to you.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, no, I have a great board, actually. I'm very lucky. And I sat down before I joined with my chairman, Ian, and Ian's coached a number of first-time CEOs into CEO positions, really experienced. And he actually had like a five-page document that talked about his role versus my role. And we worked through it.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And I think that was just so helpful to kind of figure out and have those discussions up front before we got into the actual job.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I think the right boards have a good mix of challenge and support, right? Because that just like the right execs and the right businesses. So I think being open to challenge and not being defensive and not misinterpreting challenges kind of, you know, something else is quite important. So because in the end, NEDs want to be helpful, right? They turn up 10 or 12 times a year,
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
They want to be useful and they want to get engaged. So the more you invite them in, the more you're going to get out of them. And I know that from being a NED. It's very easy not to be defensive at the beginning because the problems aren't really your problems. But two or three years in, you know, they are actually critiquing things you've done and advising you to do things differently.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And I think staying non-defensive and open is probably harder than starting that way.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Cross between a Labrador and a Border Collie.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I don't know what you call that. A Collie... I don't know.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Thai green curry. Ooh, love that. Yeah, definitely. Although I'm in a massive like culinary competition with my husband. Up until like five years ago, I was the chef in the family and my friends knew me as quite an accomplished chef. Then he went and did a cooking course and now he's like much better than me. And the kids are like, oh, mummy, that was quite nice. It's almost daddy standard.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And I'm like, So yeah, we can't really talk about cooking anymore. What is your favorite way to exercise? My favorite leisurely exercise-y thing is scuba diving. That moment when you get beneath the water and exhale and your daily sales reports are on the boat. You just, yeah, I love that. But I used to really, really like doing like weightlifting and body pump and these hot, but now it's yoga.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I'm just, yeah, yoga.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
People won't remember what you said or what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. It's Maya Angelou. I love that quote. I love that one. It's very true.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I think I knew intellectually, but it's not till you experience it, just how much impact every single thing you do say. If you look at someone funny, like everyone is looking at you all the time. And the kind of the weight of the office is so weighty. It brings with it, there's certain things you can and can't do.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And I think, you know, I knew that intellectually, but experiencing that's quite different. You need to carry the weight of the office lightly, but seriously.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Yeah, I'm very good at sleeping. And it's turned out to be an incredibly... My husband really isn't, so I can see the difference. But yeah, being good at sleeping, it's a superpower.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Oh, I think it's more about how does your daughter persuade you that you really need one in your life? Send us to me and I'll give us some top tips.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
That's a great question. Bring your dog to work day is every day. Oh, wow. Yeah. So we have pet kitchens. We have an agility course behind the support office. We have a lot of expensive cable trays to stop them.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
pets chewing cables under the desks um no it's really lovely there's pets always in the office the odd the odd rabbit comes in so yeah really really really lovely atmosphere and I think it it's part of the culture of the business that that we have pets everywhere our purpose is to create a better world for pets and the people who love them and that starts right at home how amazing
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I have to say, though, I've got a very similar dynamic in my two Labradors as Simon does in that my elder one is this lovely elderly kind of support dog. He's so calm, so sweet, so lovely. And so we bred from him, hoping that his temperament would come out in the puppies. And we got Barney, who is an
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
absolute hooligan and so i can't take him to the office because he's so naughty and i do sometimes take him on photo shoots when i'm in the press and things and he just always always gets his private parts out and refuses to comply so he's just so naughty uh but we love him he's absolutely gorgeous but yeah he's he's not he's not office trained shall we say
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
it's always a bit weird on how far back do you go? So I'll go back to kind of my uni degree, I think, which was in geography. Um, and I really loved that because it was this balance of the human, the physical, the arts, the science, data, and creativity.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And that kind of, I think set me up really well for a career in business because it's those hard and soft skills that you really have to bring together. And actually ultimately as a CEO, really important to get that blend. So I knew I wanted to do business and, um,
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So I joined McKinsey and they had this program at the time where you did a couple of years with McKinsey and then a couple of years in industry and then go off to business school and then back to McKinsey.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So I followed that path with one slight deviation, which is I had my first daughter when I was in the middle of my MBA at Harvard Business School, which was a real introduction to work-life balance and nothing changed. has ever felt quite as hard since because they have rules at Harvard Business School like they did in those days 20 years ago about missing class.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So you're allowed one day off for your own marriage, one day off for the death in your nuclear family, or one day off for the birth of your own child. So when I went in, I said I was pregnant. They said, oh, don't worry. Those are meant for the men. We have had women here who've taken two, three, four, even a whole week off. Yeah. Oh, wow. How generous. So I negotiated a half a semester.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So anyway, so that was, that was interesting. So then I went back to McKinsey as a mom in my, in my twenties. And I got to kind of my early thirties and I had a bit of a, I know this podcast is about redefining moments. I had a bit of a redefining moment as I got just approaching 30, where I I just realized that in consulting, I was only really bringing half of myself to work.
Redefiners
Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
It was only really half of my skill set. I loved actually the problem solving. I love working in small teams on big strategic problems. But I wanted to do as well as think. I didn't want to be the person whispering in the ear of the person making the decision and then never being around for it to happen.
Redefiners
Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So I decided that I wanted to go into industry, into a role where I could grow businesses and lead big teams of people and actually kind of get things done and kind of see the impact of the decisions. So that's why I joined Sky. And it turned out to be the most brilliant decision. I spent 12 years there. Absolutely loved it. It's such a unique culture at Sky. It's a really...
Redefiners
Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Believe in better is the tagline, and that's how it feels. Both the belief, the confidence, the ambition, but also the fact that there's this... Discomfort with the status quo, like a restlessness. And so we kept innovating. We always felt like the challenger, never the incumbent. It was a really high performance organization. And I was able there to really grow my career.
Redefiners
Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
First of all, leading the broadband business. Then we started a mobile business, which was like an amazing startup, but with all the resources of a big incumbent, we were able to do some really innovative things there.
Redefiners
Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And all of this time, because it wasn't the core business of Sky, everyone was really focused on TV, I got to do loads of really interesting and cool things as I was sort of growing my exec career. So I've always been attracted to roles maybe where you're doing something a bit innovative and different and then eventually came on to run the whole consumer business. So that was a great time.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And it was actually a real wrench to leave, I have to say, because it's such a fun, dynamic place. And I'd been on this journey from... taking it from an analog TV provider to kind of a media and telco be a myth. But ultimately, I just felt really ready to be a CEO. It was just the time.
Redefiners
Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
I often talk about the CEO role as not, it's not kind of quantitatively different. I thought it would be 30% harder than a divisional, like, you know, owner or executive. And it's not any percent harder. It's just a completely different role. And like with any transition, what gets you to be successful in your old role is almost the thing that will hold you back in your new role.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
People say it's lonely. I don't find it lonely because there's actually lots of people that you can talk to. I've got lots of mentors. Lots of people will give you soundings and advice. In the end, the buck stops. You have to make the call. When something is difficult and you're an executive, your job really is to figure out the plan. Ideally, keep the CEO away.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
so you can figure it out and get on with it. But if you have to involve the CEO, convince the CEO of kind of what's the right next step. But when you're the CEO, you have to convince yourself. And it turns out I'm a much harder...
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
sell than than any of my bosses and quite often you're choosing between you know not great options and you're only 50 sure that one of them might be the best and then you have to kind of perform this alchemy where you pick one and then convince the organization that it's you know absolutely logical and clear and we should all follow it and performing that alchemy is it's
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
repeated and so i think it's just a very different role you know an exec leadership team is not the same as a as a divisional team you know you've got much bigger people with much more gravitas but also you know you can't manage them in quite the same way um and you've you know you've not really got a boss but you've got a board and you've got shareholders so it's more diffuse but that doesn't make it that makes it somewhat more complex so i think
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
just the role itself is so different and I'm not sure anything can prepare you for it but almost going into it knowing you it is so different is quite helpful and that you have to leave a what a lot of what made you successful before behind because when things got tough before I would go faster dive in harder kind of you know get into the organization make things happen and you actually you can't do that as a CEO you have to stand back and create space
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So very different.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
You know, I spent a lot of time coaching and mentoring women throughout my career. I think the experience of women who want to become senior executives and the barriers that they face are generally quite different than what I've experienced when I've been coaching men. And so I feel incredibly privileged now.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
to live in a geography and a time in history where my opportunity to be a CEO is even possible. Like it's probably only in the last 30 years and only in like 10% of the globe where this is even an option. So I just feel that, you know, I don't carry that weight heavily. I just feel incredibly privileged.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And so I want to pay that forward and I want to make sure that, you know, I help women, you know, frame their experiences and their capabilities in the way that helps them succeed. So it's quite core to me.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
So when women come to me for coaching in that kind of area of their career, or actually any area of their career, any point in their career, it's such a different experience than when men come. And I think it starts really early in childhood where When boys fall down, they're told, get up and try again, right? Get up and try again, keep going. And they frame success as like 51-49.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Whereas little girls are told, don't fall down, you'll get dirty. So women frame success as 100 out of 100, right? And if they get to 99 out of 100, they think they've failed. All the women that come to me say, my issue is confidence, right? I don't have confidence. And I'm like, well, you... you have to have confidence as a CEO.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
It's like saying, I want to be a CEO, but I can't do analytics or public speaking. These are just... Table stakes. Table stakes for the job. So I help build confidence. And I think explaining that the frame of reference is wrong. You can't be heading for a hundred percent and beating yourself up because you got 99, right? You need to reframe that as you're 51, 49.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
And that is so powerful because I say to women, you know, everyone compares them. Every woman compares themselves against what their perfect self would have done. I call her perfectly, sir. And it doesn't really exist either.
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Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
It's impossible. It's impossible. And you know, you can't compare yourself to perfection. You have to compare yourself to, am I the best person in this place right now to do this job? Yeah, in that case, I'll get on and do it. So for a lot of women, it's about frame of reference of what success is that is actually holding them back.
Redefiners
Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
You know, there's that thing that everyone says, oh, if women can do, you know, nine out of 10 things on a job, they might put themselves forward. Whereas men say, oh, six out of 10, I'll do it. But it's all of that. It's the frame of reference. And so I try and coach people to look around at everyone around you and say, am I doing as well as, if not a little bit better than that? Okay, I'm good.