Redefiners
Paws, Purpose & Profit: A Conversation with Pets at Home CEO Lyssa McGowan
Wed, 12 Mar 2025
The global pet industry is expected to grow from $320 billion today to nearly $500 billion by 2030, as more pet parents treat their pets like their own children, often sparing no expense on their pets’ nutrition, health, and wellness. As we celebrate International Women’s Day, today’s episode features a conversation with Simon, Hoda and Lyssa McGowan, CEO of Pets at Home, the UK’s leading pet care business. Lyssa will “shed” some light on how she’s “grooming” Pets at Home for growth by creating an omnichannel pet care platform in the UK. She talks about how she balances keeping what works in a purpose-driven organization while adding new capacity in data and technology. She’ll also share her insights on how and when she uses customer feedback to develop new products and services. We'll also hear from Hetty Pye, leadership advisor and co-founder of RRA Artemis, a movement designed to accelerate the development of women from the world’s most influential organizations into the CEO seat. Hetty will discuss our latest research on the media’s representation of women CEOs. Four things you’ll learn from this episode: What are the key barriers getting in the way of more women becoming CEOs and how to get past them How to lead through rapid scaling and a subsequent slowdown How a unified customer platform, data, and AI create consistent customer experience at scale What role customer feedback plays in shaping product and service innovations If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like these Redefiners episodes: Exploring the Art of Possible with Google and Alphabet President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat Leadership Lounge: How to develop your personal leadership brand Talking Tough Decisions with TCW President and CEO Katie Koch Leadership Lounge: Why are there so few women in the CEO seat? Leadership Lounge: How to nail your first year as CEO Outwork the Competition: Jordan Brand’s Winning Strategy with President Sarah Mensah
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts of the podcast?
Call them changemakers. Call them rule breakers. We call them Redefiners. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Redefiners. I'm Hoda Tahun, a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates, and I'm joined once again by my very captivating and fantastic colleague and co-host, Simon Kingston.
Hi.
Before we get started, Simon, just a quick reminder to our listeners that you can find all episodes of Redefiners and the Leadership Lounge on YouTube. If you're currently watching on YouTube and you haven't yet subscribed to the show, please go ahead and hit that subscribe button below so you don't miss an episode.
And for our audio listeners, don't forget to rate Redefiners wherever you get your podcasts. And please share your feedback on each episode as well as guest suggestions. We'd absolutely love to hear from you. Simon, as we start to think about this episode, do you have any pets or did you grow up with pets when you were younger?
I grew up with a great many pets. I think the maximum score was six cats and three dogs at one point. Oh my! Named after board games by my insane parents who had four children.
And we now have one dog now in my family who was bought to be a companion in his old age to a lovely purebred parson, Jack Russell, that we had, who was at that point, this is three or four years ago, getting a little bit old. And so in West Cork, where I come from, we bought what was allegedly a fox terrier, but transpires to have been a cross between... a Jack Russell and a Corgi.
And Lisa probably knows this, but the term of art for one of those is a Kojak. And older listeners will get the reference. And he is a total hooligan. He now lives with us for most of the year.
And what is his name?
His name is Tiberius, obviously.
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Chapter 2: What are the current trends in the pet industry?
and thinking about preventative care in a much more systematic, much more serious way than I think was the case not so long ago. It's an important part of the pet-owning household budget.
Well, today's guest is leading the charge on redefining the pet care industry to create a truly holistic pet care experience. This CEO will shed some light, pun intended, on the industry and share how she's leading her company in a very growing and expansive market. Simon, please tell our listeners who our guest is today.
Well, she has quite a tale to tell. Lisa McGowan, who is chief executive officer of Pets at Home. That's the UK's leading pet care business. We're going to hear a lot about that. But before joining Pets at Home in 2022, Lisa had had an extremely successful career in leadership roles at Sky, where she was chief consumer officer.
And she led the whole of the consumer business there, serving more than 10 million customers and running a business with revenues of around about $10 billion. And before that, she had roles at both McKinsey and at Telewest. And alongside it, she was formerly a non-executive director at Morrison's. So she brings a breadth of executive and non-executive experience to this.
And in addition to all of that, she is, I believe, the proud owner of two Labradors, Freddie and Barney. And incidentally, but we might as well have it for the record, is mother to three human children as well. Yeah.
Lisa, welcome to Redefiners. Thank you for having me. It's lovely, lovely to be here. So Lisa, before we jump in, I read that 85% of your team are pet owners. I'm a little curious. What does bring your dog to work day look like at your company?
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.
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
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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Chapter 3: How does Pets at Home support pet owners?
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: What leadership qualities are essential for a CEO?
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.
And what do you think are some of the key barriers holding back women from becoming CEOs?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, this notion of perfection, it doesn't exist.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do women face in leadership roles?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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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Chapter 6: How can women build confidence in their careers?
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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
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
And as that's underway, because it's an extraordinarily compelling proposition, the breadth of the offering, and clearly differentiates you from people who are merely engaged in the retail side of it. But what was the conversation with your customers like along the way? And how much did that shape the way the integration and the consumer-centric bits of that played out?
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Chapter 7: What role does mentoring play in women's leadership?
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?
Is he supposed to have one of those?
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?
But I mean, that could be a topic for an entirely different and longer podcast. But that idea of trust in a time when trust is at a premium, I think is fascinating and must be kind of part of what you and the board and you've touched on the board relationship a couple of times. We should just come on to that. But I mean, in a way, what you're custodians of is that trust. Yeah.
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.
Yeah, that's really interesting. You mentioned, Lisa, at the beginning, the kind of the transition to being a CEO and it being a different job. And that in a sense, you don't have a boss, you've got a board. Tell us a bit about how you work with the board to discern strategy for pets at home and how that dialogue happens.
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.
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.
And any advice you would offer somebody else about to step into that CEO role on the board relationship in particular? Clearly a very good relationship with the chair, clearly setting the terms of engagement, but anything else or any observations that surprised you despite having been a NED yourself before?
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Chapter 8: What insights does Hetty Pye share about women CEOs?
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
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.
Now that you're a few years into your CEO role at Pets at Home, what's one thing you wish you had learned sooner?
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.
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.
And what is one important skill every person should have? Sleeping. That's a great one.
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.
Can I ask one bonus question, Hoda, with your permission? Yes, of course. And Lisa, with yours. How do I persuade my daughter that she doesn't really want a Syrian hamster from pets at home?
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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