Profile: Andy Edge, Park Resorts

Leadership styles / 01 October 2009

Managers try all sorts to find out how their team really feels about work, but not many go to such lengths as Park Resorts’ Andy Edge – the sales and marketing director spent a few weeks undercover at the coalface, and on prime-time TV too. Jane Lewis went to find out whether the experiment paid off

Senior managers often wonder what their underlings are really up to; few get the chance to find out first hand. Still, it takes an exceptionally brave company to sanction a warts-and-all TV exposé of life at the coalface – especially when the programme-makers retain full editing control.
Taking part in Channel 4’s Undercover Boss was a gamble that could have backfired big time for Park Resorts, Britain’s second largest caravan holiday camp operator. No wonder the board deliberated long and hard before going ahead.

The premise of the series, as one reviewer noted, is to throw ‘bigwigs into the snarling lions’ pit that is their own workforce’.
Fortunately, the company had just recruited the perfect candidate for the mission. Sales and marketing director Andy Edge had been in the job just eight months when he agreed to go undercover to work incognito as a chef, waiter, cleaner and entertainer at two of the company’s 37 parks – and you would be hard pushed to find a more personable chap for the role.

He might possess a six-figure salary, a nice line in sharp suits and a name that wouldn’t look amiss in an early Martin Amis novel, but Andy Edge doesn’t do tantrums or shouting.

In fact, he professes to despise the brasher elements of the sales and marketing profession and is at pains to distance himself from the bully-boy sales boss stereotype. ‘A lot of people I meet in marketing are up their own backsides in terms of how they view themselves,’ he declares. ‘As for the way they treat people... [long, withering pause]... It’s just pointless.’

Whatever else the programme-makers were expecting, they were never going to get a pantomime villain.

‘I’ve taken some amazing trips and jollies in my time, and I always send a thank you letter,’ says this paragon of good manners. Indeed, Mr and Mrs Edge can congratulate themselves on a job well done. ‘My parents are real down-to-earth people from Oldham,’ says Edge.

He considers himself moulded in the same tradition. Before beginning his corporate ascent (starting in magazine ad sales, he then worked his way up through the marketing departments of Kraft, St Ivel and brewer Scottish & Newcastle, eventually taking a senior job at Madame Tussauds), he paid his way through university by working on the assembly line at the local factory – and prides himself on an ability to rub along with most people.

What’s more, caravanning is in the blood. Having spent all his childhood holidays touring round Britain, home in tow, Edge retains fond memories of running free in grassy idylls.

Reality television

So far, so perfect from the point of view of Park Resorts’ PR machine. But even Edge was taken aback by some of the things he uncovered as he delved deeper into the company, posing as ‘Drew’ and armed with the cover story that he was taking part in a documentary about learning new trades.

Mixed in with some entertaining footage of him confronting his own personal demon – getting up on stage, ‘stone, cold sober’, to jump about in front of an audience of 80 – were some serious issues about staff morale and motivation. The holiday business, often reliant on seasonal staff paid the minimum wage, is notoriously difficult to manage well, particularly at the budget end. And there were both nice and nasty revelations.

‘On the quality side, what surprised me with some of the people was their absolute energy and passion in what is a very difficult job. I kind of hoped I’d see that, but when I did it was great,’ says Edge. But the programme also revealed some gaping management holes and there were some telling vignettes highlighting just how undervalued a large tranche of the staff felt. Some of the cleaners, as one reviewer remarked, were ‘in revolt’. But the most negative surprise, according to Edge, ‘was probably the breakdowns in procedure’.

Park life

Exhibit A: the chronically over-worked head chef, charged with getting hundreds of meals out daily, without the benefit of proper training. ‘We had environmental health over the other day because someone found a bit of plastic in their cauliflower cheese,’ he revealed.

After his own gruelling shift in the kitchen – exacerbated when a staff member phoned in sick and couldn’t be covered – Edge was inclined to sympathise. Of all the jobs he undertook at the two camps in Norfolk and the Isle of Wight, the kitchen ‘was the worst in terms of pressure’, as hungry campers agitated for their food.

The chef, who regularly worked a 60-hour week, had slipped through the training net because he’d joined midway through the season and ‘we normally train chefs at the start’. He was working his socks off, ‘but feeling adrift and, in that respect, the company let him down’.

Exhibit B: The accommodation manager who made no bones of the fact that she hated her job and whose team of cleaners, unsurprisingly, was similarly unmotivated.

‘In the programme we saw how to get it right – and how to get it wrong,’ admits Edge. ‘If you’re an entertainer, it’s physically very difficult and tiring. But you get the adulation of the audience, and that gives you a high.’ There’s no such perk for those toiling away behind the scenes in the cleaning and maintenance departments. But, as he found out, with the right encouragement from a switched-on manager, staff morale can still be high.

‘We had one really exceptional accommodation manager who empathised with her team. She was structured: there were clear rules and a clear process, and she recruited good people.’ Above all, she made them feel like a valued team, with a vital role to play in the overall Park Resorts’ proposition.

‘She made the cleaners really understand that someone coming on holiday might have saved for 12 months. This could be their one holiday of the year – and you’re making that happen.’

If there were ever complaints the team – who made a point of socialising together outside work – ‘felt personally that they’d let that customer down. As a result complaints were really non-existent and satisfaction scores were high.

‘Of course, what we’ve now done is to apply [this model] across the whole business,’ he says. Other lessons have also been assimilated. Sean the chef was dispatched forthwith to catering college and is now back at his stove; and, in future, all new recruits will be given induction training, whatever time of the season they arrive. The rebellious cleaning manager, meanwhile, was found a different post. ‘She was a good person, she just hated the job. She didn’t like cleaning, she liked dealing with customers. So she’s now a reception manager at the same park – and she’s fine.’

Management matters

Making Undercover Boss was always ‘going to be a journey’, says Edge. ‘As a company we believe that you’ve got to strive until you get better,’ which was the main reason the firm agreed to take part in the show. But the greatest lesson that Park Resorts appears to have drawn from the programme is the importance of strong, individual managers at every level in the company hierarchy.

Perhaps the biggest structural change made since filming in August 2008 is the reversal of the policy of cluster management, in which one general manager was responsible for several parks.

‘We try to have a consistency of approach and we’ve got a lot of systems and procedures,’ says Edge. ‘But the general manager will largely determine the feel of the business in a park. One thing that became clear from the programme was that customer experience is critical and that – with hindsight – it was the wrong call to try and go for cluster management. So we’ve reverted back to one park, one GM.’

What he doesn’t mention is that, a few months after filming, there were also big ructions in the Park Resorts boardroom – culminating in the ousting of the CEO and finance director for alleged mismanagement and underperformance. The pair, along with a third executive, recently sued the company, which is owned by American private equity firm GI Partners, for unfair dismissal and won £45,000 in compensation.

It is clear that the financial situation at Park Resorts when the filming took place in summer 2008 was a good deal more complicated than the programme revealed.

‘We have since turned the business round significantly and have made major improvements,’ Park Resorts’ returning chief executive, David Vaughan, told The Times.

Sales sensation

And, fortunately, the TV show appears to have made its own positive contribution to the bottom line. ‘We were having a good season before the programme, which was aired this June,’ says Edge. The good weather early on in the summer helped, as did the trend towards recessionary ‘staycations’. ‘But the week after the programme we saw a big spike.’

Overall, he says ‘we’re seeing 20% year-on-year revenue growth at the moment selling holidays’. Figures that would seem to contradict the contention of one critic who claimed it was difficult to view the programme as ‘anything other than a marketing stunt gone badly wrong’.

On the contrary, says Edge, ‘we’ve had hundreds of letters from people saying, “Good on yer – well done for being so brave, Park Resorts; well done for being so brave, Andy”.’ He thinks the public warmed to the company’s honesty and the way it addressed issues. And it never does any harm for a company director to be shown ‘cleaning a bog’. One correspondent even went so far as to claim that ‘if Andy was running the country, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in’.

But perhaps the most beneficial impact of the programme, as far as Edge is concerned, was the effect it had on staff morale. ‘I got loads of emails from people in the company afterwards saying, “I feel really proud to work for the company, because I’ve got a director doing what I do”. As a company, we got great media value from Undercover Boss, but the important thing for me was that employees felt motivated.’
Undercover education

What did Edge learn from his stint undercover about leadership and motivation? To some extent, he says, it reinforced what he already knew from his own experience at the hands of previous bosses.

‘In my career I’ve met bosses of whom I just thought: “You know, you’re probably not getting the best out of me because you just don’t fully get me.” But I’ve also worked for people who pressed the right buttons – and I’ve tried to learn what to do and what not to do.’

Getting people motivated is about imposing ‘clear rules, clear processes and, I think, making them feel part of a bigger picture’. But perhaps even more important than that is personal example. ‘I think one positive aspect of the programme was that I came across as very approachable. I’ll get stuck into anything. There’s nothing I would ask my team in the office to do that I wouldn’t do myself.

‘You don’t need to whip people,’ he adds. ‘For me it’s a case of empowering them. I’m a pretty laid back person and I know that if I get stressed it just ripples down to the people below me, so I try and keep some perspective. I never shout, but my team know when I’m hacked off and obviously they know that they’re letting me down if they don’t deliver. But for me the key thing is to make them feel valued and motivated in their roles. I’m a firm believer that I’m only as good as my team.’

Ultimately, however, the buck stops with the boss. ‘If you’re happy, your team will be happy; if you’re structured, they’ll be structured too. As an old boss of mine used to say, it’s all about the shadow that you cast as a manager.’