Neil Clifford, the boss of Kurt Geiger, one of Britain’s best known shoe brands, began his career miles away from the glitz and glamour of fashion.
As a child, the CEO failed almost all of his exams because of his dyslexia. After leaving school with only an art degree, Clifford went to the job center and found work at a Fiat car dealership, earning £25 ($33) a week.
“That was my first job in August 1983, so I guess I did pretty well,” Clifford said Assets.
And he actually did it quite well: The 57-year-old has worked his way up from car sales and toilet cleaning for extra pocket money to head the Kurt Geiger company, which has an annual turnover of £330 million ($432 million) – and has done so for more than two decades.
His career took a new turn after a friend got him an interview for Burton’s menswear at Debenhams in his hometown of Portsmouth.
“Suddenly I went from delivering paraffin wax to selling suits,” he recalls. “I realized I was really good at selling things because I could convince people how great they looked.”
There, Clifford had his big breakthrough, which paved his way into the high-profile world of fashion.
Clifford’s career-defining moment
After working at his local department store for a few months, Clifford noticed that the then CEO of Burton and founder of Topshop, Ralph Halpern, had made a habit of walking through the store most Saturdays.
Clifford knew he had to seize this opportunity to stand out from the hundreds of other workers across the UK. His plan? He would have the courage to put his ambitions directly to the boss.
He waited for the right moment to strike – when his manager was on vacation.
“I knew that when he came in today, I would already have my speech in my head,” he recalls. “I knew that this was a moment for me. It was a bit like being a footballer who came on as a substitute and had to take a penalty.”
“I had this half-hour opportunity to chat with the really, really big boss,” he adds. “I knew I wanted to ask for advice, but I also wanted to express my enthusiasm, ambition and energy… So, yes, that was a moment for me where I knew I had to perform.”
The advice that stuck with Clifford was: “There are plenty of jobs, but you have to move to London. You won’t make it in Portsmouth.”
It was the push he needed to leave his sleepy hometown and throw himself into the hustle and bustle of the city.
The move to London changed Clifford’s career
“I applied for a job in Woolwich that week,” Clifford recalls the defining moment of his career. “To be honest, I didn’t know where Woolwich was, but it had a London postcode.”
The role offered him the chance to run his own boutique instead of a food stall in a department store – it was a big step forward and to his surprise he was offered the job immediately.
“I was the only applicant,” he laughs. “Nobody else applied for the job because, as it turns out, Woolwich was a pretty rough place in 1986.”
And just like that, Clifford traded the safety of Portsmouth for one of the roughest parts of London and never looked back.
“The entire staff was stealing, so I had to replace the entire staff,” he says, adding that this gave him the opportunity to turn the business around and make a name for himself.
At the end of the year, the store was the most profitable and highest-grossing, according to Clifford, who was only 19 years old at the time.
“I won this big award, store manager of the year; I was earning £9,000 ($12,000) a year. I was the king.”
This experience quickly put him on the road to success and Clifford received one promotion after another before being poached by Kurt Geiger in 1996.
“I ended up managing the company’s largest store in Bromley within 18 months, with 40 staff and an annual turnover of £4 million ($5.2 million) – at 21, I was the youngest flagship store manager in the entire Burton group.”
The CEO of Walmart had his big break in the same way
Like Clifford, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon came from a humble background, starting his career in the company’s warehouses in the summer of 1984 at the age of 17.
Since then, he has worked his way up the retail giant’s hierarchy, from unloading trailers for $6.50 an hour to becoming the company’s youngest CEO since its founder, Sam Walton – and now boasts a salary of $25 million.
He, too, had his big break when he got involved during his boss’s vacation and left his mark.
“One of the reasons I got the opportunities was because I always raised my hand when my boss was out of town visiting stores or something,” McMillon recently revealed.
“I then put myself in an environment where the risk of promotion was low because people had already seen me at work.”
