It's hard enough already, while you are wrestling with your change or credit cards at the Sainsbury's check-out, just to get out of the store with purchases and sanity intact. But for over a year now it has not been possible to escape without having to answer the final question: 'Have you got a Nectar card?'
Nectar is the new loyalty card scheme run by Loyalty Management UK (LMUK), a fast-growing business that has quickly persuaded Sainsbury's, Barclaycard, Debenhams, BP, the Thresher Group, Adams, Ford, as well as recent recruit Vodafone, to join the Nectar stable. By spending money with these firms you earn loyalty points, and, of course, we all know what points make - prizes. Well, special offers anyway.
It was Keith Mills, the chairman of LMUK, who introduced the concept of loyalty purchases to the UK in the 1980s with AirMiles. He has now re-entered the UK market with Nectar, a 'multi-coalition' loyalty card scheme.
The importance of establishing HR processes early
LMUK has grown fast. Crucially, and exceptionally for a start-up, HR has been in on the growth of the company from the outset. HR director Teresa Petrie joined the firm at the beginning of last year as employee number 14. 'The senior management team at LMUK knew what had worked well in this market before, and that meant getting proper HR processes established early,' Petrie says. As a former employee of boo.com, the failed online fashion retailer, she has learned lessons from the past. 'Right from the start I tried to get some of the crucial pieces in place,' she says. 'We decided what our policies would be, what careers at LMUK would look like. It was a recruitment tool as we were talking to some very astute people.'
As LMUK moved from its start-up to operational phase, including signing up its corporate sponsors, the firm had to take tough decisions on headcount. 'In April last year we still had only 13 employees,' Petrie says. 'We had outsourced some key functional areas which we have brought back inside. We now have 100 staff.' And it has capitalised on the timing of its launch, using HR to attract and retain crucial talent. As Petrie knows all too well, the end of the dotcom boom, and the crisis in consultancies, meant that there were some very high-calibre people about looking for jobs.
Letting managers share the responsibility for people policies
'A key factor for me has been getting managers to own and help me with HR procedures,' Petrie says. 'We developed a list of competencies together based on the attributes of high-performing colleagues they had identified. There has also been an emphasis on career development.' The first annual review, measured against agreed key performance indicators, has just been completed.
In many ways LMUK is a model of a post-new-economy, wise-after-the-event start-up that has really taken off. Its staff include refugees from McKinsey and Bain, with finance
raised by private equity firm Warburg Pincus. And in contrast to many failed new-economy businesses, LMUK has real clients, real revenues, and is growing.
