James A Reed (entrepreneur)

Education

Reed attended Scaitcliffe prep school and St Paul's. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford in 1984 with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and subsequently gained an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where his father briefly joined him to study.

At Oxford, Reed was Political Editor of Samizdat, a magazine for political science students. At Harvard he produced a case study and video about slum improvement works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Titled In The Shadow of The City, the case study was taught at Harvard and other Universities. Reed was also travel editor of Harbus News, the Harvard Business School's student news organisation.

Early career

Reed's first job was in a cemetery, levelling graves at a burial site in Old Windsor. In an interview with The Independent newspaper in 2000 Reed said: "I got the job because an elderly lady asked my predecessor what he was doing digging up her husband's grave. He wasn't, but flippantly he said it was because her husband hadn't been paying the rates lately - and he got fired. It was miserable, it was cold, it was horrible and hard - and I didn't last very long at it."

After graduating from Oxford in 1984, Reed sought to work for an entrepreneur. He wrote a speculative job application to Gordon and Anita Roddick of the Body Shop plc. The couple subsequently employed him as assistant to then-chairman Gordon. Reed has described his time at the Body Shop as his transition from University to the world of work. He has cited Anita Roddick as an influence, saying: "If a bottle of jojoba hand lotion wasn't displayed properly on the shelf, she'd pull you up on it. And I really liked that — that combination of real drive and enthusiasm, and getting the details right."

During 1985-1986 Reed worked as a media planner/buyer for Saatchi & Saatchi plc, where he planned and managed advertising campaigns for British Rail, Club 18-30, Eurotunnel and Procter and Gamble.

In 1987/1988 Reed worked for Afghanaid and Help the Aged, coordinating relief and development programmes in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. In Afghanistan he established a village assistance programme for farmers affected by regional conflict, coordinated fundraising, publicity and sponsorship services for Afghanaid and reported on the Afghan conflict for The Independent newspaper. In order to enter Afghanistan from Pakistan's border, Reed travelled disguised as an Afghan with a party of Mujahideen rebels.

Following his graduation from Harvard in 1990, Reed began a two-year production course at the BBC, where he worked as an Assistant Producer on documentaries and factual programmes. These included BBC TV's 'Business Matters', for which Reed produced Crazy Ways for Crazy Days, a 50-minute documentary about management guru Tom Peters, and The Pros and The Cons, an inside view of prison privatisation at Strangeways. After the Tom Peters documentary grossed £1m, Reed requested funding to make a similar programme - but was turned down, leading him to grow dissatisfied with his employment at the BBC.

Reed became a non-executive director of Reed in 1992. In a 2014 radio interview, Reed spoke of the circumstances leading up to joining the family business full-time:

Joining the family business wasn't a fait accompli. When my father got to 60 he said ‘James, there’s not much point having a family business if there isn’t anyone in the family in it, and I’m getting to the age where I have to think about these things’. I’d been sitting on the fence for some time. Then one day he said: ‘That job that I have been talking to you about? It’s going to be in The Sunday Times Appointments section next week - do you want to apply or not?" That got me off the fence! To tell you the truth, I was fearful of following him. He was a very successful entrepreneur who’d set up this business and he was well loved in the business. I was worried about failing. That fear of failure probably kept me on the fence for longer than it should have done, and that was an early lesson.

Reed Group

Reed joined the Reed Group full-time in April 1994, as director of operations. He became Chief Executive in February 1997. To symbolise the handover of control of the company, Reed's father presented him with a conductor's baton mounted in a glass case. The baton now hangs on the wall of Reed's personal office at the company's headquarters in Covent Garden, London.

In press interviews, Reed is often asked to respond to the accusation that his appointment to the family business was an act of nepotism; he has consistently offered unqualified agreement. In a 2010 Guardian interview he said "There is no other way of describing it", and in a 2013 interview with Associated Newspapers he said: ‘The family joke is that I had a 30-year interview and eventually got in’. Reed's father is quoted as believing that family-run businesses "...cut out a lot of company politics". Reed succeeded his father to the position of Chairman in 2004.

Reed has said that he considers his three most significant contributions to the Reed Group to be the development of reed.co.uk, the advent of Reed In Partnership and the globalisation of the company.

Welfare-to-work (Reed In Partnership)

In 1997 the-then Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson invited Reed to bid for the inaugural contracts issued by the newly elected Blair Government which, as part of its New Deal programme, saw some of the traditional work of Job Centres outsourced to the private sector. As of 2011, Reed In Partnership employed 900 staff. Reed has expanded the business into Poland and Australia.

De-listing

As chief executive, Reed delisted Reed Executive from the UK Stock Exchange in 2003, buying back the company for 140p per share, at a valuation of £62.6 million and at an 18% premium to the previous day's closing price. Shares in Reed Executive rose 15% following the announcement.

At the time, some financial commentators suggested that the Reed family were taking advantage of a lull in the firm's share price, in the wake of both a cyclical downturn and the controversy over Reed's decision to spin off Reed Health. (Two years later Reed would launch a £38m hostile takeover for Reed Health, following which the company eventually came back under the Reed family's control).

Reed stated that the firm was delisted because it no longer had need of outside capital. In his autobiography, Reed's father suggested that the de-listing was due in part to the publication of the Higgs and Cadbury reports into public company governance, both of which called for wide-ranging restrictions upon directors and their appointments.

reed.co.uk

reed.co.uk was the first recruitment website offered by a recruitment agency in the UK. It launched in 1995 with 40 vacancies. It now advertises over 200,000 vacancies a day. In interview, Reed has made light of the fact that the company's first website was suggested and built by a young IT contractor nicknamed "Pancake the Clown", after his sideline business as a children's entertainer. In a 2014 interview with JazzFM, Reed said: "The truth of the matter is, I got Pancake the Clown to build our first prototype"

Reed has also spoken of being "horrified" when a young member of staff suggested that the firm should open up its website to vacancies offered by rival recruitment firms. Reed would go on to approve the experiment; the scheme began in May 2000 and by November of the same year over 2000 rival firms had registered on the site. Reed would go on to credit the idea as being the foundation of the firm's online strategy; the junior staff member was paid a £100,000 bonus for his suggestion.

Media commentary

Reed regularly comments in the media on employment issues, including zero-hours contracts, workplace skills, taxation reform for family businesses and improving opportunities for prisoners and ex-prisoners.

Reed is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and was formerly an Associate of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit and a member of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)'s business-led Taskforce on Race Equality and Diversity in the Private Sector. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election, Reed conducted public video-interviews with the three Parliamentary candidates nominated for the role of Secretary of State (Steve Webb, Yvette Cooper and Theresa May), asking questions sent in by job hunters.

Television appearances

Since 2008, Reed has been depicted in a series of humorous TV adverts featuring the actor and comedian Rufus Jones. Some of these adverts have been directed by the previous year's winners of Reed's annual Short Film Competition.

The adverts begin with Jones introducing himself as James Reed. Jones' portrayal of Reed is a knowingly over-acted caricature of a comic book superhero, one who has the superpower to transform job-hunters into their ideal vocation. In one advert Reed makes a cameo appearance as an ice cream seller who is transformed into a nightclub DJ by the character of James Reed as played by Jones. The adverts have received more than 28 million YouTube views. The 2016 TV campaign sees Jones playing Reed as a comic knight.

In 2015 Reed made an appearance in Series 11 of BBC Television's The Apprentice.

Put Your Mindset to Work

Coauthored by Reed and Harvard lecturer Paul G. Stoltz, Put Your Mindset to Work was published by Portfolio Penguin in May 2011. The book offers research data underlining the importance of employee mindset, citing that 97% of employers would put mindset ahead of skill set when recruiting. The book goes on to identify three elements of a competitive employment mindset, namely Global, Good and Grit, which the authors summarise as "the 3G's". Global is said by the authors to measure an employee's ability to set their actions and decisions in a global context; Good refers to an employee's sensitivity to people and the desire to do good for others; Grit references an employee's tenacity and intensity in the workplace.

Put Your Mindset to Work was awarded the CMI Management Book of the Year Award in the Commuters' Read category. The book entered the USA Today best-seller list in June 2011. A second edition of the work was published in August 2013, with jacket endorsements from Timpson CEO James Timpson, Gordon Roddick and management author Jim Kouzes.

Why You: 101 Interview Questions You'll Never Fear Again

Reed published a second book for Penguin Portfolio in January 2015. Titled Why You:101 Interview Questions You'll Never Fear Again, the book features examples of interview questions and strategies for answering them, based on research obtained from Reed's network of hirers, recruiters and interviewees. The book's premise is that even though a candidate might be asked any one of thousands of different interview questions, all are in fact variations on just 15 distinct questions, which Reed terms "The Fateful Fifteen". He encourages candidates to relate any question at interview to these 15, but he also cautions against preparing verbatim answers in advance, arguing that such an approach is the reason why so many employers lament the absence of genuine and spontaneous conversations with candidates.

Bookbag.co.uk awarded the title a "Highly Recommended" in its review section; The Notting Hill Post called the book "...essential reading"

Personal life

Reed is married to Nicola and they live in London and Wiltshire with their six children. His hobbies are said to include running, riding and driving horses, football and mountaineering. He has participated in two of Reed’s annual Alpine Leadership Challenges led by the alpinist Stefan Gatt.

Reed has identified his father as the person he most admires in the recruitment industry, and King Alfred the Great as his boyhood hero.