Secrets of my success: Giffgaff's Mike Fairman

Giffgaff chief executive Mike Fairman on his role at the mobile firm, starting a product from scratch, and nearly getting shut down.

What do you do?

I’m the CEO of Giffgaff but my formal job title is “gaffer”. I couldn’t resist that, given the name of the business, so I do have a business card with “gaffer” on it. I lead the team.

We’re a seven-year-old mobile network based in Uxbridge and we have a fairly unique approach. The idea came out of Telefonica and we were set up from day one as an independent business.

We work in collaboration with our members [SIM card customers] to help run the business, grow the business, improve the business. So when I say I lead the team, it’s not just our employees but our member community as well.

What do you like about your job?

We do a lot of collaboration with our members. It’s the unique way of working and focusing on working with our customers which makes it a really interesting job. For example, a few years ago, Apple changed the size of its SIM cards.

Apple is very secretive in the way it works and we didn’t know that was going to happen. Overnight, our SIM cards didn’t fit in the latest, sexiest device and it was going to take us two or three months to change our supply chain to make them fit.

Within a couple of days, our members discovered you can go online and buy stamps that converted the new-shape SIM cards and they set up a website to buy these new SIMs. We thought it was so good we put links on our homepage to go to it. None of that is possible without working with our members.

What was your biggest break?

It was probably when I was running an online sales channel at O2 and my boss had a project to launch O2’s first non-mobile business, O2 home broadband. I sat down with him and said I’d been doing my job for a while and I loved it but was ready for a change.

He mentioned this opportunity and I ended up getting the job. It was the first experience I had of starting something completely from scratch and it was a big project and very challenging.

It was at the same time Carphone Warehouse went in, Sky went in, Orange went in. The whole market completely changed and I was rewriting business cases every month.

It was very difficult to get the product off the ground. In the end, we did and we did a really good job of it but that was my first experience of creating something from scratch and I got the bug for it.

Biggest setback?

When we started Giffgaff, there was a whole load of research done to identify the business opportunity and the exact segment of the market we should be targeting.

When we launched, we discovered there was a completely different segment of people buying the product. It was incomplete, we needed to change it and our marketing strategy wasn’t working.

We spent a year trying to make it work. That was challenging. We nearly got shut down. We were probably six weeks away from that. But we just had enough green shoots showing that we got a stay of execution and we eventually came through it.

How do you manage your work/life balance?

One of the things I’ve always believed in is to never have a long commute. I’ve never had a commute longer than half an hour. If you’re trying to manage your work/life balance it seems silly to me to add the bit in between that takes all your time up.

At the moment because I cycle in to work it takes me 10 minutes longer so I’m now 40 minutes but I also believe in healthy body, healthy mind. When things are tough — such as in that year when we were trying to make the business successful — a long bike ride really helps to clear the mind.

Any tips?

When you get into a management position, always remember your employees are the most important people — more important than shareholders and customers. Try to keep things simple. Wherever you can, make little gains that take decisions out of the way, then do it.

A silly example for me is getting dressed for work in the morning. I’ve got four pairs of identical jeans, I always wear black shoes and I’ve got a load of shirts. It just means you don’t have to think about it, it’s one less decision.