Operations director leaves Majestic

Majestic has confirmed that its operations director Rob Farnworth, who had recently taken on more responsibility following the departure of MD John Colley, has today left the business.

CEO Rowan Gormley confirmed the change to db, issuing a statement to us today saying that in order to improve team retention and engagement, Majestic needed to make some changes to make the business “more entrepreneurial”.

“To achieve this we’ve made some changes to our team and we are rolling out the new Majestic Partner Program to give control back to our store managers and encourage a new entrepreneurial culture,” he said.

Majestic had previously confirmed to db that it had bumped up the role of Farnworth and buying and merchandising director Richard Weaver in May, following Colley’s departure at the start of the month, saying they were “stepping up their activities” in certain areas to support Gormley in his new role as MD of Retail.

Farnworth, who was in the role for 18 months, joined Majestic from outside the wine industry in January 2016 after thirty years in the retail sector. He previously working with Colley at trade tool wholesaler Screwfix Direct as head of retail, while Colley was commercial director and more recently was retailer operations director at Hobbycraft, as well as working for healthcare providers MiHomecare and Helping Hands Homecare.

Gormley’s statement today echoes the the problem of staff retention in the core Retail business highlighted in last Thursday’s results, which noted that although it was stable at 74% (down one percentage point from 2016), it was one of the areas that had not worked as well as the management team had hoped. This was despite moves last year to reward employees across the entire company by giving them all a stake in the business through a new share incentive scheme.

“The fundamental reason for this is that the best people have been frustrated by the fact that there is nowhere to go once you make it to store manager,” he said in the results, admitting that Majestic had had an overly cautious approach in addressing this in the past. “We have now tackled the issue head on by testing a new Partnership programme where store managers are given the chance to literally run their own shop. Managers will be able to earn a percentage of their store’s contribution by having more control over the day-to-day running of their own store,” he said.