Paul Philpott, President and CEO of Kia UK, has seen his organisation grow by sales volume in 16 of the last 18 years since he first joined the company. He tells Al Clarke, Chairman of the Ennis & Co Advisory Group, the secret is to build sustained progression with achievable milestones, not dash for high volume.
AL CLARKE: When you set out on your career, did you have a big idea about what you wanted to do?
PAUL PHILPOTT: No, I was a 22-year-old, wet-behind-the-ears graduate who had studied finance at Loughborough and didn’t know what to do for a career. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to be an accountant. I applied to several different organisations, and at the ‘milk round’, I came across Ford Motor Company, who were recruiting for their sales and marketing graduate trainee scheme. I thought it looked interesting, applied successfully to join the scheme and have been in the automotive industry ever since.
AC: After joining the industry, did you just go with the flow, or did you decide that you really liked it and wanted to stick with it?
PP: I think the automotive industry is very difficult to leave. One of the good things about our wonderful business is that everyone’s got a view about it, and if you say you work in the automotive industry, it’s always an interesting topic of conversation. That keeps people pretty loyal to it.
I’ve been blessed with the opportunities that have been put before me, and I’ve been lucky with the ones that I said ‘yes’ to and the ones that I didn’t say ‘yes’ to. There have been a couple of times in my last 37 years when I’ve been approached about roles outside the industry. I’ve thought about it but have always come round to the realisation that my knowledge and experience in a very dynamic industry sector are worth an awful lot. It would take something quite special to take me away from that.
AC: You took a blue-chip route in your early career, first with Ford and then with Toyota. Was it a conscious decision to work for big, multinational organisations?
PP: I joined the Ford graduate scheme straight out of university in 1988, and this proved a fantastic training ground. There were some great people at Ford at the time, and I learnt from them every day. Ford was big enough back then to provide so many different opportunities for young graduates, and in the nine years I was there, I did eight different roles in sales and marketing. That gave me a strong foundation to build on later in my career.
I’m sure I would have had a good career if I’d stayed with Ford, but, at a certain point, I was approached by Toyota. They had just moved from being an independent distributorship in the UK under Inchcape to being Toyota Motor Corporation-owned, and they were looking for further growth. As the market leader, I guess Ford was there to be shot at.
In the nine years that I was with Ford, it was clear there was no growth potential for the business coming from such a high base. We had a 30% market share when I joined, but it was less when I left, and it’s a lot less now. The opportunity to join an organisation that had growth potential, as Toyota (GB) had back in 1997, was therefore very attractive. It was also a bigger role in a slightly smaller organisation and, like Ford, had UK production, which was interesting as well. Ultimately, though, it was their big growth ambitions that persuaded me to jump ship.
Whenever opportunities are presented to you, you should always take them seriously. You need to do your due diligence to make sure they’re going to be good for you for the right reasons and focus on the opportunities that are going to give you a broader experience and develop you as a leader.
AC: Obviously, Ford no longer has the same footprint that it once had. Do you think it’s still possible to follow the same pathway in terms of the broad range of opportunities you were given as a graduate trainee during your nine years in the company?
PP: I can think of plenty of examples in our company where young managers have joined after three, four- or five-years’ experience with another brand who are seeking a new opportunity. Likewise, we lose people to other brands, which is always a sad moment.
Back in the 1980s, Ford was obviously a dominant organisation with a 30% market share that just doesn’t exist anymore. Even the market leader, Volkswagen, has something south of 10%. Nowadays, you would probably have to consider more moves in your career to gain the breadth of experience I got at Ford. Having said that, with the amalgamation of brands into large groups, there are likely to be opportunities to move easily across different brands.
Automotive is still a great career for bright, young graduates, and, absolutely, there are very good opportunities for career development and breadth of experience. The difference is that you probably have to be a bit more nimble now than when I was starting my career.
AC: After rising through the ranks of Toyota (GB) to become Commercial Director, you joined Kia Motors UK as Managing Director. You were still very young at the time. Did you feel you were ready for such a senior role, or was it more a case of being brave and stepping into the unknown?
PP: No, I wasn’t ready, but it was all part of my career journey. Looking back, what persuaded me to leave the world’s biggest car manufacturer to join Kia UK back in 2007 was the opportunity to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond and to take on a true leadership role that was highly entrepreneurial. The company was pretty small then and a bit broken. We had high staff turnover, high dealer turnover and were a poorly perceived brand. It was about pushing supply rather than creating demand.
But there were three things that attracted me to Kia back then. One, we’d just opened a new state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Slovakia, our first European plant. It was a billion-euro investment, so there was a clear commitment to future growth. Secondly, the company had just produced the first car out of that Slovakian plant, which was the first-generation Ceed, designed and developed for Europe only. It was backed by a seven-year manufacturer’s warranty, which was pretty much unique in the industry and was a clear demonstration of the belief Kia had in its quality of manufacturing and its quality of products. That really helped with the whole journey that we’ve been on in terms of convincing customers to consider a new brand. Thirdly, Kia had just recruited a new global head of design from Audi, whom I met before I joined the company. He had been given a blank sheet of paper and told to go make car design an integral part of the Kia brand – to make it attractive and desirable. Taken together, those three things were powerful attractions, along with the challenge of heading up a business that I knew wasn’t in good shape.
I knew it was going to be a bit of a baptism of fire when I got there, but my first three months at Kia UK were probably the most challenging of my 37 years in the automotive industry. Everywhere you looked, there was trouble, and the immediate task was just to steady the ship. Then it was about giving some belief to the people there who still had faith in the future of Kia, having been through a succession of different senior management teams – putting together an easy to understand growth strategy and a vision for people to believe in.
Someone I worked for at Ford said to me that if you’re leading an organisation, always think about your body language because the whole organisation will be looking at you. Don’t arrive in the morning with your head down, a glum expression and looking like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. Even if that’s how you are genuinely feeling, don’t show it, because people will start worrying about the future of their jobs and whether they should be looking for another job elsewhere. If you’re feeling under pressure on the drive to work, take a moment in the car park and give yourself a talking-to. Tell yourself that things may be tough, but you can do it. Then walk into the office with your head held high. If you can do that, people will recognise your positivity and run with you. Since those difficult early months, that’s something I’ve always taken forward during my whole time at Kia.
AC: What you’re talking about is resilience. How do you build that when you’re in a situation like the one you’ve described when you first joined Kia?
PP: It helps to have a supportive family around you. When I joined Kia, I had a four-year-old and a two-year-old, so it was good to have that diversion and experience different challenges at home. It’s also about having a few trusted right-hand people around you. Although I inherited a senior team, I brought in a trusted director from Toyota and another from Ford, and they became my right-hand men. I don’t think any leader can do it on their own. You need the right people around who, particularly in those tough times, can help build you back up again and remind you that things are so much better than they were before. Throughout my career, I’ve learnt the importance of having good people around you in senior roles to help keep all the troops running in the same direction.
AC: You have worked in American, Japanese and Korean organisations. How different is the leadership style between each of them, and what is your advice for people to succeed within internationally owned organisations?
PP: They were very different, and if you visited New York, Tokyo and Seoul today, you would feel the cultural differences. Kia is a South Korean company, and that’s where the ownership sits. You have to respect the company, its culture, its roots and its beliefs.
There were some big differences between American management, Japanese management and South Korean management at the time that I experienced them, though I can’t comment on whether those differences persist to this day. What I can say is that as a young, naïve graduate at Ford in the late ‘80s, I found that I had to be on the front foot because the culture was a bit ‘he who shouts loudest gets heard’. At Toyota in the late ‘90s, the Japanese culture was very different, and there was a lot of consideration before decisions were made. Only when there was a consensus was a decision taken, which often took a long time. But, once a decision was made, it was final, and there was complete alignment behind it.
The Koreans are different again. There’s more urgency about what South Korean companies want to achieve, and they’ve been very successful at it. There is probably a greater readiness to make the odd mistake along the way, so long as they learn from it. I’ve seen Kia develop from quite an immature, Korea-centric organisation back in 2007 into a business that is part of the third biggest global manufacturer in the world today – the Hyundai Motor Group. I’ve seen the Korean culture develop very rapidly into what it is today, and I’m delighted to have been part of it.
AC: In between your MD role and being promoted to President and CEO of Kia Motors UK, you spent three years in Frankfurt as Chief Operating Officer of Kia Motors Europe. How important do you think it is in today’s environment that would-be automotive leaders gain some experience of working abroad?
PP: Having got Kia UK onto a growth path, I was lucky to be given the opportunity to move to Frankfurt as COO from 2009 to 2012 at a time when Europe was starting to grow. The experience I gained there of how both the European head office and the headquarters in Seoul operate was really valuable. When you’re running a single-market organisation, what’s important is the people around you, the dealer network and your customers. What’s important in a European head office is the relationship upwards and the relationship with your markets. You have far fewer relationships, but your influence within those relationships is key.
Not only did it give me an understanding of how the global organisation fitted together, but it’s also helped me to share best practice with other markets across Europe. In that sense, although I’ve been working as the CEO of Kia UK for the past 13 years, I feel I’ve had an indirect influence on the growth of Kia in other markets.
AC: Kia has been on quite a journey from challenger brand to leader. Those are two very different animals in terms of mindset. As a leader, how were you able to sustain your team on that journey from one mentality to the other?
PP: It’s all about going step by step, delivering sustainable and progressive growth. In our industry, it’s very easy to grow significantly over the next year, as some of the new entrants are finding. It’s quite an open market, and you can go in, establish yourself and grow very quickly. Sustaining it for two, three and four years is a completely different set of challenges. One of the things I’m most proud of is that since I joined Kia 18 years ago, we have grown as a business every year except for two years. We couldn’t maintain growth in 2011 because it was the year after the scrappage bonanza, and the pandemic meant we went backwards in 2020. But in every other year, sales have grown incrementally.
To me, the lesson is clear. Don’t take people on a journey that promises we will be market leaders tomorrow because that simply isn’t going to happen. Instead, we have taken them on a journey that says, ‘We want to be looking a bit like this in five years’ time.’ The targets that you set cannot be too hard and fast because if you start to fall behind, it can lead to wrong behaviours that do not deliver sustainable growth. When I came back from Europe in 2012 to take over the CEO role, I established the ‘magic 100,000’ vision, which was a target of selling 100,000 new cars a year, though I never committed to a year when we would do it. At that stage, we were selling about 65,000 units, so a fair amount of growth was needed to get there. We finally got to 100,000 units in 2022. Since then, we’ve had further growth in 2023 and 2024, and we will grow again in 2025.
Achieving progressive growth is about setting milestones that people believe in and putting simple steps in place so that people can understand their role. What are they going to do? How do we take the dealers with us? How do we take the customers with us? We’ve faced issues such as Brexit and Covid that we couldn’t have foreseen when I returned to the UK in 2012, and we’ve faced uncertainty over electrification. It’s therefore about setting a clear direction for growth, breaking it down into five-year chunks, having clear annual landmarks and making sure that everything you do in the current year keeps half an eye on next year and the year after. One of the reasons I’m still at Kia is that there is a lot of growth potential for the brand, and what we are doing today has a solid foundation. That’s very exciting.
AC: What, if any, are the gaps you see in future leaders who aspire to your level? What are the common things they need to learn to make the step up?
PP: Studying finance at university has been very useful to me. I’ve never worked in finance, but having an appreciation of how the financials of the organisation work has been key. I think having experience across the different functions of the automotive industry is also important. If there is an issue with service capacity, for example, you are able to understand the reasons and how to guide people in a certain direction to resolve it.
The other thing I would say is, as you get further up within an organisation and become the leader, don’t always look for quick fixes. Have the self-confidence to believe that you are going to be there some time. Some organisations really suffer from too fast a turnover of their leaders. A new leader comes in, they take the first year to assess what’s going on, they make a load of changes in the second year, and in the third year they’re looking for their next promotion somewhere else in the world. Actually, all they have to do is report good numbers to the global head office to get their next job.
Having changed brands just three times in 37 years, I’ve learnt the value of building for the long term and not being too urgent. We develop our products on a six-year change cycle, so if I were to have any influence over our future product cycle, it’s at least three years away.
AC: We live in a world now where there is a lot more self-promotion and where a perception has perhaps taken hold that if you stay in a role for more than two years, you’re getting stale. How do you persuade people that it’s better to build a solid progression instead of being in a hurry to move on?
PP: It comes down to what you want out of your job at different times of your career. Having been at Toyota, then Kia UK and then working for Kia Europe in Germany, I had reached a stage in life where I wanted some continuity. When I returned from Germany at the age of 45, I knew I would be working for the next 20 years, and I wanted to build something that would be a legacy. I wanted to be able to say that I took something that was really small to being four times as big by the time I retired. That was my personal motivation. There are some people who aspire to global careers and are happy to jump from job to job, but that wasn’t for me.
AC: Who have been your most significant mentors or inspirations? What was it about them that made them memorable?
PP: I don’t think I would single out any individual from my professional life. I’ve worked with some fantastic managers and built my leadership style on the good things I’ve seen demonstrated and the not-so-good things that I’ve tried to avoid.
One person outside my career who has been a positive influence has been Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson – not that I know her very well these days. In my final year at Loughborough University, I was president of my hall of residence, and I remember Tanni arriving as a fresher. Since then, I’ve always followed her career with great interest – her triumphs as a Paralympic athlete, her disability advocacy, her charity work, her role as a TV pundit and her political life in the House of Lords. From humble beginnings, the influence she has had has been dramatic. She didn’t need to go outside the country to ‘go global’. She’s had a huge influence on people by staying in the UK, and I find her story compelling.
