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Best Served Cold: The rise, fall and rise again of Malcolm Walker CBE
This is the dramatic story of the ups and downs of a born entrepreneur. Malcolm Walker was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1946. With fellow Woolworth's trainee manager Peter Hinchcliffe, Walker opened a small frozen food shop called Iceland in the Shropshire town of Oswestry in 1970. Iceland became a public company 14 years later, through one of Britain's most successful stock exchange flotations of all time, and by 1999 it had grown into a GBP2 billion turnover business with 760 stores. In August 2000, Iceland merged with the Booker cash and carry business and Walker announced that he would step down as CEO in March 2001. In preparation for his retirement, he sold half his shares in the company and left for the holiday of a lifetime in the Maldives. However, while he was away the new management of the company slashed profit expectations, plunging Iceland into a GBP26m loss rather than the GBP130m profit the City had been expecting. Walker was fired and spent three years under investigation by the authorities before being cleared of any wrongdoing. In Walker's absence, Iceland's sales collapsed as customers deserted the company - and, almost exactly four years after he had left the business, he returned as its boss. His amazing revival of Iceland has seen like-for-like sales grow by more than 50% and the business winning the accolade of Best Big Company To Work For In the UK. In March 2012 Walker led a GBP1.5bn management buyout of the company and is now personally worth over GBP200m. The incredible story of Walker's life - which he tells here for the first time - is as dramatic as any you will find in business, and it serves as a model for how, through hard work and intelligent risk-taking, it is possible from a relatively modest upbringing to build a national enterprise and a household name known to millions.
337 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 4, 2018
This book surprised me! As someone that's just started a business, i'm devouring business books at the moment and this one, despite being a bit 'un-cool' was really inspirational!
The writing is simple, you can tell that Walker isn't a natural author, but actually that makes it feel genuine and authentic. I didn't know the story of Iceland and it was a real eye opener to the world of large retailers and what goes on behind closed doors.
Walker was relentless and sometimes brutal in his quest to take over the high street. It taught me that you should always keep going, not be afraid to take risks and most importantly, you will make (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes but it's all part of the journey.
The writing is simple, you can tell that Walker isn't a natural author, but actually that makes it feel genuine and authentic. I didn't know the story of Iceland and it was a real eye opener to the world of large retailers and what goes on behind closed doors.
Walker was relentless and sometimes brutal in his quest to take over the high street. It taught me that you should always keep going, not be afraid to take risks and most importantly, you will make (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes but it's all part of the journey.
October 15, 2018
A real life thriller!
I bought this book last year but never found the time to read it.
The only thing I knew about Malcolm Walker was that he founded Iceland (the shops) and I had composed a humorous ode for him when his lawyer Peter Bullivant retired
So this book was a real eye-opener with more twists and turns than a Robert Harris novel!
It’s a real page- turner
I bought this book last year but never found the time to read it.
The only thing I knew about Malcolm Walker was that he founded Iceland (the shops) and I had composed a humorous ode for him when his lawyer Peter Bullivant retired
So this book was a real eye-opener with more twists and turns than a Robert Harris novel!
It’s a real page- turner
June 5, 2019
By no means a literary masterpiece but an entertaining read nonetheless. Packed with lessons on business, friendship and betrayal.
December 5, 2013
By George Hay
Malcolm Walker has a no-nonsense recipe for retail success. While larger supermarkets have expanded upmarket, overseas, and away from food, he’s made a fortune selling cheap frozen dinners to hard-up Britons through his Iceland Foods chain. It’s all about meeting customer demand, controlling costs, and staying focused, his autobiography shows. Still, Walker’s travails down the years are a reminder how easily things can go wrong in the food business.
Walker’s title - “Best Served Cold” – threatens a dreary exercise in score-settling. There is, indeed, a bit of that. He devotes a fair few chapters to defending a controversial 2001 share sale. After 30 years at the helm, he was making way for new management. But they were keen to “kitchen-sink” the bad news following a troubled merger, and issued a walloping profit warning. A three-year investigation ensued.
Still, Walker turned it round. He was cleared, returned to Iceland in 2005 (via a buyout financed, appropriately enough, by Icelanders) and made the group successful again. Nowadays the Reykjavik raiders are gone too, but Walker remains in charge, having led a new buyout in 2012. And beyond the self-justification, and surfeit of exclamation marks sprinkled throughout the book, he offers an interesting primer on good retailing.
Despite his estimated 215 million pound fortune, Walker apparently retains an acute sense of what cash-strapped customers want. Cheap frozen food, for starters. But as Walker says, good value isn’t always the cheapest. Removing genetically modified ingredients from most own-brand products helped Iceland carve out a niche as cheap, but respectably so. Lidl and Aldi are now taking a similar tack.
As he concedes, the central business is deceptively simple. Obviously you need to sell something people want to buy. You must also have maximum clarity and control over your costs. You have to minimise “shrinkage” - stock that gets bashed or stolen. And too much discounting, even if it boosts sales, is dangerous.
In the 1970s, Walker and his business partner, Peter Hinchcliffe, were micro-managers. They produced weekly financial statements long before near-real-time financial controls were commonplace. When he came back in 2005, Iceland’s internal controls had become so lax that one employee had enjoyed a company-funded wedding. Another had somehow bought a horse on Iceland’s account. More prosaically, Iceland carried too many ranges and had a slapdash approach to discounting.
Still, Walker hasn’t always avoided another danger: because retail can be so easy, those who are good at it quickly get bored. Early on, this manifested itself in an endless mania for diversification. Iceland ventured into commercial printing; opened a pizza restaurant in Rhyl; and tried to buy Hungarian farms after the Iron Curtain came down. Later, as Iceland grew to 760 stores nationwide, the restlessness fed into corporate finance and M&A – with equally questionable results.
The takeover of Southern rival Bejam and a merger, later unwound, with cash-and-carry outfit Booker were exciting at the time. But they prompted management struggles and loss of focus. They probably helped bring on Iceland’s early 2000s slump. Terry Leahy, Tesco’s expansionist former boss, would no doubt sympathise.
Unlike many entrepreneurs, Walker is also disarmingly candid about his own shortcomings. He admits his main motivation for Iceland’s 1984 flotation was financial insecurity. Now he thinks he would have been much richer if it had stayed private. He criticises Rothschild for under-pricing the issue.
Indeed, Walker’s bemused encounters with corporate financiers are part of the book’s charm. Banker excess has made the public suspicious of commerce. But Walker’s story is a reminder that outside the City, business isn’t about selling duff advice, but something customers need. He’s just best off sticking to frozen food.
Malcolm Walker has a no-nonsense recipe for retail success. While larger supermarkets have expanded upmarket, overseas, and away from food, he’s made a fortune selling cheap frozen dinners to hard-up Britons through his Iceland Foods chain. It’s all about meeting customer demand, controlling costs, and staying focused, his autobiography shows. Still, Walker’s travails down the years are a reminder how easily things can go wrong in the food business.
Walker’s title - “Best Served Cold” – threatens a dreary exercise in score-settling. There is, indeed, a bit of that. He devotes a fair few chapters to defending a controversial 2001 share sale. After 30 years at the helm, he was making way for new management. But they were keen to “kitchen-sink” the bad news following a troubled merger, and issued a walloping profit warning. A three-year investigation ensued.
Still, Walker turned it round. He was cleared, returned to Iceland in 2005 (via a buyout financed, appropriately enough, by Icelanders) and made the group successful again. Nowadays the Reykjavik raiders are gone too, but Walker remains in charge, having led a new buyout in 2012. And beyond the self-justification, and surfeit of exclamation marks sprinkled throughout the book, he offers an interesting primer on good retailing.
Despite his estimated 215 million pound fortune, Walker apparently retains an acute sense of what cash-strapped customers want. Cheap frozen food, for starters. But as Walker says, good value isn’t always the cheapest. Removing genetically modified ingredients from most own-brand products helped Iceland carve out a niche as cheap, but respectably so. Lidl and Aldi are now taking a similar tack.
As he concedes, the central business is deceptively simple. Obviously you need to sell something people want to buy. You must also have maximum clarity and control over your costs. You have to minimise “shrinkage” - stock that gets bashed or stolen. And too much discounting, even if it boosts sales, is dangerous.
In the 1970s, Walker and his business partner, Peter Hinchcliffe, were micro-managers. They produced weekly financial statements long before near-real-time financial controls were commonplace. When he came back in 2005, Iceland’s internal controls had become so lax that one employee had enjoyed a company-funded wedding. Another had somehow bought a horse on Iceland’s account. More prosaically, Iceland carried too many ranges and had a slapdash approach to discounting.
Still, Walker hasn’t always avoided another danger: because retail can be so easy, those who are good at it quickly get bored. Early on, this manifested itself in an endless mania for diversification. Iceland ventured into commercial printing; opened a pizza restaurant in Rhyl; and tried to buy Hungarian farms after the Iron Curtain came down. Later, as Iceland grew to 760 stores nationwide, the restlessness fed into corporate finance and M&A – with equally questionable results.
The takeover of Southern rival Bejam and a merger, later unwound, with cash-and-carry outfit Booker were exciting at the time. But they prompted management struggles and loss of focus. They probably helped bring on Iceland’s early 2000s slump. Terry Leahy, Tesco’s expansionist former boss, would no doubt sympathise.
Unlike many entrepreneurs, Walker is also disarmingly candid about his own shortcomings. He admits his main motivation for Iceland’s 1984 flotation was financial insecurity. Now he thinks he would have been much richer if it had stayed private. He criticises Rothschild for under-pricing the issue.
Indeed, Walker’s bemused encounters with corporate financiers are part of the book’s charm. Banker excess has made the public suspicious of commerce. But Walker’s story is a reminder that outside the City, business isn’t about selling duff advice, but something customers need. He’s just best off sticking to frozen food.
December 26, 2013
Like so many autobiographies I've read, this book is much more interesting when its focus is on the early days. Malcolm Walker, along with a colleague Peter Hinchcliffe, built up the Iceland chain of supermarkets from scratch. This is the story of how it was done, from Walker's side anyway. The energy and enthusiasm as they opened their first store, then their second, and third and on to their first depot burns off the page. Walker loved what he was doing and it shows, and he clearly had fun doing it. He also acknowledges that building the business was all he did, he had virtually no other interests, no other life. His commitment to his business was his life (and interestingly, later in the book he states that retirement, which he can no longer contemplate, is death.)
The story, however, becomes less interesting as it goes along. Iceland becomes too big for him as he gets cut off from the roots of the business and becomes entangled in finance, mergers, acquisitions and management politics. It's clearly not his strength. He befriends and backs some idiots, makes a few howlers, loses his way, sells up and eventually comes back to buy the business he nursed from birth. To be fair to Walker, he gleefully highlights the mistakes he made and the idiots he backed, and doesn't try to pin the blame for wrong directions and decisions on anybody but himself. As such, it's an entertaining read but maybe more for those who are involved in the UK fmcg business and have an interest in it.
The story, however, becomes less interesting as it goes along. Iceland becomes too big for him as he gets cut off from the roots of the business and becomes entangled in finance, mergers, acquisitions and management politics. It's clearly not his strength. He befriends and backs some idiots, makes a few howlers, loses his way, sells up and eventually comes back to buy the business he nursed from birth. To be fair to Walker, he gleefully highlights the mistakes he made and the idiots he backed, and doesn't try to pin the blame for wrong directions and decisions on anybody but himself. As such, it's an entertaining read but maybe more for those who are involved in the UK fmcg business and have an interest in it.
October 3, 2015
very interesting read although i dnt understand about shares and things i enjoyed reading the book :)
July 20, 2020
An enjoyable read, the story of Iceland is much more interesting than I thought it would be!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews