Corporate social responsibility
smart digital platforms to supply affordable energy to the masses. Looking back, Jackson describes those early days as a “front-row seat in the digital revolution”. Adding that energy was clearly a market in need of transformation. “It was regulated in pretty much every country and had incumbent companies growing bureaucratic and bloated,” he says. So in 2015 – with the climate crisis looming – he teamed up with co-founders Stuart Jackson and James Eddison to do something about it. Looking back, Jackson concedes that the Octopus success story was about good luck and good management in equal measure. “We were definitely lucky with timing,” he says. “We weren’t so early that everything landed on a world that wasn’t able to absorb it, and not so late that we had to play catch up.”
Combining old and new From day one, Octopus was a disruptor, yet Jackson was careful to retain some fundamental business practices. “The inspiration for me was the golden age of retail,” he says. “When you used to see a retail business get a new CEO, you’d see things turn around. And that’s because the CEO would walk the floor and see how customers were interacting with staff, what products were on the shelves. I spend a few hours a week dealing with individual customers – those few hours are like walking the floor.” To put it another way, Jackson agrees that he’s nurtured a family business mentality despite Octopus’s sprawling tentacles. I suggest that – one day soon – he and his senior team will no longer have time to ‘walk the floor’. He says it’s the system – not the ideology – that will adapt. It’s a concept already being applied across his business. “When our customer operations team grew to around 50 people, we found they were taking less personal responsibility for customer issues,” he explains. “We were about to implement metrics and KPIs – all the things you see in a call centre – but then we realised everything had been incredible when we had just ten or 20 people.”
Instead of creating more top-down control, the customer operations teams were divided into smaller units of about ten people. “As the company grows,” Jackson continues, “we grow more teams. The most successful teams are split to create new leadership opportunities for the people in the highest performing teams. So what we’ve got is dozens of small businesses.” Transferring knowledge and promoting individual responsibility in this way is crucial, as is employee buy-in to the company’s mission to provide cheaper, cleaner energy. In many ways it’s an easy sell – the environment is a hot topic and people are passionate about working for companies that fight climate crisis. “It may sound easy, but the delivery is unbelievably difficult,” says Jackson. “Loads of companies are
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trying to wrap their products around the environment, but it’s only skin deep. The real challenge is to be true to the core – if we’re going to say this stuff, we need to deliver it. We need to make sure that we are relentlessly driving to make green energy cheaper. Authenticity is the thing that actually makes it hard.”
Lead from the front That’s certainly good PR, but it’s also good for the bottom line. And it’s here that Jackson’s core ethos marries with the strategic decision to actively develop the energy sector – rather than waiting to cash in on the transition away from fossil fuels.
Above: CEO Greg Jackson puts Octopus’ success down to a combination of good luck and good management.
Opposite page: The start- up has been a disruptor from day one, operating its offices in modern and interactive way.
“If you control the technology, you can have an idea on Tuesday afternoon and by Wednesday it can be in place.”
“We’ve chosen to be a leadership business – we’re not going to spend our time dragging our feet until we’re forced to do something,” Jackson explains. “Thomas Edison created the electricity system; we’ve got to do the same again, but with renewable energy. The current system is built around all the stuff we’ve got to move away from. We’re reinventing the system the way Edison would if he’d done it with renewables. That’s our job.”
That job includes providing teams with the tools to work independently within a decentralised work environment. “We give people a framework, a mission, a culture,” he says. “What we don’t do is go through a big checklist every Monday and ask, ‘have you done this?’ Trusting people with responsibility is an amazing thing.” Jackson says this way of working has given management the ability to “fight on lots of
$5bn Bloomberg 37
The December 2021 valuation of Octopus Energy.
Octopus Energy
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