Corporate social responsibility


“It’s a bit like a strategy game on a computer,” he says. “You can choose different characters, some characters have good offensive capabilities, but they can’t move very fast. Others have tremendous defensive capabilities, but they’re weak on offence. You can actually win with any character if you play to its strengths. Our strengths are in creating and deploying technology.”


Those strengths – and the company’s agility – are backed up by any number of investments. These include the recent acquisition of sister company Octopus Renewables and a buyout of French operator Engie’s UK customer base. Perhaps the most audacious early move was a successful 2018 bid to pick up 100,000 customers after rival Iresa went bust. These momentous decisions, however, don’t keep Jackson awake at night. The company’s extraordinary growth, he says, allows room for error. “We’ve got a very straightforward decision-making criteria and we apply that very quickly,” he says. “Often, the only way of finding out if something is a good idea or not is to do it. If we make a mistake today, that may be 1% of our business – within a year, it’s going to be 0.1%. If we don’t take those risks, we won’t deliver exponential growth. If we do take them, exponential growth means most mistakes won’t look very important down the road. I think that’s critical.”


Even in a market in such a state of flux, Jackson


Above top: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rish Sunak, embracing sustainable Octopus technology.


Above bottom: Octopus green technology exists to drive fossil fuels out of the energy sector.


fronts at once”. Those fronts are diverse – the company has invested in everything from wind turbines in East Yorkshire and South Wales to a concept that pays solar-powered homes premium rates to feed power back into the grid at busy times. There’s also a multi-million pound foray into hydrogen. All the while, the company has ploughed resources into developing software that has been licensed by competitors. Jackson says this last strategy in particular has allowed the company to control its own destiny.


“If you’ve outsourced your software, every innovation becomes a negotiation between you and the vendor,” he says. “If you control the technology, you can have an idea on Tuesday afternoon and by Wednesday it can be in place.” Jackson calls it the equivalent of compound interest and compares Octopus to Tesla, which makes its own electric cables. “They’re not constrained by commercial contracts and I think that’s the same for us.” There is little doubt this approach derives in part from Jackson’s lifelong understanding of the power of technology. I ask whether the company would be as successful with a finance professional at the helm.


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says it’s possible to stay one step ahead of the competition. He cites the electric car market as an example. “It’s fascinating to look at the early forecasts for electric vehicle growth produced by the traditional car and energy companies and by governments – they were all orders of magnitude wrong,” he says. “If they’d gone out and actually driven electric cars five years ago, they’d have known that they were going to be the biggest thing ever.” Jackson adds that having a finger on the pulse of external environments and ignoring “voices of incumbency” have been key. “Then it’s just a matter of working out what it means for our sector and what we can do about it.” What Octopus did with electric vehicles was to promote uptake in subtle yet market-shifting ways. There’s an e-car leasing division, as well as dedicated tariffs for electric car users. “It’s a bit like when mobile phones were first introduced – we needed specialist retailers that understood mobile phones were different to traditional phones,” Jackson explains. “So we created energy tariffs designed to work with electric cars. When other energy companies were saying that electric cars would create too much demand for electricity, we showed it to actually be an opportunity, not a problem.” Jackson’s team then set about winning customers –


Chief Executive Officer / www.the-chiefexecutive.com


Octopus Energy


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