Gordon Brown

I think that was the key with Tony.

He visited all the stores every year, talked to the staff in the shop floor, in the tea room, talked to the manager.

And he could really gauge the people.

Tony was a gentleman, a real gentleman.

So what was the role of JK around that time then?

He was a president.

Although he did attend all the board meetings.

And he attended the board meetings for the probably first four or five years that I was on the board.

But I think what Tony did was also continue that best value concept that JK had.

And I remember him writing to me not long after I joined the company saying, I want a maximum gross value.

And he gave me a value.

And what I don't want is profits to be more than typically around 5% return on sales.

And if you get to 7%, then we're taking too much money off our customers.

And so we had a bonus scheme that was targeted to that.

And so we went for the 5% and we started drifting up.

We dropped our prices so that we get more sales and we kept the 5% more sales, more profit.

Everyone was happy.

That's one of the things I think about Wilco at that time.

I think they're very high level of honesty and a high level of integrity.

I mean, one of the things that we all said, and this was JK, was he wanted the suppliers paid on time.