MBR_ISSUE 46_NOV_DEC_18_LowRes

Malta Business Review
MBR: What motivated you to work with
LIDL? How did the idea come about and
what is your role?
MF: Lidl is one of the top four grocery retailers
in the world. Who wouldn’t be motivated
to work for a company of this stature? The
Company has a presence in 30 Countries
worldwide, with over 10,500 stores and more
than 260,000 employees!
CORPORATE INTERVIEW
Organisational Standard, Excellence
and Outstanding Achievement By George Carol
Interview with Mark Farrugia, Regional Director at Lidl Malta Ltd.
I started at Lidl in 2013. Before I had
been working for an important local food
distributing company for nearly nine years.
I was very happy working for that company,
but felt at the time that I was not growing
enough personally. I was approached by a
recruitment agency to fill the post of a Sales
Operations Executive, which was a stone’s
throw away from my home. I went for an
interview - and it turned out to be Lidl, and
the rest is history now.
Following an initial training stint in Italy
(of around 16 months) I took over the
Sales Department for Lidl Malta as Sales
Operations Executive and as of last June as
Regional Director.
MBR: How would you measure success in
what you do and also in the role you hold?
MF: Success is measured in various ways; the
easiest is the numeric one, which is financial
performance and the attainment of KPIs. The
more difficult one is the qualitative one.
At Lidl Malta the success factor can be
clearly seen every day through the number
of clients who choose us consistently as their
supermarket of choice. This can be confirmed
by the fact that we have been voted the best
value and most loved supermarket on the
island consistently for a number of years now.
Today’s leading enterprises such as Lidl
Malta foster a work ethos that encourages
employee enthusiasm, vision, and problem
solving skills that are crucial in ensuring the
success of the enterprise. The success of such
a work ethos is measured in the development
of a team that believes in what they do, and
who carries out their daily duties with passion
and dedication.
MBR: How much oversight/interaction
do you like to have from your employees
when working and how important are the
relations you keep with your team?
MF: In a world where we are more
networked than ever, where one could say
we have become completely interdependent,
interaction with one’s team is imperative.
In today’s world, a company’s purpose
or mission will need to be ingrained, or
At every level of this
journey someone,
somewhere in some way
would leave some sort
of influence on me.
moulded into the minds of all employees. We
must nurture this talent towards becoming
collaborators in value rather than individuals
after personal success. This talent will need
to be gradually empowered to take real time
innovative decisions always in line with the
company’s mission or purpose.
MBR: What is the most interesting LIDL
project you have worked on? What did you
learn from this, and how did you apply it?
Mark Farrugia
MF: There are so many projects covered
that it is difficult to pinpoint one - so I will
mention two which have definitely been
game changers.
The first was the opening of the Lidl Mosta
store. This was definitely a gamble since it
distanced itself from the conventional Lidl
stores we had opened previously. The store
was the first of its size to be built offering
a completely different experience to our
customers. The siting was also very different
to what we would have usually opted for and
the timeline we gave ourselves, to take the
store from the drawing board to being fully
operational (sixteen weeks), was what some
people would have deemed "ambitious".
The outcome depended on a number of
internal departments and external entities
working perfectly in sync in order to achieve
the deadlines. We managed to build and
open the store in a record fourteen weeks;
unprecedented! The store went on to
become one of the most successful in the Lidl
portfolio worldwide.
The second would have to be ‘Evoluzzjoni
Store Manager…….L’evoluzzjoni hija is - sahha
taghna’. This was a project which kicked
off in June 2015 when the company took
the decision to raise the bar on all levels of
management. In order to do so, it required
a formation strategy and level of planning
which was unparalleled. Imagine waking up
one morning and saying that we are going
to re-train every level of management in the
company on a global scale. Easier said than
16