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Herb ran a business called Kalyx, a<br />
name derived from the part of the flower<br />
than protects the petals as they develop.<br />
In headline terms, the business ran<br />
prisons, but what Kalyx really did was<br />
take people at their lowest point and help<br />
them get their lives back on track: “It was<br />
this,” Herb told Phil, “that gets him out<br />
of bed every morning, and as soon as I<br />
understood that, it changed my life.”<br />
Subsequently rebranded as Sodexo<br />
Justice Services, Phil served as Chief<br />
Operating Officer and then Managing<br />
Director, before being appointed Chief<br />
Financial Officer for the wider Sodexo<br />
group in the UK and Ireland. “This was<br />
at the time of the Olympics, and I well<br />
remember we were given 12 days to get<br />
everything set up on site to provide food<br />
and hospitality at the Olympics, despite<br />
many of the utilities having been buried<br />
under tarmac. It often felt that we were<br />
never more than twenty minutes away<br />
from disaster. I also remember we served<br />
three million portions of fish and chips<br />
during the Games!”<br />
After almost two years as CFO he was<br />
tempted away to join Working Links, until<br />
it was sold five years later to a German<br />
Private Equity business, and in October<br />
2017 took over from Mike O’Connor CBE<br />
as CEO of StepChange Debt Charity. It was<br />
everything he expected and more.<br />
“It sounded fun, but perhaps I hadn’t<br />
fully thought it through. My degree<br />
included nine weeks in Iceland<br />
studying the impact of catastrophic<br />
glacial decantation!”<br />
STAFF ENGAGEMENT<br />
One of his early tasks was to organise a<br />
series of staff roadshows, going around<br />
the country and listening to his teams’<br />
ideas on how to make a good service even<br />
better. This in turn helped further refine<br />
what has now become a four-year strategy,<br />
with the concept of early-intervention<br />
very much at the forefront of future plans.<br />
Current statistics show that<br />
StepChange helped a little over 300,000<br />
individuals a year through full debt<br />
advice to a solution, its preferred measure<br />
of success. Phil acknowledges that this<br />
is a mere fraction of the total number<br />
that need help, and as such the charity is<br />
investing over £20 million in a process and<br />
IT transformation project to update its<br />
systems and infrastructure with a target<br />
of a 35 – 40 percent uplift in operational<br />
efficiency.<br />
“Being a charity as opposed to a<br />
corporate, it is even more important for<br />
us to demonstrate efficiencies,” he says,<br />
The Recognised Standard / www.cicm.com / April <strong>2019</strong> / PAGE 19<br />
continues on page 20 >
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