Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson: six leadership lessons

“Then I realised it was actually a huge opportunity. At every one of our rivals, someone was looking at the same thing, and we were a stronger, more efficient, better capitalised, more agile business than any of them. 

“It took maybe 72 hours to go from looking down the hole to feeling that, if this was the biggest ever crisis, it was also the biggest opportunity. We acquired Avro Energy, Bulb and Shell’s energy business as a result of that insight.”

2. Culture comes before process

“Peter Drucker apparently said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Process is just the scraps off the bottom of the breakfast plate.

“Relentless positivity is a driver, and putting that at the heart of what you do is more important than process. We don’t have a mission statement, but every one of our employees could tell you the mission in their own words, and they mean it deeply.

“We use something we call the family dinner, where we get the entire company together on a Zoom call to reinforce what matters. People can then make decisions without having to work through a list of KPIs or take PowerPoints up to management all the time. They just get on with it.”

3. Deliver what your customers want

“When we built our company, we had a relentless focus on getting to know the customers and what they want from us. Call it an energy company, but we’re really a service provider for people’s third biggest outgoing. Nobody wants to buy electrons or gas molecules off us. They want to heat their homes. No one phones us up about volts and kilowatts. They call us about money. 

“We worked out what they wanted and we built the company to deliver that. Then we did the marketing at the end. If we can find ways to put electricity in your car more cheaply, by doing it at certain times and automating it, that’s compelling.”