Mark
Adlestone

Q&A with Mark

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What does it mean to you to be a family business?

“I’m incredibly proud of how we’re still a family business today. Beaverbrooks has been going for 105 years since the business was started by my grandfather and his two brothers in 1919. They moved to Belfast to pursue their dream of selling fine jewellery and gifts, selling silverware from a suitcase. Just one year later they swapped a suitcase for their first store.

Today we have 88 stores across the Beaverbrooks Group and it means everything to me to be continuing my family’s legacy. I’m third generation and my daughter, Chloe, is fourth generation. We know my grandfather and his two brothers would be very proud to see their family continuing and building on their dream.”

Beaverbrooks has celebrated many achievements over the years. Which one stands out most to you?

“The most excited I’ve been is when we attended our first Best Companies Awards ceremony in 2004. We came second and I won the Leadership Award. It was extraordinary. It was the first time we’d ever been involved and it put us onto a national scale for people to see us in a very different light. I was super proud about that.”

“This year, I was also thrilled to be recognised with a ‘Lifetime Recognition Award’ at Best Companies, for outstanding workplace commitment over my 45 year-long career at Beaverbrooks. This was a huge honour for me and a proud full circle moment to receive it twenty years after our first Best Companies Awards.”

And what about a personal achievement in your career?

"As a business, we're proud to have so many awards under our belt. Some highlights include coming first for the UK's Best Large Company To Work For in 2021, which we came 3rd for in 2023. We're so happy to have won first place for the UK's Best Retailer To Work For award three times in the last three years, and we have so many more awards that we've worked really hard for. We've achieved so much so far, and we're committed to being the best for our people and our customers.

“Another proud moment of my career was when I received the OBE from Her Majesty the Queen in October 2015 for charity and business. I felt I was accepting it on behalf of our entire company and our wonderful Beaverbrooks family.”

What legacy would you like to leave behind, in your personal and professional life?

“In an ideal world, I would like the legacy of Beaverbrooks to endure for eternity – what we are, the way we operate as well as our core purpose of enriching lives. We’ll do our best to make it so. We’re also a company with heritage and a real family business. There’s already legacy built into Beaverbrooks. My personal wish and desire is for that to continue for as long as possible.”

How has your passion for enriching lives shaped your role as Chairman?

“To me, enriching lives is integral to everything we do within Beaverbrooks. I talk very much about enriching the lives of our people, the experience our people have working here and the experience our customers have when shopping in a Beaverbrooks store.

It’s also about the relationship our customers have with our colleagues and our suppliers, and the way we interact, negotiate and build partnerships with them. It’s so critical that we get that balance right and we’re fair, because one of our core values is fairness.

Our communities and our charities are so critically important and they’re a big part of what we do. We exist to enrich the lives of those around us and to change the world around us.”

Why do you love being a Trustee of the Beaverbrooks Charitable Trust and enriching lives through charity work?

“It’s so important to me to be a trustee of the Beaverbrooks Charitable Trust, and to be so involved with charity & community work, because I believe all businesses should have a philanthropic arm to the work they do. Strategically, it should be integral to what they do. I’m super proud we donated over £2.4million to 571 different charities last year.

The special nature of our charity work is that we allow each of our people, our departments, and stores to choose which charity they want to support. We’re very democratic in the way that we operate and we’re very inclusive for that reason. I’m so proud of that and the difference that we make in so many cases with so many different charities.

I get a great joy from giving my time, my money and my expertise, and it enhances my life but also our company in many different ways."

Tell us about a longstanding relationship you have with a charity.

“I’ve been the Chair of a charity called The Mustard Tree in Central Manchester for the last three years, I came across them in my year as High Sheriff of Greater Manchester. It’s an amazing organisation that deals with homelessness, poverty, long term unemployment, refugees and asylum seekers. I have a strong relationship with the Chief Executive Jo Walby, and I know I bring a lot of the skills from the Beaverbrooks world into the charitable sector, which I know Jo, her team, and colleagues value very much.”